If you hadn’t seen a single Mission: Impossible movie up until Dead Reckoning Part One, then it would be very easy to assume that Esai Morales’ Gabriel was a returning character, seeing as he clearly has a long and complicated history with Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt.
Of course, that isn’t the case, but other than a single flashback and some ominous hints as to how the two are connected, we‘ll need to wait until the second half of the double-header to find out. However, there could have been additional exposition and explanation in Part One if Christopher McQuarrie hadn’t gotten a scathing email from a disgruntled viewer following an early test screening, as he revealed to Empire.
“[A viewer] wrote the most brutal email I’ve ever read – not hostile, but just both barrels right to the chin, things that were not working for him in the movie, things that were really bugging him, and that he was not a big franchise action movie guy to begin with. He was not a huge fan of Mission: Impossible. And I woke up that morning and read this email and just wanted to vomit. It was so brutal. It just forced me to look at things through another person’s eyes, which is really what the value of testing is. He’s in the special thanks.”
The non-fan’s perspective centered on the flashback in question, that dug deeper into the backstory involving Ethan, Gabriel, and the mysterious “Marie.” Theories are already arising that Hayley Atwell’s Grace will ultimately be revealed as the hero’s daughter as part of the villain’s nefarious scheme, but we’re going to have to sit on our hands and ruminate until Part Two arrives thanks to McQuarrie rejigging the entire subplot on account of a single scathing assessment.
