Headscratchers / Final Destination 4

• I have to question Death's omnipotence just a bit, since Jonathan Groves doesn't die until he's been identified, implying that Death wasn't able to find him until then. So what, Death can't do something as simple as finding someone already on its list unless that person's name is publicly known? (and if that's the case, then cheating Death should be simple: everyone just changes their goddamn name...)
  • I assume that the reason why he lived so long was that Death assumed he had died in the crash as planned, and simply didn't bother remembering about him. When Nick learns that Johnathan survived, Death learns it too, and takes care of him as soon as possible. This still doesn't explain how Death DIDN'T KNOW about his survival, despite being omnipotent, but it's a start.
    • Evidently death is only nearly omniscient, like somebody playing The Sims or using Google Earth.
  • What evidence is there that Death didn't know about his survival? Death has waited entire months before just to kill survivors the way it wants to. It wanted to crush Jonathan with an overflowing bathtub so it waited until the time was right to do that. Giving the survivors false hope was an added bonus.
• Jonathan Grove's death; he survived the speedway accident completely independent of the premonition, by surviving being in the accident itself instead of simply avoiding it like the other survivors. Yet, Death decrees that, as a survivor, he shall have a pool smush him. Why? He played out Death's Plan as the premonitions stated, and survived, so why does he have to die along with the other survivors?
  • The protagonist and friends didn't ask him to move after the protagonist had the premonition; if they had, perhaps he would have died and thus he survived as a result of the premonition.
    • That makes no sense, since you're pretty much saying that he survived due to the premonition because he was not influenced at all by the premonition. That does not work; if the protagonist and his friends didn't do anything to the guy to try and get him to avoid his death in the premonition, that means he played out his part in Death's design for the accident as the premonition showed, meaning he survived independently of the premonition. He was caught up in the accident and got crushed by the falling debris, just like he had been in the premonition, and survived. That's him surviving the accident separately from the premonition, not as a result of it. So why must he die?
    • He was supposed to move. However, before the protagonists could ask him to move, Nick had his vision and they hightailed it out of there. He therefore was out of place in Death's design, and he managed to survive by pure luck. Death must have been been distracted while saying "Oh bugger, another one of those prophets." and decapitating a woman with a tire.
    • First of all, why was Jonathan supposed to move, again? And if the vision was what caused Nick to not ask Jonathan to move, in the first place (and the visions were supposed to be part of Death's Plan, as hinted at the end of the movie)), then that means that Death himself saved the poor guy from dying.
    • People have always been saved as an indirect side-effect of the visionary's actions in this series. Some of the teens kicked off the plane in the first film or the coaster in the third hadn't done jack-squat to indicate they believed said visionary's warnings: they just got booted out because they groused about all the fuss, or were with somebody who did get kicked off. Heck, one could just as well argue that Death saved the French teacher's life.
    • Alright, let's just look at it this way. After the vision begins, Jonathan notices his hat blocks our protagonists and moves down closer. Therefore, when the shit hits the fan, he is slightly higher up and farther away than he was in the original vision. So the flaming car that hit him in the vision didn't, because he was already farther up, and being crushed under rubble, but still alive. Death, having already plotted out his latest design, and having his OCD thing with order, doesn't bother to toss in another rock or two while he's nudging a tire to fall on Nadia. He is rescued and sent to the hospital, where he is recovering until the room above collapses upon him.
    • If you watch the vision scene carefully, you can see Jonathan (the guy in the cowboy hat) farther down in the tiers of seating, where he tries to scramble out of the way of an oncoming car, and fails. He dies when the car impacts a pylon and crushes him against it. He was only down there in the first place because the main characters asked him to move.
• Was the impending mall disaster at the climax still fallout from the racetrack disaster at the beginning of the movie, or was it a new disaster that was just averted by one of the racetrack survivors? (And if it's the latter, how long will the hundreds of people whose lives were saved really expect to live afterwards?)
  • Maybe since the disaster itself never actually happened, as opposed to the raceway crash, the effects are negated. Nick prevents the explosion itself, when before he simply got his friends and a few others out of the raceway. Instead of removing a few pieces of the puzzle, Nick pretty much tossed the entire thing off the table.
  • The movie basically answers this at the end with the reveal that the premonitions were part of Death's design along. Thus the people in the cinema were meant to live because they were meant to be saved by Nick. The next movie appears to ditch this theory however.