As a Headscratchers subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.
- What was up with the truck that slams into Kimberly's SUV? Not the one in the premonition, the one after? The car was well back from the pile-up, surely the driver would have seen it and slowed down or pulled over well before?
- Maybe the driver was drunk. Death could also have come up with some convoluted reason for him to have lost control of the car just in that one moment.
- If Clear wouldn't let anyone into her padded room if they had a, b, c, d, e, f, g, etc. items on their person, how was her hair still dyed? And clean? And where did those new clothes come from?
- Perhaps Clear is a natural blonde, like her actress Ali Larter. And the hair she had in the first movie was dyed. Now that she's in the hospital, her original colour has grown out.
- When Kimberly drove the ambulance into the lake so that she could die, instead of banging on the glass with the butt of his gun, why didn't Thomas simply shoot through the glass?
- Because maybe the bullet might hit Kimberly by accident? And maybe his instinct was to smash the glass as quickly as possible, rather than loading the gun, setting up and shooting.
- Even when Clear is locked in her padded cell, shouldn't there still be ways for Death to get to her? She has to eat, doesn't she? Isn't it possible for something to contaminate the food? What about the lights and other electrical devices in and around her cell? We have seen in this franchise that electrical failures will turn into raging fires at the drop of a hat. For that matter, why doesn't Death just arrange for the entire building to burn down, or some other external disaster happen, that Clear's padded cell wouldn't protect her from? Or is all of that just too mundane, and Death was waiting for an opportunity to kill Clear in a really bizarre, sadistic way?
- At least regarding the option of burning down the whole building, Death is, at this point in the franchise, very careful to only target those who cheated death before. Destroying the building would cause the deaths of those for whom it's not their time.
- Regarding food, Death seems to only use whatever is immediately available to kill, not tools brought from a distance. Poisoned food might've been too attenuated. Also, Clear may have established protections from choking or other eating hazards, such as someone watching her on that video setup, while the door remains open.
- Who's to say that Death didn't pointedly let Clear live for a further 2 months after Alex's death so she could catalyze the deaths of the Route 23 survivors? Remember that Clear was indirectly responsible for the deaths of Kat and Rory (her bringing Kimberly to Bloodworth lead them to the "new life" theory, which in turn lead to their car crash en route to the hospital), and directly responsible for the deaths of Nora and Eugene. Death's patience would also especially make sense given that it was sealing the Flight 180 rift backwards and Clear was first on that list.
- Death seems to, in some weird and twisted way, respect Clear - it certainly fears her. It's said that all of Clear's "escaped" and "cheated" deaths - presumably six - with her and Alex between the two films involved explosions, so it's trying to get rid of her quickly. In a Mental asylum, there's nothing to kill her quick - Death needs Clear to make her error, namely leaving the Mental Asylum, so it can take its shot to get rid of her as quickly as it can - which it tries, with the canoe to knock her out of a window into a substation outside which will presumably explode and kill her, but she manages to dodge that. That is when Death gets serious, stops toying with her, and almost panics; she can see the signs and, more importantly in Death's eyes, is smart enough to escape, so when she does die, it's quick and painless and forgoing the signs for Clear until it's too late - she's opened the door and can't avoid it this time and is subsequently blown up in an exploding hospital room.
- Why does the highway pileup happen so much sooner in reality than in Kimberly's premonition? In her vision, she drives on the highway for at least a good five minutes, seeing (and interacting with) several other drivers, before the logs on the semi come loose and the disaster begins. But later, back in reality, the crashes and explosions start only seconds after the semi passes the entrance ramp. The pileup happens only a short distance from the entrance ramp in reality, but it happened much farther away when Kimberly foresaw it.
- If time is kept starting with the woman knocking on her window, it's possible about the same amount of time has passed. She simply spent that time remaining on the ramp.
- That explanation doesn't really work. Remember that in her vision, Kimberly was driving on the highway for a good five minutes before the pileup happened. That would mean the accident occurred about five miles or so past the entrance ramp. But later, back in reality, the pileup happened within the sight of the people still waiting on the ramp. No explanation is given for why the accident happened so much closer to the ramp, and so much sooner after the semi passed it, in reality than in Kimberly's vision.
- This difference between Kimberly's vision and reality creates a significant plot hole in the film. Supposedly, Kimberly foresaw that she and the other drivers would be killed in the pileup if they entered the highway, and they all cheated death by staying on the ramp instead. The problem with this is that in reality (unlike in Kimberly's vision), the semi arrived at the entrance ramp a while after the cars got stuck on it, and then the crashes occurred just seconds later. This means that if Kimberly and the other drivers had gotten onto the highway when they originally had the chance, they would have been well ahead of the semi when the logs started coming loose. The entire scenario no longer makes sense. It would have been impossible for Kimberly and the other drivers to be killed in the pileup in reality, because the accident would have occurred behind them on the highway.
- It had to happen at a different location, post-vision, because Death was specifically targeting Kimberly and her friends to die first in that movie's reverse-order sequence. Therefore, the chain holding those logs in place had to snap a bit sooner, ensuring Kimberly's car could be demolished at the tail end of the crash. Yes, it was a discrepancy with her vision, but one fully justified by Death not wasting any time about wasting its first targets. (As for the "plot hole" mentioned above, we actually see the logging truck pass another character's vehicle in the highway sequence, indicating that the truck driver was in a hurry and had managed to move up ahead of the other victims before the crash as originally envisioned.)
- An easy explanation is that the premonitions in the series aren't exact depictions of the future to come. More likely, they're rough approximations of what will happen/who will die, but not down to the last detail. This would explain other inconsistencies, such as the cabin lights being dimmed on Flight 180 (but not in Alex's vision), Devil's Flight crashing without Frankie's camera (but not in Wendy's vision), and the North Bay Bridge collapsing way faster in real life (but not in Sam's vision).
- If time is kept starting with the woman knocking on her window, it's possible about the same amount of time has passed. She simply spent that time remaining on the ramp.
- Brian shouldn't have died in the end. Rory, who would've been dead had he not escaped the pileup, saved him being hit by a news truck (similar to how earlier in the movie all the survivors find out they'd all be dead if the Flight 180 survivors had stayed on the plane). The problem with that is the news truck that would've hit Brian was only there because Kat had crashed her car. If Rory was dead, he couldn't have saved him, but if Kat was dead, there'd be no news truck in the first place.
- Some people believe Death's plan was never for them to die in the pileup. They were always meant to escape it and die where they do throughout the films; Death has been playing the long game and Brian was on the list, but didn't know he was.
- According to a newspaper clipping in the movie (seen in detail here, at about the 17-minute mark
), Brian was meant to die in a large fire some time earlier, but somehow cheated death and survived.
- Why do they put so much stock in finding the pregnant woman? Even if the pregnant woman had been killed in the crash, her giving birth to her kid wouldn't have worked, going by the "rules" it required a "new" life, the pregnant woman was ready to pop, a fully functional baby, so her baby was already part of the list from the get go, closest thing would be if a listed character either got or made someone pregnant after they had survived, also the whole new life thing seems dodgy from the outset, seeing as Alex was killed and brought back after being shocked and exploded, so just drowning yourself and being revived either shouldn't have worked or Death really did have it out for Alex, Clear and Carter.
- Its not as though they have a clear understanding of the rules in the first place. They're trying to riddle out what they've been told about and understand about Death and are trying to work the best plan they can think of off that.
- Is that one semi in the car crash from the start some sort of vehicular personification of Death, or something? Because I can't think of any other reason it would crash into the one guy's car and then turn around and crash into another two on the way back.
- The Wiki calls it "The Truck from Hell" and calls it a servant of death, so that's confirmed.
- Alternately, the flames and smoke disoriented a semi driver on the adjacent stretch of highway lanes going in the other direction, and that truck jumped the median and crashed into Kimberly's upturned vehicle.
- That kid that dies right at the end. Two things scream at me about this one. First, if Kimberly's temporary-suicide was supposed to wipe death's list clean, why did that still happen? Doesn't that mean the cop's still a gonner? And second, and more importantly: The kid was almost run over by a vehicle which was only there because of the death of one of the people on the list. If they'd all died in that car crash, that van would have never been anywhere near him. So why does he need to die?
- On the first point, yes, it almost certainly does mean the cop's still a gonner, as well as Kimberly herself. Though it isn't mentioned in the third installment directly, in the special features of the FD 3 DVD there's a newspaper clipping that says both of them got ground up in a woodchipper. On the second point, remember that one of the big points in the second movie is that the survivors of Flight 180 caused a ripple effect in Death's plan. It's the whole reason the victims of the highway pileup were all going to die together in the crash later instead of in separate incidents sooner. It is therefore logical to assume that the kid was going to die at that point anyway, and his involvement with the second set of victims (their being both the cause and avoidance of his death) was caused by that ripple. If Alex hadn't had his original premonition and Flight 180 had exploded with everyone on board as planned, the kid would almost certainly have later died at the same time by some completely unrelated mechanism.
- I took it more that the kid was saved from his own predetermined death by an outside interference (one of the heroes who should've already been dead saving him), so while the surviving heroes got their list erased, the kid's survival had started a whole new list (probably a list of one, unless he spent his offscreen time running around saving a bunch of other people).
