Look at all the less-than-subtle odd references to her in every film. They're all over the place, most notably the "Clear Rivers" signs, and how so many places are, coincidentally, named "Clear Rivers". The constant occurrences could potentially mean everything is made up by Clear after she fails to cope with the death of her boyfriend—a chance happening—including her own death, which is what happens in Final Destination 2 as a result of leaving the institution while trying to save others, but is only her depression manifesting as a metaphor of her own death in even trying to accept the reality of it, which she is not mentally willing to do. In her attempt to "save" herself, she only causes the deaths of others, all of which die along with her. The ultimate Downer Ending and her own death in Final Destination 2 is her own conclusion that everything is completely hopeless regardless of her actions, so she chooses to hide inside herself, the only place where things can make any sense. The Final Destination prominently displays a place called "Clear Rivers", right by the site of where another death occurs. At the beginning of the second film, we see her in a psychiatric hospital, who is said to have voluntarily checked in to protect herself from Death, but is killed as a result of leaving the psychiatric hospital—ironically, in a futile attempt to prevent the deaths of others, along with herself and everything she's ever cared for. In other words, Death is just her own way of assigning blame for an accident that caused the death of her boyfriend. Clearly in a Despair Event Horizon after her boyfriend dies in Final Destination (and explained later in Final Destination 2), she makes sense of her own inner world and circumstances by inventing the system of Death and how it works, which is only a way for her to make sense of the death of her boyfriend by giving Death a sensible and logical "system" to which she consistently makes up new details with every story—a way to explain things which is only a single coincidence of her boyfriend's completely random and senseless death. She creates an entire imaginary timeline, with their own characters and added details and systems from film to film, filling in all the gaps in her own mind, with Final Destination 5 adding context she, herself, needs, in order for everything she has already created in the previous films to make sense. That's why it's a prequel: Clear needs the previous films, or stories in her mind, to make rational sense, at least to her.
Unable to cope with her boyfriend's death being nothing more than an accident, Death becomes her way of coping with the randomness of it and rationalizing it, with which she can't come to terms.
For example, perhaps one of the doctors would have been treating one of Andy the Mechanic's co-workers for an on-the-job injury, except that Andy's death forced the shop to close early for the day and consequently the injury never took place. (Had the others not shown up at the shop, Andy would have lived until the end of shift, long enough for his colleague to be injured.) End result: the doctor had a few minutes to spare to check up on Jonathan, and discovered the error in time to save him. Then the surviving main characters' own alertness kept them alive, ducking a few close calls they didn't even register, until Grove's turn came up again.
Hey, it's not impossible.
I don't know, there seem to be too many implausible, if not impossible things going on. Two examples from FD1: the toilet fluid returning to the toilet after making Tod slip in the bathtub and the power line that clearly was actively trying to off Clear. If they're all coincidences, they would still adhere to laws of physics. That is of course unless the science in the Final Destination universe is "different" somehow.
The visions come from that fate actually happening, but Death goes back in time 4 minutes and averts it, wanting to kill them in a certain way. Or perhaps he/she wants to kill them him/herself, for revenge.
- Pretty much confirmed in
Final Destination 4THE Final Destination.- And then retconned in Final Destination 5.
- Final Destination 5 is a prequel, so probably not.
- Yeah, they did. It's 100% established the characters cheat death and that they can beat it by killing someone else and taking their life. So no, the retcon is true. (That said, you could argue the vision in TFD was sent by death, but FDs 1, 2, 3, and 5 all featured protagonists who 100% cheated death)
- Furthermore Final Destination 2 explicitly contradicts Final Destination 4's theory. The fact that Death reverses an entire list indicates that there is indeed a rift in it's design and that it doesn't just want to kill people in awful ways for the fun of it.
- Why it can't be both? Here is my take: After untold aeons, Death has gained a sadistic liking to killing, but it is forced to follow the natural order much to its annoyance. Death would love to kill you in the most grisly ways imaginable, but if you are meant to die peacfully in your sleep at the age of 113, there is nothing it normally can do about it. At some point during human history some people started having promonitory psychic abilities, which would allow them to cheat the natural order, and thus Death was allowed to intervene in a much more direct to correct the issue. Death found that such a thing could be used as a loophole to have fun as it pleased and get creative in killing people, so from time to time it would send a psychic warning on purpose.
- The Grim Reaper should have infinite patience. Everybody will end up his guest eventually.
- Doesn't Death need people to die in the right order? Doesn't that mean that NOBODY should be able to die until Death finishes off the ones that get away? You'd think somebody might have mentioned if there hadn't been a single death between the first and second movies. Even if we limit it to the same incident, shouldn't even people who stayed in the initial death trap get away because those who were supposed to be killed in the middle of it aren't, which would screw up the order for everyone else?
- Perhaps there's more than one Death, like in Dead Like Me or Discworld; the Death stalking this lot just happens to be the Death of Amazing Freak Accidents That Defy Audience Belief. There have been at least a couple Absurdly Overpowered Fireballs, haven't there?
- If so, more people should be coming back. He's bad at pirate slang. And the Disc has only three Deaths.
- If whatever is giving the protagonists their visions is somehow opposed to the Reaper, then it sucks at its job; all its interference does is get its chosen ones killed in even more fantastically brutal ways.
- Perhaps it's Death playing a game of metaphysical Mousetrap with God. God keeps trying to stop the mice (the humans) getting killed in Death's mousetrap (the elaborate deaths), but God just sucks at Mousetrap.
- Hey, man, Mousetrap is hard.
- Unless it takes advantage of the disruption in ways we can't perceive or simply aren't informed of. This other entity doesn't necessarily care about saving people; it may just be using them to further its own supernatural ends.
- Jossed. In the fourth movie, it's been revealed that Death's been giving them the visions all along.
- Perhaps it's Death playing a game of metaphysical Mousetrap with God. God keeps trying to stop the mice (the humans) getting killed in Death's mousetrap (the elaborate deaths), but God just sucks at Mousetrap.
- Not likely: he died in part 3.
- The reason that all the victims previously escaped fatal accidents: The first time was either a case of psychic ability or a fluke. They then get mentioned on the news; the book wielder, who also possesses an extremely warped sense of humour, decides to use them as his next victims. He has so much fun doing so that the subsequent accidents are engineered by the note wielder via the simple method of writing things along the lines of 'X dies from Y, having previously escaped Z'. Whoever has the black book in question is a very sick puppy and might be someone who knows the victims, which would explain why he's so fond of this particular routine - that is, he finds the panicking entertaining in some way. (While one little black notebook ended up in the hands of someone who possesses some standards, twisted though they may be, this one ended-up in the possession of a total headcase.)
- Alternatively, the visions were unrelated to the notebook in question. But its owner has been using it for so long that they've developed a death god-complex and have taken the idea of a group of people escaping death as a personal challenge or affront, which they respond to by trying to inflict maximum terror on their victims before killing them.
- FOX ONLY! NO ITEMS!!
- Alternatively, the Grim Reaper is supposed to represent competitive elitists; the kids represent casuals. The kids escaping death alludes to them being able to create their own style of play, while their dying at the hands of the Grim Reaper alludes to elitists always attempting to get casuals to conform to their style of play.
- Off topic, but this is usually the other way around, believe it or not.
- Nah, Death uses way too many items in his kills to be a Smash elitist.
- Death was playing with some fellow human opponents, and one of them had the nerve to turn items on and pick Hyrule Temple. He came to the conclusion that Humans Are Scrubs and has set out to kill Scrubs as a warning to those who dare to have fun in video games.
- Maybe he's bored, and (unlike Discworld's Death) there's no-one he likes enough to make watching lives worthwhile; exploiting loopholes to allow cooler deaths is his only form of amusement.
- You mean this isn't canonically true? Bludworth is CREEPY.
- Also, his line "I'll see you soon" is a hint. Sure, since he's a coroner and knows the score thus far, it could be excused as a case of morbid humor; but it makes you wonder.
- This troper has always thought this.
- Jossed. Craig Perry has confirmed that William Bludworth is not Death.
- So, Hsu and Chan have Death after them from killing Dracula? That explains EGM and 1up.
- Uh, could you please explain EGM and 1up?
- Clear Rivers has been wiped out from existance
- There is no more Death. Nobody ever dies. Everyone is now an immortal.
Exactly how this affects the plot of the reboot is uncertain.
- None of the movies have been reboots.
- Death's "true form" in one of the spin-off books kinda supports this.
Thanks to their awakening power, they sense that it's about to happen and, understandably, panic. But everybody dies someday; that's unavoidable. Aware of this, they subconsciously influence their environment and cause things to 'correct' themselves.
Thus, they become Tragic Heroes of the worst sort — completely unaware that they're the cause of all the carnage until they wind up taking themselves out with their own powers. They're fighting a losing battle, but not the one they think they are. And since everyone with these abilities winds up killing themselves before realizing the truth and learning to rein in their powers, the Vicious Cycle continues unabated.
- Or, the visions of the future are exactly what they look like and instead of being Reality Warpers, the people who get the visions are just subconsciously able to see the future and are subtly influencing events to cause the deaths that they prevented. If you intuitively know the consequences of every action before you take it, you can cause anything that could happen to happen. If you delay someone from crossing the street for just exactly the right amount of time, you can cause that person to get hit by a bus, and that's just the least subtle of ways to cause death. The sudden brush with death in the beginning of each movie just causes enough shock and morbid thinking to get the character with the visions to start subconsciously killing people.
- Death: A crown? I never wore a crown!
Death 2.0: You never wanted to rule.
This may have been more than professional pride - Death could perceive something Very Wrong with his replacement, and knew he needed to act quickly to prevent disaster on a cosmic scale. So, after Death throws down and gets his replacement oustered, the Auditors get a the scolding of an eternity from Azrael and vanish. Where did they and their kingly nominee go? To the Destination-verse. But, after entering a world that was less dependent on magic and narrativium, their Death slipped his leash. In reality, the replacement Death was badly made and therefore insane, and the Auditors only discovered this too late - and imagine their horror upon seeing the chaos he sowed. The events of the movies are the result of the rogue Death messing up The Plan and the Auditors trying to clean things up.
- Everyone has to die some day.
- This could effectively make almost every human character in the series an Anti-Villain as they don't realize or understand they should follow Death's plan and only want to live full lives.
In other words: Who ever has the premonition powers in a Final Destination movie will become the Grim Reaper in the next. Alex Browning was the Reaper for FD2, Kimberly was the Reaper for FD3, Wendy was the Reaper for FD4/TFD, and Nick will be the next Reaper for (Hopfully) FD5. Although, it might be weird explaining how Alex and Kimberly become reapers in the first place do to them living. But someone might add to this thoery and make it make more sense.
- Actually, both of them died by the next respective movie. It's stated that Alex died in between 1 and 2 by... getting hit by a falling brick. Kimberly and the other survivor were sucked into a wood chipper in between 2 and 3. So this theory doesen't work.
- Who says that they have to be still alive to become the new death? In fact it would make more sense for them to become the new death after they themselves have died.
- Since ''FD5='' is a prequel of [=FD1, and Sam dies in the same accident that Alex Browning foresees, this theory doesn't hold up.
- Actually, both of them died by the next respective movie. It's stated that Alex died in between 1 and 2 by... getting hit by a falling brick. Kimberly and the other survivor were sucked into a wood chipper in between 2 and 3. So this theory doesen't work.
- The rivets on the bow of the ship were made of iron rather than the much stronger steel due to the inability of the riveting machine to deal with curves.
- The compartments in the belly of the ship were not quite up to the ceiling as they should have been.
- The planned route would have taken them much further south, allowing them to completely avoid any risk of icebergery.
- Had the ship been travelling at a more sensible speed, they would have been able to avoid icebergery even on the new route.
- The Titanic 's radioman cursed out the radioman of the California (the nearest ship at the time of impact) for sending iceberg warnings while he (Titanic 's guy) was trying to send out his own messages, leading California 's guy to shut off his radio and go to bed, leaving them unable to receive Titanic 's S.O.S.
- There weren't nearly enough lifeboats because investors were concerned that they would mess up the "look" of the ship.
- The night of the sinking was the night before the new moon, giving very little moonlight to help see the iceberg.
- There was virtually no wind the night of the sinking, making the iceberg harder to see without breaking water.
- There were no binoculars anywhere on the ship.
If any one of these had been different, it is quite likely that either the ship would have gotten to the States completely unscathed, or else not nearly as many people would have died in the disaster. Instead, over a thousand people drowned or died of hypothermia in the resulting Disaster Dominoes. The route change and the push for more speed caused them to encounter and fail to avoid an iceberg, which punctured the hull, causing water to rush in and over the incomplete compartment walls, causing the iron rivets to give way, causing the whole thing to ultimately fold in on itself while they tried in vain to raise the only ship within range to evacuate to, and half the passengers were left SOL when many of the (already inadequate number of) lifeboats were launched to safety only partially filled. While I don't generally invoke Diabolus ex Machina in Real Life...
- Problem with this one: Death doesn't seem to be able to manipulate people's conscious decisions in the films, else the characters could just be made to walk directly into traffic or whatever, and Clear couldn't have decided to lock herself away from danger. All the factors you mention except the weather conditions were a result of human bad judgement, not the kind of unthinking carelessness or one-in-a-million mechanical glitches that the films' Death is into.
- True, but if Death makes it so that there are no better rivets available, then the weaker ones have to be bought, or if death uses a freak gust of wind to conveniently knock Binoculars out of someone's field of view so they forget about it, then he could be behind it all. He does things like that - activates things that CAN'T be activated, moves things so they hit you, etc. He could, presumably, just as easily move things away from you so they're not in a position to be used... thus leading to everything going wrong with Titanic.
Alternatively:
- If the latter... My God...
- Original Troper returning from FD wiki: seems it was in an alternate ending. Does it mean this WMG is canonical?
- That's rumored to be the driving twist of the 5th movie.
- And that rumour was correct! Confirmed as of movie five.
- Nope. Like the first and second films, Bludworth only pops up in a couple scenes. After that, he just disappears, but he's still alive and well.
- Maybe Pigeons are just angry at being scared all the time and seek revenge?
- Almost. His voice is heard at the end of Final Destination 3, and he is not in The Final Destination.
- Close. He voices both the Devil's Flight rollercoaster as well as the voice on the train.
Also, the ending has been rumored to tie in with Final Destination The last two survivors are supposed to die on Flight 180, the disaster from Final Destination. Also, if this happens to correct, The Final Destination would be canonically the last movie of the series.
- Confirmed. At the end of the movie, the two remaining survivors (Sam and Molly) board Flight 180, and witness Alex Browning and Carter Horton fighting before being thrown off the plane with the survivors of the FD 1 cast. When the plane blows up, Molly gets sucked out of the plane and bisected by the plane's wing while Sam burns to death.
- In that logic, other gods involved in this Universe would be the ones giving the humans visions. Think about it, this figurative Chess Board, needs two players. The second player would be another god equal too, but the opposite of death. Whom believes no matter what humans deserve a chance at life. These two are probably buddies, they can't kill each other because of their duties and their immortality. The Life God proposes that the humans deserve a chance at life. Though Death disagrees he is intrigued, and makes the game. The rules are simple. No direct contact on both sides. (Hence why death is never seen in the movie. As well as the deaths being domino style.) They would also have a referee (Bludworth) who is allowed to help but only in riddles. The Ref agrees and to insure that nothing happens to him he is granted eternal life. Natural life and death (babies being born and old people on death beds) still apply do to their duties. However each game has to begin with a major disaster. Death has it set up in order to make the disaster. The Life God draws a random name to pick as its visionary and the game begins.
- World War I resulted in massive casualties all across the globe, and directly lead to even more gore and death in World War II, and was all started by a suspiciously narrowly successful assassination attempt in which every single thing that could have gone wrong did, yet the attempt succeeded.
- The Silver Bridge collapse in The Film of the Book of The Mothman Prophecies. Possibly in reality as well.
- Which bodes ill for Connie, Victim #37. Perhaps Indrid Cold is the one giving the visions?
- There is no fate. Death is just someone who kills people who deserve it. The people who he killed were all going to live really crappy lives/cause the deaths or misery of others, so he killed them for the greater good.
- Alternatively, Death was just doing it's job killing people when they were supposed to. You know, like Real Life.
- Death itself is just a natural phenomena, but there is something out there setting up The Plan so that It can feed off of the death and fear It creates. Bludworth, and all of the precognitive characters, have "The Shine" which causes them to see that they may die. This Psychic energy draws It to the survivors, and It kills them off, feeding. Bludworth has survived multiple encounters with It because his family has encountered It, and because all of the Halloranns/Bludworths are so damned meta.
Meanwhile, Death plays poker with William Bludworth on Fridays.
(Or everyone would just drop dead when they failed to die appropriately ((So what if a ton of people drop dead of heart attacks after narrowly averting death in a terrible car accident, or plane crash? The people died, and there is nothing that can say it was anything but a heart attack. What are they gonna do, arrest Death?)))
-, cannot just rewrite an entire plan that has spanned billions of years on a whim. Rather shortsightedly, Death is just killing people who are effected by the premonitions. Remember the butterfly effect? Everyone will eventually be effected by the premonitions. It's all just a matter of wiether or not it happens prior to 2012.
They just don't get it.
So, since they're still technically dead, they just haven't been collected he starts taking them back one by one. He still wants to make a statement about the dangers that everyone on the planet is just ignoring and since he's fairly limited in how he can make his point he has to take them by using the safety flaws against them. He's not playing a game, he's doing a protest and trying to make a statement.
Essentially what happens when you get a tragic evil can't comprehend good. Where "evil" in this situation is a frustrated death collector not comprehending the idiots who set the world up as one big suicide booth.
Coroner Bludworth: "I'll see you soon."
Indeed.
- this is also supported by the Death Note theory, only they person who has the note is a Kira, getting rid of the 'immoral people'
- Supernatural has Grim Reapers and has had quite a few rouge ones. It also canonically has telepaths. All it would take is one Reaper just cleaning up after a death gone wrong.
- If one of the survivors were to treat their numbered days as a means to do everything they were otherwise afraid of, Death would not disgrace them with a painful and pitiful death. If a survivor were to spend their last days living out their dreams, then instead of some contrived, painful demise, death would more likely visit in the night and take them quietly with a sense of reverence.
- Death isn't bored, he's just doing his job. Not everyone can have premonitions so when people die in a normal way it goes unquestioned. Some people (our universe included) can find synchronicity everywhere. The people who are able to have these visions are only MORE LIKELY to see the signs and whatever. So even if someone died in their sleep or from a disease there is still a chance they could've been warned in some way. Basically, everyone is born with a talent but not everyone has the same talent (in this case, visions). Hope this makes sense.
As a result, he decides to become a mortician, and gives cryptic advice to survivors because it's all he can really do, while staying alive himself.
Death is a natural part of life. It allows new life to be formed and gives what life we have meaning. Imagine a world without death: all the pain and agony of age would continue. If someone was decapitated, his body would continue functioning in a state of perpetual agony. If someone was disemboweled, he would continue feeling that same agony. What could even be eaten? If plants and animals can't be killed, how would they be eaten?
The visions aren't sent by Death, but by a cosmic force, "Anti-Death," who is constantly trying to undermine Death's plan. The brutality of the deaths of the survivors is either Death is mistakenly believes the survivors are working with Anti-Death and is attempting to punish them, or he genuinely doesn't understand how much pain and terror he is causing.
Essentially, Death is trying to stop Marvel's Cancerverse from taking hold.
Rather, Death peeked at the photos, noted their contents, and devised deaths for the people depicted that reflected them, purely to troll the characters.
The ghosts of people who were previously on a Death list send each new protagonist visions and signs of Death's impending strikes from the afterlife. Why them? who knows. Maybe it's because they're able to perceive their messaging on some level. The fact that they're trying to help suggests that there may be a legitimate way for the survivors to get a chance at a "full life"...or at least they think there is one. They do this mainly because, as it turns out, Death isn't the only one who decides where, when and how someone dies. Having seemingly gone off the rails, it starts taking lives that possibly were not even supposed to be taken yet and they're doing everything in their power to level the playing field.
Or alternatively...
Or rather would it be "Birth"?
The imposter is the now-demonic spirit of a deceased, homicidal maniac who may have found a way to take the reigns of Death's controls in the afterlife. Ironically, it's the REAL Death who's trying to keep the survivors alive while trying to take back it's job.
What if the reason Death is so obsessed with balancing out the books is that with each successive error, we bring the universe one step closer to crashing? Also just like the Butterfly Effect WMG mentioned above, if enough people break sequence, will the machinations proliferate uncontrollably, beyond what even Death intended?
There are actually two kinds of death: Peaceful death (death by old age, for example) or violent death, which this series has aplenty. The Death we see here is the one who managed the latter, but didn't like the more peaceful Death, thinking that Peaceful Death's job was... BORING. So he knocked Peaceful Death out and took over his job, and made sure that in the FD-verse, every deaths shall be complicated and violent. People don't die out of being old anymore; people die because Death wanted a sadistic show.
Which leads to...
Spin-off because it's starting to LEER from the premise of Final Destination.
Eventually, perhaps the audience may want the people of the FD-verse to earn some happy end. Some individuals would learn on how sadistic this Death is and did their best Samuel L. Jackson impression: "Enough is ENOUGH! I HAVE HAD IT WITH THESE MOTHERFUCKIN' VIOLENT DEATHS ON THIS MOTHERFUCKIN' WORLD!" This led them to discover the existence of Peaceful Death on how it was usurped by the current Death, and work around a way to wake it up, thereby granting them enough power to materialize the violent death and beat the crap out of it or obliterate it. Peaceful Death takes back its place and stated that a new Violent Death deity will eventually come and hopefully be less sadistic than this one.
The movie then ends with one of the heroes having a chronic heart attack and dies after being sent to the hospital. Because hey, Peaceful Death gotta do his job, Death is a natural part of life, but this time, there won't be some asshole deity manipulating it for lulz.
You are on his list, it's neat, it's tidy, some people go in their sleep or in illness, some people get into horrific accidents, that's just the way it goes, but if you cheat his list and, in essence, mess up the order, he gets nasty, you will note that most (not all) of the initial disasters the characters die rather instantly, usually asshole characters get nasty ones (the bosses death by tar as an example) but everyone else gets their heads smashed in or crushed or splatted, all instant, painless, maybe not clean but still pop and you are out, for cheating his list Death gets angry and constructed more prolonged and painful deaths, the more you cheat him or actively try to, the worse it gets, but if you accept it is happening and you can't stop it, he relents and gives you a quicker death (Rory & Nora from 2), the only reason most of the characters get a horrible death is because Death is actively angry at them for cheating him.
Sure, freak deaths happen in real life, but the ones in these films are often partially a result of technology which seems to have been designed to help facilitate horrible accidents. There also seem to be much lower safety standards. Judging by such things as the design of the tanning salon and by many characters—characters whom one would assume to be competent—who make mistakes that one would think would be avoided by anyone (such as Eugene being left alone without any supervision), it's also possible that human instincts were influenced by Death's will.
In Final Destination 3, Ian's last words to Wendy were "You see? I'm not gonna die! It's you, Wendy! YOU'RE DEAD!"; later on in the movie, Wendy actually did (possibly) die. So... Yeah...
- A helicopter crash
- An earthquake
- A flood
- A factory or warehouse accident
- A mass shooting
- A fire
- A building collapse
- A science lab accident
- A yacht capsizing
- A nuclear meltdown
- A school or university
- A factory or warehouse
- A political rally
- A political protest (March For Life, March For Our Lives, etc.)
- A military warzone
- A stadium
- A wedding
- A funeral
- A science museum
- A zoo
- A yacht
- A remote island
