Warning: major spoilers for 2017’s Jigsaw.

Jigsaw revived the Saw saga when it had supposedly reached its end, and as is now expected in any Saw movie, it has a twist ending that leads to another twist reveal, but there were clues to this throughout the whole movie. The Saw franchise arrived to revive the gore genre with the story of John Kramer (Tobin Bell), who put others in life-threatening situations as tests of their will to live and to teach them a lesson about all their crimes and questionable actions. Kramer’s legacy seemed to have ended with Saw 3D, but the franchise came back to life seven years later with Jigsaw.

Set a decade after John Kramer’s death, Jigsaw sees the start of another game with five new “players” in a barn, all of them with crimes to confess. Parallel to the game, Jigsaw follows Detectives Brad Halloran (Callum Keith Rennie) and Keith Hunt (Clé Bennett) as they investigate the new “game” and try to find the copycat Jigsaw killer. To the audience’s surprise, Kramer was behind the game at the barn, but all those scenes were actually set in the past and the copycat killer was Logan (Matt Passmore), a pathologist working alongside Halloran and Hunt.

Logan was Kramer’s first apprentice and one of the players in the game at the barn – in fact, he was the first one to fall. At the beginning of the game, one player woke up too late and was supposedly killed by the buzz trap. Kramer decided to spare Logan, who was the hospital worker who mislabeled his scans detailing cancer, and took him in as his apprentice. In the present, Logan recreated Kramer’s first game to make Halloran pay for his crimes, and there were plenty of hints (although subtle) throughout Jigsaw about its double timeline.

10

The Players Don’t Recognize Jigsaw’s Traps (& Billy)

The Players Truly Had No Idea What Was Going On

Jigsaw wastes no time in taking the audience to the first stage of the barn game, where the five victims wake up chained to a door on the opposite side of the room and with metal buckets on their heads. Every stage of the game is clearly a Jigsaw one, and Billy the puppet even shows up at different points, but that’s only obvious to the audience. None of the players recognize Billy nor do they realize that they’re in a Jigsaw game, and that’s because they are in Kramer’s very first one.

The past timeline in Jigsaw is set before the events of Saw, and for this first game, Kramer chose people he knew, such as his neighbor (Anna), who he heard suffocating her baby, and the man who killed his nephew by selling him a motorcycle with leaking brakes (Mitch). To them, this whole terrifying experience was new, but not to the audience.

9

The Players Struggled To Follow The Rules

Had They Known Jigsaw, They Would Have Played Better

Jigsaw could be quite cryptic in his tapes and instructions sometimes, but in most cases he was actually pretty clear about them – the problem is that, in their panic and shock, the players either don’t listen or don’t understand the instructions. In this first game, Kramer was actually quite literal in what he wanted from them, and Anna saved the rest by understanding the process more than once. However, what they all failed at, including Anna, was following the rules.

More than once throughout the first game, the players broke the rules, leading to extra traps that only put them at bigger risk, as happened with Ryan, who got half his leg cut off after trying to escape. Anyone who had heard of Jigsaw’s traps and “games” before would have known that following the rules is key to their survival, but that wouldn’t have been entirely clear to his first victims.

8

The Players Don’t Question That Kramer Is Alive

John Kramer’s Reveal Wasn’t Shocking To Them

The biggest question throughout Jigsaw is if Kramer is truly alive and how he survived if he had been dead for a decade. The reveal of Kramer being the mastermind behind the game again was a shock to the audience but not to the players – in fact, only Anna recognized him, and that’s just because she was his neighbor. If the barn game had been set in the present, as viewers are led to believe, and Kramer was alive (somehow), Anna and Ryan would have reacted completely differently and would have been shocked to see a dead man alive and well.

Ryan did not react to Kramer’s presence because he had no idea who he was, so to him, he was simply a crazy man who enjoyed torturing and killing others. To Anna, it was a bigger shock to see someone she thought she knew putting her and the rest through so much pain.

7

Kramer Gave The Players A Very Easy Way Out (& None Of Them Seized It)

Kramer’s First Game Was Unlike Others

As mentioned above, Kramer’s instructions could be confusing sometimes, taking advantage of the victim’s panic and shock, but he was surprisingly clear in the barn game. Kramer usually added a way out to every one of his traps, though many of them left the victim with some permanent physical damage, but in his first game, he gave them the easiest way out and none of the players seized it.

What Kramer wanted was for them to confess their crimes and truly repent, something none of them genuinely did. Even in the final trap, with the shotgun set to backfire, he told Anna and Ryan that the shell inside it was the key to their freedom – and it was, because he hid the keys to their chains in the shell. Unfortunately, Anna took the shotgun to kill Ryan and was instead killed by it, destroying the keys, too.

6

The First Trap Never Touched The First Victim’s Head

The “Sleepy” Victim Shouldn’t Have Been Decapitated

Another early hint at Jigsaw’s double timeline is the first victim, who Eleanor and Logan end up calling “bucket head”. The man’s corpse is found hanging from a bridge, and when taken to Logan and Eleanor for an autopsy, his head is cut in half. The audience is led to believe this is the man who woke up too late during the game’s first stage and was killed by the buzz trap, but that man’s head never touched the blades, just his back – and later on, Logan’s back is shown to have various scars that match the blades.

It made no sense, then, that “bucket head”’s head would have been sliced in half, more so as he was wearing the bucket. It’s later revealed in Logan’s plan that he did so to leave the victim almost unrecognizable, which in a way is reminiscent of what happened to him after that same test, as he became a completely different person.

5

The Bodies’ Wounds Don’t Match The Events & Traps At The Barn

The Bodies Were Clearly Different

Bucket Head’s corpse wasn’t the only hint at Jigsaw’s timeline twist, as the other bodies didn’t match the events and traps at the barn. The second victim in Kramer’s first game was Carly, a purse snatcher who caused the death of an asthmatic woman when she stole her purse. Carly had been injected with poison while unconscious and had to choose from three syringes: one had the antidote, another one was saline, and the other was acid. As she refused to choose, Ryan injected all three of them into her neck, killing her with the acid.

However, the body that appeared outside the hospital that was supposed to be Carly’s had other injuries on her face that Carly didn’t have when she died. Later, Mitch was killed when the engine trap shredded his body, but the body found at Eleanor’s studio, supposed to be Mitch’s, had more injuries than Mitch’s and their skin color was different.

4

Logan Recognized The Acid In The Second Victim’s Body Way Too Fast

Logan Knew Way Too Much

Tied to Jigsaw’s timeline twist is the reveal of Logan as the copycat killer and Kramer’s apprentice, and this was also hinted at throughout the movie. As mentioned above, Carly was killed by acid, which made her bleed through her eyes and ears in a truly horrifying way. The body found outside the hospital, which the audience is led to believe was Carly’s, was taken to Logan for an autopsy, who was too quick to say her death was caused by acid.

Halloran caught this and questioned him, with Logan saying he saw what acid could do when he was in the army. This was quickly brushed off and Jigsaw moved on, but looking back, it’s a clear hint at the double timeline and Logan’s real role, as he had seen the effects of acid on Carly and used it again on his new victim.

3

Eleanor’s Engine Trap

The Engine Trap Is Key To The Twist Reveal

Jigsaw presents some potential suspects during the search for the copycat killer, the main ones being Halloran and Eleanor. The latter was revealed to be a huge Jigsaw fan, visiting websites dedicated to Kramer’s traps and crimes and even purchasing his traps on the dark web. Eleanor had a whole studio where she kept the traps, and revealed to Logan that she had also acquired the blueprints for one of Kramer’s first traps: the engine trap, the one that killed Mitch.

Eleanor said it was one of Kramer’s undiscovered first experiments, and she had built it based on the blueprints. Not long after, the engine trap made its appearance in the barn, revealing that Kramer had truly built it and used it, but it was never found thanks to him and Logan.

2

John Kramer’s Autopsy Was Shown In Saw IV

Kramer Was Truly Dead

John Kramer’s appearance in Jigsaw was a big surprise for viewers, though a confusing one. As mentioned before, during the events of Jigsaw, Kramer had been dead for a decade, yet there he was. It seemed like Jigsaw had made Kramer into an immortal being at some point, but the timeline twist becomes clear when remembering that his autopsy was shown in Saw IV.

John Kramer died in the third act of Saw III, where, after revealing his motives for his final “game”, his throat was slashed with a power saw. Kramer’s autopsy was shown at the beginning of Saw IV, and a wax-coated microcassette for Detective Mark Hoffman was found in his stomach. Seeing his autopsy in Saw IV would have been a clear hint to Saw fans that Jigsaw was playing with a timeline set in the past.

1

The Saw Saga Had Previously Played With Timelines

Saw Is Into Double Timelines

Another hint that should have given Jigsaw’s timeline twist away to fans of the saga is that the franchise had played with timelines before. Since the first movie, the Saw franchise has relied on flashbacks to explore the victim’s backstories, but Saw II and Saw IV took double timelines to another level. Saw II ran so Jigsaw could walk, as it did the same trick of showing a “game” that had already taken place and through which Kramer was playing with the police (and the filmmakers with the audience).

Saw IV follows the aftermath of Kramer’s death and the final game he left prepared, as he had planned for his death. At the same time, it goes to the past to explore Kramer’s backstory, as told by his wife. The Saw saga is no stranger to double timelines and using these for a plot twist, so it wouldn’t be surprising if future movies pulled this trick again.