In the Final Destination series, Death's plan seems kind of suspect
Putting too much thought into a movie series that invites nothing of the sort.
For certain types of overthinkers like me, watching all of the Final Destination movies in short succession leads to scrutiny of the sort that is best described as misdirected. Some horror franchises invite examinations of their lore, although in many cases, consistency between entries is often accidental, with the motivations of the villains and the “rules” the characters are required to follow varying wildly from movie to movie, with the filmmakers probably expecting that nobody will really care as long as they deliver the expected gore. But that’s what leads to ever-more-complex fan theories as people try to work out the mythology of these series and make them make some sort of sense.
The Final Destination series stands out among horror franchises in that it’s remarkably consistent from movie to movie. Part of that is due to the simplicity of the idea. In each movie, someone has a vision of a disaster that kills a lot of people, but by acting on their premonition, they and a few others are able to avoid death. But since they escaped “Death’s design,” that means Death is coming for them, and they end up dying one by one in outlandish, coincidental ways. That means that in each installment of the series, audiences get to enjoy seeing a bunch of improbabilities add up to one gruesome death after another, and as long as that happens, there’s really no need for much in the way of lore to explain what is happening or how to escape it.
However, that’s not quite true, since it wouldn’t be very dramatically interesting to just see people escape death and then die one after the other. Someone always has to become aware that Death is coming for them and try to figure out if there’s any way to survive (in most cases, it turns out that there isn’t). That’s where the lore starts to creep in, and while the movies generally discourage thinking too much about their rules and supernatural mechanics, well, people on the internet need to have something to go on about.
Watching all of these movies has made me start to ponder how exactly the supernatural forces involved actually work. Is Death really an implacable force that will never stop, or is it more of a cosmic humorist, coming up with the most ridiculous ways possible to get back at the victims that it believes have cheated it? Is there some other force at work trying to help people out, or are the various clues and visions all part of Death’s plan, its way of toying with its prey? Let’s take a journey through the series to try to figure it out:
Final Destination (2000)
As the movie that started the whole thing off, this entry often keeps things fairly simple. Its opening disaster is a plane crash that’s much less elaborate than the grandiose orchestrations of mass death that would show up in later entries. It does still provide some elaborate deaths though, starting with a scene in which a kid slips on water in the bathroom and manages to accidentally hang himself when the wire on which the shower curtain was hanging wraps around his neck. There are plenty of other similar bits of mayhem, making it clear early on that the idea behind the series was a winner.
The other primary thing that this movie introduced was the idea that, when hunting the people who had escaped it, Death would kill them in the same order as they died in the original vision. This provides a lot of drama as the characters figure out who is supposed to die next, and there’s also some business about how if people manage to escape Death a second time, it will skip them and go on to the next person before coming back to them later. This also means that in addition to orchestrating elaborate schemes to kill people through a series of coincidences, there are some moments when Death seems to take the opportunity at hand, such as when, after the main character saves one character from being killed when a train was about to crash into his car, a piece of shrapnel lying near the tracks gets sent flying so that it can decapitate the next person in line.
In terms of lore, there wasn’t a whole lot that this movie bothered with outside of the basic concept, although it did also establish the motif that when Death is about to act, wind starts blowing ominously. That’s something that would last throughout the series; even when characters are indoors, candle flames start flickering or beaded curtains start rattling when Death is getting ready to do its thing.
Tony Todd, the primary actor associated with the series, made his debut here, and he’s another element that has been somewhat inconsistent. He’s a mortician who seems to have some familiarity with the people involved in the plot and an understanding of Death’s schemes. While he’s not exactly a villain, he seems to get some malevolent enjoyment out of the proceedings. This characterization would vary significantly in the entries where they bothered to bring him back.
Final Destination 2 (2003)
The first sequel is the point where the series tried to establish some lore and make things more complex, but then mostly gave up on it. While it works well enough here, it’s easy to see how it could quickly become unwieldy, and it makes sense that the subsequent sequels would mostly pare things down to the basics. They would often have characters reference Flight 180, the plane that crashed in the first movie, but usually just as a way to explain that the same thing is happening again.
The disaster in this entry is a massive pileup accident on a freeway after some logs fall off a log truck, and it definitely ups the ante in terms of mayhem. However, the twists start almost immediately; a young woman has a vision of the accident and freaks out, getting out of her car and stopping several other drivers behind her from entering the freeway where they would have been killed in the accident. But her friends, who stayed in the car, are all killed when another truck plows into them. This would seem to go against the pattern introduced in the first movie, since they were among the last to die in the original vision.
As more deaths start happening, it becomes clear that Death is proceeding in reverse order this time, for reasons that don’t make a whole lot of sense. After some investigation, the characters learn that everyone who was supposed to die in the accident had previously managed to avert death due to the intervention of one of the people from the first movie who escaped the plane crash. So the accident was Death’s way of cleaning up the lingering effects of a previous escape from its clutches. This does make one wonder if Death is really all that concerned about the right people dying at the right time, since there had to be a whole lot of collateral damage in an accident like this. It also makes some of the lore start to get too complicated, so it’s easy to see why the series didn’t continue in this direction.
This movie also introduces another element that’s somewhat inconsistent throughout the series. Along with the original vision, the main character has premonitions before each character’s death, some of which seem to line up with what happens and some of which don’t. Death only occasionally seems concerned about killing people in the right order, and it makes sure to clean up its messes, killing anyone who the people who avoided death manage to save along the way.
Another new element that we see is the fakeout death in which Death makes it seem like something crazy is going to happen to kill someone, but they survive, only to be killed by something else just when they thought they had escaped. There’s a teenage kid who goes through a whole thing while getting a dental procedure done, with nitrous oxide tanks malfunctioning after water from a leaking fish tank causes an electrical short, plus an ornament hanging over the chair falling into his mouth and possibly suffocating him. He gets saved at the last moment, but later, when he’s leaving, he gets squished by a falling pane of glass. Something similar happens to a guy who gets his hand caught in his apartment’s garbage disposal and comes close to dying in a fire started by a series of coincidences, but after he gets out of the apartment just in time, his head gets impaled by a falling fire escape ladder.
Tony Todd returns for this movie, and while he still seems pretty aloof, the characters eventually convince him to help them, and he tells them that the only thing that can defeat death is new life. This means they spend much of the movie trying to save a pregnant woman who they thought was supposed to die in the car accident, believing that the birth of her baby will stop Death’s plan. This doesn’t work out though, due to a twist where it turns out the woman wasn’t going to die in the accident after all. So the main character comes up with a new plan, driving a car into a lake to drown herself so that she can be revived, which is apparently the way to trick Death, possibly out of an acceptance that it has found a worthy adversary.
This whole series of events actually leads to a double fakeout death. There’s a character who is in the hospital, and it seems like he’s going to die when his bed starts rolling around his room, the nurse call button slips out of reach, and something hits some buttons on an oxygen tank, indicating that it’s going to overload and explode. But when the pregnant woman gives birth, everything seems to miraculously right itself, allowing him to survive. Except then we learn that she wasn’t part of Death’s plan after all, at which point the oxygen tank promptly explodes. This whole sequence seems to show that Death is not just fucking with the characters and coming up with crazy ways to kill them; it’s also fucking with the audience.
Final Destination 3 (2006)
The third entry in the series takes a step back from the complexity of part 2, avoiding what could have easily become a cumbersome morass of connections that stretched back for who knows how long (that would have to wait until later). Here, we go back to the simplicity of the idea introduced in the first film: after a vision of a roller coaster accident, a young woman manages to escape along with a few others, and then they die one by one, as expected. We know the drill by this point, but it’s fun to see various bits of nonsense play out, like a couple of girls who get trapped in tanning booths and burn to death or a guy who dies when a truck smashes into some cars in a fast food drive-thru, somehow causing the fan blade in a vehicle’s engine to be exposed and chop up his head.
The gimmick regarding visions of future deaths this time around is a dumb one that was fortunately abandoned in later entries in the series. The main character, who had been taking pictures of other people for her school yearbook, starts reviewing the photos and finds that the last picture taken of people before they died contains some sort of hint about their death. When she tries to explain this to another character, she illustrates the idea by showing him a picture of Abraham Lincoln with a line in the image that supposedly lined up with where he was shot, as well as a picture of one of the towers of the World Trade Center with a shadow of an airplane on it. Does this imply that 9/11 was somehow part of Death’s plan? That may be a bridge too far for a series that’s often pretty nihilistic.
Aside from that element, things mostly proceed as normal, although the finale of the movie introduces something new: a secondary vision. After she believes she has escaped death, the main character happens across the other two remaining survivors while on a subway, and sure enough, now that they’re in the same place, Death takes the opportunity to stage a massive crash. Except this turns out to be another vision similar to the opening of the movie. However, it didn’t seem to make any difference, since the character snaps back to reality just in time for the crash to happen anyway. It’s uncertain what the point of the sequence is, although it’s notable in that it’s another example of Death going way overboard and causing a disaster that kills dozens in order to take out a few who had slipped out of its grasp.
The Final Destination (2009)
This may be the low point in the series, although it’s still full of enjoyable mayhem. The opening disaster is a speedway crash that causes dozens of deaths when racecars crash into the stands and cause them to collapse on top of everyone. There’s the usual vision and the group of people who escape and then start dying. We all know the drill by this point.
In this entry, the visions plaguing the main character are back, although they take the form of prophetic dreams that include artistic elements that are only vaguely inspired by the deaths that are about to occur. For example, when a tow truck driver is about to be killed by being dragged behind his truck and set on fire, the main character has a vision of 3-D animated chains flying around and bursting into flame. Whoever is sending these visions doesn’t seem to be bothering to provide any helpful clues, which may support the theory that it’s all just Death fucking with people for fun.
This entry contains an especially egregious fakeout death in which a woman is getting her hair done at a salon, and various elements (a curling iron, some leaking water, the hydraulic lift on a chair) conspire to make a ceiling fan come loose. Except it doesn’t do anything; it just lands on the floor in front of her. But then when she’s leaving, a lawn mower sends a rock flying through her head. Come on, Death, what was the point of all the shenanigans if you were just going to use the simplest option?
This entry and part 2 also get kind of silly with the idea that people have to die in a specific order. In the second film, a character tried to shoot himself in the head, but all six bullets in his revolver misfired because it wasn’t his turn to die. The same thing happens here, with a character trying to commit suicide but finding that Death won’t let him die out of order (when his turn does come up, he just gets hit by a car after wandering into a busy roadway, which is always a risk in these movies). The preciousness about people having to die in just the right way doesn’t really line up with Death’s regular engineering of massive disasters that kill many more people than those who are specifically targeted.
This movie also features a secondary vision in which the main character realizes that his girlfriend is going to die in an explosion that takes place at a movie theater (a 3-D movie, no less, with the explosion synced perfectly with one that takes place on the movie screen, making the audience think they’re seeing the best effects ever in their final moments). When he snaps back to reality, he has just enough time to get to the theater and save her. It’s all for naught though; in the next scene, he and the other two survivors meet for coffee, just in time to be wiped out by a runaway semi.
Final Destination 5 (2011)
For what once seemed like the final entry in the series (it ends with an awesome montage of all the gruesome deaths that took place in the previous films), things became even more simple, not even bothering with prophetic visions or portents of doom and mostly just going through the expected motions. That’s not really a problem though, since this entry sees one of the most enjoyable opening disasters (a bridge collapse) and many excellent deaths, including a series of events that leads to a gymnastics accident, a nerdy horndog racist guy’s head getting crushed by a heavy Buddha statue after he falls off a massage table, and a woman falling out of a window after being wounded by a malfunctioning eye surgery laser.
This entry features the welcome return of Tony Todd, who keeps freaking the characters out by popping as part of the coroner’s crew at all of the death scenes and making cryptic comments. After the characters track him down and query him for information, he provides a new example of lore: if someone targeted by Death kills someone else, their lifetime will be extended by the full amount of time that the person they killed would have been expected to live.
That kind of makes sense as a plot element, since if the whole reason Death is coming after people is because it was cheated, having someone else die before they were supposed to would create some extra time in the continuum, satiating Death’s hunger temporarily. Except isn’t the whole raison d’être of the series that Death gets mad when people mess up its designs? Wouldn’t it get even angrier when someone has taken away its ability to kill people when the time is right? The whole idea seems suspect, which may be why the final moments of the movie see one character who had extended his lifespan die suddenly right after he learns that the person he killed was on the verge of death anyway.
It may also explain why, after the other surviving characters get caught up in a fight where one character is trying to kill the others to steal their lifespans, Death sort of says “Ah, fuck it” and kills them all anyway. In a somewhat clever twist, the series loops back around on itself by showing that this entry actually took place before all the others, and the surviving characters get on the very plane that crashed in the first movie. This seems to be another indication that Death has no problem with collateral damage, but it can’t bear the idea that someone may have escaped from its grasp once it has decided to inflict mass death.
Final Destination Bloodlines (2025)
It took more than a decade for another sequel to show up, but apparently, the years between entries were spent trying to figure out how to make the lore as complex as possible. This movie introduces the idea that Death has been putting its plans into effect for decades, and who knows, maybe even throughout human history. It’s an expansion of the mythos that could provide plenty more fodder for exploration in future entries in the series (although I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s mostly ignored, with the series going back to basics yet again in any additional sequels).
The opening disaster here takes place in what the characters describe as 50 years in the past, although based on the outfits and music, it seems like it’s happening in the 1960s rather than the 1970s. A young woman and her boyfriend go to a fancy dinner at their town’s new attraction, a Space Needle-like structure, and, wouldn’t you know it, a disaster involving a penny thrown by a kid from the top of the tower causes the whole structure to collapse, killing everyone.
We don’t get answers about exactly what happened for a while, since the movie jumps to the present day, but it eventually comes out that the main character’s grandmother was the young women from the flashback, and after she had a vision of the disaster, she completely stopped it from happening, saving hundreds of people. Because this was such a large disruption of Death’s design, it has taken 50 years to clean up the mess, killing not only the people who should have died in the disaster but all of their descendants.
This is a cool idea, and it expands the scope of the series significantly. The sort of thing we’ve come to know and love throughout the series has been happening for decades, and since we’ve seen that Death isn’t too worried about collateral damage, it has probably engineered dozens of disasters, each of which probably led to visions, escapes, and more of Death’s methods of cleanup.
However, the rest of the movie doesn’t necessarily hold up to scrutiny. We learn that the grandmother spent her life figuring out how to escape Death’s design, eventually holing up in a remote shack where she can remain completely safe. But since she was the last person to die in her vision, she should have been safe all along while Death took its time killing everyone else and their descendants. For someone who spent her life figuring out Death’s plan, she seems pretty ignorant of its actual mechanics.
When the grandmother is finally taken out, Death can proceed with killing her children and grandchildren, which is what makes up most of the plot of the movie. However, there’s one especially notable fakeout, with one of the grandchildren going through a whole rigamarole while working at a tattoo shop involving a chain catching on his nose ring and then wrapping around a ceiling fan and a fire that seems like it should have killed him. He survives though (and in a later scene, there’s a joke in which he almost gets hit by a car after stepping into the street, which is how multiple other characters throughout the series have died), and it turns out that he was born after his mother had an affair, meaning that he wasn’t part of the bloodline destined for death. So why did Death go through the whole process of almost killing him? It seems like another indication that it likes to fuck with the audience just as much as the characters.
The movie also provides one last chance for Tony Todd to appear, and it actually gives him a nice send-off in which his character seems to accept that he’ll be dying soon (Todd died in real life a few months before the movie came out). It turns out that he was a boy whom we had seen in the opening scene, and he had befriended the grandmother and learned about her research into Death’s design, which sort of explains why he seemed to know something about what was going on whenever he would appear.
Todd also acknowledges some of the elements that previous movies had introduced, telling the characters that there are only two ways to escape Death’s plan: kill someone and steal the rest of their life or die yourself and then get revived. While the characters debate which option to choose, they ultimately decide that death and revival would be best, and that’s exactly what happens to the main character. However, even though pretty much the exact same thing happens that allowed the main character in part 2 to survive, with the character drowning and then getting revived through CPR, we get yet another fakeout when someone else callously informs her that she didn’t really die since her heart didn’t stop. With the audience having become aware of this, we get one last disaster, a train derailment (caused by the same penny that had almost caused the disaster 50 years ago, which made for a cute detail) that serves as another cruel punctuation to end one of these movies.
Have We Learned Anything?
After all of this exhaustive exploration into how exactly this movie series works, I don’t know if I’m closer to any answers than I was at the beginning. I had been noodling with the idea that maybe there was an unseen “good” force that was conspiring against Death the whole time, accounting for the various visions and the occasional escapes. But I don’t think that really makes sense, since those elements are almost always ineffectual, and in many cases, they act as self-fulfilling prophecies that lead the characters to cause the very deaths they are trying to escape.
Instead, it seems like Death is the sole force operating here, and even though it makes people think there’s some sort of plan, it’s really just a predator playing with its prey. It’s the one that gives people visions, and then it engineers ever-more-elaborate schemes as a way to amuse itself. While it sets up complex rules that it supposedly follows, it’s happy to violate them whenever it feels like, if only to provide people with a glimpse of hope before delivering the final punch line in its cosmic joke.
In fact, I would even say that Death’s powers extend beyond the world of the films, directly interacting with the audience to try to keep us guessing. That’s why we get so many fakeouts and misdirections before the inevitable final destination arrives. Maybe that’s just a way of saying that the filmmakers themselves are the villains, serving as cruel gods who amuse themselves and us by raining mayhem and destruction on everyone who comes within their purview. I doubt that’s something that will ever be acknowledged by the series, although I would love if we got a metafictional entry at some point where Death’s plan manages to escape the bounds of the screen and affect the world at large.
I guess if we’ve learned anything, it’s that dwelling on the inevitability of death doesn’t have to be a depressing, morbid pursuit. There’s a dark humor in the idea of sudden and absurd deaths not just happening randomly, but through an apparent design by a puppetmaster who can never truly be defeated. We all know that death is coming for us at some point, so imagining that it will happen in the most ridiculous way possible may provide some catharsis rather than a sense of creeping dread. If that’s the main takeaway from this seemingly endless thought experiment, I think it might actually be somewhat meaningful.