The summer of 2025 was made infinitely more palatable for the presence of a snot-nosed little gremlin who helped unleash a nightmare at 600 feet and firmly won my heart in the process. And all he did was throw a coin at an inopportune moment, race down a flight of stairs, knocking aside a grown man on the way, and finally get flattened by a falling piano. Such is the morbid lot of a character in a Final Destination premonition. That's my boy Alfred the Penny Kid. Lived in splendour, died in chaos.
What stayed with me most about Final Destination Bloodlines were the characters. Sure, like everyone else who goes to see a Final Destination installment I was primarily there for the gruesomely creative kills, but the characters are what made the experience. Having a bunch of figures we can feel genuinely invested in before their inevitable reduction to human passata is what elevates macabre pleasure into super macabre pleasure. We had some grisly kicks and we made (then lost) a few friends on the way. Of the central cast, I know that everybody loves Richard Harmon's Erik (it seems like they pulled out every last stop to make him the fan favourite), and Owen Patrick Joyner's Bobby (a jock who's a soft-hearted turtle daddy is an appealing combination), but the player who particularly stood out to me was Rya Kihlstedt as Darlene (to the extent that I'm actually kind of regretting how I bad mouthed Home Alone 3 at the end of my review of Bushwhacked last year). Nonetheless, for as much fun as it was following Stefani's family and their fight to stay a part of this mortal coil while on the big D's hit list, for me their story never quite scaled the same glorious heights as the movie's prologue, in which we bore witness to the messy downfall of one of the most hubristic buildings known to Man. The Skyview's disintegration was quite the lurid spectacle, as grand and as ghastly an opening disaster as this franchise has ever executed, but once again it was the characters who really stuck with you. Yes, even the minor ones who were just there to be fodder for the crumbling rubble. They too were such a colourful and distinctive bunch - not least the older and bolder of the two children unfortunate enough to be caught up in the misadventure. This kid, portrayed by Noah Bromley, had extremely minimal screentime all told, but as far as I'm concerned he's the Bloodlines MVP. We do know the character's real name (Alfred Milano), for reasons I'll get into later on, but the film's closing credits have him filed under the affectionate moniker "Sky View Penny Kid". "Penny Kid" is how directors Adam Stein and Zach Lipovsky also refer to him in the Blu-Ray commentary, so that's the name I'll be predominantly using here. (Also, if you haven't seen Final Destination Bloodlines, know that there will be spoilers.)
I love the Penny Kid (to death), and I dug every scant second he spent on screen. But I get the impression that I'm something of an anomaly in that regard, and it vexes me so. In the aftermath of Bloodlines' release, I was a little taken back by how much animosity I saw for this child on certain online venues. I mean, I understand it to a point. Not everyone's going to feel so warmly-disposed toward a character who played such a vital role in a chain reaction that doomed numerous people. It was an accident, but one born of churlish disregard. Compared to the other child (Jayden Oniah) who shows up in the Skyview and sits there innocently toying with a model train (innocently, but unwittingly foreshadowing how this whole story will eventually end), Penny Kid is really not in the business of endearing himself to onlookers with any winsome wholesomeness. Rather, he represents the darker side of childhood, the amorality mixed with the uninhibited idle energy and the resentment of adult authority. He doesn't set out to cause serious harm, but he's decidedly not an innocent. He immediately feels out of place amid all those unwary adults gathered at the venue, no matter how dressed up to the nines he is. Prologue protagonist Iris (Brec Bassinger), by far the most perceptive visitor at the Skyview, seems unnerved by him the instant she lays eyes on him - although it might not be the Penny Kid per se that unsettles her so much as the weapon of mass destruction he wields and insists on taking all the way to the top of the tower. In either case, there is a certain delectable irony in having the most insidious person on the scene the one we would ordinarily be inclined to perceive as the most harmless, as this franchise already understands. You might recall how, in Final Destination 2, Kimberly Corman was taunted by a child in an adjacent car who bashed two toy vehicles together with an eerie smile on his face that seemed to knowingly anticipate the impending pile-up. But Penny is the most joyously extreme example to date. (Here there is an additional significance to having our chilling omen of what's ahead be a child, which becomes more apparent by the end of the film.)
Penny Kid is not a character designed to procure sympathy. But he gets it from me anyway.
So what exactly is the kid's role in the prologue? He's present at the grand opening of the Skyview (a swanky observation tower/restaurant clearly modelled on the Seattle Space Needle) in 1968, and is first seen attempting to steal coins from the fountain at the bottom. A security guard catches him in the act and advises him that his sticky fingers will bring bad luck; Penny apologises, but keeps the change he's already pocketed. Shortly after, he boards the elevator and ascends to the top of the tower, alongside Iris and her partner Paul, played by Max Lloyd-Jones. (It should be noted that the elevator sequence is the only point in the prologue where Penny Kid is accompanied by his parents, a detail it's strangely easy to miss; at every other time we see him, he's been left unsupervised.) Iris, whose anxieties have been increasing the further she ventures into the building, is particularly ill at ease inside the elevator, which is visibly over capacity. Her reservations are not allayed by the commentary given by the elevator operator (Travis Turner), who cheerfully describes how construction of the Skyview was rushed to have it ready five months ahead of schedule (Iris: "Is that a good thing?"). Penny Kid picks up on Iris's fearfulness and teases her by jumping on the elevator floor. He's later seen on the observation deck where Paul proposes to Iris, pulling out the coins he collected earlier and releasing them down the side of the tower. As he prepares to throw the last of his coins, a penny, he's accosted by yet another security guard, who warns him that a penny thrown from a tower could turn into a lethal weapon. Penny Kid gives an ostensibly polite and compliant response, but calls the guard a "fat ass" under his breath and throws the coin anyway when his back is turned; Iris sees this and clearly has her misgivings, but turns a blind eye and follows her new fiance to the dancefloor for what they assume will be a night of celebration. Alas, the shoddily-constructed tower just wasn't made to withstand so many partygoers jumping up and down to Isley Brothers tunes, and eventually gives way. As for the dreaded penny, instead of falling to the ground and potentially getting embedded in someone's skull, it gets sucked into the building's ventilation system, eventually colliding with a pipe and causing a gas leak. One thing leads to another, a panicked guest gets set on fire from contact with a kitchen pan in the ensuing commotion, they get too close to the gas leak, then kaboom. Now the building's on fire, on top of everything else. As the guests make a mad dash for the stairway, Penny Kid climbs down from the observation deck and asserts his right to go first by means of the Birkenhead drill. Unfortunately, the stairs prove just as shoddy as everything else in the building, for as the stampede of feet starts to trample down them, they also give way, causing everyone upon them to fall to their deaths...all except the Penny Kid, who has the advantage of being both lighter than everyone else and at the front of the procession. He keeps going, and is eventually able to get out of the tower unharmed. Whereupon he's crushed by a piano falling from the flaming wreckage above and turned into, well, human passata. Atop that very piano was the penny he'd thrown earlier; its gruesome work accomplished, it slides back down into the fountain and resumes its place within the waters.
Of course, that's only the premonition, and it doesn't come to be outside of the head of visionary Iris, who proves a worthy adversary for Death. With her foresight and resourcefulness she's able to avert the disaster completely, first by getting hold of that infernal penny, then by covering the open flames in the kitchen area and finally by warning everyone that the building is disintegrating beneath their feet. They heed her words and are all able to go home safely that night. But if you've seen any of the prior installments, you already know how it goes. Death returns for Round 2, and works its way through its earmarked victims in the order in which they were originally intended to die. The twist in the case of Bloodlines is that we're not following the immediate survivors of the opening premonition, but the descendents of Iris and Paul. The former so excelled at saving lives that Death was faced with an unusually protracted list that took decades to work through, giving numerous survivors time to reproduce before their number came up. As per Death's procedures, any further descendents of unintended survivors are automatically added to the list, as they should never have existed in the first place. (This confused some viewers, who recalled that in Final Destination 2 it was put forth that the birthing of new life could have the opposite effect and invalidate a list entirely, but this was never actually confirmed.)
An anecdote I've seen repeated a lot from different commentators discussing Bloodlines is that the audience in their theatre cheered when Penny Kid met his demise beneath the piano. The thought of an entire auditorium of people cheering the pulverising of a child, even an unruly one, strikes me as a little harsh, but I get it. It was designed to be an uproarious moment (Stein and Lipovsky observe on the commentary that this is the moment that's gotten the "biggest reaction" in the screenings they've attended), in that it plays like something out of a live action cartoon. You can't quite believe your eyes the first time you see it - it's nasty, it's gleeful and of course it took serious balls (keep in mind that Tim Carpenter from Final Destination 2 was reportedly written as a much younger character, but aged up because nobody at the time wanted to involve kids in these splatter fests. I guess we as a society have moved on since then). It obviously works as a karmic death, since Penny is effectively done in by the very coin that he threw, which takes a prolonged time to work its way down, setting the piano into motion and finally crashing to the bottom just as he's leaving the building. I'm not going to shame you if you found his death funny, because on some level, I did too. I have, however, read a lot of reactions to Penny Kid that make me bristle. The most distasteful are along the lines of people claiming that they would punch Noah Bromley if they saw him walking down the street. I know it's just internet bravado speaking and most people probably wouldn't, but there's something most unsavoury about threatening to do physical harm to an actor because you don't like something their character did that becomes a thousand times worse when the actor in question is a child. Then there are those who'll suggest that he's the ancestor of some other detested character like Hunt or Carter. Not tsundere Carter from the original film. The bad, racist Carter from The Final Destination. How...dare you? (Also objectively false.) I've gotta say that I am perturbed by the number of people who are willing to lump him in with the likes of Carter, Isaac, Frankie, etc, as if being an obnoxious child is really on the same level as being a racist or a sex offender. Some folks will even go a step further and claim that he's the villain of the entire franchise, at which point I can practically feel the fissure spreading across my brain.
Hence why I feel obligated to make a post in which I outline why I love Penny Kid, what makes him such a fun and fascinating character, and why I think that much of the animosity he receives is just plain overblown. If I don't stick up for this littlest of guys, then I'm sensing nobody will.
The notion that Penny Kid is somehow the villain of the franchise seems to stem from two misconceptions - a) that Penny Kid is responsible for the entire Skyview disaster and b) that the other disasters in the preceding films are all connected to what went on at the Skyview. Neither is correct. Penny Kid didn't cause the entire disaster, as anyone who watched Bloodlines ought to know. The floor was already cracking before the chain reaction with the coin got underway. Because the tower itself was total shit, despite its beguilingly elegant appearance, and all the rushed construction and endless cut corners meant that it was unable to withstand anything too out of hand or unexpected. Penny Kid might have represented that element of wild unpredictability getting into the system, but he didn't corrupt said system so much as expose the terrible flaws that were already there. One way or another, that building was going down, and the hubris and irresponsibility of the officials behind it were ultimately more to blame than the disobedience of a child. He's also not responsible for the occurrences in the preceding films, with Lipovsky confirming that the Skyview disaster was not intended as an "origin story" for any of the other scenarios in the Final Destination series (it clears up much of the mystery surrounding a certain recurring character, but that's it). I'm not sure why people should be so convinced that Iris's premonition of '68 and her subsequent cheating of Death was necessarily the first time that anything like this had ever happened in all of human history? Does it have anything to do with the trailer, which invited us to "Witness the birth of Death"? All marketing bluster. I recall that, prior to the film's release, there was speculation that all of the visionaries from the previous entries would be descendants or relatives of Iris, and that the ability to have premonitions was genetic, but that turned out to be bogus. We still don't know where the premonitions come from.
Another point I'll make in Penny's defence is that there was, in my eyes, a grown adult in the disaster who behaved so much more odiously than him. The Maître d' (Bernard Cuffling) shoved Iris like a thug and doomed everyone inside the elevator. Whatever you might think of Penny, he has an intrinsic excuse in that he's only a child, but what's this guy's explanation? Yet he seems to have gotten off scot-free, at least in terms of online vitriol (in the film itself he gets messily bisected by the falling elevator). Don't call that justice.
It's important to establish that, while I've described him above as a chilling omen, Penny Kid is not The Omen. He isn't like Damien the Devil's spawn.[1] There is nothing evil or supernaturally bad about him. Nor is he a scheming sociopath along the lines of Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone or The Good Son (you can take your pick). What he DOES remind me of, in the best possible way, are the bratty children from Charlie and The Chocolate Factory. You know how partial I am to those bad nuts. Like them, he's a caricature of childhood vices, exaggerated for effect but based on the honest observation that children aren't always doe-eyed cherubs who behave as adults desire. Often they are chaotic and lacking in boundaries. We've noted that Penny Kid seems eerily out of place at the adult party, but there's a way of looking at it that might even make him, if not quite sympathetic, then at least comprehensible. My guess is that he likely didn't want to be at the Skyview that evening. The celebration wasn't a family event, and it didn't exactly seem like a fun place for a child to hang out. The only other child present was a few years younger than him and tucked away at the back, so probably wouldn't be viable company. Penny was bored and frustrated, and decided to amuse himself by throwing coins from the tower. That that he's so isolated from others his age and forced awkwardly into an adult milieu marks him out as someone whose innocence has been corrupted too soon, something best exemplified in his use of adult language to combat the grown-ups he butts head with. Which also happens to be Penny's funniest trait - for me, his most uproarious moment came not in being crushed by a piano, but in his shocked reaction to Iris when last we see him, as she physically intervenes by prising the penny from his grasp, and he cries out, "WHAT the FUCK is WRONG with YOU?", with the quirkiest intonation. That line, and that delivery, is a great part of why the character holds such a special place in my heart. Stein and Lipovsky loved it too. I was delighted when they stopped their commentary just to listen to it, before confirming that the line in question was improvised by Bromley. That kid did a fabulous job in the role, and I'll look forward to seeing if he pops up anywhere else.
Penny is a wonderful throwback to the likes of Augustus, Veruca, Violet and Mike, right down to the fact that his childish rebelliousness ultimately brings to him to a sticky end. The bad nuts don't actually die in Charlie and The Chocolate Factory (except maybe in the stage musical), but they do receive gruesome comeuppances that, in most cases, entail some grotesque form of damage being dealt to their bodies, a concept Bloodlines takes to its extreme, in having Penny's body be wrecked beyond recognition. His story is a cautionary one that works on the same brutally visceral level as Roald Dahl's novel, in being all about consequences and the misfortune you'll potentially bring on yourself by venturing beyond your limits and not adhering to adult authority. Dahl's novel followed a fairytale logic, in which a wayward child might be transformed into a blueberry and dejuiced back to their original state (but for the detail of remaining blue). Bloodlines follows quite a different logic, that of the urban legend. The warning Penny is given by the second security guard, that he could kill someone by throwing a penny, is an old wives' tale. Throwing a penny from a tower is still an inconsiderate thing to do, because if it hit someone it would certainly hurt them, but the part about it plunging directly into their skull has no basis in fact. It's just something people tell us will happen, and might even have happened to an acquaintance of one of their own acquaintances, and which we too pass on, in spite of our healthy scepticism, because the narrative of such a small and childish act reaping such terrible consequences is too irresistible not to. Bloodlines takes the idea to demented new heights, so not only does Penny Kid beget his own demise by throwing the penny, it causes a whole lot of additional, gleefully improbable damage on its downward trajectory, sending an already nightmarish situation hurtling out of the frying pan and (literally) into the fire. His story is a lesson in the pitfalls of pushing back against authority; despite having assimilated too much of that adult culture for his own good, Penny really seems to dislike his elders. At best, he feigns politeness with the security guards, but insults one of them behind his back. He shoots Iris a standoffish glare as she enters the elevator and goes on to tease her. The saddest observation to be made about him is that he doesn't seem to have a particularly strong bond with his parents. Not only is he seen alone in most of his appearances, during the attempted evacuation he does not try to reunite with them. (It's also true that he ran off after the stairs gave way, grinning with elation at his own seeming good fortune, but was there anything he could actually have done to have assisted those on the other side of the gap?)
The spectre of the urban legend haunts Bloodlines in a broader sense still. Perhaps inevitably in a series that's all about mundane situations going horribly wrong, the various mishaps depicted feel suggestive of this brand of folklore, the kind that speaks to the anxieties of the modern world, offering unsettling reminders of our mortality and innumerable vulnerabilities, even when surrounded by technologies and creature comforts, and functioning as warnings against deviant behaviours and misplaced trust alike. The sequence where Iris and Paul are invited to join the overloaded elevator, on the operator's foolhardy insistence that there is still sufficient room, has eerie, seemingly deliberate echoes of another old legend, as recounted by Bennett Cerf in the 1944 publication Famous Ghost Stories, where a woman interprets a dream as a warning not to enter an elevator that subsequently breaks and falls. There are countless urban legends concerning food and beverage contamination - the glass shard in the lemonade ice is not a variation I'm sure I've heard, but it wouldn't surprise me if it's out there. Finally, there's the film's epilogue, in which yet another hoary myth is evoked involving the childish misuse of pennies - in this case, the possibility that a coin placed on a railway track could cause a train to derail - in an obvious echo of Penny Kid's earlier misadventure.
Though before we touch on that we should shed light on the fate of Penny Kid. We know that his being crushed by a falling piano didn't actually come to pass, thanks to Iris's interventions, but after the flashback sequence, by which the older Iris (Gabrielle Rose) recounts how she confiscated his penny, he isn't seen again. I'll admit that this was contrary to my expectations when I first watched Bloodlines; then, I could have sworn that they were setting the youngster up to be of greater significance later down the line. Given that he'd died so late in the premonition, for a while there I was fully anticipating seeing Penny show up again in the present as an adult. When it was established that Death was currently up to Iris, my heart sank because I knew that, as per the rules of this franchise, he'd already have to be dead. Since I had so much investment in the character, I was really curious to know how he met his demise for real and what kind of life he'd led in his borrowed time. Fortunately, the answer to that is included within the finer details of the film, as an Easter egg for those eagle-eyed enough to spot it. Among the documents that Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) inherits from Iris is a timeline made up of newspaper clippings detailing all of the fates of the Skyview survivors and their descendants. If you study it closely, you can make out the various headlines and stories, and it's pretty fucking obvious which one is supposed to be Penny Kid. He's this guy, Alfred Milano.
When the above image first started circulating online, there was some preliminary debate about which post-it note alluded to him - whether he was Alfred Milano or Kirby Dylan, and if he had a daughter named Francesca or no descendants at all. Since then, it's been accepted that the way the post-its align with the wider timeline would appear to identify him as Alfred. In addition, Francesca's associated clipping indicates that she was killed in a gas leak, which ties in with how her father's actions were once fated to inadvertently trigger such a calamity. My boy Penny, though? It seems that he was run over by a piano-moving truck whilst trying to make off with someone's wallet. If there's a crumb of comfort to be extracted from this, it's in the likelihood that he would presumably have died a mercifully quick death, as he did in Iris's vision. I'd imagine it would have been a lot like Terry's in the original Final Destination. And he died doing what he loved - gallivanting with ill-gotten change.
Was I disappointed that he never changed his ways and progressed from being a pouty brat to a petty criminal? Maybe...for about ten seconds. The truth is that it all makes perfect sense. He was never going to change because of the sheer futility of doing so. Iris might have thwarted Death's plans at the Skyview, but the people within remained bound by the fate already chosen for them, and however much borrowed time Iris (and their procreating urges) had secured them, there's a level on which they all remained permanently mired in that moment from 1968. The question of how much control we have over our own destinies is a particularly intrinsic one to Final Destination, where characters are traditionally called to match their supposed free will against forces much greater than themselves, and it's a point that Bloodlines emphasises through the recurring motif of circles. As Stein and Lipovsky facetiously put it on the commentary, "Circles kill". The Skyview is absolutely plagued by the little round devils. There is, yes, the penny, but the building itself also assumes a circular shape when viewed from above. The prophetic Johnny Cash tune heard playing on the radio as Paul and Iris approach the tower laments not simply of falling into fire but into a burning RING of fire. There's the ring Paul offers to Iris when he proposes to her, a classic symbol of eternity. And of course Iris's own name, alluding to the circles in her eyes, which foresee the impending destruction before it happens. Circles kill because they symbolise the inevitability of fate, for whatever move you make will eventually take you right back to where you started (something Stefani discovers in the film's epilogue, when she finds herself reliving various details from Iris's prologue experience). It is the bottom line on why I can't really hold any of what happened at the Skyview against Penny Kid - Death had decided that this particular group of mortals' time had come, and one way or another it was going to make it happen. The penny IS fate (ie: Death), and it knew exactly where it needed to be. There was no transcending the path already ordained, however prolonged. In Penny Kid's case, he never overcame his magpie tendency to pilfer shiny change, and continually found himself pushing up against authority, which shifted from meddling elders to law enforcement (the discernable details in his associated article would indicate he was a repeat offender). His desperation to avoid the police is what caused him make a fatal error and blunder into the path of that truck. And, once again, he died under a piano, even if it wasn't the piano per se that killed him. Lived in splendour, died in chaos.
Admittedly, not everything about it adds up. The timeline indicates that he perished some time in the early 1980s, but considering that he died so late in the premonition I would have expected him to have stuck it out at least a decade or so longer. (I'll concede that while he was the third-to-last character we saw die onscreen, ahead of Iris and JB, he wasn't necessary the third-to-last to die overall - there were a bunch of falling people who may have yet to hit the ground at the precise moment the piano squashed him.) A bigger problem is the visual inconsistency regarding his age. We don't know exactly how old Penny Kid was back in 1968, but he clearly can't have been much over 10, meaning that if he'd died in the early 80s, he'd have been in his mid-20s at the time. Yet that age doesn't align with the pictured individual, who looks a lot closer to his mid/late 30s - which is roughly the age bracket I'd have anticipated Penny Kid making it to before Death got round to him, based on the premonition. A great deal of care and attention evidently went into the construction of that timeline, and I look forward to combing through with greater scrutiny in the future and uncovering further macabre treasures, but there might have been the odd bit of oversight here and there. If he did die in his 20s, then the really tragic implication is that Francesca must have been a particularly young age when she lost her father, and soon after her own life. We have only speculation to go on where she's concerned, but it's noteworthy that she had her father's family name, implying that he was either married to her mother or in a stable relationship with her. The point is, he found someone who liked him, so there. Although it's too bad that her involvement with him ultimately landed her with two very traumatic losses.
By the time we get onto Stefani's story, Penny Kid and his bloodline may be long extinguished, but there's a sense in which he still lives on. He has a counterpart in the present. Enter the Penny Lady (Ethel Pitchford). She's first seen during the hospital sequence, where she briefly interacts with Erik, before reappearing and playing a more significant role just as the picture is tying up. After confiscating the penny from Penny Kid, Iris had kept it for all these years, taped up in her morbid scrapbook where it could cause no harm; it's transferred to Stefani's possession, but "escapes" outside the hospital, whereupon Penny Lady finds it and picks it up. The penny has unfinished business, and Penny Lady has arrived to help complete what Penny Kid helped to start. She and Penny Kid are, in many deceptive respects, polar opposites. Significantly, one is a child while the other is a senior, indicating the beginning and the end of the line. One is male and one is female. One's a rapscallion, the other seems utterly guileless. But they are nevertheless soulmates - two sides of the same coin, if you will. They share that same magpie attraction to shiny pennies, and they bookend the narrative in where that attraction ultimately leads them. Of note, if Penny Kid had lived, he would be in his 60s by now, and I'm guessing that's the age bracket she's in. (Here's a crazy idea, but could she even be Penny Kid's aforementioned widow? Probably not, but I'm toying with making it my headcanon until proven otherwise.) And, in both cases, the character's involvement evokes a classic piece of modern folklore pertaining to pennies. Unlike her younger counterpart, Penny Lady doesn't purposely discard the coin upon the railway tracks; rather, she absent-mindedly releases it while engaged in the most wholesome act of of purchasing cookies from a children's bake sale. It finds its way down to the tracks, as it was always wont to do, and derails a train, spelling disaster for Iris's remaining bloodline. In practice, Penny Lady's sweet-tempered obliviousness proves as lethal as Penny Kid's churlish deviancy; in the landscape of urban myth, both are equally inviting of misfortune. Their mutual mistake was in assuming that they had mastery of the penny, by holding it in their hands, when in actuality they were merely pawns in the hands of Fate.
There is a slight twist, however, in that, unlike her young counterpart, Penny Lady does not get caught up in the disaster she helps unleash. There's been some debate among fans as to whether anyone besides Stefani or Charlie (Teo Briones) was killed by the runaway train (we see houses get demolished, but we can't say for certain that anyone was in them at the time), but as the train derails, it goes in the opposite direction to where Penny Lady was lurking, so we've no reason to believe that she was affected. When Erik had encountered her earlier in the hospital, he was sizing her up (presumably none too seriously) as a potential murder victim whose remaining lifespan could be stolen, on the advice of Bludworth (Tony Todd - RIP), and asked her if she had much time left. "I think so..." she'd replied, visibly rattled by the question (as you would be). Though she plays into the hands of fate, Penny Lady noticeably does not tempt it for herself. Her presence might signify the end of this particular (blood)line, but as we've established, fate's preferred form is not a line, but a circle, and it will keep renewing itself over and over. Penny Lady is not yet done, just as fate is not yet done. There is one last name to be crossed off Death's list in the form of Bludworth (although that will have to be resolved off-screen, for obvious reasons), but after him there will still be plenty more macabre stories left to tell. The same chaotic cycle of lives being brought into the world only to be helplessly snuffed out will continue, and there's not a whole lot to be done about it, other than what Bludworth finally suggested, which is to make the most of whatever comes in between. It's a point the film accentuates by showing the penny still in motion as the closing credits play, rolling alongside items from Iris's collage, with it still to be determined (at least from our perspective) where it will land next on its deadly journey. Penny Kid's clipping is featured in this closing montage, although not as one of the stories seen in close-up.
In a manner of speaking, Penny Kid lives. I mean, sort of. He himself is obviously dead, but his spiritual successor lives on, and that's good enough for me.
[1] Not that I don't have my share of sympathy for Damien too, but we'll save that discussion for another day.
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