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Anna's motivation
- I honestly fail to understand it. I understand they wanted to make a realistic complicated villain in a form of Anna, but is it only just me who thinks the story wasn't fully covered? I mean, moms don't murder kids just because they want to murder kids. If she did it because she was just that petty and poisonous as a person, it's one thing. If her husband actually did something particularly nasty to her which made her completely reevaluate her life choices, it's another thing. I just don't believe that a previously decent wife that was referred to as compassionate and supportive could just commit such a heinous and outrageous crime out of nowhere.
- It's likely she snapped after endless sleepness nights and the strain put on her marriage by the baby, along with possibly some post-partum depression.
Logan's scheme
- How exactly did Logan pull off a good portion of his whole stunt? How did he manage to get inside Eleanor's studio to plant that body in her closet, how did he get the hanging body up on the bridge without anyone seeing him (even if he did it in the dead of night, likely someone would notice a man hanging a dead human off a bridge) how and when did he dig up John's corpse and replace it with Edgar's, again, with nobody seeing them? Did he grave-dig and replace a body all by himself? It took a small crane to lift the casket out of the ground, how did he manage that? Did he find help in people like Brad and Ryan? If so, how? If he attended the support group, isn't that something his loved ones would have maybe known about?
- Not sure about a lot of these, but the body hung from the overpass might've been initially strapped to the side of the parapet and covered by a tarp, making it look like some minor repair to the bridge was in progress. Well after Logan had slipped away, a timer cut the straps and released the body to dangle from the rope. As for the switcheroo with the corpses, who says Logan removed the casket from the ground at all? He could've dug away the soil above the casket, opened the lid inside the grave, swapped out the bodies, then closed the lid and replaced the carefully-preserved turf.
- Our killer goes to the hospital where his pawn Edgar Munsen is comatose. He injects his IV with something milky white which immediately causes Munsen to wake up, despite the actual doctors believing it could take him years to recover. This magical-coma-fixer juice makes no sense. What is it, how did the killer get it, and why wouldn't medical professionals utilize this stuff on someone who's an important informant to an ongoing crime spree?
- Edgar's coma was medically induced for his own safety due to the proximity of the bullet he’d been shot with to his heart, and therefore could be reversed at any time. The doctors were waiting for him to stabilise before doing anything further. Waking him from the coma was issuing a pretty-much-guaranteed death sentence, but since his purpose was to be buried in John’s grave anyway that didn’t matter. Logan probably wanted Edgar to wake up and see him as the killer so he’d know his fate was a result of having killed the guy’s wife.
- Why did Logan kill his victims in the same way the participants of Jigsaw's "game" died 10 years ago? No one found out about those deaths, so recreating them in the present serves no purpose. In fact, why did he even do anything related to Jigsaw at all? If his overall goal was just to frame a corrupt cop for murder and then kill him, wouldn't it have been easier to do so without making it look like Jigsaw was somehow involved?
- Well, there's the "Batman" line of thought; drawing upon ominous mythos of the Jigsaw Killer sends a message to other malefactors warning them to stop their bad behavior lest they incur his wrath yada yada yada.
- Did he want to frame the corrupt cop for murder or manipulate him into confessing to his wrongdoing? It might have been easier to lure the guy by his curiosity than to take him by force (he is a trained cop, after all). Especially if our new Jigsaw already formulated plans for the other five targets- kill two birds with one stone, as it were.
- Staging the same game he'd been intended to suffer may have been cathartic for him, or it may simply have been convenient since John had already set up practically everything except the laser collars. (The latter were probably Logan's effort to out-class his predecessor's primitive tech, as well as a necessary substitute for the shotgun if he was to pose as one of the last two victims.) If nothing else, he could be fairly confident of getting away with such a recreation, given that John already had.
- Did Logan outright miss the point of John's philosophy or should that be chalked up to a failure to provide any proper context to any of the present-day victims? We had Edgar being straight up executed in the hospital, with the scant bit of information we got he was tasked to survive by retrieving and activating the remote device, which he did. The replacement victims to duplicate the barn game seemed to only serve the purpose of deceiving the audience with matching dead bodies, a plan that would accomplish absolutely nothing if they "won". Halloran, despite being an outright dick in activating Logan's collar first, supposedly followed the "rules" of the tape to confess and was left to die regardless. He kept referring to the "game" but all we effectively saw was him sentencing people to death. Is Logan slipping into Hoffman territory of using the Jigsaw moniker to serve his own needs or did the screenplay just completely screw up in giving us a solid reason for any of the deaths outside of the barn game?
- Logan may have been using Jigsaw's methods to carry out several straight-out premeditated murders, while casting suspicion on a non-existent Jigsaw copycat. He doesn't actually want to "play a game", as evidenced by his parting line to Halloran; he just wants to kill people in nasty ways in revenge for the dead, while dressing it up as another Jigsaw spree to throw off potential pursuers.
- In the middle of an investigation into a Jigsaw copycat, Logan takes the body of a person he murdered to Kramer's grave, exhumes Kramer's corpse, replaces them with the body of this other guy, then buries said guy and disposes of Kramer's remains somewhere else. How did he accomplish this, and (apart from tricking the audience into thinking Kramer is actually alive) what on earth is the point of taking this risk? He's not going to trick the police into thinking he's still alive. What if the Mayor didn't order Kramer's remains exhumed?
- Had the exhumation not been ordered by the Mayor or the investigators, one of the other bodies would've probably been found with a hint that Kramer's grave held something significant to the case.
Ryan's test?
- Additionally, what was Ryan's test supposed to be? John points out that the No Exit trap that Ryan got trapped in wasn't supposed to happen. So how was the game supposed to continue if that event hadn't happened?
- Not everyone has a personalized test in group games, and the elimination of two other participants would have gone the same way regardless of Ryan's actions. Even if nobody had tried to bust through that door and the last two had made it to the final room with two legs, it would've still come down to two players and a shotgun.
Logan's past involvement
- We see an apprentice we've never known about: Logan, who survived his test years ago and whom John took sympathy on and enlisted him. Who else besides the two of them knew about his apprenticeship? Did Amanda and Hoffman and Lawrence know about him? We know his test took place about 10 years ago, so was that before or after Amanda's, since we see him and John constructing what might be the ORIGINAL Reverse Bear Trap, if not one of them. Did he ever help out with other tests, or did he just lie in wait for 10 years?
- It's unclear whether Logan was originally an apprentice - i.e. someone Jigsaw was actually training and indoctrinating to continue his "work" indefinitely - so much as a tit-for-tat short-term partner. Logan is into revenge, so he could understand John's wish to punish the others once he was told what each of them had done. Possibly Logan told Jigsaw that he wasn't able to absorb John's broader "appreciate your life" philosophy - his past captivity in the Middle East surely taught him that torture is not therapeutic - but he did agree to help construct one trap, to compensate for Jigsaw's belated act of mercy and to make amends for mixing up the X-rays in the first place. If his wife hadn't been murdered, Logan might never have had anything to do with the Jigsaw crimes again.
John's knowledge and "predictions"
- How did John know that Anna killed her baby? There was nobody else in the house that could have seen. Or that Mitch was aware that the brakes didn't work on the motorcycle he sold? Or that Ryan's crash was quote-unquote "his fault?" Or that Carly was the purse-snatcher? Or that Logan's the one who messed up the x-rays? How does he know half of the things he knows that gives him justification to put these people in their traps?
- For Anna it's hinted he just put the pieces together from hearing her breaking down from across the street just before her baby's crying stopped. He mentions Mitch's victim was his nephew, so it's not inconceivable he was close at hand to get a look at the bike very soon after the crash, or knew the deal well enough to inspect the garage later, where he maybe found evidence. And it's not out of question that Logan's role in the X-ray mixup would come to his knowledge after the mishap was detected. Can't help with the other two.
- We see Mitch covering up the leaked brake fluid with his foot during the flashback to the sale. Possibly John saw the footprint left behind in the puddle, and knew it didn't match his nephew's footwear at the time. Suspicions roused, he inquired at nearby motorcycle mechanics' shops and learned that the brakes on Mitch's bike had been giving him trouble before, finally receiving an estimate for repairs that Mitch was unwilling to pay for.
- How did John know Ryan would be the one to fall into the wire trap? Ryan's name was on the tape recorder. What if Ryan had gotten killed by the saw blades at the beginning, and Mitch later falls into the wire trap? Heck, what if Anna had ended up in Mitch's trap instead of Mitch?
- The tape recorder only had "Play me" written on it. The recording didn't specify any person's name.
- The tape didn't. But the TV that started playing after Mitch and Anna went into the silo did specifically mention Ryan.
- Multiple TV recordings must have been made, one for each person. Jigsaw activated the one with Ryan's name after seeing which sucker the wire trap had caught.
- The tape recorder only had "Play me" written on it. The recording didn't specify any person's name.
- How did John know how much Carly stole from the woman she let die?
- Maybe the woman had just left a store where she'd gotten that exact amount of change?
The barn hasn't been discovered for A DECADE?
- How on earth did nobody discover the barn for ten years? Did nobody in the Tuck family check their (apparently well-maintained) barn on their property, which we saw had never been scrubbed of evidence after the game? Jill herself wouldn't become a confidante to John's work until being introduced the "new" Amanda, which chronologically took place well after the barn test. One of the first things the FBI did after taking over the case in Saw IV was to go right after Jill as a suspect and, especially after turning herself in later on, did the thought never cross a single person's mind to investigate the property or follow up on a missing persons case that fell right into the later-well-known Jigsaw MO?
- We only know that the property was connected to Jill's family. It's possible that the connection was a fairly distant one, that didn't come to light until family-tree tracing services like Ancestry.com became more readily available.
- About the barn's well-maintained appearance: The farm may have been in much worse shape when Logan first came back to re-set the various traps. He might have done a load of repair-work before setting the events we see into motion. He'd need to make sure the new set of victims couldn't just kick their way out through the barn walls, after all.
- It's literally called the "Tuck Family Farm", so the relation wasn't that distant. More likely (even if this issue could be a mere oversight from the writers), the Metropolitan Police Department are just totally fucking incompetent. After all, none of them seemed to think Hoffman could have been Jigsaw, even when they found a potentially evident victim in the form of his sister's murderer, and they kept him on the case up until the very moment he was exposed as John's successor.
The barn's final trap
- In the original barn game, Mitch and Carly both had individual traps to face, and the final trap was a face-off between two survivors over who'd do what with the shotgun: a confrontation which ended up pitting Anna and Ryan against each other. But, wait... wouldn't Logan himself have also been present at the conclusion, if John hadn't given him too much sedative? Having him unceremoniously taken out of the running by the buckethead trap was never part of the plan. So was there an additional trap designed for that game, that John cut out of the sequence when the candidates were whittled down to two early, by drugging Anna unconscious when she was on the brink of finding it?
Hacksaw replica
- Why does Eleanor have a replica for one of the hacksaws from the Bathroom if that place was never discovered by the police? None of the other traps involved the use of hacksaws, as far as I know.
- Perhaps the Bathroom was discovered at some point during the gap between Saw 3D and Jigsaw. Whether they found Hoffman (dead or alive) or not is a completely different question, however.
- Lawrence presumably explained how he'd come to be missing a foot once he'd returned to his old life, even if he never told the police where the Bathroom Game took place. Even if the room itself is undiscovered, Eleanor would've read Lawrence's story.
After the end
- Logan spends the entire movie setting up Halloran as the emerging Jigsaw copycat, and by the end he seems to have succeeded in making the police think so. But how on earth is his plan supposed to work on the long run? As it stands, the police are supposed to believe Halloran was smart enough to set up all the kills without implicating himself, but then dumb enough to put himself in a trap with no failsafe for himself? If anything, Logan has basically set himself up to take the fall anyway. He's covered in blood but with no wounds to show for it, and his own Laser Collar was fake, right down to the lack of burn marks on the ceiling that Halloran picked up on. Eleanor is the last person to see the two of them alive, and will testify that she last saw them in a struggle. How would Logan come out of this without looking extremely suspicious at the very least?
- Easy. He claims he briefly got away from Halloran, ran into the laser trap room, and recognized the lasers were similar to tools he'd used in the morgue. This suggested to Logan that it must be a trap intended for him. He checked the intensity settings on each laser collar, and realized that one was set to kill and the other was actually harmless. Hearing Halloran approaching from far down the hallway, he hastily swapped the collars, then pretended to have only just stepped into the room when the evil cop showed up and forced him into the collar Halloran thought was fatal. He bluffed his way through the resulting game, and tricked Halloran into killing himself first.
