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This Villain was proposed and approved by Villains Wiki's Pure Evil Proposals Thread. Any act of removing this villain from the category without a Removal Proposal shall be considered vandalism (or a futile "heroic" attempt of redemption) and the user will have high chances of being | ||
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| “ | Your mission, should you choose to accept it... I wonder, Ethan, did you ever choose not to? Did you ever stop and ask yourself who it was giving you the orders or why? While every day the master you serve moves one step closer to ending the world.[...] Terrorists are schoolboys, desperate for attention. Hoping to shape public opinion through fear. I don't care in the least what people think or feel. In my experience they don't do either for very long. [...] You see the end as clearly as I do, Ethan. Governments the world over are descending into madness. The Syndicate was created to tear them down, brick by brick. [...] The Syndicate was civilization's last hope! A chance to smash the old world order. That hope is gone now because of you and your pathetic morality. You should have killed me, Ethan. The end you've always feared is coming. It's coming! And the blood will be on your hands. The fallout of all your good intentions. | „ |
| ~ Lane taunting Ethan Hunt. |
Solomon Lane is the main antagonist of the 2015 action/thriller film Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation and one of the two main antagonists (alongside August Walker) of its 2018 sequel Mission: Impossible – Fallout.
He is a former MI6 agent who led The Syndicate, a mysterious international and powerful terrorist organization that consisted of former government agents who faked their deaths betrayed their countries. He was originally chosen to lead the Syndicate by Atlee while it was a government program, only to go rogue with the organization and turn its assassins into his operatives.
He is the arch-nemesis of Ethan Hunt, so much so that Lane is bent on eliminating Hunt and his IMF team in order to prevent them from stopping his plans to create a new world order based on unstoppable accidents and terrorist attacks that will actually turn the entire world into a massive terrorist superpower. Following his apprehension, his followers reform the Syndicate into a similar anarchist faction called "The Apostles". Thereafter, Lane colluded with a notorious extremist named John Lark to accomplish his terrorist agenda in exchange for framing Hunt as the perpetrator of said crimes as revenge over his previous defeat.
He was portrayed by Sean Harris, who also played Jungler in Deliver Us from Evil, Sean Fifield in Prometheus, Micheletto Corella in The Borgias, and Stretch in Harry Brown.
Biography
Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation
Agent Ethan Hunt of Impossible Mission Force is convinced that he can prove the existence of the Syndicate, an international terrorist consortium consisting of former government agents and well-trained killers. Reporting to an IMF substation to receive his orders, the Syndicate reveals their existence to Hunt, as Lane infiltrated the substation to capture him. Hunt is rescued by Ilsa Faust, a disavowed British MI6 agent and an operative for The Syndicate who offers no explanation for her actions. With their existence confirmed, Hunt begins following his only lead: a blond man in glasses who oversaw his capture.
Six months later, Hunt leads a CIA team to an empty safe-house as a means of passing new information on the Syndicate to his friend and an intelligence specialist Benji Dunn. Suspicious of Alan Hunley's actions and believing he will capture Hunt at the first opportunity, William Brandt recruits former agent Luther Stickell to discreetly find Hunt, using a likeness of Ilsa found at the safe house. Hunt arranges for Benji to attend an opera in Vienna, recruiting him to take part in a covert mission to locate the man in glasses. Realizing that the Syndicate plans to assassinate the Chancellor of Austria at the opera, Hunt intervenes by shooting him before the Syndicate can. Escaping with Ilsa, one of the intended shooters, he is powerless to prevent the Chancellor from being killed by a car bomb put in place as a redundancy.
Ilsa partners with Hunt and Dunn to locate a file hidden by a Syndicate traitor on a high-security server used to regulate a Moroccan power station. Believing it to be a ledger containing the names of all Syndicate agents, the trio secure it before Ilsa betrays Hunt and Dunn. She returns to London and passes the file onto her superior Atlee, also the chief head of M16. However, Atlee discreetly erases the file - THUS forcing Ilsa to return to the Syndicate and prove her loyalty to its supreme leader, Solomon Lane, who Hunt knows as the man in the glasses.
Regrouping with Brandt and Stickell, Hunt and Dunn follow Ilsa back to London, where they debate the nature of their work.
Having betrayed one another so many times, they can no longer be certain of their own loyalty, question what to do next as they cannot be sure that Lane has not anticipated and moved to manipulate them. When Dunn and Ilsa are abducted by Lane's men, Hunt realizes that Lane will always have his plan to acquire the files and that the only sure way to stop him is to force a confrontation with him. He agrees to Lane's ultimatum to abduct the British Prime Minister and use his voice print to unlock the file.
Disturbed by this turn of events, Brandt contacts Hunley and reveals their location. Hunley arrives at a charity auction to try and prevent Hunt from attacking the Prime Minister, and take him with Brandt and Attlee to a secure room. Having posed as Attlee, Hunt reveals himself and he has the Prime Minister confirm the existence of the Syndicate: a top-secret project that sought to recruit disavowed foreign government agents to carry out clandestine missions; an initiative that the Prime Minister opposed as too extreme. When the real Atlee arrives, Hunt subdues him, and he admits that Lane hijacked the project for his own ends and went rogue, which Atlee has been covering up its existence ever since. Atlee is arrested and is taken into custody.
Stickell discovers that the file is not having a ledger of known agents, but contains the locations and access codes for billions of dollars in untraceable funds that Lane has been desperate to get to keep the Syndicate active for decades. Hunt memorizes the data and destroys the file to force Lane to release Dunn and Ilsa in exchange for what he knows. He lures Lane out into the open and into a trap set up by Stickell and Brandt. Imprisoned in a bulletproof cell, he is gassed and taken into custody and the Syndicate is dismantled once and for all.
Mission: Impossible – Fallout
Lane first appears in Hunt's dream while he is sleeping. In the dream, Julia and Hunt are remarrying after their breakup in the fourth film, but things change when Hunt realizes that the priest is actually Lane. Lane starts talking about how hard it would be for Hunt to marry her, due to his job and how hard it would be to protect her from Hunt's enemies. Hunt says "that's enough" before seeing that the priest is actually Lane, and Lane says "you should have killed me". An explosion is seen in the background, and both Julia and Hunt die. When Hunt wakes up from the nightmare, he sees the tape announcing his mission, and it is trying to stop an enigmatic terrorist going by the name of "John Lark" who is recreating The Syndicate under the name of The Apostles. Thereupon Lane is suspected to be involved in this, but possibly even more dangerous this time around.
Soon enough, the arms dealer known as White Widow makes a deal with Hunt that would allow him to get access to Lane. When they interrogate him in order to make a mask for him and copy his voice, but Lane threatens Hunt as they are copying his voice, saying that he is planning on ruining Hunt's entire life, "the fallout of all [your] good intentions". Benji uses the mask to disguise as Lane in order to see who is the true John Lark, who is eventually revealed to be rogue CIA agent August Walker. It soon transpires that Walker is planning on killing a third of the world's population so that the world powers will work together, which may cause peace in the future. However, Lane's intent on achieving this is to satisfy his vendetta against Hunt by framing him for the attack; this would've resulted in Hunt getting arrested, henceforth Lane's scheme would make Hunt rot in prison for years to come, seeing everything around him being slowly ruined and destroyed. Walker soon becomes frustrated with Lane's obsession with Hunt, going so far as to ask Lane why he has to make everything so complicated. Eventually, Walker realizes that the Lane he is seeing is Benji on disguise.
Endgame
At the climax of the film, in Kashmir, it is revealed that either Walker or Lane created a medical center after spreading a disease through the village, just so that Julia would go and work at the center, preparing on blowing it all up just to spite Hunt. Ilsa sees Lane standing by a house, and prepares to kill him. Lane hides until he attacks Ilsa from behind and ties her up on a chair, screaming in panic as she is unable to escape. As she is unable to speak with Benji through their microphone, Benji comes in as well and prepares to kill Lane.
Unfortunately, Lane comes from behind and ambushes Benji. They fight and Lane brutally beats Benji before hanging him from a rope, while Ilsa is forced to watch Benji slowly die. Before he is able to tie Benji to the rope, however, Ilsa comes from behind and beats Lane unconscious before saving Benji. In the end, Lane's plan fails after Hunt retrieves the detonator to stop the explosion and kills Walker in the process. Lane is left unsatisfied at being foiled once again. Later on, he is rearrested for his crimes by the CIA and is handed over to MI6 to be taken into their custody.
Since Lane does not appear in the next movie, nor is he mentioned, despite being still alive, it's possible that he was executed by MI6. Evidence supports this as Ilsa informs Ethan with what he knows, MI6 could not have Lane running around, sharing his knowledge with foreign governments.
Personality
| “ | Walker: Is it true Lane gassed a village of 2,000 people? Ethan: Yes. Walker: Is it true he brought down an entire passenger plane just to kill one man? Ethan Yes. Walker: Is it true that he— Ethan: Look Walker, whatever you've heard, if it makes your skin crawl, it's probably true. |
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| ~ Ethan to Walker about Lane's accomplishments |
As we see from the very beginning, Solomon Lane is an extremely cruel and manipulative person - essentially Mission: Impossible's incarnation of 007 villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld (meaning that the Syndicate would be the Mission: Impossible incarnation of SPECTRE). As seen in the quote above, Lane has very little concern for human life; he is willing to let a third of the world's population starve to death just to get back at Hunt, as well as shooting the girl at the record shop with an emotionless expression. Lane also intended to stay behind with bombs as they exploded, implying that he may also be suicidal. However, Lane doesn't appear as entirely evil when he first appears in Rogue Nation, only wanting to capture the UK Prime Minister to unlock the red box to help fund and expand the Syndicate's operations. After the IMF captures him, he presumably became more colder in prison as he appears to be more hostile and dangerous in the sequel, Fallout.
When Ethan explains the Syndicate to Benji, he rattles off several Syndicate-executed plans, all of which resulted in the death of an important person or collapse of a company due to financial issues. These plans included: a car crash involving a visiting President of Malawi, a passenger plane carrying 236 passengers including the Secretary of the World Bank vanishing over the Pacific Ocean and starting a fire at a petrochemical plant to gas a village of 2,000 people. The car crash later ended up triggering a civil war while the fire bankrupted a global arms corporation. According to Ethan, Lane was seen at every incident, implying him to be the mastermind. Also, to show how manipulative he is, Lane has led the public to believe that these were just random accidents, but Ethan reveals them to be links in a chain.
In his service as an MI6 agent, he unhesitatingly killed innocents, eventually making him bitter. Even before his time as a secret agent, Lane was skeptical about the motives of governments and saw them as corrupt and destructive organizations, all ultimately equal to their egoism and their actions, with the sole aim of leaving everything as it is - for everyone: price. However, as he worked as a spy, these beliefs deepened, bringing Lane closer to an anarchist and nihilistic worldview. From then on, he used MI6's planned Syndicate to commit terrorist attacks worldwide, destabilize the world order, and finally destroy it altogether, believing that only chaos could bring long-term peace. The innocent opera that brings his actions with it, as Lane does not care about it and he justifies himself that he has done nothing else as an MI6 agent, becoming the perfect personification of anarchism.
In planning his operations, Lane is cold and calculating - he leaves out his personal feelings. A silent individual, he shows a different pattern of behavior based on violence, killing and anarchy but wants to show this behavior silently, and made his actions without noise or explosions, describing his killing methods as "more surgical", presumably referring to Janik Vinter and his tools of torture. In his contact with humans - subordinates as well as enemies - Lane is calm, polite, emotionless and can only be led to feelings by serious personal defeats - in most cases, sheer rage. This anger is Lane's biggest weakness, since it causes the otherwise brilliant terrorist to make crucial mistakes. In fact, it is his hatred for Ethan Hunt that makes him forget caution and, in many cases, is the reason for his defeat. For example, Lane managed to perfect two atomic bombs linked by a fail-safe detonator: any attempt to disarm one bomb without disarming the detonator will trigger the other bomb. Ethan secured the detonator and removed the firing pin, deactivating the nuclear weapons. Nonetheless, Lane is a brilliant strategist and a criminal genius whose plans always involve several levels and often leave the enemies in the belief that they have won, only to then perform an action that is in Lane's interest.
After the Syndicate was almost crushed by Lane's arrest and unable to act as before, the deluded Lane realizes that the syndicate - which he saw as the last hope of civilization to smash the insane governments - is now gone. Therefore, he takes on a new perspective, which is lived by a new anarchist ally, John Lark. According to the hypothesis that every phase of peace was preceded by a great suffering, Lane and the Apostles now want to cause the world as much suffering as possible in order to bring about peace. Lane is also ready to obliterate a third of the world's population. In fact, Lane is driven by this one goal at the time and is even willing to sacrifice his life for it - even his goal is to die, even though he has options to escape.
Another aspect Lane lives for is revenge on Ethan Hunt, who thwarted his original plans. To see Ethan suffer, Lane sets some levers in motion. So he organizes that Ethan's ex-wife and great love, Julia Meade-Hunt, works as a paramedic in an auxiliary camp in the Kashmir Mountains, because that's the place where Lane wants to detonate his atomic bombs. In addition, while still imprisoned, Lane is continuously haunting Ethan in his dreams, and even when meeting him due to Hunt wanting information about John Lark, Lane psychotically tells him that the end he always feared is coming for him. The anarchist also gives his henchmen explicit instructions not to kill Hunt, as he is not done with this yet. But these perfidious vices of revenge eventually turn out to be Lane's downfall as Ethan manages to thwart the anarchist's plans a second time.
Quotes
| “ | Ethan Hunt is a gambler. And one day his luck will run out, and thousands of innocent people will pay the price. Which one of us will be the villain then? | „ |
| ~ Solomon Lane explaining his motives to Ilsa Faust. |
| “ | This is the end, Mr. Hunt... | „ |
| ~ Lane speaking to Ethan through Benji's voice |
| “ | To shield from terrors unknown, to lie, to cheat, to deceive, to fail to prevent her abduction, force her into hiding, take away all she has known. And Julia, do you choose to accept? | „ |
| ~ Lane in Hunt's nightmares, as Hunt is dreaming about marrying Julia, only to notice that Lane is the priest. |
| “ | My running days are over. This is where it ends for me. | „ |
| ~ Solomon Lane to August Walker upon activating the nuclear weapons. |
| “ | He can't stop it, understand? There's nothing he can do. When the clock runs out, Ethan Hunt will lose everything and everyone he ever cared about. | „ |
| ~ Lane to Ilsa, during the final battle scene in Mission: Impossible – Fallout. |
Relationships
Allies
- The Syndicate
- August Walker/John Lark †
- Janik Vinter † - Former Henchman
Enemies
- Impossible Mission Force
- Ethan Hunt - Archenemy
- Ilsa Faust † - Former Agent
- Luther Stickell
- Benji Dunn - Former Hostage, Impersonator, and Attempted Victim
- William Brandt
- Alan Hunley †
- IMF Record Shop Girl † - Victim
- Chancellor of Austria †
- Erika Sloane
- Julia Meade-Hunt
- Erik
- Alanna Mitsopolis/White Widow
- Zola Mitsopolis
Trivia
- Solomon Lane is the first antagonist in a Mission: Impossible film who is captured instead of killed or ending up dead at the end.
- Despite being the first villain in the franchise to live on for more than one installment, Lane's actor Sean Harris said that he didn't want to appear in a film series and would only join the cast if they promised that Lane would die in the film. Reportedly, Harris pleaded with director Christopher McQuarrie throughout filming of Rogue Nation to kill off Lane. Interestingly enough, Lane hasn't been killed so far and has appeared in two films. Whether or not he's been executed by MI6 after being arrested is unknown.
- This may be an indicator that Harris ultimately changed his mind or was somehow convinced to return.
- Lane has also been confirmed (so far) to not be returning for the last movie Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning. Although he was last seen being incarcerated once again by MI6 it is unknown if he was actually killed off-screen though it remains a possibility that MI6 executed Lane to prevent him from leaking vital information to foreign governments however this has not been confirmed.
- According to McQuarrie, he and co-star Tom Cruise had written several versions of Rogue Nation's ending where Ethan and Ilsa kill Lane. The crew decided not to go with this as they could not justify the manner of Lane's death and felt it to be too far-fetched.
- It was thought that Lane would be recast and played by Esai Morales for the Dead Reckoning movies; this was proven false when Morales was revealed to be playing a new character called Gabriel.
- Lane is the second antagonist of the franchise to face Ethan Hunt in a personal way, the first was Owen Davian and the third one was Gabriel.
- Lane shares similarities to a few of the villains from the 007 franchise:
- Ernst Stavro Blofeld: Both wore a grey Nehru dress coat, which became Blofeld's classic trademark. Similarly, he and Blofeld both founded international terrorist organizations (Lane founded the Syndicate while Blofeld founded SPECTRE)
- Raoul Silva, from Skyfall: Both were formerly disgraced MI6 agents, before becoming international terrorists.
- Along with Gabriel and The Entity he's considered by fans of the Mission Impossible franchise as one of its smartest and most dangerous villains.
- Despite being the main antagonist in Rogue Nation, Ethan and Lane only face each other in the beginning and at the end of the movie.
External Links
- Solomon Lane on the Pure Evil Wiki
- Solomon Lane on the Mission: Impossible Wiki
 Villains
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Mission: Impossible (TV series) Mission: Impossible (film) Mission: Impossible 2 Mission: Impossible III Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation Other Mission: Impossible – Fallout Other Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning | ||