Remember that Fridge pages are Spoilers Off!
Fridge Brilliance:
- When the CIA are trying to apprehend Ethan in Havana, Hunt is doing pushups and pullups in Paris while monitoring the action on his laptop. He's doing this so that the phone he's connected to back in Havana picks up his loud breathing and the CIA don't realise ahead of time that he's not in Havana at all.
- Back in Mission: Impossible (1996), one of the Spy Speak phrases that indicate you're accepting a mission is "No, I prefer the theater." Here, Ethan mails Benji tickets to a presention of Turandot in Austria to help foil an assassination in an actual theater. The concept of a theater of operations is thus quite literal this time.
- In Ilsa's compound in Casablanca, as Hunt and Benji walk in, there are two wetsuits hanging up — one in Hunt's size, the other in hers. She, or perhaps more accurately, Lane and the Syndicate, have already picked Hunt for the ledger heist, even if he doesn't know it yet.
- The plot of Puccini's Turandot, the opera seen in the film, concerns a princess trying to discover the name of a suitor, much the same as Ethan is trying to do for Ilsa and Lane at that point in the movie. To cap things off, a variation of 'Nessum Dorma' returns as Ilsa's main theme.
- Ethan ultimately trips Lane up in the final confrontation because he’s willing to do the one thing Lane never would; Ethan is willing to put himself at risk and sacrifice himself to save his friends and achieve his mission goal, but Lane was never willing to take that kind of risk for the sake of the mission. Even when Lane returns in Fallout and is willing to die as part of his final plan, then his actions are motivated by a hatred of Ethan and desire to destroy his enemy compared to Ethan’s love of his friends and allies (to say nothing of Lane having likely suffered some form of breakdown during his two years of constant interrogation where he now sees death as his only "escape")
- Ethan dramatically knocks over the white box with Lane inside. In chess, White (the Syndicate) moves first, black (IMF) reacts. Checkmate.
- Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol established that it is nearly impossible for IMF agents to maintain stable romantic relationships. In this film, Benji receives two free tickets to the Viennese Opera and shows up alone.
Fridge Horror
- Brandt stonewalls Congress about the IMF's activities in the Book Ends, with the excuse that there is currently no Secretary who can authorize him to discuss such activities with them. This raises very thorny constitutional questions: part of Congress's job is to provide oversight of executive branch agencies (which IMF almost certainly is) as part of the broader checks and balances system. In effect, Brandt has positioned the IMF as being above the law, which should scare anybody worried about the increasing power of the US national security apparatus.
