My family has always had a fraught relationship with lady luck. My mom had fantastic luck until she didn’t. Then it became horrid. I had great luck for a few things and no luck for a few others. I learned from an early age, I had to either create my own luck or ignore luck altogether and go my own way. I just couldn’t rely on luck to pull me out of hairy situations. Of course, who can really?

There are those that are lucky. I’ve known a few people like that who press their luck and more often than not they end up just fine. But with people like that I often wondered what that did to the cosmic laws of the universe. It’s a little like that Seinfeld episode where George, who normally had bad luck, decided to do the opposite of everything he would normally do. By changing things up that way, he changed his luck. But then his friend Elaine, who normally had good luck, ended up having back luck after bad luck. When luck changes in one part of the spectrum it impacts others along that spectrum.

When I caught Deadpool 2 last weekend, which I was super excited to watch, I was left thinking about luck yet again. Luck is not pain-free, for others. In the movie, Deadpool recruits new superheros to be part of his new group X Force. Of course, this is a set up for sequels but I won’t go into that here. Part of his new recruit gang, was Domino. Her superpower is that of luck. And, she is truly lucky. And quite cool, I must say. But as she goes through the movie fairly unscathed due to luck, there are others strewn about that didn’t fare as well. He luck had a price. It just was ignored and left unaddressed and unexplored. In the television show The Flash, there had been a meta whose superpower had also consisted of being lucky. This was the “Luck be a Lady” episode. But you got to see more explicitly than in Deadpool 2, how her luck left carnage behind.

All this makes me wonder if luck is a zero sum game for which there is just a finite amount of luck in the world bucket. Its like a universal see-saw where both cannot be up or down. When one person’s luck is up, another’s must be down.

Besides my need to deconstruct the luck concept, I did end up liking Deadpool 2. Not bad for a sequel and an R-rated one at that. It was sadly not as snarky as the first one. However, there was a great baby scene a la Basic Instinct. Go see it and determine how lucky you think you can be.