Saw | Jigsaw | Saw X
- The entire first third of the movie. Yes, even after every utterly despicable thing we've seen John do, it's legitimately heartbreaking to see him so visibly worn down from his cancer being only months away. Within the first five minutes of the movie alone, we see him penning his last will and testament. The usually stoic John being Not So Stoic is legitimately surprising, as in several scenes he has a legitimately worried or sad look on his face, as if his mortality has finally set in.
- Speaking of which, pretty much every scene of John being given false hope for his cancer. He meets three different people placed to tell him how Cecilia gave them hope, and he forms such a genuine bond with them that he buys a bottle of tequila as a gift not for the doctors who cured him, but one of these survivors, Gabriela, only to find they have all fled. Furious, John snaps, destroying the bottle — his world is shattered once again, and now he's hellbent on destroying theirs. And given how the promise of a cure made John consider stopping his crusade as Jigsaw, this scam has caused the deaths of more people than just them throughout the rest of the franchise.
- One can only imagine how crushed Amanda was feeling when she heard that the "cure" for her mentor's cancer was fake. As she's faced with the reality that she would lose John to his cancer one day, she breaks down and sobs in his arms. Not only that, but John becomes misty-eyed in reaction.
- John tests Gabriela, the one he intended to give the gift to, and rapidly discovers she did it not for the money, but to desperately fund a drug addiction that has left her weak and sickly. Despite her fury at the scammers, once she realizes this, Amanda is actually ready to let her go, but John only barely convinces her to let her go through her trap. She is forced to break her bones while enduring radiation that horribly burns her face until she lands on a broken foot and falls unconscious. Pederson gets the upper hand and cruelly refuses to let her be taken to the hospital, executing her with a stomp that breaks Gabriela’s spine, making all of it worthless thanks to John refusing to put Sears in a trap when they had him unconscious.
- Amanda's sympathy for Gabriela becomes much more tragic retroactively, given she displays none while testing decent individuals like Allison Kerry and Lynn Denlon in Saw III. After so much time absorbing Jigsaw's philosophy, she doesn't even have what little humanity she displays here anymore.
- It's in this moment that we see the beginnings of Amanda's growing nihilism. She actually moves to try to save Gabriela, only to be held at gunpoint by Sears, being Forced to Watch someone who fairly beat their test, someone she saw herself in, be unjustly and remorselessly killed. It's like once we heard Gabriela's neck snap, we heard the last of Amanda's faith in humanity break with it.Amanda: (wails in horror) YOU SICK BITCH!!! (screams)
- It's in this moment that we see the beginnings of Amanda's growing nihilism. She actually moves to try to save Gabriela, only to be held at gunpoint by Sears, being Forced to Watch someone who fairly beat their test, someone she saw herself in, be unjustly and remorselessly killed. It's like once we heard Gabriela's neck snap, we heard the last of Amanda's faith in humanity break with it.
- Amanda's sympathy for Gabriela becomes much more tragic retroactively, given she displays none while testing decent individuals like Allison Kerry and Lynn Denlon in Saw III. After so much time absorbing Jigsaw's philosophy, she doesn't even have what little humanity she displays here anymore.
- Everything about Carlos, implied and shown. Carlos is a kid with potential to live a good life thanks to his soccer skills, but the poverty of his father, a groundskeeper, likely prevents it. John helps the boy mend his bike, one of the few times we see him using his mechanical knowledge for good, and one can almost imagine him doing something similar had Gideon survived. This is only compounded by the poor boy being tricked by Pederson, a woman he trusts, into being brought into the factory and placed in a Jigsaw trap, all because Pederson wants to further torment John.
- As Josh Stolberg confirms: the reason why John calls Carlos a warrior, other than bravery? That’s what the name of his son, Gideon, meant.
