Partway through the classic 1990s thriller Se7en, serial killer John Doe is inspired to change his plan after an encounter with Mills and Somerset. While now regarded by many as one of the best directors of his generation, David Fincher didn't exactly have a warm welcome into Hollywood. His first studio feature was the infamously compromised Alien 3, a sequel that saw Fincher fight with 20th Century Fox at every possible turn, making it a bit of a miracle the film is even as decent as it is.
Thankfully, his follow-up film Se7en saw Fincher quickly prove just how much of a force to be reckoned with he would be. Receiving both great reviews from critics and widespread approval from moviegoers, Se7en raked in over $300 million worldwide on a budget of $33 million, ending up in the top ten highest-grossing movies of 1995. It also spent an entire month on the top of the domestic charts, a feat rarely accomplished nowadays.
While Se7en is an all around great film, one of the main reasons it became so renowned was its memorably dark twist ending, in which serial killer John Doe (Kevin Spacey) pulls off the ultimate gambit against Detective Mills (Brad Pitt). In doing so, Doe ends up becoming his own last victim, but that wasn't always his intention.
John Doe Changed His Plan Midway Through Seven
While obviously insane, Se7en villain John Doe is clearly not stupid. His plan to punish sinners by killing them in ways related to their sin was meticulously crafted, as evidenced by the long-term torture he did to his Sloth victim. It's said early in the movie that Mills and his wife had only recently moved to town, meaning there's no logical way they could've been part of his original plan, and the film seems to confirm that, with Doe admitting that Mills and Somerset finding his apartment was an event he didn't expect.
This means that Mills and his wife Tracy weren't part of the original group of Doe's seven planned victims. He changed things on the fly after Mills and Somerset were able to locate him early, and the fact that he pulled it off on such short notice only speaks further to just how smart and calculating a monster John is. He altered his kill list without breaking a sweat, and pulled off a gambit requiring cooperation from Mills and Somerset to succeed. It would be impressive if it wasn't so ghastly.
Was John Doe's Original Plan More Standard?
It would seem like Mills and Somerset causing John Doe to change his grand plan was if anything a huge stroke of luck for Se7en's killer. The reason Doe's masterwork ends so spectacularly is that he made the final two kills personal by specifically targeting Mills and Tracy. As dreadful as his other five kills were, they didn't seem personal, they didn't feel connected. They were just John punishing sinners he felt worthy of such treatment. Had Mills and Somerset not tracked John down early, one assumes John had two entirely different victims planned to serve the roles of envy and wrath in his twisted masterpiece.
It's impossible to guess who those could've been specifically, as Doe's targets seemed to be fairly random, in the sense that they weren't important to each other. For envy, it's possible Doe had a similar idea of killing a person who coveted a lover they couldn't have, or envied the superior life of a neighbor or co-worker. For wrath, Doe might've targeted someone who had taken revenge, or was seeking it.
This would make his switch to Mills and Tracy a bit more seamless if the ideas for the killings were similar at their base. However, it seems doubtful that Doe's original plan was to have the wrath sinner kill him. Doe's death seems like a very organic result of his personal confrontation with Mills, and unless Doe had planned something equally personal, which wouldn't fit his pre-Mills modus operandi, his own death becomes less and less likely.
John Doe's Original Seven Plan May Not Have Ended In His Death
Now that it's been established that involving Mills and Tracy was not part of John Doe's original plan, and that his normal way of operating didn't involve personal grudges, it seems safe to say that he probably didn't end up dead under the original seven-kill blue print. It's possible he still would've, but unlikely. It wasn't until after Doe felt he had committed his own sin, envy, toward Mills and his life that he decided to target the couple, and seemingly made the decision that he himself should serve as the final victim, the final piece of his puzzle. Before meeting Mills, it would appear that Doe didn't consider himself worthy of death, and thought that he was doing the right thing, as sickening as that thought is.
What's more is that by forcing Mills' hand, and getting killed by him, Doe has sort of claimed an eighth victim, adding a kind of coup-de-grace onto his original idea to claim a victim representing each of the seven deadly sins. While Mills isn't dead, he's mentally broken, and it's possible he'll never recover. To have planned for another scenario in which wrath would be willing to murder him, Doe would've had to have found another person and studied them from afar enough to know that they also had the kind of hair trigger temper Mills has, and determine something they could do to that person that would be awful enough to cause them to commit murder. And that's presuming Doe wanted to die when he originally came up with his plan, which seems like a stretch.
Luckily for Doe, the stars were all aligned for him in Se7en's reality, leading to the best possible ending scenario for a serial killer with delusions of grandeur, outside of surviving to kill again. His heinous crimes will ensure his infamy for decades to come, he's claimed a victim even after his death, and he's put the cherry on top of the bloody sundae by orchestrating his own escape from justice, at least the kind that would be inflicted by law enforcement. He accomplished all his goals and went out on his own terms. Sadly, John Doe won.