8 Smartest Decisions Made By Saw Characters

7. Hoffman Tricks Strahm Into Signing His Own Death Warrant (Saw V)

Saw V
Lionsgate

Peter Strahm is one of the most likeable characters in the Saw franchise, and, overall, he's also quite intelligent too - something we'll touch on later.

But in this particular instance... he got played like an absolute fool.

After figuring out that Mark Hoffman has committed several grisly murders, Strahm decides to bring this reign of terror to an end. Following Hoffman to an underground tunnel network, Strahm eventually finds a room with a large glass coffin in the centre, inside of which is a tape recorder.

Upon playing this recorder, Strahm hears a message left for him by Hoffman: if he climbs inside the coffin, he will live, and if he doesn't, he will die. It's a simple little game, but since Strahm knows that Hoffman is a murderer, he isn't just going to climb inside a small glass box for no good reason - so he doesn't.

Seems like a smart move, because that coffin is clearly a deathtrap, right? Well, no. After a brief scuffle, it's Hoffman who ends up inside the coffin, at which point it's revealed that he was actually telling the truth: the coffin was safe all along.

This results in Strahm being crushed to death, while Hoffman, lying inside the coffin, is lowered out of harm's way. Since Hoffman wanted Strahm dead, you could argue that there were easier ways to go about this, but tricking him into rejecting the coffin was still a cunning, cold, and well-calculated move.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!