Breaking Down the Gruesome Ending of Saw X

Warning: This post contains spoilers for Saw X.

After being killed off in Saw III, Tobin Bell returns for a grisly showcase of Jigsaw Killer John Kramer's torture trap prowess in Saw X, now in theaters.

Set between the events of Saw and Saw II, the tenth installment in the Saw series takes place while both Kramer and his original apprentice, Amanda Young (Shawnee Smith), are still alive and hoping to find a cure for John's terminal brain cancer. The movie, directed by franchise veteran Kevin Greutert, follows John as he travels to Mexico for an experimental medical procedure touted by Dr. Cecilia Pederson (Synnøve Macody Lund) and her team as a miraculous new cancer treatment.

But after undergoing what he believes was a life-saving surgery, John discovers the experiment is fake and run by con artists—from the cab driver who picked him up at the airport to the supposed neurosurgeon—scamming desperate patients out of money.

With the help of Amanda, John goes to work kidnapping Cecilia and her colluders to subject them to his unique brand of justice in the same warehouse where they pretended to perform his surgery.

Read more: How Saw X Fits Into the Saw Universe

How does Saw X end?

After two of Cecilia's accomplices have endured—and failed—John's gruesome tests, Parker (Steven Brand), a man introduced to John earlier in the movie as a fellow recipient of the treatment, shows up at the warehouse with a gun demanding his money back. Amanda is able to knock him out and brings him up to the viewing area to watch a third collaborator, Gabriela (Renata Vaca), undergo her test.

Gabriela is mangled and irradiated, but ultimately manages to complete her task and survive. But before John and Amanda can take her to the hospital to have her injuries treated, Parker is able to take back his gun and it's revealed that he's actually Cecilia's lover, arriving to save her. He forces them to free Cecilia—and she kills Gabriela. Parker and Cecilia start locking John up where had kept Cecilia, when suddenly, Carlos, an innocent boy who John met before his surgery, also shows up at the warehouse. Cecilia lures him inside and locks him up on a platform across from John.

The device John rigged for Cecilia is a two-person blood waterboarding trap of sorts that gives each person the ability to pull a lever that allows the other to come up for air while they drown. John tells Carlos not to pull the lever, preparing to sacrifice himself for the boy. But Carlos realizes what's going on and does his part to save John.

Meanwhile, Cecilia and Parker head upstairs to reclaim the bag of swindled money they think John stashed there. But, of course, this was all ultimately part of John's plan.

When Cecilia and Parker grab the cloak they think is hiding the bag of money, it triggers a new trap that locks them inside the viewing area as it begins to fill with poison and stops the blood flowing on the other trap. As Amanda frees John and Carlos, flashbacks fill in some gaps in the overall mystery: the cab driver who helped trick John later revealed to him that Parker was romantically involved with Cecilia. When Cecilia briefly got hold of her phone and tried to make a desperate call for help during the games, Amanda saw that she had called Parker. Since John knew Parker's true motives, he switched out the bullets in Parker's gun for duds while he was unconscious, giving Parker a test of his own.

Parker failed his test by retrieving his gun and turning on John and Amanda, but John had a contingency plan. While John did not intend for Carlos to show up and thought it would be him and Amanda strapped into the waterboarding trap, everything else worked out accordingly.

John informs the couple that there is only one air hole in the room, meaning only one of them can survive. Cecilia ends up killing Parker and survives the gas by sticking her head out the air hole. But there is seemingly still no way for her to escape as John, Amanda, and Carlos leave the warehouse together. John also gives Carlos the bag of defrauded money to keep in a gesture of good will for braving the trap.

Does Saw X have a credits scene?

Saw X does in fact have a mid-credits scene that shows how John dealt with Henry (Michael Beach), the fellow cancer support group member who originally told John about Cecilia's "miracle treatment."

The sequence shows Henry waking up in a trap as John and Detective Mark Hoffman (Costas Mandylor), another of John's fan-favorite disciples, walk into the room. John notes that Henry no longer has the massive stomach scar he showed him from his supposed life-saving surgery—and the game begins.

Franchise producer Oren Koules has said that if there were going to be an eleventh Saw movie, it would center on Hoffman's role in the Jigsaw killings. "One of the things that we’ve read a lot about is that Jigsaw always seems so ahead of everybody," Koules told Dexerto. "So one of the tricks in this movie that we wanted to show is that he’s been dealing with Detective Hoffman for a long time. So when he’s been ahead of everybody—and knows things that people are doing—it’s a little nugget for the fans to realize that he’s been talking to Detective Hoffman a lot earlier than we previously saw him in a movie."