| “ | Hey! Don't throw that penny. It could kill somebody. | ” |
–A security guard telling Alfred Milano to not throw the penny off the tower. | ||
The "penny" refers to one of the coins picked by Alfred Milano from The Sky View's artificial lake. After being reprimanded by one of the security guards to not steal any coins as it's "bad luck", Alfred enters the restaurant and starts throwing coins from the rooftop for fun.
Biography
During Iris Campbell's premonition, he continues dropping coins. When he throws this specific penny, a strong gust catches it and blows it into an air vent. The penny then gets stuck in the blades of a fan in the ventilation of The Sky View, eventually causing it to throw a blade into a gas pipe, causing flammable gas to slowly build up and make its way through the ventilation.
Once the disaster begins, one of the guests, Beatrice Fuller catches fire and ignites the leaking gas, causing a large explosion that damages half the restaurant and launches the penny on top of the chandelier. When a large portion of the restaurant begins to collapse, the penny lands on a piano, knocking it over and crushing Daphne Wo against the glass. This also shatters all the window panes, sending the remaining guests plummeting to their deaths. Alfred, who has just reached the ground, is crushed by the piano, while the penny rolls back to the lake it was picked from.
After Iris' vision ends, she panics and confiscates the penny from Alfred, before going down to the restaurant and stopping the disaster from happening, thus saving everyone present, including Alfred. She keeps the penny in her book for many decades following the incident. When her granddaughter, Stefani Reyes, visits her and informs her about her nightmares about her vision, Iris realizes Death is targeting her family, so she gives her book to Stefani. When Stefani later examines the book, she finds the penny attached to one of the pages with tape.
After Erik's and Bobby Campbell's deaths, the penny falls from Iris' book and is picked up by an old lady. Sometime later, when the lady is buying cookies, the penny falls from her purse and rolls down a set of stairs before getting stuck on a set of points on a rail line, causing the switch to be jammed and misaligned. A train later derails and causes the deaths of Stefani and Charlie Reyes.
During the credits, the penny is shown rolling over red tape past a lot of newspaper articles of the deaths of The Sky View's survivors, before vanishing into the darkness.
Signs/Clues
- ????
Trivia
- A security guard at the Sky View tells Alfred to not throw the penny as it could "kill" someone. This is not just an act of foreshadowing as the penny does cause one of the most fatal things to happen in the Sky View accident, but actually a real myth that if a penny falls from a skyscraper (or similar height), it will go fast enough to kill someone, similar to a bullet. This is purely a myth as a penny hitting a person from a tall height would only hurt the person, and not cause any actual damage.
- During the credits, there is a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment where the Penny says "In Death We Trust".