This review contains spoilers, click expand to view.
I have to start by saying that I am largely in agree with some opinions from the specialized critics about this Episode 3 - Chaos Theory.
What was expected by Episode 3 is, I think, a turning point in the plot, a deepening that should have revealed more about the mystery of Arcadia Bay... and yet it's not exactly what happened. Nice to go around the campus at night, breaking into the school and to play the "young investigators", certainly very beautiful the scene in the pool, sure a "different" moment, then move on to the escape and back to Chloe's house. There were also quite clever uses of Max's powers, such as the one with Warren's bomb to open the principal's office closed door, or the one where Max needs to steal Frank's camper keys without he finds out. However, in all this, apart the discovery that Rachel and Frank were doing more than Chloe thought – with the obvious 5-years old child hysteria by her – is that the plot has not been evolved particularly. So between good moments and certainly important scenes (but without real developments), the impression is that "Chaos Theory" has given less than it should. And then, there's the final section: ok, it's a breakthrough. Max, through a photograph, goes back in time – for the first time: back in time, not rewinding, or at least she never rewound so much – up to 5 years before. She finds herself in Chloe's house, as a 13-years old girl, a few minutes before her father takes the car and goes to his death, just exactly how things happened. Then? Then, with spontaneity – assuming that, in Life is Strange, time is represented in the wrong way, but it's ok, since the Novikov self-consistency principle is more complicated even if more "accurate" – Max saves Chloe's father and manages to change the past and thus the future, or more realistically to create a fracture in the spacetime in which an alternative story has developed, in which things are different. She is a member of the Vortex Club, David is a bus driver, her friend Warren... is no longer her friend. And finally, here comes the twist: though Chloe's father survived... his daughter finds herself paralyzed in a wheelchair. And it is here that finally the name of the episode, "Chaos Theory", assumes its meaning. But only at the end, in the last 10 minutes at most.
It was nice but there is no doubt that, from an episode almost as long as the previous two, it was expected something more. Maybe, there are now more questions than answers... than before. And only two episodes are remaining to the end of the story. And this new alternative universe? I wonder how it can end. I'm curious but I hope that, in the end, everything will come together.… Expand