Wendy Christensen

Wendy Christensen is a fictional character in the Final Destination franchise. The character, created by James Wong and Glen Morgan, and portrayed by actress Mary Elizabeth Winstead, serves as the protagonist in Final Destination 3. Outside of the films, the character also appears in the novelization of Final Destination 3.

In the film, Wendy is depicted a high school graduate from the fictional town of McKinley in Pennsylvania, and is one of the survivors of the Devil's Flight roller coaster derailment. The character is portrayed in the film as an emotional "control freak" who becomes increasingly distressed over the course of the film as she fails to save the lives of those around her.

Both the character and Winstead's performance were positively received by critics, often being singled out as one of the highlights of the film, even by its detractors. Wendy's ultimate fate at the end of the film was ambiguous and has attracted discussion since the film's release.

Wendy lives in McKinley, Pennsylvania, with her sister Julie. She is shown to be a control freak. She is dating Jason Wise, and is friends with Kevin Fischer and Carrie Dreyer. She is the school photographer for the yearbook. Wendy and her friends celebrate at the amusement park for their senior field trip. At the start of the film, Wendy admits that she doesn't care for Kevin, but as the movie goes on, she slowly forms a caring relationship with Kevin once she gets to know him better.

Before boarding a roller coaster ride known as "Devil's Flight", Wendy begins to have the feeling of "having no control". Shortly after being seated on the coaster, she suffers a premonition of the entire ride derailing and brutally killing her and all the other passengers. She panics and manages to get several of her fellow students off, before realizing her boyfriend Jason and best friend Carrie are still on the roller coaster. She fails to get them off the ride in time and witnesses the derailment of the roller coaster and the death of Jason and Carrie.

After the incident, she is determined to leave McKinley due to the bad memories. When she begins noticing the photographs she took on the night of the roller coaster ride carry ominous clues as to how the other survivors eventually meet their end and also learns details of the Flight 180 disaster, including the visionary who predicted it, Alex Browning, from Kevin beforehand. Initially skeptical of Kevin's findings, but after sensing a haunting presence stalking her, she conducts her own research relating to premonitions that leading her to learn about another visionary, Kimberly Corman, who foresaw the U.S. Route 23 pile-up, which was strongly implied that somehow connected to the Flight 180 explosion, she then pairs up with him to save the other survivors, in time sensing that it is the same unseen entity that caused the past disasters stalking them; she ends up only managing to rescue Ian McKinley, her sister Julie, and Kevin from their second intended deaths. Shortly after, Ian confronts Wendy, Kevin, and Julie; he blames Wendy for his girlfriend Erin Ulmer's death and is determined to ensure that she will not survive. Fireworks behind Wendy nearly hit her, but she avoids them, and they hit a nearby aerial work platform. It collapses and kills Ian, who inadvertedly takes Wendy's place on Death's List. Wendy, Kevin, and Julie believe they have managed to escape Death, but five months later, Wendy sees signs relating to the events of both the roller coaster and the Flight 180 disasters, and senses something is wrong. After unexpectedly reuniting with Julie and Kevin, she receives another premonition that foretells their deaths in a subway crash. Her attempts to stop the subway are for naught, as the film cuts to black, with sounds of the train derailment being heard just as she runs towards the exit door, leaving her fate ambiguous.

In the "Choose Their Fate" bonus feature available on the DVD release of the movie, three alternate endings are available, with each one resulting in a different fate for Wendy. In the first alternate ending, after Ian gets completely crushed, she along with Kevin and Julie leave the tricentennial, but not before the camera which Wendy threw to the ground takes one last picture of them, presumably hinting their next way of death. In another ending, Wendy did not receive the second premonition and the film ends with the subway barreling straight into her, explicitly showing her death. In the final alternate ending, Wendy receives her vision before she boards the roller coaster, and manages to save herself along with Kevin, Jason, and Carrie; an epilogue shows that she changed her name to Ming and became a fortune teller.

Wendy appears in the novelization of Final Destination 3 by Christa Faust. The storyline follows the same one as the film up until the ending. The book uses the alternate ending in which her camera takes another picture of her after Ian’s death, hinting that death is still coming for her but ending the story there. In the novel, Wendy's relationship with Kevin, unlike in the film, becomes more romantic in nature over the events of the story.