Remember that Fridge pages are Spoilers Off
Fridge Brilliance
- How were Chloe and Kate both able to survive their encounters with Nathan while retaining the details (including the Dark Room in Kate's case)? After overdosing Rachel, Nathan lowered the dosage of drugs, which resulted in him underdosing Chloe and Kate.
- In the Sacrifice Chloe ending, why do people who weren't close to Chloe (such as Warren, Kate, and Dana) attend her funeral? They aren't there for Chloe; they're there for Max. These three are Max's best friends at Blackwell, and it would make sense for them to want to support their grieving friend. On that note, why is Victoria there too? Either because it was her best friend that murdered Chloe, or because she also admires Max. Maybe both.
- At first it seems odd that Jefferson would have an empty binder with "Victoria" written on it considering she's far from the "naive and innocent" type he likes for his illegal photo-shoots (he even says that she doesn't interest him as a "subject"). But it makes sense if you assume that he possibly created that binder as one of his "discipline" methods for Nathan, threatening to kidnap her to coerce him into submission.
Fridge Horror
- Everyone assumes there is one single timeline, and Max rewinding time undoes bad timelines by erasing their outcomes from existence. But what if there isn't, and Max's time travel works on multiverse theory? How many versions of Chloe were hit by the train after watching her best friend vanish, leaving her to die? How many times did you rewind?
- Why is Kate not present in the alternate universe? With Max in the Vortex Club, she was probably in on the bullying, and thus nobody talked Kate out of her suicide attempt.
- Max's powers are kind of a mix between spatial-temporal travel and Mental Time Travel. Sometimes she can physically move through space, but she mostly seems to bring her consciousness back to a certain point and lets it continue on from there. When she travels several years into the past and creates the alternate timeline, she still remembers everything as it happened originally. That might make it seem like simple Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory, except we see diary entries about Alternate Max's life at Blackwell and in the Vortex Club. Original Max doesn't have any memory of those, nor does she have any moments of dealing with conflicting mental information like a lot of other time travel stories. So what exactly happened to the Alternate Max's consciousness and memories?
- At the end of Episode 5, if you choose to sacrifice Arcadia Bay, Max, and Chloe leave the ruins of the town behind. Given the implication that the tornado was the universe trying to undo Max's constant saving of Chloe, who's to say it won't happen again wherever they decide to go?
- In the Sacrifice Arcadia Bay ending, it is implied that everyone in Arcadia Bay is dead. Since it's only implied, it is possible that there were at least some survivors. But remember Max's trek to the Two Whales, and all the people she had to help? Evan getting hit in the head by debris, the trucker trapped under a fallen beam, Alyssa stuck in a destroyed house, the fisherman stranded in a burning building, and Joyce and Warren (and Frank) in the diner (which explodes).
- In the alternate timeline, judging from her texts and journal entries in Episode 4, Max is a frivolous, borderline Alpha Bitch who doesn't really care about "unpopular" kids and in any event probably would've felt severely uncomfortable around disabled Chloe. If it hadn't been for the "real" Max, she might never have made good on her promise to visit Chloe, who would've been left by herself except for her family and died friendless and lonely when the tornado eventually wiped out Arcadia Bay.
- If you had Max euthanize Chloe in Episode 4, she immediately uses the photo to go back in time. However, that means that if this timeline continues on without her, Max wakes up in her own body, next to her dead best friend she hasn't seen in years, having unknowingly killed her and with an entire day's worth of memories missing. And, to make things worse, she may even be accused of homicide by William and Joyce (considering that both refused to euthanize Chloe in the first place and what Max did was more of a Mercy Kill than a legal euthanasia).
- In Episode 4, in the alternate timeline, Max's text messages mention that she's getting her submission for the Everyday Heroes contest ready for Jefferson and is fully planning on submitting it. Rachel Amber is still missing in this timeline, which means that Jefferson must be doing the same as he was in the other timelines with the girls. Regardless of the timeline, Jefferson is still going to get his photoshoot with Max.
- One side article about Jefferson informs the player that he was on a teaching tour before landing a permanent spot at Blackwell. The dark room in Arcadia Bay was originally a storm shelter. Max even notes that he was a famous photographer in the '90s. All this together means he might have created dark rooms all around the country to commit his crimes, by using the money and connections from his earlier career to find and worm his way into underground bunkers and higher learning institutions multiple times over.
- In the Sacrifice Chloe ending, David doesn't get his character development. He never expresses his care for Chloe, he doesn't get any moments of kindness or compassion, and (worst of all) he still has those cameras in the house. Although he probably eases up on the students because the cause of the disappearances has been caught, he's still a jerk willing to violate people's privacy to satisfy his paranoia. He may arguably be even worse because with his stepdaughter gone, Max having no place in his life, and Jefferson getting caught too late to help his victims, all his worst personality traits are being encouraged.
- His potential appearance in Life is Strange 2 seems to debunk this.
- Chloe never met Rachel in the alternate timeline. Instead, she befriended another girl named Megan Weaver, only for Megan to stop going to school and lose touch with Chloe. In Episode 4 in the main timeline, a Freeze-Frame Bonus in the Dark Room shows a file labeled "Megan", which is implied to be the same girl that Chloe befriended in the alternate timeline. DONTNOD confirmed in the Extra Life stream that it is indeed the same Megan. The newspaper shows that Jefferson still gets to Rachel in the alternate timeline. Why does Megan stop going to school?
- You'll notice that the alternate timeline still has the weird phenomena that occurred in the main one. Whether or not Max euthanizes Chloe, she's not going to be there for her, which means that it's unlikely she'll ever figure out why the phenomena are occurring or discover Jefferson's secret. The most likely course of action will be that Jefferson kills Max in the Dark Room during the storm, allowing Jefferson to ride out the storm in safety and get away scot-free. That, or Max ends up in jail for assisting Chloe's suicide.
- Jefferson lecturing about separating the photographer from their art (this is noted by Max when she prepares to spitefully think "go fuck your selfie" regarding Victoria's photos; she goes on to note, "don't confuse art with the artist") is his way of justifying what he does to young women. The creation of any kind of art is intimately linked to the artist's vision and method of forming it (be it painting, drawing, writing, or picture taking). By citing a belief in criticizing photos in isolation, Jefferson is essentially exhibiting consciousness of guilt; he knows full well that if he were ever found out, all of his pictures would instantly become suspect and any trends he started would fall flat, and his reputation as a teacher and mentor would be destroyed.
- Jefferson's true nature is that of a grimdark grayscale villain who excessively craves corruption and domination, within a colorful setting that is full of both human and environmental suffering. The contrast in color and light between everything associated with him versus everyone else and Arcadia Bay itself shows not just how different he is from everyone else, but how he poisons the soul of the entire town. Case and point, he has at least some form of hand in the suffering of every single major character in the game, and also inadvertently set the stage for the scene that kicked off the plot.
- He has obviously collaborated with the Prescott family's tightening of their financial stranglehold over Arcadia Bay, as evidenced by the poverty and misery discussed throughout the game as well as his access to their storm shelter bunker for use as his Dark Room.
- He became Nathan Prescott's mentor figure as part of the association with his family, nurtured the worst of his creepy tendencies into an accomplice to heinous acts against innocent girls, then killed him once he became a liability so he had no chance of redeeming himself. When Nathan finally realized he'd gone too far for nothing and was about to be disposed of, his last known act was to call Max, a girl he'd repeatedly threatened and accosted, and tearfully apologize for everyone he'd hurt while trying to warn her who the true culprit was.
- He secretly romanced Rachel Amber behind the backs of two potential lovers who were already troubled in their own right, as well as fanned the flames of her desire to leave Arcadia Bay and become a famous model to the point of deceiving both of them. This was all so he and Nathan could drug her up for use as one of his photography "subjects", resulting in Rachel's death when Nathan accidentally overdosed her.
- He further damaged Chloe Price's already fragile faith in humanity through his actions against Rachel along with Nathan, who, again, he cultivated into a minion. Said cultivated minion either fatally shot her in the stomach in the Blackwell restroom, or awakened her best friend's time havoc out of a desperate plea for him to stop. This time havoc resulted in no shortage of ways for Chloe to get seriously hurt or die in almost every possible iteration of the ensuing week, including one outcome where Jefferson himself shoots her dead at the junkyard after she's discovered the full extent of what happened to Rachel.
- He also similarly deflated what goodness was left in Frank Bowers through everything that happened with Rachel, causing his interactions with both Chloe and Max to be laced with a mutual air of danger, with either Max, Chloe, Frank, and/or his dog Pompidou being somehow hurt or even killed at the end of their encounters. Even if Max is able to carefully navigate her words and actions to avoid any of them hurting each other, the revelation that he sold Jefferson's accomplice the means that killed Rachel is shown to crush his spirit.
- He amplified the trouble within Blackwell to the point it triggered David Madsen, making the former veteran and security guard paranoid enough to start treating the school like it was under siege by an enemy at war and needed to be fortified by any means necessary including intrusive surveillance, damaging his relationships with everyone around him, not the least of which being his stepdaughter Chloe. Madsen is both miserable in dealing with Chloe's toxic temper, which gets worse after Rachel's disappearance, and devastated whenever he has to get news of her death, the stage for which Jefferson was the ultimate catalyst.
- He targeted Kate Marsh as yet another victim, leading to her getting trashed and becoming a kissing bandit on videotape via the Vortex Club, then drugged and taken to the Dark Room by Nathan to add to his portfolio of good girls' torture. When he realized that she had been underdosed by Nathan since she still remembered being taken "somewhere" that night, he slickly goaded her into suicidal despair, with Max's powers and compassion being the only reason she's possibly still alive.
- He caused Max Caulfield's reunion with her best friend upon returning to Arcadia Bay to become a horrifying adventure through the seedy hell that had crawled up and overtaken her hometown, despite his photography class being the main reason she wanted to attend Blackwell in the first place. Everything he did to Nathan and Rachel above resulted in Nathan and Chloe being in that restroom at the same time as Max, awakening her time powers and all the misery that came with them. He's also thus responsible for what happened with Kate, leaving Max horrified both when she saw Kate jump to kill herself (another moment which triggered her powers; Max may or may not have been able to talk Kate out of it after that but the event still left her scarred either way) and when Max and Chloe discovered the Dark Room and saw the evidence of what had been done to both Kate and Rachel — by his hand. Max may have also seen the picture of the similarly-drugged up Chloe in Nathan's room. She has most definitely seen the alternate timeline in which Chloe didn't lose her father, but got paralyzed instead, and the Price family went financially under taking care of her — while Max herself virtually abandoned Chloe for the Vortex Club of all people, with evidence showing Jefferson and Nathan, who is Max's friend now, still got to Rachel. And then there's the nightmare sequence. See Fridge Sadness below.
- He added emotional hardship unto Joyce Price-Madsen by proxy given everything he did to Max, David, and Chloe, making Chloe's relationship with David, reunion with Max, and general attitude towards life much harder than they had to be. Even the timeline in which Max manages to avert the death of her first husband and Chloe's father William is littered with sorrow thanks Chloe being paralyzed in a car accident and the family's ensuing medical bills putting them on the brink of losing their house. In every version of events, Joyce is doomed to either mourn the violent death of her daughter or be killed in a storm along with everything she knows. Which finally brings us to the last point below.
- Thanks to Max's powers, the second of week of October 2013 is littered with weather anomalies foreshadowing an apocalypse for every second that Chloe lives past the time she would've been killed by Nathan. Any rare version of that week in which Max succeeds at making sure Chloe isn't physically condemned to some painful death or another (as well as the alternate timeline in which she saves Chloe's father) results in Arcadia Bay being destroyed by a supernatural F10 tornado. All the other versions in which this doesn't happen still leave some fallout from his crimes, which are exposed when he and Nathan both end up either dead or in jail and no doubt will at least nosedive the town's faith in the academy. If Jefferson hadn't collaborated with the Prescotts and their ill-gotten fortune, using their resources for his sadistic pleasure and corrupting their unstable scion into his underling dealing drugs and packing pistols on campus grounds, Chloe isn't in the original situation in the restroom that leads to all this in the first place. Ultimately, Mark Jefferson, he who loves grim tones of grey, has ensured that a colorful idyllic town near Seattle will leave that week at best emotionally shaken, at worst completely annihilated.
- In Episode 1, Kate is seen suffering a meltdown near the dorm entrance. She was apparently trying to go back to her room but was blocked from entering and bullied by Victoria and her minions, and (unlike Max) had no means of defending herself.
- If the nightmare sequence is indeed Max's nightmare, then Warren's presence, lines and general behavior during the stealth section is this. Max is most likely so traumatized by what Nathan and Jefferson did to her, Chloe, Kate, Rachel, and multiple other girls that she may be developing trust issues towards men in her life, including her friend.
