www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIsauUFIguE  

“The time has come to dissolve the IMF,” thick-necked spymaster Alan Hunley tells the Senate Intelligence Committee. And just like that, the gavel comes down in “Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation” on Ethan Hunt and the Impossible Mission Force, and the big, bad CIA gets to absorb the best elements of Hunt’s daring-do team of operatives.  

(And, of course, after being disbanded at the beginning of the fifth installment of the franchise, they are reinstated by that same committee at the end of the movie after proving their mettle — also at the behest Alec Baldwin’s Hunley.)  

For the time being, leave aside questions about why the House Intelligence Committee was left out of the decision, whether the president or National Security Council would have anything to say about it, and why a CIA man (Baldwin), as opposed to the director of national intelligence, would make such a recommendation. Focus instead on the moment the movie depicts a truly impossible mission. That’s not when Tom Cruise’s Hunt hitches a ride outside an airplane in the film’s opening sequence. No, it’s the even more fantastic spectacle of Congress moving with alacrity.  

But members of the Senate Intelligence Committee can dream, no?

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