SAW

THE ADAM THEORY (AKA My Roman Empire)

Personally, Adam dying at the end of Saw was a fundamental turning point in my brain chemistry. My poor, sweet boy. However!!! Let me introduce my roman empire, my one true hyperfocus, the gospel that I hope to spread far and wide.

ADAM IS ALIVE.

Okay, I know he’s not. Like, if you went and asked Leigh Whannell himself, he’d say Adam is dead. That does not, however, stop me from being unhinged and holding out hope twenty two years later. So, with that, let’s deep dive why Adam is definitely and undoubtedly still alive.

The most famous and obvious evidence is the chains and bullets that surround Adam throughout the franchise. Whenever we can clearly see that it is Adam himself (aka alive) in the ankle chain, his chain is always on the left foot. However, if you go forward in the franchise to any show of his more decomposed body, it suddenly switches to the right foot. The bullet wounds from being shot by Gordan also constantly move through different shots. Personally, I think the bullet wounds can be pretty simply explained away as an inconsistency, but I don’t see how Leigh Whannell wrote the script for Saw 1-3, wore the chain HIMSELF and still managed to miss the inconsistency of it swapping legs? That’s the one that gets me.

Everyone knows that Kramer is incredibly fair about his traps (the same can’t be said about the apprentices, but I’m sure I’ve ranted about that elsewhere). He believes in a fair, survivable game should the participant have the drive to survive. Gordon and Adam’s trap is, of course, Kramer’s most notorious trap, so why start the franchise by breaking that rule? I don’t believe for a second that Kramer would let Amanda just throw the key into the bathtub to be immediately washed away down the drain. It doesn’t sit right with me that he’d let Amanda foil Adam’s chances, and then to make it even worse, personally suffocate him afterwards?? I definitely believe that this is one of the ‘mistakes’ that Kramer was referring to in Saw 3 in regards to Amanda that he had to keep going back and fixing. However, even if the mistake that he was referring to was the hypothetical case that Amanda wasn’t able to suffocate Adam, there was a key to Adam’s chains in Zepp’s pocket when he died in the same room as Adam. Therefore, if Adam had survived Amanda’s attack and managed to find that key, surely Kramer would have had to honour that win and let Adam free. He would have won his game. He survived, and got himself free of his shackles.

The primary reason that fans think that Adam is alive, though, is the mysterious photographer that Kramer uses. Who is notoriously a photographer? Well, Adam, of course. They believe that Adam is an employee, if not apprentice, of Kramer who is profiling, stalking and photographing the future victims of The Jigsaw Killer. I do think this makes sense, because, yes, it could have been Amanda or Hoffman, there was constant instances of Kramer receiving addresses and photos that never had the source explained. If it was someone we already know, such as Hoffman, why hide that? Unless they’re hiding it for a huge reveal. I mean, it wouldn’t be the first time that Kramer had hired Adam.

To add another cheeky twist to all of this, Adam may be the cause of Kramer’s death. In a deleted scene from Saw 1, Amanda and Adam are seen talking in the stairwell when Amanda is scouting him out for the bathroom trap. Adam’s very sweet to Amanda, which is offputting to her. This scene insinuates that Amanda may have suffocated Adam for the measly 36-38 seconds (rather than multiple minutes that would ensure death) because she knew him, and she did not want to kill him. She’s shown breaking down in the reveal of the suffocation in Saw 3, and this might be why. Moving on, the fact that Adam and Amanda knew each other prior to the trap in Saw 1 is crucial to John’s death and the conspiracy that Adam was involved. This is because it could be deduced that Adam was in the vicinity when the events between Cecil and Amanda took place. In Saw 3, John is killed by Slow Ass Motherfucking Jeff because Amanda kills his wife, which she was blackmailed to do by Hoffman who threatened to inform John of Amanda’s affiliation with Cecil - the man that caused the miscarriage of John’s baby. So the question lies: how would Hoffman know that? How would Kramer know that? But you know who would know that? Adam. Bing bing bing!!

The final reason that I think Adam is alive, and maybe this is a reach from me and my strange attachment to these characters, but I truly don’t think Gordon would have let Adam die in that room. I understand that it would take a long time to heal from his amputation and Gordan couldn’t go back for Adam himself, but I don’t see a world where he wouldn’t have absolutely hounded Kramer to get him when he completed his trap.

All in all, though, I really don’t think anything will come of this in the franchise. I think if it was going to happen it would have happened by Saw III, and honestly if it did happen in, say, Saw XI, it would be a little bit stupid to be honest, and I think I’d rather it just be left behind.