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All spoilers, including those from following movies, will be unmarked ahead. Read on or go back — make your choice.

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The victims' idiocy

• Idiot Ball is taken to new and ridiculous levels in Saw 3D. Specifically, Bobby's final trap with the hooks. There are at least 3 answers better than "shove the hooks into yourself". For the record, these are (1) step into them like they are stirrups, (2) put them under your armpits (3) hook them onto your clothing. The "freak out" excuse doesn't really work here, since he takes a good 15 seconds of his allotted time to talk to his wife, consider what he is about to do, and then do it. Of course, Bobby is shown to be an idiot.
  • The point with Bobby's final test is that Bobby is the one who absolutely ruins it. Jigsaw hints before he begins that Bobby's trap isn't physically possible and the options above are obviously what any sane person listening to the tape would probably go for, considering that Bobby only made up what would happen in the hook trap before. It's the last one - Bobby's martyring himself to his wife and to everyone else for being such a massive fake, too, but the grand gesture doesn't really work out for him.
  • Bobby surely knows enough about the Jigsaw killings from preparing his deception to be aware that somebody - maybe John, maybe an apprentice, maybe a coerced stooge whose own "game" demands they do so - is generally monitoring the progress of the ones being tested. If he'd started to do something that smacked too clearly of cheating, he may have feared they'd accelerate the timer in retaliation, same as when his publicist screamed.
• With the publicist in the fishing hook trap, we're told that if the decibel meter registers too high it will automatically trigger the trap before the time limit is up. Ignoring her screaming before the tape is played and the trap is triggered she continues to scream nearly constantly often red-lining the meter yet this never triggers the trap and time simply runs out a few seconds short of safety.
  • The screaming only speeds up the timer. It doesn't end the trap outright.
  • Also, it should go without saying that even if you've been warned to keep quiet so as not to trigger the meter and so preserve your life, it's still painful as hell to have a hook come up through your oesophagus and thus difficult as hell to keep from screaming.
• While Bobby doesn't have a great deal of time he still has sixty minutes to save his wife and based on the videos he's shown failure at a trap results in her situation worsening (or simply coming off as an average night at a BDSM club). While he doesn't have any clue how many potential victims he'll need to save (only four including his wife and excluding his two traps) he nevertheless starts each tape as soon as he notices it thus starting the trap. He never pauses to try and figure it out or find an alternate solution in advance. Considering that each trap only has a time limit of one minute and he probably doesn't spend that long wandering around he would have had at least fifteen minutes each. Assuming he was trying to rush he would have had a substantial bonus upon reaching his wife and could have afforded to spend more time trying to work it out.
  • Considering it became clear by the second trap that A) the other victims were all his co-conspirators, and B) the timers for each trap wouldn't allow him more than a few minutes each, Bobby really wasn't justified in rushing so much. There were only a handful of people who were in on his deception, after all.
• With the spikes-and-fishhook trap, wouldn't the sensible move for Bobby to make be to simply cold-cock his publicist, so she'd neither have to suffer the hook being withdrawn nor make noise that would set the trap off early?
  • That's a pretty good idea, but he's not suggested to be a violent person at all. It's actually quite hard to knock someone out with a punch if you don't know what you're doing/aiming for, and done wrong it could have severely injured her or worse. However, a sleeper hold strangle may have done the job more effectively (assuming he can get behind her neck in the circle structure), had that occurred to him.

The Sentry Gun

• Why did the automated gun kill more than one person? As soon as it started shooting, I would think that the natural reaction of any human being, especially a trained cop, would be to hit the deck. Since it can't shoot down, being automated and all, that would have saved everyone but the first guy.

About Lawrence

• Okay, I was thrilled to see Lawrence return... but why the hell was he working with Jigsaw? Sure, it explains some details of past traps, but it doesn't fit his character from the first film at all. And how did he track down Hoffman, and why did he do it after Jill was dead? And who were the other pig-mask guys?
  • Must add one more crucial thing. Why would he associate himself with a serial murderer who: a) held his own family at the gunpoint via another victim with a slow poison in their veins; b) captured Adam, whose only "fault" was spying on criminals; c) left him there to die. I am totally certain Lawrence could have easily put two and two together when finding Adam's dead body. I mean, after all this, working for someone who's essentially been the architect of all your suffering since day one seems a huge disrespect to all your loved ones, who also happened to be Jigsaw's victims too.
  • Lawrence was the only person who truly understood what John was trying to do. John told him all about Hoffman, and his instructions were to only punish him if Jill died. Not before, as he still had hope that Hoffman would change.
    • That doesn't quite explain why a man with a new-found appreciation for his family's well-being would associate with a serial killer. Likely ending up with a life sentence and risking the wrath of a pair of Ax-Crazy associates doesn't exactly help his family.
    • In part because his involvement was VERY peripheral. In the films between Saw I to 3D, we see Gordon do the surgical procedure required for Michael, do the stitching with Art and Trevor, and put John onto the path of Lynn, but that's about it. He's not involved in anything else, and that probably not only helps Gordon assist, but also what helps him sleep at night. Gordon's involvement in this film is based on one scenario only. If Jill was murdered, he was to act. If Hoffman had left Jill alone, he'd have done nothing.
    • The other key point (it's not huge, but still key), is that Gordon failed his test. I mean yes, he did end up cutting his foot off, and yes, he did end up shooting Adam, but he didn't do either in the allotted time. It wasn't until the final phone call when he was told he had failed and was panicked enough to believe his wife and child were being murdered that he did so. John knew this, but saved him anyway. That may also be a small part of why Gordon elects to assist John later, in the minor ways that he does until the end.
  • It's not "explained" onscreen so we just have to assume, but there's plenty of scenarios that would make sense to imagine how he got there. Word of God tried to fill in some of this but I think we can lay the brutal truth that this probably would have been fleshed out more had they have gotten to do it as two movies instead of one.
  • Honestly, I think, just like Amanda, it was a combination of trauma-induced vulnerability and Stockholm Syndrome. God knows how long John kept him there, and since we know that neither Amanda or Hoffman knew about his apprenticeship, I'll bet you anything that for whatever time it takes to mend a man who lost a foot (assuredly a long time), John was the only person Lawrence saw or spoke to. Amanda was loyal to a fault to John, and he didn't literally nurse her back to health, so just imagine how Lawrence must feel.
    • Still not very realistic, considering Lawrence was shown helping with the Death Mask in the second film, which only takes place about a year after the first; real life cases of captors brainwashing victims into their accomplices tend to take years, even when the victim is far younger than Lawrence, and returning to their old life tends to do a lot to undo the victim's brainwashing. But see below about the series taking victims agreeing with John as a given.
• One major one that bugged me and has me denounce all films after III. Has Lawrence just gone off and forgot about his family at the end? Seriously, the first one he was majorly caring about them, what happened after. Yet at the end of this movie he's been shown to have turned to the quote unquote dark side. Did the writers forget about one of the major plot points in the first film about his family or something?
  • He wanted his family safe. Considering how merciless this series is towards its characters and their loved ones, it's possible Lawrence agreed to help Jigsaw on the sole condition that his wife and daughter be allowed to leave the city and never get involved in these "games" — not Jigsaw's, not Hoffman's, not Amanda's, not anyone's — again.
  • While I didn't "denounce" any of the films I thought that one of (if not the biggest) flaw of this movie was spending so little time with Lawrence. It wouldn't have hurt them to spend a few minutes showing how Lawrence's experience and new outlook on life affected his relationship with his family. However, him accepting Jigsaw's philosophy doesn't mean he stopped caring about them.
  • You're talking as if Lawrence's own desires are the only ones that matter. After what she and her daughter went through - went through, because his own indifference to patients caught the ire of Jigsaw - and given how many more times victims' loved ones have been targeted, it's entirely possible that Allison refused to stay anywhere near her husband, let alone keep her Diana in the same city where they'd been kidnapped and threatened. If Lawrence pressured them to stay with him, that might only have convinced her that he's become unstable himself from his experiences, giving her even more cause to leave him. Realising they'll never feel safe around him until the Jigsaw Killings are indisputably over, and knowing John Kramer is dying of cancer, Lawrence agrees to assist John in bringing Amanda and Hoffman to heel: once John dies and his other apprentices are either retired (if they pass their tests) or taken down, the doctor can honestly assure his estranged wife that it's safe to live with him again.
  • Word of God says that Lawrence and his wife divorced after he reunited with them, due to their previous marital problems and his instability from the trauma in the bathroom and brainwashing from John's nursing him back to health. So he did get back to them and they're still probably in his life, because we saw how much he cared about them in film one. Brainwashed or no, Lawrence isn't the kind of guy to up and leave his family.
  • Lawrence isn't the half of it; according to Word of God, the two pigheads who helped him abduct Hoffman were Brad and Ryan from the Public Execution Trap, and an unused script shows there were plans for Lawrence to recruit most (if not all) of the survivor support group to Jigsaw's cause. Combine this with Amanda and Logan; the series seems to take it as a given that most of Jigsaw's surviving victims will join him. It's part of why I think some of the writers believe John is the good guy.

Bobby's made-up story

• As for the other plotline... Why did everyone believe Bobby when he had no evidence of being in a trap? And who designed the traps in this movie, Jigsaw or Hoffman? The last film suggested that William and friends were the last victims Jigsaw had prepared traps for, but that's definitely his voice on the tapes, and the grudge against Bobby is his.
  • We know that Hoffman can use voice-editing techniques on tape to make himself sound like John. And who's to say that John didn't have Bobby planned out enough to make the tapes, and schedule all the other stuff for a later date?
  • The way it's shown it would imply William was the last planned chronologically but that doesn't mean John couldn't have planned Bobby earlier and just put priorities later. After all with the ending, Lawrence was at the Survivor Group meetings even before Bobby got there, so Bobby's been under watch by an apprentice for a while even if not yet truly abducted. And according to Word of God, it would actually be three apprentices keeping an eye on him, including Brad and Ryan, even if they are just basically helping out Lawrence. Hoffman could have been looking to use up what John had left to help with his own plans to foil the police.
  • Bobby does national tours to promote his book and self-help DVDs. The traps in his trial were probably designed not that long after Jigsaw went to his book signing, but had to be held in reserve until the next time Bobby was back in the city where all these movies happen.
• One thing that always bothered me is, given the infamy the Jigsaw case had, where was the police investigation? I'm pretty sure that once word got out about Bobby's supposed "trap" he'd have the police knocking on his door wanting to at least know where the trap was so they could investigate it. Granted the only ones we see get investigated are in the movies but I'm pretty sure the cops would want to look any Jigsaw game over for evidence or clues to him.
  • Remember that Bobby's team of conspirators includes an Amoral Attorney in Suzanne. If she's willing to handle all the legal work for an obviously corrupt and falsified scheme, then she would be able to review a draft version of his story and rewrite it to hold up against police scrutiny. So she'd recommend that he was supposedly abducted in a place with no other witnesses (or if there were, and usually there aren't in Jigsaw abductions, then only other members of the team saw it), likely pulling a graveyard shift, and then when he passed the test, Jigsaw would have put a bag over his head and dumped him off at the hospital or something. This actually lines up with what the killers are willing to do for survivors in Saw X, and makes sense because it demonstrates that they will try to cover up their tracks so that the authorities can't find their test sites and thus track them down (at the very least, for survivors anyway). Note that it isn't suggested that the police managed to find Amanda's test site (they only interviewed her after the fact) and Hoffman must have retrieved the Reverse Bear Trap himself so he could use it on a subsequent victim (who ended up to be Jill Tuck). Maybe Jigsaw didn't try to cover up his test of her (by bagging her and taking her somewhere to be treated for PTSD) on that occasion, because he anticipated that she could likely be turned to his cause.

Joyce's death

• Joyce's death just bugs me. Throughout all seven movies, I can think of a justification why Jigsaw (using his twisted logic, that is, if there's anything at all wrong with you or even just something he has a chip on his shoulder about) put everyone else in a trap (excluding Lawrence's wife and daughter, but they ultimately survived, and I don't think they were actually supposed to be in any danger; see Fridge page for my theory on that), but not her. We don't learn much about her, but from what we see, she's pretty much a perfect wife and genuinely loved Bobby, and was the only reason the guy is actually sympathetic at all. Sure, she was a bit annoying as a character, but if there's anyone in the entire series who seemed like they would pass Jigsaw's morality standards, it was her. And then she is fried alive in what is possibly the most Nightmare Fuel sequence of the series. I can't understand that. Joyce never did anything wrong, anything at all. The only explanation I can think of is that Bobby's expected failure in the last trap was supposed to kill him, not her; but Hoffman changed this detail, just because he's that much Ax-Crazy.
  • By the time this movie comes around, Jigsaw had been dead for a while. Hoffman doesn't quite have the same "vision" as John.
    • Yeah, Hoffman's the main fault. Also, Joyce is perceived as Bobby's prize for all the lying and glory he's got out of his book, so the best thing to do when he fails?
  • I don't think we ever figure out what was up with the guy in Amanda's trap from the first movie, either. Or the other dude in the Drill Chair. Jigsaw didn't have a habit of hurting "innocent" people, but Joyce wasn't the first time.
    • I checked the Saw wiki. Apparently the man in Amanda's trap was her drug dealer at least according to the original script. The guy in the Drill Chair suffered from suicidal tendencies, which meant that from Jigsaw's POV he didn't appreciate his life.
  • John puts Lawrence's wife and child in a position to be killed by an unstable Zepp so an innocent person being part of a game isn't surprising.
  • We never learn if Halden from III did anything the least bit reprehensible, aside from granting a modest sentence to a drunk driver whose offence couldn't be harshly charged due to lack of witnesses. And he did die, albeit from the wrong trap.
  • I like the ideas presented in the question before this one (and the one immediately below, actually) that it may actually have been Gordon, Brad and Ryan running Bobby's game in this movie. It would certainly take pressure off Hoffman from having to do that, leaving him free to wage his war on the police and Jill (while also necessitating his involvement in the skinheads' punishment). Thus, the question of why Joyce was involved in such a way moves to those three culprits.

Hoffman's availability to set traps

• Where does Hoffman find the time to put people in his traps in this movie? Isn't he on the run?
  • At least for the Public Trap, the explanation is that it's a flashback, and also that it was Lawrence's first trap he had a hand in (not just performing surgery for other traps) so it was probably his and John's trap.

The police's idiocy

• Okay, seriously, what idiot leaves only five police officers and two coroners guarding a police precinct? Hoffman led most of the officers away from the building, but there is no excuse for leaving that few people inside a POLICE PRECINCT.
  • Well they were understaffed, what with all the detectives dying every movie. I mean, at some point, you've gotta run out of cops.
  • I wouldn't be surprised if some of the less-dedicated members of the force had started quitting or seeking jobs in other police departments by that point. Whichever city all this Jigsaw shit is happening, it's not the best place to be wearing a badge, at least not if you want to live to retirement age.

The Public Execution Trap

• Ok, I know that they were scared and disorientated, but does anyone else think there was a way to escape the opening trap (with Brad, Ryan and Dina) without anyone dying? I get the point of the guys "breaking up" with Dina, but seriously. They were tied to the machine only by their hands. If one of the guys had dropped to their knees to avoid the buzzsaw blade, the other could have pushed the device far enough to one side that the middle blade wouldn't hit Dina.
  • Most of the traps in the series could've easily been gotten out of by their victims if they only used their heads instead of freaking out, especially the ones without any real time limit and this is no exception.
  • I think Brad and Ryan were both too tall to kneel down and get out of the way of the blades, which were high enough to hit each one in the lower-middle chest when the other pushed. They can really only get down as far as the level of their shackled hands anyway, which would probably put their faces at spinning-death-level.
  • Even then, what if Dina had been released and fallen onto one of the other blades, she'd have been gutted anyway.
  • In theory it makes sense that they only way Dina wouldn't get gutted was to push it too far on one side. But the way it's shown on film does make it seem possible there's enough space to take care of that. I would expect a real life equivalent wouldn't be escapable for all three without some outside interference or factor.
  • And also, at this moment, there's a guy in the background cheering with his hands up, why is he doing that?
    • Four possible options? A) He is a sadist, B) He is a Jigsaw fanboy, C) He likes romantic dramas or D) Out of universe, the extra just wanted to be noticed by the camera, so he cheered to be seen despite how out of context his actions would be in the scene.
• Why does Jigsaw come up with the Public Execution Trap? Because placing a trap where everyone can see it was really a smart idea to teach their players a lesson? Any spectator of the trap could have easily advised the mall's maintenance people to cause a power outage and turn off the trap, allowing Ryan, Brad and Dina to leave without learning anything...
  • It's very likely that Crazy-Prepared Jigsaw (regardless of whoever it is actually using that mantle) had an isolated power generator somewhere in that mall to prevent a power cut for that very reason.
• Why didn't the cops arrest Ryan and Brad after surviving their game? It has been already discussed that Jigsaw survivors are seemingly not charged with homicide if they were forced to kill someone to survive, so they could get away with killing Dina, but the message from Billy clearly stated that they had committed some crimes to fulfill Dina's material needs. Wouldn't the police have learned this after checking the recording inside Billy?
  • It may have been lost in the shuffle, first of all the victims would be clad in trauma blankets and led away (one of them needs medical attention after all, taking the blade to his chest). They may have analysed the tapes afterwards but if they were able to get anything actionable from it (Jigsaw is quite vague with his accusations) either a) they may have already paid fines/done minor time/etc for the crimes before they were abducted for the trap or if they haven't then b) perhaps Gordon is already poised to take them under his wing and remove them from the eyes of the law before they can investigate further.
  • Non-specific accusations left on tape by a criminal mastermind serial killer? Sure, that's really a great basis to build a prosecution around.

About Brit and Mallick

• Mallick attends the Jigsaw Survivor Group meeting organised by Bobby. Shouldn't he have been in prison by now? Even if he never killed anyone in self-defence during the Fatal Five's trial, he did burn down that building, which killed eight people, so he and Brit should have been arrested for that once their injuries had healed.
  • On Erickson's page on the Saw Wiki, it states "Within the next days, Erickson found out that the five latest victims, Brit, Mallick, Ashley Kazon, Charles Salomon and Luba Gibbs, were all in some way involved in a severe case of arson which which had cost the lives of eight people. This case was previously investigated by Strahm and Perez. However, the investigation was ceased when the only witness suddenly disappeared, leading Erickson to the conclusion that Strahm had chosen them for his game to take revenge on them for escaping justice". Therefore, Perez and Erickson may have intended to re-investigate Brit and Mallick with the extra evidence they had obtained from the Fatal Five torture chambers, but this was rather superseded by the priority of finding the current Jigsaw, which had mounting evidence and time pressure. When they managed to out Hoffman as the killer, he immediately murdered them and burned down the lab, which may well have destroyed any evidence regarding the Fatal Five too in the process. So Brit and Mallick likely escaped (true, legal!) justice out of pure happenstance and luck with no evidence or living investigators to tie them to the arson murders.

About the Nerve Gas House and the Bathroom

• Saw V previously showed that Hoffman refurnished the Nerve Gas House from Saw II and got rid of the corpses of Gus, Jonas, Obi, Laura and Addison. Are there any reasons why Hoffman didn't get rid of Zep, Adam and Xavier's corpses if they also participated in the games that happened there? The film shows that the three of them are still rotting in the Bathroom.
  • I only have two possible reasons for this: either Hoffman didn't remove them since the Bathroom isn't a normal part of the house that would be seen from the outside, or it was deliberately done that way for Continuity Porn (what with the brief nod to Adam when Lawrence briefly looks at his corpse). Either way, I do agree it would have been better if those three corpses were removed as well, since leaving them there would have sounded illogical anyway, as they could result in intense odours and cleanliness problems for the whole building.

Hoffman's prospects

• Other pages on this wiki suggest that Gordon would have removed the toilet tank lid so that Hoffman couldn't just crush his foot and pull it out of the shackles like Detective Eric Matthews. But, well, couldn't he bring himself to break his foot manually some way (for example, brace it while stood on the toes and while leaning on the wall, then hop the other leg to stamp it through the trapped foot)? I just thought long and hard about it and I'm not actually sure that you need tools to get out of it (if you're determined enough, and he surely is as we see in how he escaped the trap in the previous movie).

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