Unlike Amanda, Hoffman was not drawn to Jigsaw's side after one of his games. In his dying days, he makes Amanda part of another test, which ultimately kills her.īy the end of Saw III, both Amanda and John are dead, paving the way for a new Jigsaw heir in the form of Detective Mark Hoffman (Costas Mandylor). In Saw III, it's revealed that Amanda has begun rigging her games to make them essentially inescapable, removing a key tenet of John's work, which he eventually discovers. A drug addict who truly believes John saved her life by teaching her the value of it again, Amanda becomes John's apprentice as his cancer worsens, but while she's the heir apparent to Jigsaw, the two share some philosophical differences. The first of these is Amanda Young (Shawnee Smith), a character introduced in Saw as the only known survivor of a Jigsaw game to that point, and who re-emerges as an apparent victim in Saw II only to be revealed as John's accomplice by the end. This is because, over the course of the series, John Kramer adopts several people, including former test subjects, as his apprentices and allies, and while he's present in some form in every single film so far, these apprentices are often put front and center in the sequels. Once we get to the point of John's reveal as the killer, even when we're talking about the first sequels in the franchise, it's better to think of Saw continuity not as a straight line but as an increasingly complex knot, looping back over itself, circling around from the past to the present, and growing more and more twisted as time goes on. The key component here, of course, is that John actually has faith that people will change if they survive the test and learn the value of life, so his subjects are always given an opportunity to escape, even if it means they have to do something like lose a limb or, in some cases, kill another person. So, he abducts his victims and places them in "games" or "tests," elaborate traps that require them to do something violent, sacrificial, and horrible if they want to escape and survive. He believes there are people in the world who are suffering needlessly and hurting others needlessly because they don't value life enough, a feeling bolstered by his terminal brain cancer diagnosis. John Kramer (Tobin Bell) is a brilliant engineer who has developed a particularly potent philosophy that drives his killings. It is through the franchise's very first twist ending that we discover the Jigsaw Killer's real identity. Saw, we learn, is a place where we should expect brutal death traps, tense morality plays, characters who often mean more than they seem to at first glance, and of course, twist endings. In this first film, which largely revolves around the saga of two men (Cary Elwes and Leigh Whannell, who also wrote the film) trying to escape from a single dingy room, we get several of the key hallmarks of the saga at once. Saw, the first film in the series, takes its name from a pair of hacksaws that form a crucial piece of its intimate, nerve-shredding plot, but also from The Jigsaw Killer, a name given to a particularly mischievous murderer so named because of his tendency to carve puzzle piece-shaped chunks of skin out of his victims. Let's dive into this little game, and of course be warned that there are spoilers for the entire series so far below. It would be impossible to contain every twist, every trap, every demented game from the franchise in a single summation, but we're going to hit the major beats and the overall vibe of the series along the way. If you're looking to relive the best traps and deaths, Saw II (2005), Saw III (2006), Saw IV (2007), Saw V (2008), Saw VI (2009), Saw: The Final Chapter (2010) and Jigsaw (2017) are all streaming now on Peacock. With that much mayhem and destruction, it feels like a good idea to remind ourselves how we got here. To date, the Saw films have a lengthy history of making us squirm in our seats through nine brutal films stretching all the way back to 2004. It's never a bad time to revisit one of the scariest, goriest horror franchises in modern history - so with a big chunk of the Saw franchise now streaming on Peacock - we take a deep dive into making sense of the twisty, tricky Jigsaw continuity that ties it all together.
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