Final Destination: Recurring Characters - TV Tropes (2024)

William Bludworth

Played By: Tony Todd

Appearances: Final Destination | Final Destination 2 | Final Destination 5

"In death, there are no accidents, no coincidences, no mishaps, and no escapes."

• Ambiguously Evil: The book Looks Could Kill imply that Death can make Deals and thus take people off the list. There's a lot of implication that Bludworth has made a deal of some sort with Death - false/ambiguous information to survivors that can be interpreted incorrectly in return for his own life - hence why his information never truly works; he's "seen [this] before" and knows how to slow Death down, and thus tries to help, but to save his own life, can't truly meddle and give real information.
• Catchphrase: "I'll see you soon."
• Cold Ham: He speaks coolly, calmly, but he's pretty theatrical and seems to enjoy in an understated way indicating he knows more than he lets on.
• Creepy Mortician: Works as a mortician and is the man who informs the premonition survivors that Death is after them.
• Evil Sounds Deep: Averted. It isn't clear what Bludworth's role in everything is, but he appears to be at worst a neutral party and at best a guide for the survivors.
• Mouth of Sauron: Heavily implied to be this for Death itself. He was also theorized to be Death himself, although Word of God denied this.
• Mr. Exposition: In 1, 2 and 5, he shows up to explain what's happening to the main characters and in 5, gives them hope that they can avoid it.
• Scary Black Man: It's Tony freakin' Todd. What do you think?
• Sophisticated as Hell: Finishes a rather eloquent speech about the nature of death with "You don't even want to fuck with that Mac Daddy."
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Maybe. Had he not talked about how to cheat death by killing someone else off, we wouldn't have Peter to go Jumping Off the Slippery Slope and try to kill Molly. Though it's up in the air if he intended for that to happen or not.
• Why Do You Keep Changing Jobs?: He varies between coroner work and mortician work over the course of the series. Presumably this is less an example of The Main Characters Do Everything and more meant to be one of those "inexplicable, probably supernatural" things about him, strengthened by his Voice-Only Cameo in 3 as the voice actor for the roller coaster, and the pre-recorded subway train messages.

Clear Rivers

Played By: Ali Larter

Appearances: Final Destination | Final Destination 2

• Broken Bird: After Alex's death, she checks herself into a mental institution. She only leaves when she realizes that Kimberly is experiencing the same premonitions Alex had and needs help surviving whatever Death throws their way. In the Final Destination 2 novel, she smiles when she's being incinerated. "I can sleep now."
• Cool Big Sis: in the second, to Kimberly. She becomes like a big sister to her
• Final Girl: She alone survived the original group, but not in the second movie.
• Fire-Forged Friends: With Kimberly, despite their initial hostility to each other. They gradually form a bond during the second film's events, so much so that Kimberly is devastated when she dies at the hospital along with Eugene.
• Good Is Not Nice: She does tend to be a little bit rough on her friends, but it's because she's looking out for them and is trying to protect them from death. And because life has hardened her because of these experiences. She felt a responsibility towards Alex.
• Kill It with Fire: Almost explodes in her car if not for Alex's intervention. Death eventually gets her by incineration in the second film along with Eugene. This or Disney Villain Death is also how she dies in the premonition.
• Parental Neglect: Her mother does this when her father is murdered and she becomes involved with a lowlife.
• The Problem with Fighting Death: She's the only character to survive the first movie, but she hasn't really cheated Death, just temporarily played him to a stalemate. She admits as much when Kimberly comes to her for advice in the second movie. Once she finally comes out of hiding, Death gets her in short order.
• Took a Level in Badass: As the only person who's dealt with Death's design in the second film, she instructs everyone on what to do and how. She's the most observant and alert when it comes to the new cast of characters, fitting her to find death traps and put an end to them sooner than most of the others. When Death comes for her in an apartment she is Badass enough to actively avoid it!

Death

• A Form You Are Comfortable With: In the novels, when Death interacts with mortals directly, he takes the form of an elderly African American male who wears a gray suit, has shiny white teeth, gray hair, and a cane with a skull on the end.
• All a Part of the Job: Death may enjoy mercilessly killing people, but he's only an antagonist because people have to die to keep the world's resources from running out. He's just doing his job - albeit gruesomely - and the people that have to die, don't want to die right then and there.
• Ambiguous Situation: While Tod's death is shown to make it clear that Death can control fate quite a bit to kill his victims if necessary, it's not always exactly clear when he plays a major role and which deaths are mostly brought on themselves. And while it seems that Death himself can defy a bit of logic, he probably couldn't go as far as making a tanning bed suddenly burst in flames all by himself, especially since the right ingredients hardly exist for that situation.
• Big Bad: For the entire series, Death is the main antagonist and the one the characters are trying to avoid. Instead of being merely a consequence of a certain action, Death is presented here as an active, personified, malevolent entity.
• The Chessmaster: Ultimately plans your every move to follow its grand design deciding where, when and how you're supposed to die. It's even implied the premonitions and any attempts made to cheat death throughout the series WAS the design from the very beginning.
• Death Song: Many of Death's kills are signaled by music playing, either in the general area or near the survivor who received the initial premonition. The song is either a specific song that gets played multiple times, or a song that's relevant in some way to the current death. Examples include playing Ohio Players' "Love Rollercoaster" for the tanning bed deaths in 3 since a rollercoaster was the initial accident, and playing War's "Why Can't We Be Friends" when killing the racist jerk in The Final Destination.
• Disproportionate Retribution: The reason Death makes anyone who somehow escapes the initial accident of each film a Cruel and Unusual Death. Trying to cheat it apparently ticks it off enough that it's going to make you suffer in the worst possible ways before you actually die and by the time it's over, your corpse is going to be completely mangled.
• Dramatic Wind: Sometimes uses wind to help start the events that will kill people, like in Isaac's case in the fifth film, where it sets a stand on fire and starts a chain reaction that leads to him getting his head squashed by a Buddha statue.
• The Dreaded: Well,… it is Death.
• Eldritch Abomination: Death's real form is never seen and it is treated as an inhuman force of nature, its motives in causing such cruel deaths are inscrutable to all beings except itself, and it is so powerful and omnipresent that it can claim whatever humans it wants before directing its attention to some other corner of the planet.
  • In the first film, it vaguely came in the form of an amorphous, barely visible, smoky, black mass of some kind that appeared for only a second each time it was about to off a survivor.
  • Death appears in the dreams of two characters in Dead Reckoning as a massive shifting pile of decaying corpses and bones from thousands of different species.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Death is very eager to off anyone who manages to avoid their death, but it seems to have a problem with racism, betraying your friends and sneering at religion. It also knows some honor in upholding deals and, on rare occasions, does show mercy and makes the death less painful. Death also appears to consider some people a Worthy Opponent and thus makes their death less painful/more quick.
  • When Carter is preparing to burn a cross on George's lawn in The Final Destination, Death causes his truck radio to start playing "Why Can't We Be Friends?"; then it kills him in a manner not too dissimilar to how racist lynch mobs would execute their victims.
  • Death does the same thing to Isaac, an idiotic sleaze who tries to invoke a Happy-Ending Massage at an Asian parlor after they point out that he's not at a brothel. Isaac's head is crushed by the same Buddha's statue he previously sneered at.
  • When Peter tries to murder his friends, Death just speeds it up a bit because Peter had previously stolen the life of someone who wasn't on Death's list at all and thus should have been safe. Death, however, is having none of the betrayal and offs him anyway, breaking its own rules in the process.
  • Death is more than happy to make deals — and actually honor them— if it needs to: in Looks Could Kill, the prognosticator suffers from serious facial injuries in the aftermath of the opening disaster, and spurns the other survivors before trying to kill herself. Death intervenes, and offers to remove her from his list, and restore her face, in exchange for her assistance in killing the other survivors. As she orchestrates the incidents that kill the other survivors, Death keeps his word, and allows her scars to fade. Of course, when she refuses to kill the final survivor, she rescinds the deal, and Death takes her in place.
  • After Death prevents George from killing himself in order to preserve his list, when it comes time to kill him, he’s incredibly merciful: unlike every other victim, George just gets run over and dies instantly.
• Evil Is Petty: Death is so petty that someone says "Fuck Death!" and, seconds later, almost as if offended, Death kills them. And then, of course, there are the needlessly painful and incredibly dragged-out deaths. It could make it quick, but they've messed things up... so now they have to die.
• Faux Affably Evil: Death's "human" personality is this in Looks Could Kill. Death appears amicable and using poetic language when talking to Sherry, while making his true goals and intentions no secret: even threatening Sherry with long and miserable life with her disfigurements. Towards the end of the novel, when Sherry breaks the deal and Cabernet has her baby, Death has a vitriolic Villainous Breakdown, before taking vindictive satisfaction in killing Sherry instead.
• For the Evulz: It's suggested in the novelization of the third film, and Dead Man's Hand, that the extremely cruel deaths are such because Death finds them to be fun. The fourth film reveals that death causes the premonitions themselves just to troll its victims.
• Greater-Scope Villain: Presumably an Ancient Evil that was there from the very dawn of the universe snatching life away since the earliest lifeform.
• The Grim Reaper: Eventually kills every living thing (duh!), but especially hates those who cheat its design.
• He Who Must Not Be Seen: Death has no physical form; it's effectively a force of nature.
• Hidden Villain: Death never appears in any sort of personification (unless if you consider the comic books Final Destination: Spring Break as canon) and thus is never confronted directly by the protagonists.
• Hope Spot: If the theory that Death causes the premonitions in the first place is true, which the fourth film confirms, then it seems Death really enjoys lending people a bit of luck and then snatching it away as brutally as possible. Also, each movie generally features a hope spot as the Main Characters seem to find a method to escape Death. While it would seem there are ways to slow Death down, even for as much as a year or two as Clear did, none of the methods actually beat Death in the long run.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: One of Death's personal favorite methods of killing. The first film only saw one impalement through a cleaving knife, but the other movies have Death use anything convenient to impale, both in premonitions and in real life.
• Invincible Villain: Can Death itself die?
• Just Following Orders: See All a Part of the Job, above.
• Kill It with Fire: Another signature Death tactic. Three of the five starting premonitions involve flames/explosions of some sort, and every film has at least one fire scene where someone dies (sometimes to the fire, sometimes not.)
• Motive Rant: In Looks Could Kill, Death himself appears in a human form to directly communicate to the protagonist, Sherry. Here, we are told Death's motivations straight from the horse's mouth.

  Death: “There is a complicated system of checks and balances that control the world invisible to the human eye. As you were responsible for intercepting with the fates of the individual survivors, your presence is necessary to bring about their harvest. It is imperative that those who escaped their deaths be reclaimed by me, in the exact order in which they were originally slated to die. And that all six be taken before the birth of the child.”

  Sherry: “What about the baby?”

  Death: “I'm certain even once such as you heard the analogy of a butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon and typhoons forming in the Indian Ocean. Once a life never originally meant to exist is brought into the world, the entire schemata must be reworked and new deadlines assigned to every living thing on the face of the Earth. With each reworking of the master plan, the chances of another anomaly such as yours increases exponentially.”

  Sherry: “Are you saying that Cabby's baby being born will cause the end of the world?”

  Death: “No! I am saying the child's birth will seriously inconvenience me! I do not appreciate being inconvenienced!”

• Obviously Evil: In the first film, Death is very direct in its killings and some of the accidents seem incredibly bizarre and highly implausible leading some to start speculating there are other forces behind them. After this, Death gets a lot sneakier or starts making stuff appear as genuine accidents. The first film implies that Death did not get sneaker, but was being more blunt than usual since the only people present at the deaths already knew Death is there and actively pursuing them, so Death doesn't need to hide - since they're already aware of its existence and it pursuing them it can go in all guns blazing, subtlety be damned. Unfortunately Death’s all guns blazing screwed up the following list which resulted in the list after that.
• Off with His Head!: Whenever an opportunity presents itself. Most notably Billy from FD1, Nora from FD2 and Lewis from FD3 to name a few examples.
• Powers That Be: It is never seen, but is a near-omnipresent Reality Warper who orchestrate events that causes people to die.
• The Problem with Fighting Death: Death can't be cheated forever. A character might avoid it for as long as a year, but it will always, eventually, kill those who escape their initial death. Of course, the characters accept the fact that they will die eventually, it's just that they don't want to die here and now, when they're young and life is just starting for them. Death ultimately doesn't care though; you go when it says you go. If you somehow cheat death on its list, it'll eventually cheat back.
• Reality Warper: To some extent, it can manipulate any aspect of an environment, including scientific laws such as physics, to kill its prey. One example is what it did to Tod in the first film where Death had fluid leaking from a toilet make Tod slip on to the clothes wire that wraps around his neck for Death to tightly strangle him. Death then has that leaked fluid return to the toilet to make it look like he committed suicide. This is also exemplified in Death's overly complex Rube Goldberg kills. From a mortal's perspective, some of the accidents seem incredibly bizarre and highly implausible leading some to start speculating there are other forces behind them.
• Rube Goldberg Hates Your Guts: Some of Death's victims fall to a series of chain reactions that ends with them dying. The best example are the ladies in the tanning beds when a leaking slushy and an air conditioner trap them in the beds and short-circuits them, causing the beds to overheat and eventually ignite in flames.
• Screw the Rules, They Broke Them First!: This is pretty much Death's attitude. If one somehow avoids getting killed by its traps, it'll skip to the next person, and then once every player has faced Death's wrath, it'll cheat by getting rid of those who survived its design.
• Sentient Cosmic Force: Death in the films is never physically seen, but it definitely has a personality. This force of nature is something that can be cunning, creative, and incredibly petty.
• Trap Master: Some death scenes are set up to start a chain of events that activates a "booby trap".
• Troll: Death should be the literal trope image — if it had a form, of course — as, boy, is Death a big one! Plus add in the fact that it intentionally sends premonitions of how it’s going to kill its victims beforehand…Death is the ultimate example of a Troll.
• Unseen Evil: A completely invisible force taking out the Death-cheaters one by one.
• Villainous Breakdown: In the novel Looks Could Kill, Death has a nasty one when Sherry breaks their deal, and spares the life of Cabernet and her baby. Having his list invalidated causes Death to verbally lash out at Sherry, cursing her out before slamming her into a mirror, taking satisfaction when re-disfiguring her. A year later, Death personally drives a truck that ends up hitting Sherry with a vindictive smile.
• Would Hurt a Child: There's a baby onboard the plane that Death blows up in the first movie. It also crushed a young teenage kid under a plate glass window... although, logically, every child that has ever died in history was killed by Death, so this shouldn't be too surprising.