Breaking Maxine Caulfield.
By Mitch Dyer
Life Is Strange seems unsure how to resolve its up-and-down emotional journey through the hardest point in protagonist Max Caulfield’s life. By Episode 5, Max is a changed person, hardened and frantically fighting for what she believes in, no matter the cost. The final episode, Polarized, puts her through a traumatizing gauntlet. The harrowing events of Episode 4 leave her captive and grieving, and the series finale capitalizes on her desperation with catastrophic results.
The unpredictability and danger of her time-rewinding power not only throws Max into undesirable timelines, it also begins to break her in ways that made my heart ache in good and bad ways. Guilting text messages from a dog and a dead girl haunt her bizarre nightmares, which involve both an infuriating and out-of-place instant-fail stealth sequence and terrific moments of empathy for certain characters. I’m confused about what this series wants to be, but I appreciate a lot about what it had to say about friendship, sacrifice, and remaking the past.
Polarized cleverly recaps the entire series, digging deep into Max’s psychological state as a result, by allowing you to relive it from new perspectives. Experiencing a huge moment from her childhood as a tiny Max sitting inside a snow globe is a trip — seeing yourself as a sad giant cuts deep.
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The tone, more than ever, swings wildly in Episode 5. What I enjoyed most from Life Is Strange is its grounded human drama, feel-good friendship and feel-bad family drama conveyed extraordinarily. Those moments are great in Episode 5, and even presented in brilliant ways.
Max Caulfield’s story feels like two incompatible pieces sloppily sewn together…
I really enjoyed Max remembering the best and worst points of her life while exploring her own mind, in particular. But when a scene turns suddenly from relatable issues to harsh negativity, Polarized suddenly feels like an episode from a different series. This stands out most with the cartoonish psychopath villain of Episode 5, whose dialogue with Max is almost entirely terrible “reveal the master plan” exposition and “you’ll never get away with this” cliches.
Max Caulfield’s story feels like two incompatible pieces sloppily sewn together, with moments of gut-wrenching greatness thrown in the middle. Each of the episode’s two endings — chosen independently from any previous decision or world state you’ve made — feel polarized themselves, like two separate conclusions to separate stories sharing only a similar theme.
Episode 5 spends a good amount of time nudging you toward one over the other, suggesting this is what it’s all been for — and it works. It’s a heartfelt, evocative, and long epilogue that ties up loose ends, perhaps a little conveniently, and sees Max learning a valuable lesson about living her life. On the other hand, the more selfish ending option leads to a brief, unsatisfying, and unhappy ending that pretends to be optimistic. It feels cheap and unfair given the massive number of meaningful choices that led to it.
Life Is Strange — Episode 5: Polarized is a fascinating exploration of a teenager deeply affected by loss, trauma, suffering, and failure. This is not the coming-of-age story Life Is Strange pretended to be early on, though. Polarized is destructive, unquestionably the bleak climax of the murder mystery that’s been dormant during most episodes, and it only somewhat works by the time Max Caulfield arrives to her ending. It’s disappointing to see Life Is Strange lean into its angrier story threads to complete its otherwise-touching human story, but its emotional closure and character resolutions make this a more memorable ending than its unnecessarily dark plot twists.
