Note: As before, what I write here is not meant to cover every event in this episode, nor is it meant to be a full review of the game, this is just a look at the parts of the episode I think are most thought-provoking. This blog is written in a way that those who haven’t played the game can still follow along, but I’d strongly recommend you experience it for yourself before reading.

Of all the quiet, dreamy moments Life is Strange gives you for reflection, the ones in this episode are the saddest. In many moments of conflict thus far there’s been an antagonist, someone like Frank, Nathan, Victoria, Wells, or David, someone who you can blame and displace negative emotions onto, but many of the game’s most melancholy scenes are ones where you don’t get an opportunity to be angry at anyone, you just have a horrible circumstance in front of you. The time you spend with the new Chloe consists of this. There are no arguments shouted across the living room table, no disgruntled dormitory confrontations, it’s simply one long stretch of a family trying to love each other when one of them is dying.

After a day with Chloe who is now partially paralysed and breathing via a respirator, she asks Max to fetch her morphine injector. It’s a chance to talk to the alternate William and Joyce who have been left in nearly unmanageable debt by their situation, and to explore the house, the most wistful part of which might be seeing the empty room that was Chloe’s bedroom in the previous timeline. Wanting to end Chloe’s pain as soon as possible was a deterrent to taking too much time out for exploration however. When you return the injector to her she asks Max to end her life by overdosing her with morphine. A clever tool the game employs at this point is an “I don’t know” button alongside an accept and reject option. It allows you to garner some optional emotional context from Chloe if you want, but keeps it held back unless requested so you’re not overwhelmed with dialogue. While the decision of whether to assist Chloe’s suicide may seem to comprise a single question, what the game is really asking you is three things: Do you believe in assisted suicide? Do you think it’s the right thing for Chloe in her situation? And do you have the emotional fortitude to go through with it? Or depending on your viewpoint, do you have the emotional fortitude to not go through with it? The game borderline forces you to think about the issues involved in helping someone end their life.

In the following moments it’s refreshingly subversive that the writers don’t leave you with a lot of uhming and ahing over whether to re-kill William or not, even if you can also see how integral killing William is for keeping the story on track. With complete confidence in her choice Max reverses time once again, says her goodbyes to William, and lets him walk off to that car. Returned to the timeline we know, we get to vicariously embrace the punk Chloe. Besides being touching and providing Episode Three’s cliffhanger, the alternate timeline sequence serves two important purposes: 1. It allows you to better empathise with Chloe’s loss of William, because you go through a slightly similar loss of him, and 2. It shows why even if things go drastically wrong later into the game, rewinding a ridiculous amount of time into the past to fix things probably won’t be an option: The butterfly effect makes the results potentially disastrous. Still, there are some aspects of the scenes that feel unnatural.

While infectiously happy, William does not have the depth and dimensions of other characters. Max also seems surprisingly emotionally unaffected considering what happened in the alternate timeline. You think she’d be more disturbed by just having helped kill a terminally ill version of her best friend. Instead as soon as she fixes the timeline she seems to completely forget about it and declares it will never be talked about to Chloe. The transition itself is also a little shaky. For one thing Chloe seems to think we have a much more fully-formed case than I do. The news that we have substantial evidence seems to have come out of nowhere. Still, the hard cut between the two sections does give it the quality of a dream. As we head downstairs we see David ejected from the Price household. While he was an antagonist it feels more sad than triumphant, not that I’m in favour of him staying. Even if he feels apologetic it’s hard to believe he’d change his ways. His overbearing nature is part of who he is, but as he frames his life events in terms of a battle even as he’s walking away from his own family, it feels like he is probably the biggest victim of his militaristic mindset.

Back on the trail of whatever happened to Kate before she died, Max and Chloe return to the dorms at Blackwell and it somehow feels like eons since we last saw it in sunlight. There are a couple of interesting things to be found in the grounds: Firstly, Brooke is loudly complaining that she wanted to go to the drive-in with Warren, an experience that ended up being handed off to Max instead. It seems a shame that Brooke and Warren didn’t team up for that because she would have far more interest in him than I or Max do, but I also know that if Warren likes Max instead of Brooke there’s no arguing with it. You can’t change these things. The other unexpected sight here is Samuel sitting with science teacher Ms. Grace. It’s a reminder that other people can be just as proficient as you in seeing the positive qualities in people. If you talk to Ms. Grace and take a certain path discussing the recent animal deaths, bizarre weather, and chaos theory she’ll mention Ray Bradbury’s short story A Sound of Thunder. This is at least the third time the game mentions Bradbury so let’s talk about him a little.

The game has aesthetic reasons to draw parallels between itself and the author. Not long before the start of the game Max had borrowed “October Country”, a short collection of Bradbury’s stories and Max mentions in her diary that she considers him to “[nail] the autumn atmosphere of small towns”. Certainly something that Life is Strange is also trying to do. A Sound of Thunder is far more relevant to Life is Strange’s plot however. Written in 1952, A Sound of Thunder depicts a future where a safari firm offers tourists the chance to travel through time to kill any animal they desire. When the protagonist Eckels journeys back to prehistoric times one of the guides describes to him how killing even a single mouse could disrupt the food chain, interrupting the development of humans, and eventually irrevocably changing human civilisation as we know it. When the trip goes awry the safari group return to the future to find an America completely different from the one they knew. As it turned out Eckels managed to trigger it all by killing a single butterfly.

Keep in mind this story was written before the term “butterfly effect” was coined and its relation to butterflies and storms fits with the motifs in the game thus far (if you need a little memory jogger on what those motifs are check back on the Episode Three retrospective). Also relevant are the story’s line about how “time was a film run backward” and the spontaneous death of everything from whales to birds across Arcadia Bay which bears resemblance to the time travel extinction described in Bradbury’s story. It makes you wonder if somewhere in the future Max went back and killed something important. In fact come to think of it it’s still unclear how Max and Chloe are going to stop that storm or evacuate Arcadia Bay. Maybe we can go back and kill a butterfly. The game also includes some other possible Bradbury nods. Bradbury co-wrote the screenplay for the 1956 film adaptation of Moby Dick and later wrote a book dramatising the process. Whales appear beached in Arcadia Bay, as the mascot of the Price’s diner, and in auditory form on the MP3 player in Nathan’s room. Also possibly relevant to Life is Strange are Bradbury’s The Last Night of the World, a short story about people spending an intimate last day of existence together after receiving an apocalyptic vision, and his 1962 novel Something Wicked This Way Comes in which early on an autumn day two best friends are told that a storm is on the way to their town. Maybe these are coincidences, Bradbury did write hundreds of short stories, but they feel at least worth considering. I would later find out that the day I played through the section of the game where A Sound of Thunder was mentioned was Bradbury’s 95th birthday.

Inside the boy’s dorm Max recovers crucial information on Nathan and in the process we learn about Nathan’s fetish for seeing women in vulnerable positions. It puts his armed confrontation with Chloe in Episode One in a creepier light. When Nathan catches Max and Chloe in the hallway he’s brutally beaten down by Warren of all people. It seems like an act of bravery and heroism at first, but only at first. You can’t take away from the fact that Warren might have literally saved Max and Chloe’s lives there but there’s also nothing particularly courageous in beating up someone who can’t defend themselves and is begging you to stop. It reminds me of the Victoria situation, someone’s bullying turning the victim into a bully, although it does feel like Nathan is a whole other breed of bully and in a sick way at least this might buy us some protection, even if it can’t stop him altogether.

The final piece of evidence we need is Frank’s log of his customers. The beached whales near his RV are not just more dead animals, but a sign that even very great and powerful creatures are falling under whatever force is currently besetting Arcadia Bay. With the strong connection between this small Oregon town and the nature around it, omens of approaching doom are likely to come in the form of natural phenomena. Animals aren’t the only ones at risk however. Negotiations with Frank go particularly poorly and Chloe is shot in the stomach. Much like at the end of Bradbury’s story when the gun fires there’s no visual focus on the weapon initially, only “a sound of thunder”, but Max is a time traveller, and soon all is square with Frank. The fact that he’s our best friend in the next minute only makes him seem more unhinged and lonely.

Once we have all the clues the process of putting them together is something like a Phoenix Wright puzzle and is one of the strongest examples I’ve seen in a game of clues that seem to have no relationship to each other suddenly lining up to present a complete, logical picture. Max and Chloe discover a barn and a dark room owned by Nathan where kidnapped women have been tied up and photographed. Evidence from there leads us to Rachel’s body, buried at the junkyard we visited in Episode Two. It’s grimly appropriate that she never really left her and Chloe’s old hangout spot. With Victoria pegged as the next target we haul ass to Blackwell’s End of the World party whose name is in no way foreboding. Max feels more willing than ever to be honest with people about the good qualities she sees in them, no doubt motivated by the recent reminders of mortality and the possible coming end times. It’s impressive how much atmosphere the game gets out of just the music and lighting in the party before we even get a better look at the people and props. With Nathan making some vague threat to desecrate Rachel’s body however, Max and Chloe rush back to the junkyard. Chloe is shot and Max is drugged, leaving her unable to rewind time. As the antagonist walks into frame my thought process goes something like “Hey, Nathan’s jeans and shoes sure look like Mr. Jefferson’s… Oh”.

At first this twist seemed empty, like a deus ex machina but against the heroes. The logic of how the crimes were commited is unclear and our killer is not a character the game has properly established. Sure, we know Jefferson, but the Jefferson we know is implied to be a carefully constructed face and these murders were committed by a side of him we've never met. What exactly this means for Max and Chloe is also not too well-defined. Chloe is likely dead but Max has the power to reverse time and even if it’s temporarily disabled the idea of it being able to bring Chloe back seems plausible. Some time on I don’t exactly how to feel about this ending, but it’s clear there’s at least a little more to the twist than I first picked up on. Revisiting Episode Three I found plenty of duct tape and a photo of someone digging a grave in Jefferson’s office. Fan theories reveal other small hints left that Jefferson might not be on the level.

The game strongly suggests Nathan and Jefferson are in cahoots and they make sense as antagonists for Life is Strange. Max and Nathan/Jefferson are very much light and dark sides of photography. Max comes at the hobby from an innocent place, an up and comer interested in finding her footing in the art form. Her photographs aim to capture the beauty of the world around her, including charming wildlife and cultural snapshots of Arcadia Bay. It’s not that this is the only good way to do photography, equally as valid are the snapshots in Nathan’s bedroom of the grim and macabre, but the darkest of Nathan and Jefferson’s photography is for themselves at the expense of others. We’re introduced to the idea of photography as a tool of invasiveness and discomfort through David who wants to use surveillance on his home and workplace, but even he believes he’s ultimately helping others and his plan has a cold utilitarian nature that the rest of Blackwell’s photography doesn’t. Nathan and Jefferson’s photography is deliberately malicious and is meant to violate and attack. If Max is about immortalising moments of beauty, Nathan and Jefferson are about immortalising people's pain, creating and savouring in permanent records of people's’ vulnerability. I wonder if Nathan has glommed onto Jefferson so tightly because his own father figure clearly isn’t very nurturing of him.

The true feat of wonder in Episode Four is how much ground the story manages to cover without it feeling like the pacing is broken. Over the length of this chapter you go from sitting by the bed of your dying friend in another timeline to getting drugged over Rachel’s body in the junkyard via a dormitory investigation, a marital breakup, a school party, and more. It’s typical for a story to become denser with plot as it goes but it’s impressive just how far Life is Strange runs with it.