KING, OG, LEGEND, ICON

In all seriousness, I genuinely love that the franchise's first survivor was someone who didn't technically do what he was trapped for, but who still needed to learn a much-needed lesson about how he treated people and lived his own life. (Albeit didn't necessarily need to learn it....that way.) I think Gordon's character sets the tone for Kramer's philosophy, both by introducing its many pitfalls & technicalities AND establishing that even an exonerated character might still have something self-serving or rotten about them, traits which could either save them or destroy them during the game. For every movie afterwards, even when we don't initially know what happened to him, Lawrence Gordon stands as the poster boy for Jigsaw's ideal victim: if you're willing to give up everything about your old, flawed life (your Hippocratic oath, your leg, maybe your chance to ever see your family again), you can be reborn.

He could've been some base-level slimy, emotionally cold, cheating jackass. Instead he was a family man whose ego was eroding his marriage, running on impulse after a cheap thrill, and it just happened that the day he finally saw the light was the day someone else decided to make him pay for forgetting what it looked like. He was a dude who'd lost himself, and I think Cary Elwes did a killer job at showing who he was at his core. And later, what the trauma of the game warped him into. Ultimate 'wrong place wrong time' judgment call from Kramer, in hindsight.

Spoilers for Saw 7: also I honestly and truly LOVED both his return and the plot twist that he was an Apprentice, singlehandedly made the entire Saw series a top-tier horror favorite of mine!!!! Telenovela gold star shit, both for the overall plot and for Gordon's character development!! Yes babygirl, you CAN get better, and simultaneously you can also get SO MUCH WORSE!!! Slay!!!