There are two examples of cut scenes from Fallout and DR that I wish they’d kept in/incorporated somehow, because they both offer a glimpse into how Ethan behaves between missions. The first one is him going into hiding after Kashmir to avoid Sloane. He does this as a negotiation tactic to force her to hand over Lane to MI6 in order to free Ilsa. The second one is at the beginning of Dead Reckoning, where he’s offered multiple missions by Kittridge and refuses all of them, evading the IMF and staying under the radar. You watch him walk through public streets alone, off-balance and separate from the rest of the world, until eventually the movie opens with Kittridge placing a bounty on Ilsa’s head to flush Ethan out of hiding.
And I think what’s interesting is that in both of these instances, Ethan isn’t forced into hiding (like he is in Rogue Nation or Ghost Protocol), he is choosing to hide as a form of leverage. It shows a much more calculated and angry version of Ethan, one that is actively hostile to the IMF, working for his own interests as opposed to “the greater good.” We usually see him in high-pressure situations where he’s not in control and trying desperately to solve a series of increasingly insane and dangerous problems. But these two examples show the opposite - he is very calculated and slow moving. This is how Ethan behaves when he is in control, and it’s an inversion of the panicked, rushed, lightning-fast way he behaves during missions.
It also offers additional texture to the lonesome and empty way we see him act between missions, where he’s literally sleeping in abandoned buildings and isolating himself from the world lol. It gives those at-rest periods more of an edge. In those moments, he is still working, but in a “selfish” way, using his own skills and reputation to get what he wants (eg protecting Ilsa). And imo it gives Ethan more agency in his life and helps inform how he relates to his own desires. His self-isolation acts as both a passive and active form of protection - he hides because he knows that getting close to people puts them in harms way, and he also hides as a bargaining chip for his friends’ lives. It gives you the impression that Ethan is aware of his own value as an agent, and deploys that value for political/strategic means. And for me at least it demonstrates a more cold and shrewd side of Ethan, where he can exert his will and behave in ways that are more hidden or subtle. People often joke about him being dog-coded, being a sad wet puppy, etc etc, and while all of those are definitely true lol, I like this much more deliberate and calculated side of him, where he has more control over his own actions when he isn’t being forced to just gut-react to everything. He’s great in a crisis, but when he’s not in a crisis, he is very, very still
