The Entire Saw Universe Timeline Explained

Want to play a game? Try to explain the entire "Saw" universe timeline in chronological order, from 2004's "Saw" through 2023's "Saw X."

The wildly popular and influential horror franchise made its mark with its intense use of gore, the performance of star Tobin Bell, and the many iconic traps that torture its characters. But what it's best remembered for by its dedicated fans is its soap-opera-like overarching storyline, featuring fake-out deaths, secret alliances, and a ton of flashbacks.

The "Saw" franchise timeline is so complicated that there isn't an easy answer to the question of what order someone should watch the movies in, with "Saw X" potentially setting up a secondary timeline of events that will continue to unfold parallel to the first nine films (if we ever get "Saw XI," that is). We've done our best to take all the confusing events of the series and place them in order, revealing the hidden narrative that carries the saga of "Saw."

Here is the entire "Saw" universe timeline explained.

As the "Saw" timeline contains a ton of interwoven plot-threads that stretch even before the first chronological on-screen moment, we figured it'd be easiest to start things off by looking at what each of our core characters was up to before they were drawn into Jigsaw's games, starting with Detective Eric Matthews (Donnie Whalberg) of the Metropolitan Police Department. Though Matthews is a father, a married man, and generally one of the less-horrible members of the MPD, his early years in the vice division are rife with corruption and abuse of power.

The detective frequently plants evidence to ensure his suspects — the guilt of whom only he himself was certain — were convicted. Among his early victims is Amanda Young (Shawnee Smith), a woman living with an addiction to heroin. His transgressions go unchecked by the department until he is promoted to the homicide squad, where his excessive use of force starts to catch others' attention. Overall, however, he manages to keep his head down just enough to skate by for now.

While Detective Matthews quietly continued his crimes, MPD Officer Daniel Rigg (Lyriq Bent) is obsessed with working within the system to bring criminals to justice. He is compromised early on during a case involving an abusive husband and father named Rex (Ron Lee). Rex has so terrified his wife and daughter that Rigg is essentially powerless to put him away — and in a moment of anger, Rigg physically assaults Rex in front of multiple witnesses.

Rex happens to be represented by Art Blank, a ruthless and unscrupulous attorney who manages to get his case entirely dismissed. He is unsuccessful in pressing charges against Rigg, however, thanks to the false testimony of Rigg's partner superior, Detective Mark Hoffman.

Like Detective Matthews, Mark Hoffman (Costas Mandylor) is a homicide detective for the MPD, though he's somehow got even more of a dark side than his peers. This is due in large part to the death of his sister Angelina, who was murdered by her abusive longtime boyfriend Seth Baxter. This tragedy seems to have fractured Hoffman's faith in humanity and perhaps systems of justice, as he descends deeper into corruption and brutality than either Matthews or Rigg.

Hoffman is called one evening to rescue MPD Officer Matt Gibson (Chad Donella) from a violent patient released from the recently shuttered Clear Dawn Psychiatric Facility. Hoffman murders the unnamed patient in front of Gibson, compelling the latter officer to actually report Hoffman to Internal Affairs. Though Hoffman is not punished, Gibson is brought into the division as an investigator. As Gibson begins targeting the officers in Hoffman's inner circle, the two become sworn enemies within the MPD.

Outside of the MPD's nasty bullpen, Amanda Young is watching her life slip away. Detective Matthews was successful in his attempts to have her convicted of heroin possession, which resulted in her ultimate imprisonment and financial and social ruin, as well as the worsening of her addiction to drugs.

Nevertheless, she served her time and made the choice to seek help afterward. She finds it at the Homeward Bound Clinic, a drug rehabilitation facility that urges those in recovery to "cherish" life. Along with Paul Leahy (Mike Butters), Michael Marks (Noam Jenkins), and Cecil Adams (Billy Otis), Amanda accepts care under the guidance of healthcare professional Jill Kramer (Betsy Russell).

Jill Kramer (née Tuck) is married to John Kramer (Tobin Bell), a highly skilled, successful, and philanthropically-minded engineer and architect. Jill's work with the Homeward Bound Clinic is supported by John, as well as benefactors like William Easton (Peter Outerbridge) of the Umbrella Health Insurance corporation. John is also the founder of the Urban Renewal Company that — with the help of Art Blank (apparently finding time to do zoning work for John while getting murderers acquitted) — aims to build subsidized houses for the poor. Jill becomes pregnant with their son Gideon, likely around the years 1994 to 1995 (Gideon's birthdate is slated for 1995, the Year of the Pig in the Chinese Zodiac). Overjoyed at the news, John builds his son what will be his first toy — a puppet named Billy.

At the same time, Jill's patients at the Homeward Bound Clinic continue to struggle — especially Amanda, who leaves but finds her withdrawal symptoms are so severe that she becomes desperate to score heroin. Having met Cecil Adams at the clinic, the pair plan to rob it for petty cash. Jill happens to be working when this occurs, and she is accidentally injured during the robbery. Despite rushing her to the Angel of Mercy Hospital, a doctor confirms that the trauma Jill suffered to her stomach caused a miscarriage.

John is, understandably, having a bad time. In a state of severe depression over the loss of Jill's pregnancy, he begins to neglect all aspects of his life, including his work, his partnership with Art, and Jill's clinic. Finally, their marriage becomes so strained that he ends his relationship with Jill and moves out of their home.

On his own, John begins to notice that his ailments are no longer limited to emotional and mental distress. He begins to feel fatigued, confused, and sore in ways he isn't used to. He returns to Angel of Mercy to undergo tests, including an x-ray of his brain that reveals that there is a tumor on his brain, and he is indeed experiencing symptoms of early-stage brain cancer. 

Unfortunately, the results of this test are immediately placed in the care of hospital medical examiner Logan Nelson (Matt Passmore), who accidentally mixes up John's results with those of another patient. John's doctor thus erroneously gives him a clean bill of health and sends him home, allowing the cancer in his brain to metastasize.

By the time John returns to Angel of Mercy with worse symptoms, the tumor had become inoperable and effectively untreatable. The deliverer of this death sentence was Dr. Lawrence Gordon (Cary Elwes).

Overwhelmed by his grief, loneliness, and loss of faith in the world, John drives his car off of a cliff with the intent to end his life. He miraculously survives, however, and unexpectedly experiences a great deal of shame for having taken his life for granted. This further inspires a twisted revelation about the human will to live that swiftly propels him into a madness that will define the rest of his life.

This reborn John Kramer now wants to test how much pain a human being can endure, how much they're willing to sacrifice, in order to survive and experience what he has — in other words, he wants to force those like him to truly "cherish" their lives. At the same time, however, this new mission is clearly underpinned by a bitterness with the world and a desire to enforce his own perverse idea of justice. Thus, his first target is none other than Cecil Adams, the man responsible for Jill's miscarriage.

John abducts Cecil at a Chinese New Year parade in 1995, where he finds and dons his first pig mask. Cecil is then strapped into the Knife Chair, a contraption — or, simply, a trap — of John's own making meant to test his survival instinct. Little does Cecil know, he's become the first person in history to play a game designed by the soon-to-be prolific serial killer Jigsaw.

Cecil busts through the Knife Chair test and survives, but he's killed when he attempts to attack John. John cuts a piece of skin out of Cecil in the shape of a puzzle piece, effectively giving birth to the Jigsaw Killer persona. To John, this act symbolizes that his victim was missing a piece of themselves — the human survival instinct — which he now values above all else.

The sensational "Jigsaw" murder captures the attention of the media, forcing the Metropolitan Police Department to put their best man on the case — homicide detective David Tapp (Danny Glover). Compared to the likes of Matthews, Hoffman, Rigg, and even Gibson to some degree, Tapp is the Superman of the MPD.

Even so, Tapp doesn't get to be the first to get to the bottom of the Jigsaw case. That honor belongs to none other than Jill, who recognizes Cecil and various elements of the crime scene. Believing John to be involved, she confronts him, but she chooses not to take her suspicions to the police.

Having fully excommunicated Jill and severed his last connection to his previous life, John devotes himself entirely to Jigsaw. He experiments with new kinds of traps, most notably building a coffin made entirely out of reinforced glass that a person could potentially survive in for an extended period of time. But the scale of Cecil's test was, apparently, not entirely satisfying for John. The next game needed to be bigger.

He absconds to Jill's family barn (now in his care), where he builds larger and more complex traps capable of testing multiple people at once. Tragically, fortune handed him the perfect opportunity to use this new torture barn in the form of the death of his (amusingly unnamed) nephew in a motorcycle accident. John thus devised the Murderers' Game — so-called because its subject consisted entirely of people yet to be held responsible for deaths they'd caused. It included one of John's neighbors who killed her own baby, a man who caused a deadly car accident, a shoplifter who inadvertently caused a security guard to have an asthma attack, and the man who sold John's nephew a faulty motorcycle. All of them are killed during the ordeal.

Logan Nelson was also meant to be tested as part of the group for his screw-up with John's medical results, but John accidentally overdosed him on the sedative he used to subdue the group, nearly resulting in what John saw as an unfair killing of the unconscious Logan. John stepped in at the last moment and saved Logan while the game continued. Logan becomes strangely devoted to John because of this and becomes the first disciple of Jigsaw — together, they build a murderous piece of headgear called the Reverse Beartrap. Though it seems like Logan and John are a perfect match, another more audacious soul would soon unseat him.

As devoted to Jigsaw as Logan was, his service is short-lived. It's possible John struggled to fully trust a man he nearly killed over a deadly clerical error. Or, maybe, John felt Logan lacked the conviction necessary to truly be a part of his world.

Once again alone, John is shocked to hear that Jigsaw has apparently killed a man named Seth Baxter, the abusive boyfriend of Detective Hoffman's sister Angelina. In reality, Hoffman himself had killed Seth, carved the puzzle piece out of his skin to match Jigsaw's M.O., then took on the case himself to make sure it wound up going nowhere with the rest of the Jigsaw cases. It doesn't take John long to figure this out for himself.

Hoffman is quickly kidnapped by John, who sees in him a man struggling with the lack of justice in the world just as he was. John offers him a choice: Turn them both into the MPD as murderers, or join John as the next disciple of Jigsaw. Wanting revenge on the world, Hoffman chooses the latter.

John immediately puts Hoffman to the test by forcing him to help with Paul Leahy's game. As mentioned above, Paul was one of Jill's patients. He is being tested for attempting to end his life like John once did. Paul is asked to traverse the Razor Wire maze but is ultimately unsuccessful and dies from blood loss. Despite his failure, the entire ordeal was a success in terms of Hoffman's initiation.

Having a detective on his side also provides advantages John may have not been expecting, like Hoffman being able to alert John that his colleague David Tapp has been able to make significant headway since being put in charge of the Jigsaw case. John decides he needs more time to finish his work, so he gives Hoffman a pen he had taken from Dr. Gordon's office at Angel of Mercy and instructs him to use it to derail the investigation. Suffice it to say, John and Hoffman are getting on like a house on fire.

Speaking of houses on fire, around this time a real estate agent named Brit Stevenson (Julie Benz) gets a wacky idea: What if, hypothetically, she could get a good deal on a plot of urban land by, say, maybe burning down the abandoned apartment building that currently sits on it. The idea is so interesting to her that she pays a drug dealer a significant sum to set fire to the complex, only for him to then outsource the job to one of his customers (Greg Bryk's Mallick Scott) in exchange for an ounce of heroin.

Unbeknownst to everyone involved, the apartment building is not entirely abandoned, instead serving as a shelter for several squatters. When Mallick sets it on fire, at least eight people are killed in the blaze. Panicked, Mallick turns to his wealthy father, who reluctantly pays off the right people to make the incident go away. Similarly, Brit doesn't waste any time bribing a city planner to make sure that her real estate firm gets the business of building on the newly vacated lot.

FBI agents Peter Strahm (Scott Patterson) and Lindsey Perez (Athena Karkanis) are brought in to investigate what is pretty obviously a case of arson, and they even get a solid lead in the form of Brit's initial drug-dealing contact. When they are unable to track him down, the case dries up and the agents head home to Quantico. These crimes go unpunished... for now.

John and Detective Hoffman continue the work of Jigsaw, though they aren't yet ready to repeat a test on the scale of the Murderers' Game. Instead, they continue to abduct individuals that match John's apparently flexible code. Anyone whom he deems is taking their life for granted, from adulterers and people suffering with depression to escaped murderers, is fair game. Their next victim together is Mark Wilson (Paul Gutrecht), a man who conned his friends and family by claiming to be suffering from an incurable disease. He fails his test (the Flammable Jelly Trap), after which Hoffman gets the idea to plant Dr. Gordon's pen on the scene for investigators to discover later.

Meanwhile, perhaps due to its more personal nature, John chooses to embark on the next game alone. He has two targets, both of them former patients at the Homeward Bound Clinic: recovering addict Donnie Greco (Oren Koules) and Amanda Young, the former accomplice of Cecil Adams who bears shared responsibility for Jill's miscarriage. (Note: Amanda and Donnie are both being tested simply for using drugs — it is hotly debated among "Saw" diehard fans whether or not John knew Amanda was with Cecil the night Jill miscarried.) John kidnaps them both, then unearths the Reverse Beartrap he built with Logan Nelson. He straps it onto Amanda and gives her a choice: allow the trap to spring or cut open Donnie, inside of whom John has hidden a key to the headgear. She chooses the latter, becoming the first person to win Jigsaw's game.

Not long afterward, John follows Amanda to her home and makes a surprising offer. Revealing himself as her former captor, he invites her to join his project as a disciple of Jigsaw. Strangely, Amanda actually agrees that the game helped her realize how much she had been taking her life for granted. something she had previously admitted to the police officers who rescued her, and decides to devote herself to John.

As all of this is going on, Dr. Gordon has no reason to suspect that the tragic old man seeing him for cancer treatments has anything to do with the horrific murders popping up in the papers. The married father is too busy carrying out a tawdry office affair to concern himself with such extraordinary notions, much less the possibility that he himself would ever be linked to these crimes in any capacity.

Nevertheless, with Hoffman's pen gambit having caught the attention of Detective Tapp, Gordon is unexpectedly approached by the MPD and brought in for questioning. When Tapp offers to show the doctor footage from Amanda's post-trap interview, he watches with unsettling fascination as she professes that the brutal ordeal was indeed to her benefit. Unfortunately for Tapp, this interrogation doesn't seem to go anywhere, especially since Gordon has a solid alibi for the murder of Mark Wilson, in the form of a rendezvous with his mistress.

Officially, Tapp has to direct his attention elsewhere and soon after goes with his partner to investigate a newly uncovered trap location. There, he nearly apprehends Jigsaw but fails to physically overpower him and suffers a nasty knife-to-throat injury in the process. His partner is even less lucky, falling victim to one of Jigsaw's booby traps and dying in a hail of gunfire. 

This encounter traumatizes Tapp, leading to instances of erratic behavior that earn the rare honor of getting fired from the MPD for police misconduct. Obsessed with bringing Jigsaw to justice and unable to square how one of Dr. Gordon's pens would find its way into a Jigsaw crime scene, he chooses to operate in a classic MPD procedural (and legal) grey area and hires photographer Adam Stanheight (Leigh Whannell) to watch Gordon's apartment.

Meanwhile, the real Jigsaw is starting to see his next great game form in the margins of Tapp's crumbling case, as well as the hallways of the Angel of Mercy hospital. His first target is hospital orderly Zep Hindle (Michael Emerson), who, unlike most if not all of the rest of Jigsaw's victims, doesn't have a clear reason for being tested outside of having the misfortune of catching John's interest. John and Zep's interactions at Angel of Mercy are seemingly positive, especially compared to how dismissively Dr. Gordon regards his dying patient.

In any case, Zep is captured by Jigsaw and poisoned. His "game" is to sneak into the Gordon household after the good doctor steals away to meet with his mistress. He is to then hold his wife and daughter hostage during the entirety of Dr. Gordon's own forthcoming game. Should Gordon fail in his own game, Zep must kill Gordon's family, after which he will be rewarded by receiving the antidote to the poison slowly killing him.

The one wrinkle in Jigsaw's plan is, of course, Adam, the photographer Detective Tapp hired to watch Gordon's home. So, naturally, Jigsaw does the mental gymnastics necessary to fold Adam into Gordon's test as well.

Finally, we arrive at Jigsaw's next grand game. After Dr. Gordon leaves his home to meet with his mistress (leaving Zep open to start his own game), he actually chooses to end the affair. Too little, too late, as Gordon is kidnapped by John. Meanwhile, Adam, who had conveniently followed Gordon to his meetup and missed the start of Zep's game, is kidnapped by Amanda. Both men are dragged to a remote bathroom, where an elaborate game is set up between the two of them. Seemingly developing a more passionate affinity for grotesque theatrics as the days go on, John elects to cast himself in their game as well, playing the role of a corpse.

Gordon's game is to kill Adam in a set amount of time to save his family, an idea that becomes more enticing as he learns Adam had been spying on him. Though Gordon initially refuses, a phone call from Zep, filled with the sounds of gunfire, convinces him to free himself from captivity by sawing off his own foot so that he can shoot Adam. In reality, the gunfire was Tapp rescuing the family from Zep. During a pursuit between the two, Zep manages to shoot and kill the fallen detective.

Zep flees to the site of Gordon's test to execute him at the behest of Jigsaw, but he is killed by Adam (just barely clinging to life after getting shot by Gordon). Gordon (in similarly horrific shape and bleeding out from his ankle) crawls his way out of the bathroom in search of an escape.

The test having come to a chaotic and unexpected end, a disappointed John pulls himself up from the floor in front of Adam, much to his victim's horror and surprise. After revealing that Adam could have saved himself if he somehow saw the key in the bathtub nearby before it drained, a presumably annoyed John skulks out of the room, delivers the classic "game over" line, and slams the door shut. Inside, Adam is left to suffer in chains from his apparently non-fatal gunshot wound.

On the other side of the door, John discovers Gordon alive, fighting to survive, but unavoidably succumbing to his wounds. Perhaps due to the unplanned nature of the game and his proven determination to survive, John decides to save Gordon's life. When Gordon recovers in John's care, he also decides to join the Jigsaw project rather than turn John in. In the "Saw" universe, everyone can apparently rally around a dude who was essentially ruined by the American healthcare system. Which, yeah, okay, fair enough.

The mere thought of Adam's fate torments Amanda, to whom Adam was the first of her victims as a disciple of Jigsaw. To bring herself peace, she goes to the test site without John's knowledge, but instead of rescuing him and offering him a spot on the roster, she brutally murders him to put him out of his misery.

With another high-profile case and two survivors in Amanda and Dr. Gordon (both of whom are now secretly operating as Jigsaw's henchmen alongside Detective Hoffman — Logan Nelson, meanwhile, is alive but apparently not being added to the "Jigsaw PC small group" chats), the Jigsaw brand is starting to receive wider attention. When a third non-convert survives and starts to tell her story to the public, it inspires struggling writer Bobby Dagen (Sean Patrick Flanery) to see what kind of money and clout he can farm by claiming to be a Jigsaw survivor himself, a scheme that definitely won't come back to haunt him when the notoriously territorial serial killer finds out. He publishes a memoir titled "SURVIVE," detailing the various traps he supposedly made it through, and uses it to launch a career as a motivational speaker.

Meanwhile, the actual Jigsaw survivors are too busy dealing with their own issues to worry about this pretender. Based on her experience with Adam, it appears Amanda is having some difficulty with the reality of the life she chose. Similarly, Dr. Gordon no longer wishes to return to the objectively cursed Angel of Mercy hospital and departs in search of new employment. Finally, Detective Hoffman's feud with Gibson and Internal Affairs reaches an undoubtedly distracting peak as they start to investigate his colleague Detective Matthews. Only John takes notice of Bobby's book, and he goes as far as meeting him face-to-face at a book signing, but even he is forced to divert his attention elsewhere, when an unexpected chance to return to his old life emerges out of the blue.

As Bobby Dagen is achieving a hollow version of self-fulfillment through the person of Jigsaw, John Kramer fascinatingly finds himself in a similar predicament. Killing all these people has seemingly failed to bring about the profound peace he sought initially, and when he learns of the Penderson Project (a group of scientists who claim to have developed an experimental therapy capable of curing cancer), he feels a renewed sense of hope that Jigsaw might not be the only answer to his despair.

He pleads with his old friend William Easton of the Umbrella Healthcare Corporation (once the benefactors of Jill's clinic) to approve his claim for the treatment, but William denies John personally on the grounds of the treatment's extraordinary claims. Whether or not this is true, William and UHC have a track record of ruthlessly denying claims, and they are in fact being sued at this time by the family of a man who died because they refused to cover his heart disease treatments.

John is still determined to survive, clinging to the Penderson Project as his last hope. He decides to pay for the treatment out of pocket and finances a trip to their laboratory in Mexico on his own. For a brief time, after he undergoes this treatment, he genuinely feels as though this nightmare has come to an end, and perhaps Jigsaw can as well. Before long, however, he discovers his cancer symptoms have worsened. The Penderson Project was, in fact, a complete scam executed by sophisticated con artists. Naturally, John sets out to execute them.

With the help of Amanda and Detective Hoffman, John manages to have everyone involved with the scheme kidnapped (save for Michael Beach's Henry Kessler) and brought to an abandoned facility where his next grand game takes place. The scientists prove to be surprisingly resilient and conniving antagonists to Jigsaw, but are ultimately and unanimously unsuccessful. At a later date, Hoffman personally helps John kill Henry.

While his thirst for vengeance has been satiated, John is now more certain than ever of his impending death. In this state of renewed clarity, he thinks of all the people who deserve to be tested by Jigsaw — in addition to the pretender Bobby Dagen (becoming more popular as Jigsaw continues his activities) and a host of others we'll discuss soon, John now has his eye on William Easton. He also has somehow put together Brit Stevenson's arson-murder-real-estate scheme, right down to making a list of her accomplices.

John wants all of them to pay but now understands he may well not live long enough to see his work through. He thus begins to set his affairs in order with his new lawyer (Art Blank is presumably still sore over the money lost via their failed housing project, though John certainly hasn't forgotten about him), which includes pre-planning all games for all of his planned victims to be carried out by his disciples, recording final messages for Hoffman, Amanda, Dr. Gordon, and Jill, and, curiously, leaving behind an upgraded Reverse Beartrap for an important final test. ("And none for Logan Nelson, bye!"). These items are all placed in a black box for Jill.

Though Detective Hoffman loathes Internal Affairs, John's new swath of targets ironically forces him to essentially serve justice to one of their targets: his colleague Detective Eric Matthews. Perhaps due to Amanda's involvement in the Jigsaw project, John becomes aware that Matthews had been using planted evidence to put her and several others behind bars. John instructs Hoffman to use his police connections to retrieve this evidence, then he has all of Matthews' victims kidnapped (Amanda among them as a double-agent), as well as Matthews' son Daniel (Erik Knudsen). They are forced to compete for survival in a house set to become overwhelmed by a deadly nerve gas when the allotted time expires. Amanda and Daniel manage to survive, though Amanda keeps him held captive in a safe at Jigsaw's behest.

John draws Matthews out with another game, where he at long last allows himself to be captured but reveals that he has his son hostage. However, though John plays a recording of the Nerve Gas House game that fools Matthews and the rest of the MPD into thinking the game is being broadcast to them live, the safe Daniel is being kept in is actually just feet away from them. Matthews and now-Sergeant Daniel Rigg work to find the house in vain, with John successfully convincing a vulnerable Detective Matthews to discreetly take them both away from the police and into the bathroom-site of Dr. Gordon's test. There, he is ambushed by and trapped within (left to die with Adam's corpse) by Amanda, who then rescues John and rushes to a secure location.

Though he managed to have Detective Matthews captured for his crimes, John's latest grand test cost him dearly. In addition to being beaten half to death by Matthews, he allowed his identity to be uncovered and revealed to the public. If that all weren't enough, his cancer is also rapidly accelerating. With time running out, he begins to execute the final game of his lifetime.

The first target of John's last grand game is none other than his old friend and former attorney Art Blank, at this time serving as counsel for his ex-wife Jill in the aftermath of the revelations about John's double-life. He is abducted by John's disciples (while John himself is swiftly declining in physical health, now running the show from a hospital bed) and essentially forced to be Jigsaw's errand boy during this final act of his life.

Detective Hoffman and Amanda (increasingly bitter with one another as Amanda's sanity slips and Hoffman begins to look for a safe-ish exit from this crumbling enterprise) devote themselves as they're able, starting by taking out one of Hoffman's colleagues: Dina Meyer's Detective Allison Kerry. Amanda secretly begins to go rogue and rigs her games so that they are un-winnable.

The next target of Jigsaw's final game is Jeff Denlon (Angus Macfadyen), a normal man whose life had effectively been destroyed by the callous actions of those around him. The purpose of this game is to test if Jeff can move beyond his grief and anger at the world to live a better life. If he can, he'll be able to save his wife and daughter.

Jeff seemingly was targeted in part by Dr. Gordon, who posited that his old Angel of Mercy colleague and fellow adulterer Dr. Lynn Denlon (Jeff's wife, played by Bahar Soomekh) should be on their list of Jigsaw targets. Given both of their records, it's understandable to question if he and Dr. Denlon were involved (which could make Gordon's offering of her potentially an act of spite), but there's no hard evidence to suggest anything happened. In reality, Gordon may have suggested John abduct Lynn as part of a test so that the ailing serial killer would have a decent doctor on call as he saw his final game through to completion.

At John's command, Lynn is brought to him by Amanda and forced to wear the Shotgun Collar. If John dies before the end of Jeff's game, the collar will activate and kill her.

While Jeff and Lynn's game is underway, Art (working under duress for John) prepares the test for the second-to-last piece of Jigsaw's final game: Sergeant Daniel Rigg. It was only a matter of time before the least-criminal member of the MPD found himself in Jigsaw's crosshairs.

This game appears to be largely driven by Detective Hoffman, who is perhaps beginning to grow concerned that John's demise (along with the subsequent unraveling of the entire Jigsaw case) will eventually lead him to be discovered. While Rigg's test is designed to force him to confront his pathological desire to be a hero as he attempts to rescue a barely-alive Detective Matthews (retrieved by Hoffman from the bathroom for this test) and an Oscar-worthy Detective Hoffman (pretending to be held captive with Matthews), Hoffman has already set about incriminating him in previous Jigsaw crimes. When he and Amanda took Detective Kerry, Hoffman left a bullet at the scene with Rigg's finger prints on it. He then anonymously called in Agents Strahm and Perez of the FBI to investigate, hoping to point them in Rigg's direction.

Sergeant Rigg and Jeff fight through their respective games, leaving gallons of blood in their wake. At the end of Rigg's test waits Detective Hoffman, Detective Matthews, and Art Blank. Unbeknownst to Rigg, all of them will survive if Rigg chooses to free himself of his obsession by not saving them within the allotted time. At the end of Jeff's test waits John's operating room, where the killer is being cared for by Amanda and his wife Lynn.

Unfortunately for the former test group, Rigg enters the room too soon. Matthews tries to stop him by shooting him in the gut, but Rigg still triggers the Ice Block trap that finally kills Detective Eric Matthews. Before Art can explain the nature of the test, Rigg shoots and kills him. Hoffman, emerging victorious, leaves Rigg to bleed out in the test chamber. Believe it or not, he still has one more trick up his sleeve.

Meanwhile, with Jeff nearing the end of his test, John demands Amanda release Lynn from the collar. She refuses and instead kills her, only for John to reveal that his final test was always ultimately meant for Amanda. And she failed. What John doesn't know is that Amanda only killed Lynn because she had found a note moments earlier left for her by Hoffman. Aware of Amanda's final test and wanting to clear her from the board, Hoffman threatened to reveal Amanda's involvement in Jill's miscarriage if she didn't kill Lynn. Jeff enters the room, sees the carnage, and kills Amanda. As his final test, John asks Jeff to forgive him — Jeff cuts his throat with a circular saw, killing John Kramer once and for all.

The death of John Kramer only means the birth of the new, post-mortem era of Jigsaw. Jeff, having killed John and failed his test, is unable to complete the overall game and save his daughter. Agent Strahm follows Hoffman's carefully laid trail to this very room and finds Jeff holding a gun and surrounded by dead bodies. Jeff assumes Strahm is a Jigsaw accomplice and aims his weapon at him, forcing Strahm to shoot him dead. A disguised Hoffman then captures Strahm and places him in the Cube Trap, which he manages to survive.

Hoffman is hailed as a hero by the MPD and gets promoted to Lieutenant. His ultimate victory is short-lived, however, as he not only learns of Strahm's survival but of a final Jigsaw tape discovered in John's corpse. On it, John promises that his work will continue and names Hoffman as one of his targets. Not long after, a note is left on Hoffman's desk that reads, "I know who you are," which he believes to have been written by Strahm. In reality, it was written by Dr. Gordon, whom Hoffman is seemingly unaware is one of John's disciples. Gordon likely wanted to keep Hoffman from developing a false sense of security and ending the games. Around the same time, Jill is visited by John's lawyer and given a black box full of the items left behind by him.

With Jigsaw's impending test and an ongoing FBI investigation looming over his head, the newly promoted Lieutenant Hoffman plays it cool and executes one of the games John planned prior to his death: The Arsonists' Game, meant to punish everyone involved with Brit Stevenson's arson scheme. This serves a secondary purpose for Hoffman as well, as it provides the perfect opportunity for him to once again steer investigators toward a different target, this time being Agent Strahm (who just so happened to have been a part of the arson investigation years prior).

The obsessive Strahm has conveniently been removed from the Jigsaw case by his superior Dan Erickson (Mark Rolston), despite his sound suspicions that Hoffman is somehow involved. Strahm defies Erickson's orders and continues tailing Hoffman — not that Erickson notices, seeing as he's too busy faking Agent Perez's death, for whatever reason. Regardless, Strahm's investigation eventually leads him to Hoffman, and the two face off for the last time in front of John's original Glass Coffin, hidden underneath the Nerve Gas House. Suspicious of the trap, Strahm forces Hoffman inside, activating the trap. The coffin is lowered safely into the floor, protecting Hoffman as the walls of the room come together to crush and kill Strahm.

Erickson discovers the aftermath of the Arsonists' Game, which Brit and Mallick both survived. Finding evidence leading back to Strahm at the scene (planted by Hoffman, of course), he tells his agents to bring Strahm in.

Hoffman, believing himself to have finally found the proper scapegoat for Jigsaw, continues to set up games and incriminate Strahm (thanks in large part to a severed hand he recovered from Strahm's barely-recognizable corpse). However, as he's preparing for the next grand game (meant for healthcare exec William Easton) several major problems arise at once. First, Agent Perez is revealed to be still alive and unconvinced that Strahm was a killer. Secondly, inconsistencies at recent Jigsaw crime scenes (now executed solely by Hoffman) start to betray connections to the murder of Seth Baxter, with the FBI now re-opening the case to scrutinize the validity of its connection to the Jigsaw murders. Finally, Jill Tuck is now in possession of evidence that could link Hoffman directly to John's crimes in the form of the black box.

As the FBI continue their investigation without him, Hoffman scares Jill into providing him the contents of the box and rushes the completion of the William Easton game, which results in William and most of his colleagues from the Umbrella Healthcare Corporation dying. (Jill, meanwhile, secretly withheld the tapes recorded for Amanda and Dr. Gordon — delivering the former to a journalist and the latter to its rightful owner.) When Erickson and Perez do manage to uncover the true murderer of Seth Baxter, Hoffman kills them both and uses the severed hand to frame Strahm.

With the three FBI agents dead, the final loose end for Lieutenant Hoffman to tie up is Jill Tuck — poetically, the two people closest to John when he was alive. Jill draws Hoffman back to the site of William's test. While distracting him by presenting the blackmail letter Hoffman wrote to Amanda, she incapacitates him with a taser.

When Hoffman awakes, she's strapped him into a chair and fixed the new-and-improved Reverse Beartrap to his head but with no key this time. This final game, designed by John, is seemingly meant to undermine Hoffman's assumption that Jigsaw's death will leave him "untested." It's interesting to consider here the seemingly unwinnable nature of Hoffman's game, which runs counter to Jigsaw's core principles. A possible explanation is that Hoffman wasn't meant to be tested by the Beartrap specifically, and Jill chose to do so to make sure Hoffman was killed. (Also interesting to consider that John may have left the Beartrap "to his first disciple." Jill could've assumed Hoffman when John actually meant Logan, who preceded Hoffman and actually helped build the original Reverse Beartrap. But we digress.) As Jill flees, Hoffman overcomes his trap through brute force, using window bars as a means of stopping the trap from activating fully.

While Hoffman is recovering from having his face half-dejawed by the Reverse Beartrap, one of Jigsaw's disciples finally prepares what seems to be the last game John pre-planned before his death. Without further ado, Jigsaw gets his posthumous revenge on the pretender Bobby Dagen for writing and profiting off of a false account of his own Jigsaw survival story.

There is some debate about who prepares and runs this game. It's assumed to be Hoffman, operating the games as a distraction for the MPD (perhaps selecting the Clear Dawn Facility as the venue to taunt his old nemesis Matt Gibson), but that doesn't totally square with his recovery nor his single-minded determination to silence Jill and thwart the MPD. It might make more sense that this game is carried out by Dr. Gordon, who actually appears at a Jigsaw support group to meet/taunt Bobby and hear his story, with help from at least two disciples we never learn the identities of. 

Bobby fails his test spectacularly, and he's the only saw victim to not win a single game (including a game inspired by his own writing). And yet, Bobby is left alive at the end of his game, his fate afterward left to the imagination.

Concurrently with Bobby's game (which, again, supports the Gordon-facilitator theory), Jill finally goes to the police with everything she knows about John Kramer, Jigsaw, and Detective Mark Hoffman. And who is there to receive this story but the golden boy of the Internal Affairs, Matt Gibson. Gibson promises Jill immunity for her involvement with the Jigsaw murders, and he promises to protect her from Hoffman as the bodies from Bobby's game begin to pile up.

Eventually, Hoffman contacts Gibson and claims that he can call off Bobby's game if Gibson turns Jill in (which supports the Hoffman-facilitator theory). Gibson refuses, and he's instead drawn into a game of cat-and-mouse manipulation with Hoffman that ends with Hoffman luring Gibson away from Jill (and, sadly, to his death-by-robo-machine-gun, with compliments to Walter White), so that Hoffman can tear through the MPD's skeleton crew one-by-one to get to Jill. 

Hoffman takes her to a secure location and finally kills her using Logan's original Reverse Beartrap. Once again, however, Hoffman's victory is short-lived, as he is stalked and kidnapped by Jigsaw's final faithful disciple, Gordon, acting on his orders to keep Jill safe (if a little late). Gordon takes Hoffman to the site of rebirth, the bathroom in Jigsaw's underground labyrinth. With one last "game over," he leaves Hoffman to rot with the remains of his severed foot.

As revelations about Hoffman, the massacre of the MPD, Bobby's test, and Jill's death hit the airwaves, the horrific legend of Jigsaw presumably reaches its peak in terms of public awareness and terror. (It's worth mentioning that the first public Jigsaw test took place around this time as well, though that would be the extent of its impact on the timeline overall.) Logan Nelson, still working as a medical examiner at Angel of Mercy, makes money on the side selling Jigsaw memorabilia and trap schematics on the dark web, some of which are purchased by his obsessed assistant Eleanor (Hannah Emily Anderson).

At the same time, many citizens are terrified that the games will somehow continue, and, to make matters worse, Detective Brad Halloran (Callum Keith Rennie) of the MPD is helping violent criminals escape jail, resulting in a string of murders. One of the victims happens to be Logan's wife. Having created enough public fear for the city to pass legislation that expands the powers of the Metropolitan Police Department, the MPD immediately ramps up their corruption and police brutality, all of which is covered up by MPD Police Chief Marcus Banks (Samuel L. Jackson), whose son Ezekiel (Chris Rock) is also a member of the force.

Unlike his father, Ezekiel is a relatively upstanding officer for the MPD (as "upstanding" as anyone in the MPD can be). His morality is put to the test when he witnesses his partner kill someone in cold blood to cover for one of the many corrupt cops within their ranks. Impressively, Zeke walks right over the bar for honesty in this police force (currently so low that Jigsaw could chain people to it in his underground lair) and reports his partner to Internal Affairs. Gibson would be proud.

Zeke's upstanding nature leads to mixed results for his career at the MPD. On the one hand, he eventually earns a promotion to homicide detective; on the other hand, he's basically hung out to dry whenever he calls for back-up and is nearly killed during a shoot-out. Chief Banks tries to protect his son from the other cops as much as he can, but Zeke is once again on his own when his father retires.

The murder of Logan Nelson's wife triggers him out of his detachment from the Jigsaw project. (Worth mentioning here that we still have yet to learn the nature of Logan and John's initial split, particularly whether Logan quit or was fired.) When he discovers Detective Halloran is responsible for the freeing of several violent criminals, including his wife's murderer, he decides to recreate Jigsaw's first grand game: The Murderers' Game. He rebuilds the individual tests in Jill's family barn, then kidnaps the criminals freed by Halloran and forces them to compete. None of them survive.

Logan allows these bodies to be discovered publicly in order to bait Halloran into getting involved (as well as to revive Jigsaw as a threat to criminals). As Halloran falls right into this trap, Logan manipulates events and evidence to subtly build suspicion against Halloran as a Jigsaw copycat killer. By the time the MPD has discovered all of the corpses from the Second Murderers' Game, Logan is able to lead Halloran to a reckless final stand-off at the barn, where — in front of Logan's faithful assistant — he gets to play heroic victim while Halloran is revealed as the brutal psychopath he is (even if he isn't actually the Jigsaw copycat). As she runs off to get help for Logan, Jigsaw's heir masterfully abducts Halloran and brings him to a replica of John's lair. There, he tricks Halloran into confessing his crimes on tape, then kills him using an unwinnable trap.

It's unknown if Logan continued acting as Jigsaw after this. It's possible he merely used what little Jigsaw experience he had to ruin Halloran's reputation and clean up his mess, and now he has no reason to continue with a mission he already abandoned once.

Sometime after the Halloran debacle, the Metropolitan Police Department is terrorized by another Jigsaw copycat. This time, it isn't Halloran, Logan, nor any rightful heir of Jigsaw who managed to survive (at least, not that we know of yet) like Dr. Gordon. Instead, it's one of the MPD's own: homicide Detective William Schenk (Frank Licari), who not-so-coincidentally works under Zeke Banks. Schenk, née Emmerson, is the son of Charlie Emmerson, the innocent man who was murdered by Zeke's partner years prior.

Schenk's stated aim is to punish the corrupt cops within the MPD, including Zeke's father Marcus. At the end of the game, Schenk offers Zeke the chance to join him, which Zeke refuses. He then forces him to play one last game — allow him to escape justice or let Marcus die in a trap that drains his blood. Though Zeke chooses the latter, a SWAT team called to the scene shoots and kills Marcus thinking him to be a threat.

Given how long Schenk was planning his vengeance, it's potentially possible that he was somehow brought into the formal Jigsaw fold by Dr. Gordon (maybe he was one of the yet-unknown disciples with Gordon when he captured Mark Hoffman?), but there's no evidence in the films thus far to suggest he's anything more than a lone copycat. If Gordon, Logan, or any other Jigsaw disciples are still out there, it isn't hard to imagine that they would want to meet Schenk themselves very, very soon. With the cliffhangers set up by the most recent and successful entry "Saw X," the games may have just begun.