Here Are All the Franchise Easter Eggs Hidden in 'Final Destination: Bloodlines'
Final Destination is back and better than ever with the fifth sequel, Bloodlines, the first franchise installment since 2011. Bloodlines is a slight reboot for the series, resetting the storyline just enough to attract newcomers but keeping enough of the expected trappings and references to other installments to court long-time Final Destination fans.
Each installment of the hyper-gory series follows a group of people who are, for a moment, lucky enough to avoid a mass-casualty event triggered by Death himself (and he is a "he," according to the franchise), who's always trying to slim down the global population. But after they cheat Death once, the wily reaper sets out to even the scales -- usually in the form of horrific, Rube Goldbergian accidents.
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Bloodlines follows Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana), a college student plagued by recurring nightmares which show her young grandmother, Iris (Brec Bassinger), meeting her end in a disastrous high-rise fire turned building collapse. Determined to put a stop to the violent visions, Stefani travels home to consult with her estranged father, brother, and cousins. Her aging grandmother (played in later years by Gabrielle Rose) has long left the family, and Stefani must track her down if she has any hope of defeating Death's cycle.
Directed by Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein, Bloodlines cleverly subverts the expectations of a Final Destination movie whilst simultaneously delivering "exactly what [longtime] fans are after," according to our review. While this sixth installment lays fresh track for upcoming sequels, it takes an equal amount of time to pay fan service to past Final Destination films.
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Here are all of the franchise Easter eggs hidden within Final Destination: Bloodlines. Be warned, major spoilers follow.
- During Bloodlines's opening disaster, a penny set loose by a rowdy child (Noah Bromley, credited as "Penny Kid") ends up toppling a piano, which careens out of the skyscraper. It lands with a splat, flattening Penny Kid, who's managed to (briefly) escape the carnage. The moment is almost a precise reflection of a similar death in Final Destination 2 (2002), in which another adolescent of dubious morals is pancaked by a large sheet of glass.
- Another Final Destination 2 nod in the opening disaster: The restaurant's snotty maître d is caught between two elevator doors and sliced in half (evaporated, really) when the car pulls out without him. It's a callback to the scene in part two in which an unlucky woman loses her head after it becomes trapped in an elevator door.
- When Stefani goes to visit her grandmother, she's told to empty her pockets of their contents. When Stefani protests, Iris tells her, "It's not you I'm afraid of." In part two, Kimberly Corman (A.J. Cook) visits a psychiatric hospital to seek answers from original survivor Clear Rivers (Ali Larter) and is asked by a nurse to empty her pockets. When Kimberly resists, the nurse tells her, "It's not you she's afraid of."
- Iris meets her end via a gruesome facial impalement. It's a (much, much) bloodier version of Kat Jennings' (Keegan Connor Tracy) facial-impalement death in part two.
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- At Iris's funeral, Uncle Howard (Alex Zahara) and Stefani's dad (Tinpo Lee) are dressed similarly to the detectives in the original Final Destination when they attend the funeral for the victims of Flight 180.
- The sequence at the family barbeque plays as an extended callback to the gymnastics sequence in part five, in which an athlete narrowly avoids a nail on the course before completing a backflip and meeting their end in an unexpected way. Here, the nail is replaced with a rake, and the gymnastics course becomes a trampoline. One character even begs another to "show us your backflip" before things go awry, thanks to a nearby lawnmower.
- After surviving Death at his tattoo parlor, Erik (Richard Harmon) backs into the street mid-conversation and is nearly hit by a delivery van. It's a winking homage to the death of Terry Chaney (Amanda Detmer) in part one, who was hit by a bus after distractedly backing into the road.
- The hospital where the climax takes place is Hope River Hospital, the same hospital from the end of part two. When trying to remember the hospital's name, Stefani's mother, Darlene (Rya Kihlstedt), refers to it as "Clear River Hospital," a reference to the character Larter played in parts one and two.
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- When the characters pay a visit to coroner and Death-xpert William Bludworth (Tony Todd), he explains to them the general plot of part five (killing another person allows you to cheat Death's plan). The characters dismiss it immediately as ridiculous, a knowing reference to the critical reaction to Final Destination 5.
- When Erik is sucked into the MRI machine and impaled by the disintegrating wheelchair, the bars exit the skull tattoo on his chest in a visual identical to the poster for part five, which featured metal bars exiting through the front of a skull. This is also how Peter (Miles Fisher) meets his demise in the disaster-vision which opens that installment.
- Darlene's RV is nearly hit by a log truck, the vehicle that caused the highway pileup in Final Destination 2.
- Iris' cabin explodes in a manner (and shot construction) nearly identical to Ms. Lewton's house in part one.
- Darlene is killed when a telephone pole falls and slices her down the middle, a reference to the end of part one in which a falling telephone pole triggers the collapse of a sign, which fells Carter Horton (Kerr Smith).
- The penultimate sequence in which Stefani is trapped underwater inside Darlene's RV is a reference to the water-logged finale of part two, in which Kimberly Corman drowns before being resuscitated. It's also an homage to the car wash scene from Final Destination 4.
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- In the final scene, the father (played by Matty Finochio) of Charlie's prom date is introduced as "Dr. Reddick." Jeffrey Reddick is the writer who penned the screenplay for the original Final Destination. Reddick receives a "based upon characters created by" credit on Bloodlines, despite the film sharing only one crossover character.
- Major spoiler alert: The fake-out happy prom ending, which culminates with Stefani and Charlie dying in a (yet another) penny-triggered accident, is the second time the franchise has pulled that trick. The first time was in Final Destination 3, when Wendy Christensen (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and the rest of the survivors take a long-awaited trip to New York City, only to perish in a gruesome subway accident.
- More logs: The final shot, in which Stefani and Charlie are crushed by errant logs tumbling from the crashing train, serves as another callback to the timber trauma of part two.