The Rock's Fast X post-credit return asks more questions than it answers

If ever there was a question over whether the Fast & Furious franchise is some kind of expansive Christ-like allegory, look no further than how it treats redemption and resurrection.

Firstly, the series, which is racking up its 10th pure outing (11th, if you factor in the 2019 spin-off Hobbs & Shaw) with Fast X, has made a trope of redeeming its villains. From Jason Statham's Deckard Shaw to Charlize Theron's Cipher, pure evil in muscle-bound form is allowed, over the course of a one or two film break, to show themselves, actually, to be good underneath the layers of villainous ice. All they needed was to be thawed by the power of family!

Secondly, it has the power to bring people back from the dead, literally. Over the course of its run, barely a single branch from the family tree that's been chopped for dramatic effect has stayed deceased for long. There's Han (Sung Kang), killed in the third film (which also somehow takes place between the sixth and seventh film), who reemerges in F9, Letty (Michelle Rodriguez), presumed dead after the fourth film brought back in Fast Five and, with Fast 10, Giselle (Gal Gadot) makes a fleeting return after being iced in Fast 6.

All this to say, whether you're good, bad, dead or alive, there's a place for you in Dominic Toretto's (Vin Diesel) collective. That is unless you're Luke Hobbs, played by Dwayne Johnson, a character neither particularly nefarious nor killed but, until a shocking post-credits reveal at the end of Fast X, was never expected to return to the fold.

In Fast X, the villain of the week is Dante Reyes (Jason Momoa), the embittered and vengeful son of the Brazillian druglord Hernan (Joaquim de Almeida) in Fast Five (arguably the best in the series so far). Retconned to appear that he was by his father's side the entire time, although, granted, conveniently just out of shot, he's on a one-man mission to take down Dominic Toretto et al. Basically, if he can't have family then no one can! By the end of the film, we're watching multiple cliffhangers take place as, one by one, each member of the crew is plucked off in some wild explosion. Likely, everyone will probably end up being fine because, hey, this is Fast & Furious after all!