Headscratchers / Final Destination

• Why do the characters even bother to fight so hard? Unless they honestly thought they were badass enough to outmaneuver The Grim Reaper to the point they became immortal then they should have known it was only a matter of time until they all died. Everyone dies you know.
  • What? The survival instinct is one of the strongest ones we have, of course people are going to fight for their lives if they have a chance to. Additionally, everyone dies but a lot of those people die peacefully in bed. Just because I know I'll die someday doesn't mean I'd just sit there if a bus was bearing down on me or my house was on fire.
    • I think the idea is that people feels that they were dying ahead of time. That's not how it works, your time comes when it comes. You might think it's too short, but it's not. If you're meant to die before 30, that's how long you'll live. It's like people with terminal diseases, many realize there's nothing they can do about it and accept their fate; this is the same, you know you're gonna die, you can't do anything about it, so accepting is probably the healthiest choice.
    • Who says it's their time? The protagonists cheated death once. Why not again?
    • To quote Dave Lister, "If Death comes anywhere near me, I'll rip his nipples off".

• If death wants them all to die so bad, why not just give them a lethal disease?
  • Death can only manipulate environmental surroundings, not actually move inanimate objects that would be required to inject them. As for pathogens and viruses, death can influence organisms but not outright override them, which is why the horse could only drag the girl towards the wheat thresher in the third movie as opposed to running over and trampling or...or for that matter why death doesn't just force a nearby cop to shoot the characters in order.
  • ...because if it did that there wouldn't be a movie.
  • What would you find more interesting? A movie about a group of people who, after surviving a disaster due to a prophetic vision, all immediatly have simultainious heart attacks and fall over, or a movie where people are sliced in 3 pieces by barbed wire thrown at a man by a car that exploded due to a lit ciggarette falling from the hands of a woman whose head was just impaled on a pipe through her cars air bag and into a puddle of fuel from a damaged news van?
  • Reading that made me dizzy.
  • I've always thought that the Rube Goldberg deaths were the Grim Reaper trying to make a point - there is no cheating death. If you try with some weird premonition, it's just going to get you anyways, probably in really spectacular and gruesome fashion to make up for it. The random coincidences are to make sure people get the message. No one does news coverage of a small group of people dying from natural causes over a number of years, but "survivors of plane crash all killed off in epic fashion" will attract some attention.
    • Are you saying they deliberately induced the premonition in themselves? You speak as if you’re blaming them for having the premonition and taking action based on it. I always thought the premonition was involuntary, and their self-preservering actions were just our survival instinct. I didn’t think anyone deserved to be blamed or to suffer for this. Are these movies Calvinism in disguise?
  • I've theorized that death is a drama queen and uses the premonitions as an excuse to get full control over the universe, to knock them off in ways he sees fit. I've heard one quote from a final destination character that suggests that death likes having an audience for his rube goldbergs.
  • Because Bloody Horror entertains death just as much as us.

• Why exactly were Ashley and Ashlyn’s deaths so… drawn out. I mean I get Death is petty beyond measure, but most of the deaths in FD 3 were short and relatively quick. The girls on the other hand? Their fates were horrific, torturous, and incredibly personal. And they were the kindest characters in the movie who never once did anything to warrant Death’s sheer ferocity. Why exactly did Death decide that they out of all the other survivors in the movie should get the most agonizing ends?

• At the end of every movie, the protagonist temporarily kills themselves with some "suicide serum" in order to "cheat death". Okay. Then...why was the guy who tried to commit suicide by gun prevented from doing so by Death himself? Ignoring the explanation that "Death has a schedule, and the guy wasn't scheduled to die, just then" (I'll get to the illogic of that in a moment), the incident clearly showed that Death can influence and interfere with a person's death, not just cause it. If that's the case, then why can he not prevent these mere humans from tricking him into checking them off his book through a little pseudo-suicide? I could maybe forgive him for missing it in the first movie, but not any of the sequels; he should've caught on and ensured the syringe caused massive hemorrhaging or something when they tried it.
  • He did: they stopped trying it after the second movie.
  • My question is: In The Final Destination, one of the characters tries killing themselves with gun and hanging but it doesn't work. Okay? But what if just tried stabbing himself? What would've happened? Would he be bleeding out alive until it would be his turn? Or would he still be kept alive without the knives even working, making the characters realize Death was more supernatural? Sorry, but there's death, and then there's just bodily functions logic.

• As mentioned above, the "suicide-by-gun" guy was denied by Death himself, because Death's timetable didn't have him dying that day. Okay, all well and good...had they not established in the second movie that Death can alter the order of someone's death, including completely inverting it. So, if Death can do that, and the guy was going to die, anyway (which is what Death wanted), then why didn't he just let the guy kill himself?
  • The list inverts only when an entire list cheats death at once.
  • But it's not as pleasing if he doesn't do it in a painful and convoluted matter that just makes it more horrifying for the victim!
  • Actually, there's a better explaination, because he didn't let the guy die then, he was able to set up Clear's death, thus finish off his list from the first film in one and kill off one of the new people on his list in one foul swoop.
  • Possibly inverting the list is something that can only happen if the vision-having character physically forces other people to survive, rather than just yelling about an imminent catastrophe so that others either choose to leave, or are forced out by somebody who's reacting to their hissy-fit. The big difference between Kimberly's vision and all the others was that she didn't flip out and yell: she actively blocked the entrance-ramp with her car so the would-be casualties couldn't get to the accident-site even if they chose to. Nobody's free will is involved but hers.

• Surely the visions themselves prove that they weren't meant to die in the first place? If not, then why do they have visions at all?
  • I always assumed that Death was taunting them.
  • I might be overthinking the plot, but the manga Berserk has a premise that might be comparable. In it, the world's mostly governed by causality: everyone's individually doing what they think they want to do, but their criss-crossing motives always lead to whatever the Powers That Be want to happen. But if someone survives the moment that they were supposed to die, they become a wild card. They're not supposed to exist in the world, and everything they do has the potential to throw fate right off its rails. Not coincidentally, all the forces of darkness are hellbent on wiping out the protagonists for exactly that reason. Something pretty similar might be going in Final Destination. Death has a plan, but humans sometimes see through it, and if they do, they can avert it and start screwing around with destiny. But since they're now a threat to the cosmic order, the whole system of cause and effect gets twisted into correcting the imbalance and getting rid of them. Though why it feels the need to do it in the most elaborately bloodthirsty way possible is another matter...
    • Why do the heroes not have any further protection by the forces of light against the forces of darkness? After all, the forces of light wanted them to survive for some reason, right? Yet, we never seem to see fulfillment.
    • A lot of this is discussed by the time of the Fifth movie. The characters from the second movie are the perfect example of 'screwing around with destiny' — The people are alive because their deaths were last-minute prevented because the people from the first movie survived that one day. The Fifth movie then has Death claim that if you kill someone not on the list, you take their place because it's a matter of bookkeeping. The elaborate ways could be a way to get them to give up or could be part of the bookkeeping. Or Death could even be bored - when he has his way, things are 'go big or go home' as with every major disaster.
    • Adding on to this theory, maybe Death has to go though the elaborate accidents because the people getting "detached" from the order of things, gain some sort of immunity to it. Like, normally, killing someone would be like picking something up. But when the person survives when they should die, killing them later like trying to pick something up you can't directly touch. That trait may also spread to other objects, necessitating the need for more elaborate traps, which would be like having to tie some rope around the handles of a pot to pick said thing up

• Just what is causing all these premonitions in the first place? You'd think after four movies they'd explain something about it, even if it does turn out to be some ridiculous magical psychic voodoo thing.
  • According to the ending of the fourth movie, Death itself is giving the visions to the protagonists, so he could maneuver them into where and when he wants them to be when he finally comes for them. As I stated above, this makes no sense, since it doesn't work on any sort of ironic level, as we're lead to believe for almost the entirety of the first four movies that the visions were supposed to screw up Death's plan, and seems like a waste of time and effort on Death's part, as he could've just had them die in a more convenient and efficient way. In the comics, however, it's revealed that the visions are from a reincarnated goddess of Death, who is trying to disrupt Death's plan, since Death used her resurrection to enter into our world when it wasn't supposed to, thus unbalancing the furies or some crap like that. Personally, while both theories are dumb, I'd much prefer the latter more than the former, as it makes a little bit more sense, and doesn't open up plot holes the size of the Big Bang.
    • Unrelated nitpick: The Big Bang was notoriously small... ever heard of the Planck Length?
    • Then there's only one explanation for why Death gives the premonitions and makes them die later... he's an asshole and he loves toying with humans.
    • Word of God has stated several times that it is most likely an opposite force sending them premonitions. Keep that in mind. FD 4's ending is often misinterpreted. Assuming another force is working against Death (because if Death exists in the form of a somewhat concious force another force representing Life has to be present as well although it hasn't been adressed in the franchise), the opposite force is trying to save all these people by giving premonitions to a certain individual who would be able to save the biggest number of souls. And in this film, the speedway crash premonition was assumingly sent by the second force, "Life". However, after that, (assuming Death and Life have the same ability of sending premonitions) Death has been tricking them and sending them false visions that would ultimately lead them into being where it wanted them to die. Why it only did this in TFD I do not know however. I guess it should be noted that not all premonitions after the main accident were false or misleading since everyone did die by the clues given to Nick in the "mini visions" throughout the film. So the "it was the plan for us to be here since the beginning" thing coulf have easily meant that Death had planned to kill them in the Cafe all along but it doesn't really mean they weren't supposed to die at the speedway originally because the entire franchise is centered around CHEATING Death and it had been noted that Death hates the survivors passionately. Both Jeffrey Reddick and James Wong have said they believe that there are two forces working against each other throughout the franchise so I'm also subscribing to this theory.
    • This “opposing force” seems to think it can just phone it in after the first premonition.
    • Although that begs the question of why the premonitions aren't given to someone who could stop the accidents from happening at all, rather than someone who can save juuuuust enough characters for a movie. Why not, say, give the speedway vision to the pit crew idiot who'd left that metal doodad on one of the cars, in the first place?
    • For all we know, visions do happen to people who can actually prevent disasters in this Verse, all the time. They just don't get made into movies, because if the visionary averts the disaster they'd foreseen, there's no story to speak of, just some confused schlub wondering why they had a hallucination and if it really made any difference that they picked up that metal doodad or whatever.
  • And now we've gone back to the visions aren't Death's plan and there's a way of avoiding your own death in 6. Can we please keep a consistent explanation for how Death's Design is supposed to work out, for the love of Anubis?
    • Not necessarily. Does anyone on Death's list actually survive the 5th movie- and is there any evidence that the "kill for a life" method actually works? It could have easily been Death's plan for Sam and Molly to die on Flight 180 and the 5th film was just getting them there.
    • Molly wasn't initially on Death's list, since she was originally supposed to survive the bridge disaster. However, Sam put her on the list when he killed Peter, who was supposed to kill her (and being a big jerk about it too). Also, the method did work: it prolonged Nathan's life until after Sam and Molly died on the plane, and the Wiki says that Eugene gained the time of the substitute who was killed by the crazy dude who stabbed the substitute after Eugene substituted for Mrs. Lewton. And everyone in 5 died.
    • Keep in mind that the 4th movie was an exception in that regard, not the rule (although this detail is very poorly conveyed in the movie and had to be clarified via Word of God). An opposing force to Death is still likely the instigator of the majority of visions in the series, just not those in the last third of The Final Destination.
  • I thought the idea in the first one was that the new generation had some kind of emergent psychic powers rather than the vision being specific to the incident. It's just a natural ability.

• Since when has death stopped being able to kill people using heart attacks?
  • We can argue that they were supposed to die a violent death, so Death has to kill them off violently.
    • Then why doesn't Death find a way to kill them off in a similar manner? For instance, killing the survivors of the car crash in the second movie in vehicle-related accidents (as happened to Kat in the same movie)?
    • Because as the entry for Downer Ending says, it is suggested that the premonitions themselves are part of Death's design, and that all the victims in the series were meant to die outside of the major accidents. Thus, your statement would become that Death should find a way to kill them similar to a way that they wouldn't be killed in in the first place. Plus, a movie about people having heart attacks and allergic reactions would be a bit less interesting than watching someone who gets split into seperate pieces by barbed wire that got shot at him by an exploding car.
  • American Death just loves blood.
  • Maybe they're too healthy?
  • And how are they "supposed to die" when you're implicitly warned of your impending doom? I'm sorry, but that says "not supposed to die" to me. Hell, at the very least, the guy getting the visions should at least get a pass.
    • Because maybe the guy getting the visions is the only one that could be spared, but he goes and saves other people by "mistake" so Death revokes his free pass too; you ever thought about it? Assuming Death sends the premonitions "ok guy, here is what I am planning to do; go ahead, run now and you get off this." That would be another premise for the franchise if they ever dared to explore it, it's not like these movies do bad at the box office anyways; have the main cast meet with someone who DIDNT warn anybody else. What bothers me about the franchise is that it drops the anvil too hard on the concept of death is inescapable; yeah I get it, everybody has to die someday, one day. What upsets me is that even tough i enjoy them as slashers, the premise is a good one for handling actual real life death. In not a single movie has there been survivors that acknowledge this inetability and actually tried to live a better life. It's very pessimistic because the underlying message is "since you can't scape death, give up already". the closest to a positive note in the whole franchise is the vision guy in the fifth, in contrast to the one in the first movie. The one in the first movie tried to hide away and started going crazy trying to actually cheat death, while the one in the fifth somewhat resigned but still tried to go on with his normal life.
    • But death never tells them not to save others. Is he punishing heroism?
  • There's a bit of plausibility to this theory. In Final Destination 3's Choose Their Fate option, if you invert the coin toss, only Wendy and three of her friends never get on the rollercoaster. While the others died in the crash, the heroes seem to have gotten off Death's List, so it's possible that those four getting off were the ones Death gave a free pass to.
    • This actually more likely corroborates the "kill or be killed" rule introduced in 5. In the Choose Their Fate beginning we're very clearly shown a shot of four new people taking Wendy, Kevin, Jason and Carrie's places on the coaster. These people are indirectly killed by the group getting off so it makes sense that Wendy and co get their lives.
    • Except that begs the question of why the order of deaths wasn't shifted around in 2 or 4, because presumably there'd have been other deaths resulting from the main characters' survival in those films too. In 2, it's a busy highway, so the scattered logs would have hit somebody's vehicles sooner or later, and in 4, it seems unlikely that other people wouldn't have moved around to claim the emptied stadium seats, which (barring Jonathan's hat) had a better view of the racetrack than the benches in the upper tiers. Granted, one could argue that anyone moving down from an upper stadium tier was on the list to die at Daytona already, but with the highway pile-up, it surely took out at least a few people who'd otherwise have had time to stop safely, had they seen the huge fuel-tank explosion that the lottery-winner's sports car caused. By rights, Kimberly herself shouldn't have been in danger for years, because she obstructed the entrance ramp and set up other people to die in the crash in the blocked-in drivers' stead.
  • Maybe Death was just so pissed that its plans were messed up that it took some sadistic pleasure in killing those who dared fuck with it in violent and contrived ways.
    • The book Final Destination: Death of the Senses pretty much goes with that. Tony Todd's character from the first two movies has a cameo appearance in the novel and has this to say to the main characters:
  William Bludworth: "Like I said, spend enough time with death, you start to see his patterns. And if those patterns get messed up... then boy, does that fucker get pissed off!"
  • This gets lampshaded in the book Final Destination: Destination Zero. Disaster survivor Will Sax at one point states that yeah, he gets that Death wants them dead. What he doesn't get is why it takes such perverse delight in offing them in the most horrible and gory ways possible. It's probably because Death just wants to do it for the "shits and giggles"
  • In the fourth movie, the mall collapse kills an amazing amount of people and not just the intended survivors., so by preventing it, doesn't the protagonist put another large group of people in danger of being killed in more spectacular ways?
  • Perhaps by this time, Death has gotten bored with his "normal" job, and is just having fun, possibly not even realizing how horrible he's being; he sent the second "theater" vision in the fourth movie to just to mess with the protagonist even more, but Death had to make it "look real," so that's why the second disaster was barely averted. Notably, a bystander does say the protagonist "saved a lot of people," which gets him thinking it might not be over.
    • No, the point with the mall scene was that it was a rehash of the initial accident in the racetrack: All the important details and clues were the same, including the protagonist saving people thanks to a vision. The vision and the saving-of-people was just part of the rehash.
    • No, you're all wrong; it's been confirmed that the people who escaped the explosion of the cinema were SUPPOSED to survive since only Janet and Lori were the targets - that IS why Janet gets impaled in the vision after all and then Lori gets crushed to bits in gears; the bystanders, this time, were supposed to survive as Death was all "Right.. You've fucked with me for the last time! DIE WOMAN! DIE! I COMMAND IT! DIE!... Right, that's one down... Now, where's the other one! Ooooh! Escalator! Prepare to die, other woman! MWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!"
  • There's also the fact that if the survivors witnessed the horrible accident they had avoided, then all of them spontaneously keeled over from heart attacks, strokes and other such things... it wouldn't really make a very interesting movie.
  • So under the above logic: what if the people having the visions of the initial accidents managed to prevent them entirely? Say, someone manages to stop the roller coaster in part 3 from being used at all until they check it for hydraulic failure? Would everyone on the coaster die horribly like the main characters do, or would they all be skipped while Death focuses on those main characters?

• I remember something from the fourth trailer about a few nails springing off and big cracks coming up in a racing stadium all leading to a car crash. To me, that's just too audacious, and I just knew that I wasn't one for this series.
  • No, a screwdriver being stuck in a racecar and falling onto the track caused the car crash. The stadium was old, and the cracks and nails popping loose were to show how unstable it was. Once the big explosions started popping up all over the place, the stands couldn't handle the stress.

• Does it matter how you escaped death? If it happened, then you weren't going to die in the first place, negating the whole point of the movie. Cause is cause, doesn't matter if you decided to turn left at one point or did something because of a dream.
  • It matters a lot, actually. Say you're supposed to die in a building fire, but after your premonition, you avoid the building completely. Or even better, say someone else is supposed to die in that fire, but avoids it because of a vision and then saves you from getting hit by a bus when you're not paying attention, one day. In both cases, you've either mucked up the design and pissed off Death, or Death is pulling your strings like a sadistic puppet master. Regardless, the premonitions are always the key; without them, events would play out sans interruption, and the effects of said interruptions are what these movies are about.
    • So what happens if you don't escape from the premonition but from the signs of death coming around? And what if you save people from a disaster without a premonition?
    • Same result. If you were supposed to die, Death makes sure you do. Normal people don't notice the signs.
    • Disagree. The premonitions themselves are expressly made out to be the sole catalysts for the deviation from Death's plan. Any ominous clues or signs the characters see would already exist within said plan. Hence someone getting creeped out by the "I'll see you soon" sign outside the Devil's Flight and refusing to go on it would not be put on Death's list. If there's no premonition then whatever happens was meant to happen.
  • This troper personally thinks the fact all survivors are rather young (hardly anyone in their forties or beyond), probably all of them still go with the idea that they're still too young. It would be going deep in the psyche of all these characters, but basically they all think they would die much, much later (and most likely, some of them believed they'd die peacefully way past their hair turning white). So defeating Death, in this series, might just mean escaping the horrible fate and survive, and live for a few more decades. (And if they manage to do so, does that mean their death at the retirement home will be just as gruesome?))

• If so many of the other survivors were raging douchenozzles, why should the protagonist waste time trying to protect/save them? If it were me with premotions and a bunch of kids I went to high school with, I would've gladly let Ol' Grimmy have the douchebags and focus my efforts on saving myself and maybe one other person if they had any kind of redeeming value or could be useful to me in the future. But maybe that's just me.
  • Well, every person alive is one person between you and death. Besides, if you don't keep track of them, you won't know where you stand on Death's list.
    • That's an unfortunately self-defeating viewpoint. Every one of us is going to die, and one of the main things that makes life more bearable is that we don't know when it will be. This is particularly relevant now that the sequels have repeatedly beaten in the point that none of his targets are going to survive. And let's not even get into apparent list subversions.
  • You sound like the kind of person I like to see die in these kinds of movies. No offense.
    • You actually do have a point, the kind of attitude shown by the original poster tends to come from the characters that AREN'T mourned by the audience in these kinds of movies.

• Not to reinforce stereotypes, but when have you ever seen that many black people at a NASCAR event? Odds are, you're going to find more than just one Racist there.
  • Yes, but then it means only one of them made it outside and became part of the survivors.

• What kind of a doctor LEAVES while the patient is getting LASIK?
  • A busy one?
    • Well then an assistant should be in there. You don't leave a patient alone.
    • He hadn't actually started the procedure, though. The power surge caused the machine to turn itself up, and Olivia's own panic was what turned on the laser. The doctor thought he was just leaving a woman with a numb eye alone, not a woman under the laser of death.
  • But she was strapped in and had her eye held open. Don't you need someone to moisten it? More to the point though, why didn't she cover her eye earlier? I know we could write PAGES on the idiocy of the characters, but my God, protecting your eyes is practically instinct. She could have covered her eye with one hand and unscrewed the vice of the head with the other at least.
    • By the time that she needed to cover her eye, the beam was powerful enough to scorch her hand even when it was protecting her. As far as she knew, nothing had gone wrong yet, she was just sorta creeped out.
    • She could've even used the teddy bear as a makeshift eye shield, but she didn't. Too Dumb to Live, indeed.
    • Yes, even if it could easily burn her hand, I'm sure that stuffed animal would have held out, even if the first blast hadn't made her drop it.
  • The kind that Death manipulates Olivia into booking an appointment with. The doctor was probably always incompetent and Death's real job was getting an advertisement for his clinic in front of Olivia's face.

• The laser eye surgery room has the weakest glass window EVER. All she did was trip and fell lightly against the glass and it breaks as if she was running like a bull trying to smash it.
  • Clearly Death tampered with it during manufacturing so it would break easy.
  • She's wearing stilleto boots and if you watch closely you can see she breaks the window by kicking through it. Something long and blunt like a stiletto would serve as a perfect window-punch.

• In the end how could Sam not hear Alex scream at the top of his lungs that they need to get off the plane and that it's going to explode? And if he did hear even some bit of it, you'd think he'd immediately be alerted, right?
  • Alex took a while to break down in the first movie. He might have been in the bathroom or something and not overheard it.
  • I'm not sure I would characterize Alex as screaming, but more him blurting something like "planesgonnasplode". It's hard to tell what he's saying and they all get deplaned when it breaks out into a fight. Though I would think Sam would at least visibly ponder the incident a bit longer before departure.
• Death wants to kill the people in the same order they are supposed to die. So, when the teens cheated Death, did that put everyone in the rest of the world who was supposed to die on hold while he went after a handful of people, since they were supposed to die after them? Just based on some quick math, that's about 3.6 million people who should have died over the course of story.
  • Death wants to kill them in the order they died in the accidents. In the whole 'order' thing, only the accidents matter, because they didn't die at the right time.
  • Death is omnipresent- he has no trouble being all around the world, ensuring the deaths of millions of people and the survivors, all at the same time.
  • The vast majority of deaths are presumably automatic, requiring no special attention on Death's part. It's only deaths that were delayed by premonitions that take "special attention" to accomplish, for which relative order is important.

• I understand that this movie takes place in a pre-9/11 world, but would the FBI agents really have let them all go that easily after the plane blew up?
  • They'd have to if it was clearly human error and not deliberate sabotage, plus it'd be pretty hard to pin the destruction of a plane on a bunch of teenagers.
  • To be fair, they still keep an eye on Alex for the rest of the movie, which means they didn't give their case up.
  • They very likely investigated Alex's background (and likely every survivor's) and quickly came up with nothing. With no evidence other than a panic attack and claims of a vision, no way the parents or any judge would put up with Alex being detained.
• Who lets traffic commence while there's bridge construction? Construction as in, CUTTING HOLES in the main span while, reportedly, there were high winds. Hmm...I wonder why that bridge collapsed...
  • I haven't actually seen the film, but I imagine the high winds could be the entire reason they were cutting holes in the span; multiple real-life bridges have collapsed under high winds because without open spaces for the wind to pass through, all the wind pressure along the length and height of the bridge is completely focused on it. Admittedly, letting people drive over it while they're working on it is still asking for something to go wrong and kill a lot of people.
    • Okay, no, I just saw the scene on Youtube, and what I described above is not at all what's happening. And now I'm as confused as you: what the fuck were they thinking?
  • I don't always pay attention to what the construction is, but there's at least three bridges close here and they only shut down one lane for construction. I've never seen them shut down any of those three bridges as a whole for construction in my whole life.
  • The situation isn't that unrealistic. Massive bridges like that tend to be critical paths (which is why they are there) so they will typically do maintenance on them while only closing down some lanes. They might have been doing this because problems were detected (cracks, etc.). It also tend to be windy around bridges because of the water, open space, probable canyon or the like. It's possible the bridge was in much worse shape than they thought, and there are certainly precedents and antecedents. It's also possible they have simply made a mistake and are doing more extreme maintenance than they should with the bridge in use.
• If the original catastrophe was due to be triggered by a suicide bomber, and that person was saved with all the rest, does the FD Death kick in or not?
  • One would assume so. If he was supposed to die and didn't, the Reaper would come.
    • This actually happens in a novel; a crazy mad man is supposed to kill the people that survive, but is shot before he can do so. Death, being Death, is REALLY NOT HAPPY so kills them off one by one is... rather gruesome circumstances, I mean, icicles through the eyes? Ay ay ay! That has to hurt! Death is really on the warpath in that one!

• So how come Nick wasn't rewarded or something for preventing the mall from being destroyed?
  • Because fuck Nick, that's why.

• The youngest character to die in the series was Tim in FD 2 but what about the infant that was on board Flight 180 in the first movie?
  • The baby died in an accident predicted by a premonition, and thus doesn't count. Tim was killed in a zany, over the top (and completely avoidable) death.

• Why do a lot of people assume Death is behind this? Why not the devil? The movies hint at Tony Todd's character being the devil behind it all. It makes sense for a devil to screw around with teenagers for amusement. The grim reaper has over a trillion dead people to attend to. He wouldn't have the time to toy with a bunch of teenagers. He would be too busy.
  • The movie is specifically about the people being hunted by Death. Tony Todd, who does seem rather odd of a character, is not implied to be the devil nor implied to be behind it all as he gives them routinely accurate advice (despite the fact his advice is never seen into fruition). Also, Death is more than likely omniscience and omnipresent. It can be everywhere at once, attending to those dying across the world all at one time.
  • Also, you'd think that if the Devil were responsible, he'd ensure that the people who are being targeted wouldn't be in any position to keep saving one another. Less of a chance they'll wind up in Hell if they do something heroic shortly before he kills them, is there?

• Why does no one ever decide to just royally screw with Death's plan as much as possible? As shown in two, there is a ripple effect (for the record, I DON'T like the 'the premonitions are a part of Death's plan' thing) that forces Death to try harder and harder to fix it. Since you're already on Death's hit list, why not try to say 'you screwed with me, I'll screw you right back' and mess up it's plan as much as you can?
  • Alternatively, Tony Todd isn't the devil. He IS death. The novels showcase Death appearing as an African American male.
  • Arguably, trying to survive and keep others alive is the ultimate way to screw up the plan, since it's doing the exact opposite of the plan's objective. Everyone's already doing that.
  • Death isn't omnipotent or omnipresent, it can only go to where there is a living being to fulfill its function Likewise, the question can Death itself die? Of course it can. When every living being in the cosmos is dead (long before the heat death of the universe happens), for Death no longer has any function or power over anyone, it cannot kill what is already dead, thus Death ceases to exist.

• Maybe it's death itself who's trying to prevent their deaths. What I mean is why would death be so anxious to claim some lives if it is always very busy, death isn't in such a hurry to claim pleople because we're going to die in one moment or another it doesn't matter if it's today, tomorrow or in seventy years or more, what if it's another kind of Eldritch Abomination who's messing with death's plan, why if it's another kind of entinty who's playing with the lives of the protagonists for unknown reasons whatsoever, because the deaths of the protagonists are utterly gruesome and unnatural. Of course there are nasty accidents and the such but even in those kind of accidents there are survivors in one way or another and maybe, just maybe death is the one trying to give them another opportunity. Why because they didn't have to die in that very moment. And that's something few people have considered after seeing these movies. Maybe it's death itself somehow fighting an Eldritch Abomination that is pulling the strings and death is trying to set up things right. Well this is this troper's humble opinion.

• Why no manslaughter charges for the fireman who accidentally killed Kat?
  • It's been awhile since I've seen this one. Is it ever stated he doesn't get a manslaughter charge?
  • We never find out. Perhaps he could have.

• Apparently suicide doesn't work. Death won't allow you to kill yourself. If you try to shoot yourself, your gun will jam. If you try hanging yourself, the rope will snap. What would happen if you purposely jump into a volcano?
  • In the words of Jafar from Aladdin 2, "You'd be surprised what a human can live through." Humans have sustained intense burns and horrible injuries that you would think would kill them but lived anyway. For all we know, they'd just be incapable of dying until death makes its way to them. Imagine spending days...weeks..at the bottom of a molten volcano...unable to die.
  • My theory is Death would just incapacitate you, or just make sure your plans couldn't work. Taking the Volcano example, you'd need to transport yourself to the location of the volcano.. How do you do that? You go buy a plane ticket but you can't because you suddenly have no money in the bank. You try jumping off a bridge? A car hits you on your way and you survive, but are now permanently disabled. All death has to do is stop you from dying until it's your turn.

• This might be Fridge Horror territory, but does that mean the baby and the mom from the second film will die sooner or later? Death doesn't seem like the type to play fair, or let petty things like rules stand in his way.
  • The fan consensus seems to be that Molly was meant to die on Flight 180 anyway, likely going to spread Sam's ashes in Paris or perform some similar gesture. Although Isabella and her child could die at any moment, it stands to reason that she'll live a normal lifespan with her child.

• In-universe, the citizens aren't at least suspicious about the gruesome deaths that occur in their towns? Sure you can hand wave them as accidents, but a bunch of teens prevented a plane, bus, roller coaster from taking off because of a "bad dream". They ignored the teens' warning and ended up getting killed. Wouldn't you get suspicious that these teens from different towns are having these psychic dreams?
  • I think a lot of this just modern thinking. Weird accidents do happen, while this series turns it up to eleven. The only people that would really be talking about it that much are people on weird happenings websites. How many times does the news even report deaths by small accidents, in which case most of the deaths here are (no matter how gruesome) aren't homicides more or less to be looked at as people in the wrong place at the wrong time. How many times do you ever even hear on the news about the people who got lucky enough to get out of an accident versus reporting of the actual accident? I think this expects a lot more out the media.
  • Also how much are these even in the same area? FD 2's cast are in the general area so they knew about it because it involved local people. The characters in 3 only learn about it through having to look it up online. Which would again probably be small out of the way paranormal sites more than it would be large news outlets. And we don't know how close or not the characters in FD 5 are to the FD 1 people. They used the same airport but that doesn't exactly mean much.
  • All the news ever reports is horrible tragedies and accidents. The public is desensitised to the hundred people killed in a disaster today because they're going to hear about something equally horrible the next day.

• Did the two guys who set off a firecracker by the horse in the third movie EVER get some sort of criminal charges against them?? I mean, there were several people who could have seen them do it, and their little prank destroyed a lot of stuff as well as (more or less indirectly) cause the deaths of at least two people.
  • They look about middle-school age, so it's unlikely they'd have the full force of the court system brought down on them. More likely they (or their parents) would pay a hefty fine for cruelty to animals, but they wouldn't be held responsible for the freak results of the horse's flight, which went far beyond anyone's reasonable expectation. If anything, the fair's organizers might be susceptible to a lawsuit for unsafe placement and storage of fireworks: a much bigger contributing factor in Ian's death.

• I made up my mind about the logic of all 5 FD movies and summed it up in an image (Readable version: http://www.directupload.net/file/d/4313/axxkpejp_jpg.htm). While there are multiple setups like death granting visions (just for the fun of killing them afterwards) or death giving away "free passes" (what for, if they die anyways later on), this is the only setup I find (almost) logically consistent. That said, it is still not realistic. Due to strange writing people can't die before their time. This is shown a couple of time in the movies. Physical means to kill oneself before Death's Master-Plan would allow it are all prevented. Death appeares to be omnipotent (His killing-accuracy, while not countered, is quite impressiv), but not allmighty. As mentioned above he can't make things appear out of thin air. He can, however, manipulate things which then add-up to a deadly combo. This combo can be forseen by "signs" (apparently death likes to play with his victims) or be indicated by visions. Those visions are outside Death's Master Plan, mess it up and anger him, basically meaning that there is an entity passing out those visions (it is very unlikely that the people got the visions in any other way). The only question is, why did this entity support those specific people?
  • My theory is that Death is bored as hell, after killing people since the beginning of existence, it made a game it plays every so often to keep things fresh, it sends a random person fated to die in a disaster a vision of said disaster as a challenge, takes a human form (bludworth) to explain the rules of its game, which as far as we have seen change every movie, throws a few hints their way to keep it more interesting, the characters will never win but can earn a "Pass" temporarally using the rules laid out.

• If Clear wouldn't let anyone in her padded cell with a, b, c, d, etc., how was her hair still dyed? And trimmed? And how was she still clean? And where did those new clothes come from?
  • Well Ali Larter is a natural blonde so maybe the colour in the first film was dyed, and it had grown out by then (or she'd had it touched up before she went into the cell). Her hair actually looks quite messy, as if she hasn't washed it in a while - so she doesn't seem to be washing regularly. We can assume there's a protocol for allowing her to bathe - maybe a nurse comes in with a tub and she's washed under tight supervision. The clothes could be checked out and approved before being passed into the cell.

• The films in general. Why excatly does Death give these people clear and present warnings and a way to escape your orginal plan. If these people are on your list, and they're gonna die no matter what. Why let them escape you, simply so you can spend the rest of your time hunting them down. Seems overly cruel in my opinion, but if this question was already asked and answered, than I'm sorry.
  • I don't think it's ever stated that Death is giving them the premonitions. I don't think it's ever explained.

• So why aren't people freaking out more about surviving massive accidents? now, while the first 3 movies accidents happened within the span of about 4 years, which, while tragic, are nothing to get worked up about. But every accident that had a survivor who claimed to "see" the accident happen a few minutes before it did, and in those incidents every person who survived died in horrific and weird accidents, not just a couple, according to Word of God not a single person in the series has survived more than a few months at most, That is pretty newsworthy, and many more people would be aware of these facts as the age of the internet started gaining steam, I would be abit more worried about this if I had survived a freak accident and someone claimed to have saw it after that.
  • The first three films (and the fifth since it's set in 2001) all take place in the early 2000s. Limited internet, lack of prominent social media (at least among everyday teens and twentysomethings). If you didn't have a home computer, you weren't on the internet regularly then. And this kind of thing wouldn't get mainstream press coverage - the accidents would but the premonitions and suspicious circumstances would only show up on conspiracy theory websites, which would be considered largely a joke and not visited by most people. And actually in the third film, Wendy does some researching and finds the figures about Flight 180, so there is some information out there; it's just not common knowledge.
  • Crackpots in real life frequently claim to have avoided terrible disasters via psychic visions, divine intervention, being warned off by Aliens From Planet X, or whatever. Nobody makes a big deal about it in the press, because it's either someone who's misinterpreting sheer dumb luck as a miracle (e.g. they missed Flight 180 because their taxi got stuck in traffic), who's justifying their own lapses (e.g. "Er, well, I was too chickenshit to ri- no, wait, I had a vision that I shouldn't ride that roller coaster, yeah that's it."), who's got a screw loose (e.g. they show up at racetracks and screech out about "Everybody's going to crash and burn!" on a weekly basis), or who's retroactively making shit up for the publicity (e.g. "Well, I had a vision about that bridge collapsing two days before that guy did!").

• Why does Death even care that somebody cheats or escapes it? After all, all humans die from something eventually, so why does Death even bother trying to get back at people for cheating it in the short term, if it’s still going to win in the long term? One of the things death is most well-known for is that it’s inevitable. Eventually, everyone dies. So, there is no true “cheating” Death, because Death still wins in the end. So why is Death even angry? Death is eternal, but the protagonists aren’t. So why doesn’t it just wait until they eventually die of disease or old age or something else, instead of wasting it’s time trying to kill them in stupidly convoluted ways? It’s not like the protagonists will live forever if it doesn’t kill them directly. At most, if Death had left the protagonists alone after they cheated it, they would only live for a few more decades before passing away. Which is basically nothing to Death, who has been around since the dawn of life. If Death is eventually going to win when the characters pass away from natural causes, then what’s even the point of directly going after them to kill them in gruesome ways? There’s literally no point in doing that, because Death gains nothing from going after humans directly, and it also loses nothing from just waiting until they pass away of natural causes. And if Death is really that angry at the protagonists for cheating it, then it can still punish them when they eventually die of natural causes, so in the grand scheme of things, it makes no difference to Death either way.
• And for that matter, why does Death kill the protagonists one at a time? If it has the power to bend the rules of reality to kill anyone under any circumstance, why doesn’t it just immediately kill all the main characters at once by, say, making a meteor fall from the sky and squash them like bugs? Or make the ground under them suddenly open up to swallow them whole? Or give them all heart attacks at the same time? Or any other method to kill them all at once? It’s especially jarring when you see scenes where all the people who have cheated Death are all gathered together in one place, long after they all cheated Death. Despite it being a prime opportunity to immediately kill all the people who cheated it, Death never takes the chance to do so. Instead, it just kills them all one at a time in over-the-top super complicated ways for no reason.

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