"Still got your dad's lucky lighter?"
"Unless you stole it again."
- Wendy and the Middleman
Wendy Watson carries a lighter as the only memento of her father, following his disappearance under mysterious and as-yet unexplained circumstances. It is a silver Zippo lighter with an engraving of a Douglas DC-3 airplane, the same craft her father was flying when he vanished. Wendy has a habit of playing with her lighter when bored, which she calls, "Like an OCD thing. Except...different."
In "The Pilot Episode Sanction", the Middleman steals her lighter and plants it as evidence that Wendy's negligence had caused the explosion, so she will be forced to come to Jolly Fats. She is initially enraged at the theft, but moves past this, and is later touched when the Middleman recovers the Zippo and returns it to her.
Wendy's lighter makes two more appearances in the series:
- In "The Manicoid Teleportation Conundrum", the Middleman borrows it to check a secret door for air flow.
- In "The Clotharian Contamination Protocol", Wendy waves it in the air while crawling through the Middle-vents and quoting Bruce Willis from Die Hard: "Come out to the coast, we'll get together, have a few laughs."