Headscratchers / Saw

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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 key in the bathub

• The key in the bathtub: why was it there in the first place? As far as I understand, Jigsaw was "punishing" both men, the doctor by threatening his family, and the voyeur by trapping him along with the guy he was snooping on. So what was that for, besides looking like a "very clever" move on the part of the killer?
  • In the third movie it was revealed, through flashback, that Amanda just tossed the key into the tub haphazardly, instead of putting it wherever it was meant to go.
    • And yet, Jigsaw knew it at the end. So, why didn't he put it wherever it was meant to go?
    • A test for Amanda, most likely.
    • It was a final torture that they could have freed themselves at any time.
    • Except they couldn't because, you know, the key was in the bathtub, which would be drained when Adam woke up, and the key would be lost with the water. Oh, wait, it was exactly what happened wasn't it? Seriously, that was my point from the start.
    • Considering that Jigsaw was pretending to be dead but knew that the key had been in the bathtub, one has to assume that it was supposed to be in there. However, the bathtub was set up to drain the moment that Adam woke up, THERE WAS NO WAY FOR HIM TO WIN. The key would be drained unless he, for some reason, reached around the bathtub before getting up, which he would have no reason to do. Which makes his sermon at Amanda for making his games unwinnable in the later film just a tiny bit hypocritical.
    • For all his criticism of Amanda, his games are nigh unwinnable anyway: who's going to be able to successfully remove their eyeball, and then use the key embedded in the socket to unlock a steel trap from their head in a matter of seconds without, you know, being too distracted by the agonising pain? In his twisted mind, he probably did expect Adam to have the presence of mind to search his surroundings before rising up from the tub, and the key going down the drain was Adam's punishment for not being more careful (or alternatively, maybe he was just too distracted with the self-drugging to notice that the key wasn't in its right spot - although, Saw III aside, it seemed like he was well aware that the key's no longer be accessible to Adam).
    • And for all this talk of how smart Jigsaw is, he seems remarkably idiotic in this instance if he was trying to teach Adam to be more careful of his surroundings. If you know someone doesn't check their surroundings, then having the key go down the plug hole isn't "teaching them a lesson", if they now have no real way of escaping the scenario and putting that lesson into practice. It's like deliberately running over and killing a jaywalker: they won't make the same mistake again, but they haven't learned a lesson about looking before they cross, either.
    • It's perfectly possible that, for all his rhetoric, he is simple a vengeful sadist out to settle some scores by torturing and humiliating his victims and make them know what power he has over their lives- in other words, it wasn't idiocy, it was Jigsaw being an asshole.
    • Actually, Jigsaw told Amanda to tie the key around Adam's ankle, but Amanda wouldn't have any of that and just threw the key in, almost guaranteeing Adam's failure. This flashback in Saw III was to show that Amanda was a straight-up murderer, or at least very careless, right from the very beginning.
    • Where in the film does Jigsaw tell Amanda to tie it around his ankle? If you and I are thinking of the same thing it may have been in the shooting script but there's no reason to consider it canon if they didn't allow it in the film.
    • If that was the case, the key makes even less sense. Had it been tied to his ankle, he would have found it immediately, turning a can't-win into a can't-lose scenario. Regardless of Jigsaw's intentions, there's no way the key is fair play.
    • It would've changed the dynamic of the bathroom game but Adam still wouldn't have been guaranteed a victory. Just because he can walk around the room doesn't mean he automatically wins. The door is still locked and Gordon's objective is still to kill Adam. It would've made Gordon's objective more difficult and given Adam a lot more power, but his survival/victory would still not have been guaranteed if he'd gotten out of the shackle.
    • I always interpreted it as being a final torture. Knowing that if he'd only just reached and grabbed the key the voyeur could have freed himself, and the knowledge that the chance to escape had washed down the drain forever, would haunt him until his final moments. The trick here is that hindsight is 20/20. There's no reason he should have thought to grab the key, of course, but when you're desperate and doomed to die it's not an unnatural response to beat yourself up over something like that, knowing freedom brushed ever so close to you. Basically Jigsaw's using his knowledge of human nature to be a dick. Obviously this doesn't take into account the sequels, but then again the first movie was originally meant to be a stand-alone, so Amanda wouldn't have factored in yet when they filmed this final scene.
  • When the bathtub was draining of water and Adam was still in it, there was a chance he would feel the key on its way to the drain and would grab it before it was lost forever. That didn't happen, but that doesn't mean the game was unwinnable. He had another option — or he WOULD have if he hadn't have broken his saw. If he hadn't have done that, he could have done what Lawrence did and cut off his foot to live. Alternatively, Lawrence could have thrown his saw to Adam to achieve the same thing.
  • If Jigsaw was on the floor, then who was causing Lawrence and Adam to be electrocuted through their chains? Did Zepp do that? Because there is never any indication in the film that he was responsible...
    • The end of the movie shows Jigsaw using the zapper on them in order for him to escape leaving them behind. It could have been they were just too involved in their predicament to notice any (very slight) movement from him after they've already dismissed him for dead.
  • In Saw III it shows Jigsaw injecting himself with, as loosely quoted by the zombie himself, something that will "slow the heartrate" which extends to slowing breathing. And by the time it wears off, both men would be too frantic to even bother to acknowledge the body in the middle of the room anyway.
  • Neither of them was close enough to even touch the body's outstretched fingertips. Seeing him breathing would've been fairly hard from that distance, particularly if the drug made him do so very shallowly.
  • It should also be noted that both characters claim they were "electrocuted." Electrocuted means to die as a result of an electrical shock - think "executed" by electricity. What they should have said was "electrified." Especially perplexing as one of the characters is a doctor and really should have known better.
    • "Electrocuted" is also used in reference to non-fatal injury by electricity in common parlance.
• Suppose, hypothetically, that Adam's key didn't go down the drain. If he had seen the key there, found that it fit his chains and unlocked himself and/or Lawrence... what then? What was the point of the game if it had such an easy solution and escape path that didn't involve a real trial?
  • But that's just it, it wasn't an easy solution because it seems like a safe bet that any person (perhaps not any but certainly the vast majority) would have a normal reaction to waking up submerged in a bath, that reaction being to get your head out of the water immediately to resume normal breathing. You're not gonna concentrate on a key going down the drain (as a result of your move to protect yourself) which you had no conscious knowledge of upon regaining consciousness, because at that moment your immediate survival is much more dictated by simply resuming breath, and in such life or death moments it's all your primitive senses can do to activate such simple survival precautions. And if you did have the presence of mind to grab the key, the "what then?" is answered in the contribution above which begins with "It would've changed the dynamic of the bathroom game...". The key is pretty much a taunt from the killers, no more or less, except if Adam turns out to be part of the like 0.01% of people who can manage to rescue the key in time AND has enough skill or luck to protect himself from the other deadly features of the engineered trap thereafter.

Why not shoot Jigsaw in the leg?

• The cops won't shoot (the guy they think is) Jigsaw, because he has information and they don't want to kill him. As a result, he's able to get away. But "shoot to kill" and "don't shoot at all" aren't the only options. Why don't they just shoot him in the leg? Or at least try to?
  • Sing did shot him when he made a run for it. Sure they aren't gonna shoot him when he is on his knees as that's an execution but yes they did shoot him in the back and he just got up. See this video. Why do you think they didn't shoot him?
  • Fiction has led you astray. There is no "safe" part of the body to shoot someone in, and another problem, too.
    • I know it's not all as easy as it sounds, but... still. At certain points they're at pretty close range. If they shot very low, one would think, they would have a large chance of missing him entirely, a decent-ish chance of hitting his foot, and a pretty small chance of killing him. Which would arguably be better than a 100% chance of him getting away. But of course, this could be completely wrong.
    • Well wrong yes, and wrong no. It's possible potentially... but any responsibly gun owner knows that you don't point your gun at anything you aren't trying to destroy (see I Shot Marvin In The Head) because it's not really all that easy to shoot to wound - there are major arteries in the leg, after all, and maiming usually isn't something police are wont to do. More than that, police aren't allowed to shoot unless there is an immediate threat to life - someone holding a gun isn't enough reason to shoot. Only if they show intent to harm another or themselves or have actually shot at someone, then is an officer allowed to shoot. And then, officers need to be aware of what's behind the target - shooting into a crowd is bad even if you have a clear shot and the bad guy is shooting at you - if the bullet passes through the target, it can retain enough energy to do harm to whatever (or whomever) is behind it. Of course, as the next troper mentioned, all this is why tasers, beanbag shotguns, and other less-than-lethal weapons are more common place than TV would have you believe... so officers can shoot at people and take them down without maiming and killing them.
  • The real question is where were all the tasers and beanbag shotguns?
    • Many major city police departments (e.g. San Francisco) do not issue tasers for a variety of reasons (lack of budget for deployment/training, potential danger to the person shot (because it's so much better to shoot someone with a gun that's going to hurt or kill them than a taser that has a chance to harm them), potential for lawsuits, etc.). This occasionally leads to situations such as a drunk waving a knife around being shot and killed. Attempts to aim for a "less lethal" shot don't seem to even be considered. On the other side many police officers seem to frequently use tasers more as a compliance device (i.e. not doing what they say and/or not doing it as quickly as they want you to) such as in the infamous "don't tase me bro" and UCLA library incidents and don't always seem to see as much use to disarm a dangerous suspect.
  • Taser-shocks tend to make a target's muscles contract uncontrollably. That's the last thing you'd want to do if someone has a gun pointed at you, ready to shoot, because it's just going to make their finger cramp up against the trigger.
  • Re-watching the film, it seems Tapp and his partner rushed over to Jigsaw's hideout as soon as Tapp noticed the clue in the video, then refrained from calling for backup because they didn't care to wait around for the warrant. They'd have probably had to requisition non-lethal equipment like beanbag guns especially for the occasion, which they couldn't do because Tapp was too eager to get there quickly and bust Jigsaw himself.

Lawrence and Adam's acting and thinking

• In the climax, Lawrence goes crazy and saws his foot off. Never mind getting the job done with a rusty old saw. The bones in the human leg are extremely hard, and it would take a very long time to cut through it with a saw. Lawrence would be in excruciating pain and I doubt he'd be able to get very deep into his leg, crazy or not. He would probably pass out from blood loss, exhaustion or shock before he even made a dent on the bone, and then die.
  • Likely true, but don't underestimate the power of adrenaline. People in life-or-death situations have gone far beyond normal human endurance before.
    • I don't recall where he cut through, but isn't it possible he (being a surgeon) went for the space where there's just ligament BETWEEN hard bones and didn't attempt to cut through bone?
  • That actually didn't bug me. What did bug me is that: Lawrence- you're a doctor. A SURGEON, in fact. You should know that to minimize damage to the leg and overall blood loss, you should cut BELOW the chains, and then slip the leg through them. Instead, you cut above the chains, more or less guaranteeing that you're going to die. I know, I know, it was a stressful situation, but...
    • A. He was the one continually telling Adam to calm down and think things through
    • B. In those kinds of situations, it's the little minutiae that you keep in mind, to distract you from the situation that you're in. I can't help but think that in the several hours he is in that bathroom, Lawrence never recalls that lesson in basic human anatomy.
    • No "but". He had snapped, convinced that his family was dead. You try keeping your wits about you in that kind of situation. For the whole time in the cell, I don't think they ever considered cutting off their foot as a viable option, and once it was, there was no thinking about it.
    • For that matter, why wouldn't a surgeon think to amputate part of the foot rather than cut through the leg? Easier to go through the cartilage between tarsals than to transect the tibia, and the arteries would be a lot smaller, reducing blood loss.
    • Because - as with many of the things listed here - people do not think rationally in utterly horrific situations. It cannot be stressed enough how easy it is to think this all up when you're sitting at a computer in a comfy room with a cold glass of Coke, versus when you've been trapped in a shithole for hours and think your family was just murdered.
    • Except he wouldn't have had to come up with an idea for how best to do the amputation right then: he'd had quite a while to muse over the idea, however reluctantly, between his realising what the saws were for and his finally losing it. Even if he'd never actually had the slightest intention of going through with cutting his own foot off, how could he not have had morbid thoughts about what it would be like to do so, and how best to survive it, during those interludes between conversations with Adam or other distractions...? It'd be like someone stranded on a deserted island never so much as wondering how to build a signal fire until they notice a ship on the horizon.
• Lawrence saws his foot in order to reach the cell phone, which was just a few inches away from his full arm's length. Why did he not use his shirt to bring the phone closer? Don't say they'd be too worried to think about this option, because they had already done it before!
  • Or just flip the box around and use the empty part to snag the phone. The answer is the same as the one to most of these questions: panic is the antithesis of logic. Perfectly obvious answers are rarely so clear when one is sure that their family is currently being murdered by a madman.
  • Or he wasn't so much trying to get the phone as trying to appease Jigsaw so his family wouldn't die. Remember that he shoots Adam after he's free and can retrieve the revolver; presumably he does this in the desperate hope that Jigsaw will spare them if he carries out his task of killing Adam for real. Then Zepp breaks in and is killed, so Lawrence offers to find help for Adam because, with the man he thinks is Jigsaw dead, it's no longer necessary that his fellow-trap victim die.
• Why didn't Lawrence, Adam, or both use something heavy and solid, such as for instance the nearby toilet cover to break their chained feet and then slip out of their cuffs, which they could have done at any point in the movie? Sure, it would have hurt like HELL, but it wouldn't have hurt any less than cutting their own feet off, and it would have been infinitely more survivable and even offered them some mobility if they could've fashioned a crutch out of something.
  • Banging their feet against something solid could just as easily cause the foot to swell, thus making it harder to get out of the cuffs. Still way better than cutting your foot off, though.
  • Neither man wanted to hurt themselves during the game. Lawrence only sawed his foot off and attempted to murder Adam after hearing his wife fight for her and their daughter's lives.
  • This alternative option was depicted in the third movie and seemed more viable for that victim than for these ones, due to the different contexts of their imprisonments.

The Bathroom's purpose and structure

• The more I think about it, the less Lawrence and Adam's trap makes sense to me:
  • First, why would Jigsaw trap Lawrence anyway? From the clips of his private life we see, he seems pretty respectful of life. The only vaguely reprehensible thing he does is THINKING about cheating on his wife, but he cancels the date before it's too late, and if anything, that shows he enjoys life a bit too much. Jigsaw himself gives an awfully vague reason to trap him: "every day you tell patients they will die soon, now it's your turn to end a life." What the hell?! Is Jigsaw really blaming him for not being able to magically cure patients with terminal diseases? And what about Adam? So yeah, he's a freelance photographer and as such, he stalks people. Big freaking deal, his job leads either to punishing assholes or cleaning innocent people's image.
    • I think the point of Lawrence's punishment is basically for being a dick. It's sort of implied (with the whole first scene with Zepp) that he's nonchalant about the lives of his patients. Which (especially if you're crazy, like Jigsaw) you can somewhat twist into him being a "bad person". But every doctor isn't Patch Adams here, some just kind of get deadened to the emotions that go with oncology. So I'd say that in Jigsaw's mind there is a logical reason Lawrence needs to learn a lesson, though not logical by any stretch of the word in reality.
    • He's definitely cold to his patients, seemingly desensitised to giving them the news of their death. It's also revealed in a later film that he had his hand on the door half the time during appointments, meaning he doesn't spend a second longer with them then he has to.
    • And just to add to this, this actually happens in real life, doctors who deal with terminal patients eventually become desentisised, and no, it's not because they're evil or immoral, it's the mind's protection mechanism. If they become very empathetic to their patients, this can damage their mental health due to the higher pressure on their emotions, it might be good for the patient to have an empathetic doctor, but it's bad for the doctor himself. Probably even John understands this, which shows what a massive hypocrite he is, when he 'helps' his victims, he isn't exactly the least cold person in the world.
  • Second, we know that Lawrence must kill Adam, but what is Adam supposed to do? Jigsaw never explains it (and Adam isn't here just as part of Lawrence's test since he gets a tape as well, meaning he too is being tested). Is he just supposed to escape using the key or the saw? And then is he supposed to help Lawrence or leave him to rot? And if Adam escapes early on, does Lawrence lose even if he has plenty of time left?
    • Adam's goal is to survive. As Jigsaw indicates, "Are you going to watch yourself die today Adam, or do something about it?" His test is to actually do something and not just observe others. If Adam were to free himself from his shackle (which was highly possible given the fact that he was left both the key and the hacksaw) he'd still be locked in the room with Dr. Gordon. The door wasn't open.
    • "Highly possible" is actually heavily debatable, as another headscratcher points out that it was all but guaranteed that the key would go down the drain and the saws are brittle and weak from rusting.
  • Third, why give them the saws? Okay, maybe one for Adam since it's apparently his secondary means of escape, but why give Lawrence one too since the goal of his game is explicitly to kill Adam?
    • He had to kill Adam to save his family. That doesn't necessarily mean he wouldn't have had to free himself too.
    • To add to this, the bathroom game is elaborate. There's multiple solutions to almost everything. Gordon's hacksaw was likely given to him in case he chose to go the gun route to kill Adam.
  • And last but not least, why on Earth would Jigsaw put the key to Adam's chain right next to him?! Had Amanda not tossed it in the bathtub, Adam could have just used it and walked away. What is he supposed to learn from that game? Don't forget your keys at home?
    • If Adam's tape is anything to go by, the point of his test was to change his attitude of watching other people's lives while ignoring his own. With that, it seems like he was meant to pay attention to himself enough to find and use the key. According to material that didn't make it into Saw III, Amanda was supposed to have sabotaged the trap by placing the key on his chest rather than tying it to his neck, and by tying the chain for the stopper to his foot.
    • Still makes no sense. If you know someone doesn't pay attention, then to make their survival reliant upon them checking their surroundings when waking up under great stress isn't teaching anything or making a point. It's just rubbing their face in it when they fail in the way you expect- "Ha ha, if you'd looked, you'd have escaped. But you didn't, so you'll die". Which isn't what Jigsaw claims to be doing. And if the key had been tied around Adam's neck, he would have noticed it. Even an unobservant person would notice something unusual around their neck, especially if they were looking for something like a key. Or Lawrence would have noticed it and mentioned it, hoping Adam would free him too.
    • Even unchained, they'd still have had to search around for ways to get out of the room.
  • Was it ever explicitly stated that the key left with Adam was to Adam's shackles? Maybe it was the key to Lawrence's shackles, and the point of leaving it with Adam was to see if he'd actually get involved with one of the people he's been performing surveillance on from a distance, by trusting the doctor - who, after all, might actually be the one who put him there and/or might have noticed he was being followed and be pissed about it - enough to free the man when he's still trapped himself. Which would add a new level of challenge to Lawrence's test, since he'd actually owe the man he's been ordered to kill a favour.
    • Jigsaw states at the end of Saw that "the key to that chain is in the bathtub," referencing Adam specifically. Now, it's possible the key would have worked for both of their shackles, but that's pure guesswork.
    • He could have been referring to how opening Lawrence's shackles with the key would be "the key" to Adam getting his own shackles removed, because it would have given Lawrence the chance to escape and bring back help, or even to search the otherwise-inaccessible parts of the room and find Adam's key hidden in some odd nook or corner. Again, requiring that Adam find it in himself to trust Lawrence despite knowing that Lawrence was being pressured to murder him would have been a very appropriate challenge for a person like Adam.
• How is it possible that, the whole time they were locked in the bathroom, Gordon or Adam didn’t consider the possibility of using the toilet's lid, which they later use to kill Zepp, to break their chains or the pipe to which the chains were tied? Eric Matthews does exactly this later in Saw III and escapes, and the toilet's lid proved to be very durable on both occasions it was used.
  • Either it didn't occur to them, or they may have assumed it could be boobytrapped to produce some lethal outcome if the lid was removed and didn't want to risk that until Adam saw no other option and had to kill Zepp in self defence.
• Why did no one use the gun to shoot the chain? Sure, being in a state of panic meant you were not thinking straight but they had the gun quite long before the "panic" part started right?
  • While Lawrence is still capable of thinking straight, he'd probably fall back on professional experience. That is to say, he may be aware of some accidents (some even fatal) which resulted from people in similar circumstances e.g. trying to shoot the lock of a door, or a chain, etc. This may carry a danger of shrapnel from the chain being shot (and since it's literally confining you and the other guy, there's no chance of shooting the obstruction from a safe distance), or a ricochet off the walls of the bathroom, etc. During the extended portions of the in-universe real time which the movie skips through (we know there's a deadline but it has to compress the action into the movie's runtime), he may have likewise warned Adam against such an attempt and refused to try it himself.

About Amanda

• It just kind of bugs me that Amanda, who arguably had the easiest trap of anyone else in the entire series, was a survivor. The only thing she had to do was cut open another person and dig for a key, which should have been a huge decision and a moral conundrum, but Jigsaw explicitly told Amanda that the person was dead, when they really weren't. Seriously, why did he tell her he was dead? And who was this person that Jigsaw simply chose to die? Did he fail a trap in a non-lethal way, with his "death" being used in this way?
  • Probably because cutting someone open is still Squick, and realising he's still alive before doing it, makes it Nightmare Fuel.
  • It wasn't THAT easy. She had to stab a path through a guy's stomach with a little tiny scalpel and then find a tiny little hidden key somewhere inside his intestines and then unlock the Reverse Bear Trap and get it off her face. In under sixty seconds, no less. That's not arguably easy — it's pretty damn hard. Lawrence had the easiest test of all: all he had to do was shoot a stranger who had been taking pictures of him to give to a crazy ex-police officer. And he was given several hours to do it. And yet, he still didn't succeed.
  • It wasn't easy by any normal definition of the word, but it was easy relative to the other games that Jigsaw's subjects had to play. Most involved severe self-mutilation (Pound of Flesh) or the possibility of dying a horrible death as a result of attempting to escape (Flammable Jelly in this movie). Compared to having to gouge one's own eye out or crawling through a barbed-wire maze with a time limit, finding a key in some half-conscious guy's entrails is a walk in the park.
  • You might want to cut down on the horror films, it's skewed your perspective. People on here handwave victims acting in a stupid fashion by claiming they're in shock or terrified and thus do silly things, but then talk of how easy some traps were and say ridiculous things like "all she had to do was murder another human being, then root around in his guts to find a key that would unlock the bear trap that's been ticking down this whole time to tearing her face apart...". Amanda is a junkie, not a psychopath. Sure, some traps are less difficult compared to others, but they're still objectively near-impossible and horrendously traumatising for the average person. To be honest if you put most people in the RBT and put the key on the other side of the room, most people wouldn't have it undone within sixty seconds, since they'd waste time panicking and fumbling with the lock.
  • Well, maybe, because the trap was easier than most she was able to escape it? That kinda makes sense. Also, Amanda was one of the first victims, so, maybe, after she managed to survive Jigsaw decided that was too easy and made the subsequent traps to be harder to beat.

Zep was really another pawn?

• We see Zep playing with his kidnap victims in a sadistic manner; i.e. putting a gun to Alison's head and using a stethoscope to observe how Diana's heartbeat reacts. This makes sense while we think that Zep is Jigsaw, but Fridge Logic kicks in once we learn that he was just yet another innocent pawn. One is left with the feeling that this scene was put there merely for effect, and admittedly it is a very powerful scene...
  • Innocent pawn? There must have been some reason Jigsaw decided to put him in a "game" and poison him. Odds are even though he isn't Jigsaw, he was still a sick fuck.
    • Being an orderly, Zep developed a friendship of sorts with John. He spent much of his time criticizing and gossiping about the doctors. John realized that he was jealous of their success yet did nothing to better his own life.
    • Being in Jigsaw's games reveals nothing about the victim's character. Saying that "there must be a reason Jigsaw chose him, so he's probably a sick fuck" makes no sense; most of his victims are just ordinary, albeit flawed, people. Word of God has it that Zep was relishing a situation where he was finally in control over the lives of others, and he was getting sick thrills from it while he had the opportunity. So, yeah, he was a sick fuck, but that has nothing to do with why Jigsaw chose him.

Tapp's survival

• How did Tapp survive with his throat slashed if no one knew where they were?
  • It was supposedly Jigsaw who patched him up for the tests in the video game.

Why didn't Adam drown?

• I was watching "How Saw Should Have Ended" and it brings up a couple of interesting points. Like how do you sleep underwater without drowning? I'd mention the blood loss thing as well but they did the same thing in The Walking Dead: Season One if you choose to amputate Lee's arm. So I'm assuming a good bandage/tourniquet stops blood loss.
  • Adam wasn't actually pushed underwater in the flashback from III when Amanda and Jigsaw were setting up the bathroom game; he only slipped below the surface when the sedative started to wear off and he reflexively shifted position in the uncomfortable bathtub. That dipped his face underwater, which woke him up pretty much instantly.
  • Speaking of Saw III's flashback to how the Bathroom Trap was assembled: If Amanda and Jigsaw were arranging things very shortly before the events of Saw, and they did so with the bathroom lights on, why wasn't the glow-in-the-dark paint already visible when Lawrence and Adam initially woke up?

The bathroom's location

• Could the police have located the bathroom using Zepp's laptop with the camera feed and the cell phone given to Diana?
  • Clearly not.
  • Jigsaw probably went back and cut off the feed from the camera as soon as he'd finished cauterizing Lawrence's leg.
  • The real question is; how could they not have located it at all when Tapp, Matthews and Strahm are all led down there? Do they not track vehicles in this universe? Surely they could have worked out the general area all these people are disappearing from by that point.
    • And, as of V, the area the bathroom is in has clearly been developed, because Hoffman is living in the Nerve Gas House from II.
• The restroom where the game takes place is in a sewage treatment plant (or something like that). However, in Saw II that same restroom can be reached by going through some hallways connected the basement of a house. Did John buy a house really close to the sewage treatment plant and dig a tunnel over to the restroom, just so that the participants in the game of the second movie could have the opportunity to stumble across the mummified corpse and foot from the first movie?
  • Possibly the house was an on-site residence for the manager of the plant, and the tunnels connect to it because they share the same steam-heating system.
  • Also, it's not so much "just so they could see the body and foot" but more "Jigsaw often likes to set up traps in buildings closely linked to each other".

Jigsaw's possum act

• Adam falling for Jigsaw's possum act is understandable enough, but why on earth did Lawrence get suckered in by it? Livor mortis/hypostasis occurs in all dead bodies, it's really not the kind of thing you can fake very easily and it's not the kind of detail a supposed surgeon would be likely to miss. (For those tropers who don't know, hypostasis is when the blood settles in the lower parts of the body after death, since it's no longer being pumped by the heart.)
  • You never think about it in the moment, but it's AMAZING how much stress affects your ability to focus on or notice details. And Lawrence was VERY stressed.

Lawrence waking up before Adam?

• How is Gordon already awake when Adam escapes from the bathtub? After Adam makes it out of the bathtub, Gordon speaks to him and advises him to not yell because Gordon has already tried that. As shown in the third film, both Gordon and Adam were still unconscious when Amanda left the room, so shouldn't Gordon still have been unconscious when Adam was woken up by nearly drowning? Or, while unconscious, was Adam somehow able to hold his breath for enough time for Gordon to wake up, yell for help and see him nearly drowning from the other side of the bathroom?
  • Why are you presupposing that "shouldn't Gordon's unconsciousness have lasted longer than Adam's"? Seems reasonable to assume he just so happened to wake up before Adam. Also, the folder "Why didn't Adam drown?" indicates that Adam was actually only underwater momentarily. Thus, clearly if Gordon woke up first, his yelling wasn't enough to bring Adam up through the sedative.

Why didn't Lawrence take legal action?

• Once he learns that David Tapp hired Adam to spy on him, Gordon states that Tapp has stalked him since Sing's death under the obsessive assumption that he was the Jigsaw Killer, despite Gordon having a confirmed alibi. If Gordon knew that, why didn't he file a restraining order against Tapp?
  • Is it confirmed that it's been a long time since Sing died? Gordon may have been getting round to taking legal action, but didn't do it as promptly as you might have thought perhaps due to his own professional obligations distracting him.

Adam's death

• Why is Adam left to die at the end of his game? Technically, Adam did win his game. Jigsaw instructed him to survive and he did it. If anything, it was Gordon who lost, as he was instructed to kill Adam to win and he didn't. Even before sealing Adam into the bathroom, Jigsaw says to him that most people are so ungrateful to be alive but that he won’t be anymore, which is the same thing Billy said to Amanda after she won her game.
  • Jigsaw literally said his only option was death. Adam was only supposed to "witness his death". Lawrence's test was in murdering Adam as well. One way or another, Jigsaw wanted him dead. Why? Well, probably because he was used by the same cop who was trying to catch John before. This is actually something everybody suddenly forgets when discussing Kramer's philosophy.
  • Disagree. Adam both had a key (which admittedly he had a non-zero chance of retrieving due to how Amanda rigged it, but the numbers of that chance have a point and a lot of zeroes preceding them!) and a hacksaw of his own, before he broke it trying to cut the chain that is. He could have sawed his own foot off, or even taken the Eric Matthews approach with the toilet lid which was right by him if he had been brave enough to consider either of these options. Now, I'm not sure if Zep unlocked the door when he arrived to intervene, but leaning towards it was already unlocked, so that either (or possibly even both) of the captives could have left and sought medical attention after making their sacrifices (also, not sure if Zep or Kramer himself would have punished Gordon if he didn't kill Adam). Adam's only option was not death.

Between Tapp and the Drill Chair

• I can understand why Tapp decided not to free the man stuck in the chair; in a rare display of Genre Savvy in this franchise, there's a chance that man was Jigsaw in an elaborate ruse. And maybe they figured it'd be easier to corner Jigsaw once he was in the center of the room, but why did they let the man who came out of the elevator (far more likely to actually be Jigsaw) walk all the way into his workshop (full of potential weapons) and to the trapped man (a potential hostage) before jumping out?

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