What’s the most you ever lost on a coin toss? This is not an idle question pretty much any time it gets asked. It’s certainly not for Dalton. Upon arriving at the Double Deuce to tender his resignation, he is greeted by a phone call from Brad Wesley. “Top o’ the mornin’ to ya!” the deranged JC Penney franchisee says, before telling Dalton “what’s on for today”: “Wade, or Elizabeth…one of them dies.” Dalton has no response but to tell Wesley “you’re a sick man,” his voice echoing Morgan telling him “you’re a dead man” lo those many moons ago. So, in the absence of Dalton expressing a preference, Brad Wesley flips a coin. He looks at the result, gets back on the phone, and says “Dalton, I’d sure like to tell you how it turned out.”
This is how it turned out:
It’s hard to see what with the corpse of Wade Garrett obscuring it, but there’s a point I’m making here: At no time during or after their conversation does Brad Wesley say anything like “Heads for Elizabeth, tails for Wade.” He doesn’t even list them in that order! The information in the note above is a point of interest, I suppose, but since Dalton was given no frame of reference for the coin toss it might as well say “It was heads” or “It was Option C” or the text of the Gettysburg Address. The point of a supervillain coin toss is to tell you what the options are and then let the coin fall where it may, not to do all of this in secrecy and only reveal the results when they mean nothing to the person to whom you’re revealing them.
Unless you’re the supervillain in Road House, in which case all bets are off. Brad Wesley didn’t bring the Fotomat here by playing by your rules.
Tags: brad wesley, coin toss, dalton, road house, wade garrett