Maverick (Tom Cruise) threw the wrong dog tags at the end of Top Gun. With the upcoming sequel, Top Gun: Maverick, on the docket, there's a renewed interest in the 1986 cult classic movie directed by Tony Scott. As fans revisit the original film, new details from it emerges, including one that totally changes how the public perceives its ending.
Focused on Pete "Maverick" Mitchell — a Navy lieutenant who has impressive flying skills — the events of Top Gun kicks off after he and his RIO, Nick "Rooster" Bradshaw (Anthony Edwards) were sent to the TOPGUN academy in San Diego. There, they train with the best of the best in the organization and compete with other trainees to come out on top of the class. Unfortunately, tragedy struck when a training exercise went horribly wrong, resulting in Goose's death. This will be a pivotal plot point in Top Gun: Maverick with the introduction of Bradley "Rooster" Bradshaw (Miles Teller) — son of Goose who has some animosity towards Maverick.
This is an interesting turn of events considering that the general assumption was that Maverick has moved on from the death of his friend three decades ago. Top Gun visually represented this by having him throw Goose's dog tags into the ocean at the end of the film, indicating that he's let go of the guilt that he felt towards the accident (in reality, Tom "Iceman" Kazansky (Val Kilmer) is primarily to blame for the incident anyways). As it turns out, however, the aforementioned sequence isn't what it was assumed to be since Maverick got rid of the wrong dog tags.
The end of Top Gun shows Maverick looking back at his experience in the academy and his most recent mission, during which he almost suffered a panic attack remembering Goose's death. In the ending scene, Maverick is holding a set of dog tags most viewers have assumed to be his deceased partner's. Upon closer inspection, however, it's not Nick Bradshaw's name that's engraved on the metal plate, but Mike "Viper" Metcalf (h/t tylerDurdenUMD). The TOPGUN senior official also has a personal connection with Maverick having served with his supposed disgraced father, Duke Mitchell. However, in one of their conversations in the film, Viper revealed that the rumors about the older Mitchell aren't actually true. While he didn't elaborate on this matter, he assured Maverick that his dad did everything in terms of protocol and he's one of the best pilots that Viper has flown with.
There's a possibility that this was intentional as it's Top Gun's way of resolving Maverick's issue with his dad. However, while this particular plotline was tackled in the film, it wasn't as big of an element in the narrative to be brought up at such a crucial point. If anything, aside from Viper's story, which didn't offer much detail, there are still a lot of lingering questions regarding Duke Mitchell's career as a Naval aviator to be resolved just like that. Chances are that the filmmakers intended this scene to be Maverick's way of letting of Goose, as originally perceived, but Cruise was given a different set of dog tags to film with. Perhaps Top Gun's production crew assumed any dog tags could be used in the scene since the technology available to the public in the '80s had much lower image quality, making specific details like this unnoticeable to viewers — but as times have changed, people can now enhance the image to discover the continuity error.
