Without having to go into too much detail for those of my readers who are unfamiliar with the games, just before the game reaches its climax, the protagonist, Commander Shepard, and his/her team recapture an ancient virtual intelligence, or VI, a sort of computer that behaves to mimic intelligence for ease of interface but is not actually intelligent, that contains information on where the MacGuffin, known as the Catalyst, is located. Supposedly, the MacGuffin is the key component to a super weapon, referred to as the Crucible, of ancient design intended to be used against the Reapers, the ancient, synthetic entities assaulting the galaxy.
Mind you, up to this point, the Catalyst is simply a MacGuffin. It is nothing more and nothing less; so far as we, the audience, have been informed, the Catalyst is just a plot device meant to be used with the Crucible to stop the Reapers. Up until now, no one even knows what they actually do, let alone what they are, so we're kind of just meant to accept them at face value as plot devices. The Crucible, for further explanation, has supposedly been constructed by different civilizations over numerous Reaper cycles, the period of approximately 50,000 years between when the Reapers arrive and wipe out civilization, and it has never been completed, essentially meaning that you have numerous civilizations attempting to build it in the hopes that it might save them. Such behavior is nonsensical, but plausible enough that I can work with it.
The VI reveals that the Catalyst is, in fact, the Citadel, a huge space station/city in the Serpent Nebula that has served for thousands of cycles as a sort of "galactic capital", with no one really knowing its origins. It even serves in the game as the main hub from which the player can find side missions and purchase goods. It is then revealed that a major antagonist, "the Illusive Man", affectionately referred to by fans as "TIM", who runs a secret organization, Cerberus, devoted to "furthering the goals of Humanity", has informed the Reapers that Shepard has obtained the VI and is now aware of the Catalyst's identity/location. It is not clear how TIM managed to communicate with the Reapers directly, but since it's obvious at this point that he's been Indoctrinated, despite not knowing it himself, we can assume the Reapers were willing to listen, if, indeed, they even needed to speak. Whatever the means, Shepard is then informed that the Citadel has been moved to Earth's orbit.
Now, here is where the first major plot hole enters into the ending. Why Earth? Why do the Reapers suddenly, discovering that their greatest foe has discovered the secret to defeating them, immediately take the Citadel to the human homeworld? Isn't that just a little TOO convenient? Well, in a sense, yes, it is a little too convenient, but it is also explainable. Earth was the second planet the Reapers assaulted directly, and we already know the reason for this. In fact, the only reason it wasn't the first was because the Reapers essentially had to fly through Batarian space just to get there, so they, of course, proceeded to start destroying the Batarians on the way. The reason they target Earth is exactly because it is the human homeworld.
Let me put it this way: you are an entity several hundreds of thousands of years old. In all those hundreds of thousands of years, you've never once even been scratched by another living being. Then, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, some little bug comes along and pokes out your eye. In this analogy, you are the Reapers and Shepard is the bug. In the first Mass Effect, Shepard managed to do what had never been done -- EVER -- by preventing the Reapers' arrival when the Reaper Sovereign attempted to open a Mass Relay, a form of extremely rapid faster-than-light travel, in the middle of the Citadel. In the second game, Shepard manages to lead a team into the heart of the galaxy and either capture or destroy a human Reaper (I'd attempt to explain this one, but it'd really take way too much time than I have for writing and you have for reading to be worth it). So, yes, the Reapers have every reason to think that humans are special, as it is a human that has managed to be the only being in hundreds of thousands of years that could manage to make them rethink their strategy.
So, in that case, why bring the Catalyst straight to Earth? Why not take it somewhere out of the way? Well, I can answer that question with a single word: Harbinger. Harbinger is the oldest known Reaper, effectively the oldest living thing in the known universe, and is, arguably, the leader of the Reapers. Little is known about the Reapers and their origins, but there are a few things that we can say for sure, and especially about Harbinger in particular. Harbinger has an almost fetishistic desire to oversee its plans personally, as we hear over and over again when it "assumes control" of various minions in the second game. Harbinger gets a hard-on for doing the most important jobs itself, which makes its minimal role in Mass Effect 3 seem all the more bizarre, but, well, for arguments' sake I'm taking this for what it is. It makes sense, then, that if Harbinger wants to protect something, it would keep whatever it wants to protect as close by as possible. And, if Harbinger wants to destroy something, it would either be there for its destruction or assume control of something that is. In short, Harbinger would be at Earth in order to destroy humanity, and the Citadel would be at Earth because Harbinger would want to be able to personally keep an eye on it.
We now return to our stupid-ass ending, already in progress. After using the combined fleets he/she has gathered from around the galaxy, Shepard breaks through the Reapers in orbit around Earth, making it possible for the Shepard's ship, the Normandy, to dispatch a landing party. With Shepard in the lead, the landing party break through the front lines and establish a forward position near the space below the Citadel's geosynchronous orbit over London. Alliance troops line up for a final run toward what the military leaders refer to as a "conduit", a weird beam of light running from the ground up into the Citadel. What is the conduit? The only explanation I can come up with is that it is some sort of built in function of the Citadel designed to hold it in geosynchronous orbit. Alliance troops, including Shepard and his/her mentor, Admiral David Anderson, charge the conduit on foot in a momentary bout of stupidity, and after fighting off a massive onslaught of Reaper-created monstrosities, are met with none other than our old friend Harbinger in the sky, who proceeds to blast the crap out of Shepard and the remaining soldiers with a death ray, and Shepard blacks out. That's it for Harbinger. Thanks for the cameo!
Shepard awakens right where he/she blacked out, armor decimated, limping and down to just a pistol to fight off the remaining Reaper forces, all the troops in the immediate area dead or dying. Radio chatter reveals that everyone is dead, giving the order to all remaining soldiers to retreat. Shepard limps on toward the conduit, bravely shooting down a few weak enemies. Finally, Shepard makes it to the conduit and... is transported upward, into the Citadel. Apparently it functions as beaming technology, too. Who knew? Finding him/herself in a dark chamber among the bodies of thousands of people who didn't manage to escape the Citadel before the Reapers claimed it, and discovers Anderson is on the Citadel somehow too via radio communication. Shepard limps forward, meets Anderson, who is also badly wounded, at a terminal that they hope can be used to open the arms of the Citadel in order to let the Crucible in. In walks TIM, to reveal that he thinks it would be much better to CONTROL the Reapers than to destroy them, and he proceeds to begin controlling Shepard and Anderson, forcing Shepard to shoot Anderson in the left abdomen.
Here is where we meet our next major plot hole. If TIM is actually Indoctrinated, how is it that he is able to seemingly control Shepard and Anderson through Indoctrination? This is simple, naturally. TIM is a puppet of the Reapers, and the Reapers are in full control. He only thinks he has free will because the Reapers let him. Meanwhile, the Reapers exert their own control on Shepard and Anderson, killing to birds with one stone: Shepard and Anderson are reminded of the power the Reapers hold, and TIM continues to be a willing pawn doing the Reapers' bidding without even being aware. The alternative in this scenario would be the Reapers attacking directly, but they would deem this too dangerous because it would risk damaging the Catalyst. More on that in a minute.
We continue to go through an exchange in which TIM tries to convince Shepard that his plan of controlling the Reapers is the best plan and can work. This ends either with Shepard shooting TIM to save Anderson or Shepard managing to convince TIM that he's been indoctrinated, at which point TIM realizes the only way out is to kill himself, which he promptly does.
Shepard and Anderson then have a moment to chat, both exhausted from their wounds. This is the one redeeming feature of the ending, in my opinion, and I think most people agree with me. It's a touching moment in which Shepard and his/her father figure throughout the trilogy get to have a real heart-to-heart connection, both sure of their own impending deaths. Indeed, Anderson, a moment later, quietly passes on with Shepard looking on solemnly.
Some people point to a fresh, bleeding wound in Shepards left abdomen as evidence of Shepard's Indoctrination. The argument, in this case, usually points out that it's the same location that Shepard shot Anderson, claiming Anderson represents Shepard's resistance to Indoctrination and that Shepard is, in fact, shooting him/herself. This, of course, requires you to assume that Anderson is, in fact, a representation of Shepard's subconscious, which is at the very least as large a leap to make as simply making the assumption that Shepard accidentally reopened an earlier wound in via stress.
The radio then crackles to life again and we hear the voice of Admiral Hackett, who asks if Shepard can hear him and proceeds to say that the arms of the Citadel still aren't open and they need to be if there is to be any hope of getting the Crucible inside. Some people question how Hackett could know Shepard was on the Citadel if everyone supposedly died in the charge to the conduit, but I don't bother with this one too much. It's a relatively minor plot hole, and can easily be explained away with a handwave, ie. something about trackers being placed on all Alliance soldiers or something. Yes, such handwaves are cheap, but they exist because they are easy explanations for minor detail issues.
Shepard opens the arms of the Citadel, and the Crucible floats in. Hackett's voice over the radio informs us that nothing's happening and the problem must be on Shepard's end. This is when any idea that the ending was at least decent firmly plants itself in the crapper and proceeds to flush itself down into the municipal water system of Dumbassville. Suddenly, a patch of floor beneath Shepard's feet begins to levitate into the air, lifting Shepard up to a level above the terminal that apparently no one noticed was up there. Dogs CAN look up, but apparently every other species in the galaxy seems to have lost this ability. And what is there to welcome Shepard to this hidden chamber of one of the most populous locales in the known universe? Why, the Catalyst, of course! Wait... what? Yes, you heard right, that MacGuffin we've been chasing all this time is, in fact, a fully sentient AI that has been literally beneath your feet the entire time.
The Catalyst appears to Shepard in the form of a ghostly image, the shape of a young boy Shepard witnessed being killed by the Reapers on Earth, and has haunted Shepard's dreams throughout the game. There might be lots of things open to interpretation in this ending, but one thing has been made almost painfully clear by BioWare: the boy is intended to represent all the people Shepard could not save. Why the Catalyst chooses to present itself this way is anyone's guess, but it must be able to read Shepard's mind in order for this explanation to work. Considering that the Reapers are established to be able to control people's minds absolutely, it is not a huge leap in logic to assume that similar technology could be used to read minds.
Now here's where things get complicated. The Catalyst proceeds to explain to Shepard that it controls the Reapers, and that the Reapers exist in order to harvest organic civilizations and preserve them as Reapers every 50,000 years in order to prevent organics from developing synthetic life that will inevitably destroy organic life. Naturally, this notion is ridiculously circular logic, but their is a sort of brilliance behind it that I have worked out. This brilliance, of course, even if it proved true, would never counter the execution so bad it could only have been written by a drunk chimpanzee, but it does make sense. First, the Reapers claim to have more-or-less always existed. They claim to have witnessed synthetics destroying organics. Indeed, they even claim to have originally been victims of this tragedy. That's the first step in the equation. The Reapers have seen this happen, and work to prevent it from occurring again.
From that, we can suppose that, much in the same way that the Reapers "harvest" organics and preserve them as Reapers, the Reapers were, themselves, originally organics. This is the easy conclusion we make in this. It gets more complicated from here. The Catalyst claims to control the Reapers. Some people believe this to be contradictory to the idea that the Reapers are artificial intelligence, but it is and it isn't. The Reapers are still intelligent and capable of acting on their own, but that does not make the Catalyst's claim of controlling them a lie. We could suppose that the Catalyst was the central control of the Reaper cycle, maintaining their purpose and directing them to perform their tasks, but that it somehow lost control. The Reapers, for sake of argument, began to act against the will of the Catalyst.
Why would this system exist? Well, I take a large part of the inspiration for this theory from the conflict between the Geth, another artificial intelligence in the Mass Effect universe, and their creators, the Quarians. Much like the Geth, the first Reapers were created but feared by those among their creators that did not understand them. This resulted in a war that ultimately led to the destruction of the organic species that created the first Reapers. Much as the Geth remained mostly loyal to the Quarians even though they would fight for their own survival, the Reapers would be upset at the loss of their creators, so they begin a process of maintaining the galaxy in their stead. They create the Catalyst to function as a form of central computer to observe and guide their efforts, but over time the Reapers begin to slowly deviate from their original intentions. After witnessing further wars between organics and synthetics, they draw the conclusion that destruction is inevitable and begin the cycles as we see them in the Mass Effect games.
That leaves one major plot hole, however: the Crucible. How is it that a device, designed, added onto and constructed over numerous cycles, could ever perfectly connect to the Catalyst and manage to carry out a function? The answer comes from the only possibility: the Crucible was originally designed by the Reapers themselves. The Reapers are not stupid. They might do things that seem ridiculous to humans, but they never do them because they just weren't thinking. Everything they do is done with specific intent, even when that intent is flawed. The Reapers foresaw the possibility that they would become the very thing they hoped to prevent, so they designed a failsafe, the Crucible, to be used in order to stop them from destroying everything. The core design of the Crucible was the necessary function, but the added devices managed to modify its use, both empowering it and adding additional capabilities, such as being able to control the Reapers directly or to take a template and imprint that template on all life in the galaxy, thus explaining the differing results of the ending.
The rest is mostly little details that can be explained with handwaves, and I really don't feel like going into every little thing. I think I've covered the major points here. Again, a lot of speculation goes into it, but I don't think it requires any more assumptions than the Indoctrination Theory. In essence, it's a sort of Murphy's Law counter to IT more than a "better explanation". It does no better of a job tying all the plot holes together, just ties them together differently. It doesn't change the sheer massive fail that is the ending, but it is an alternative perspective.
I'm a bit late to the party. My apologies!
ReplyDeleteI was wondering what you thought of the rumor that Weekes (is that how you spell his name?) said that he didn't think the starkid could be 'trusted'.
Thinking of that, and also the fact that the only 'survive' ending is also the 'destroy' ending, made me wonder if the starkid wasn't a last ditch attempt at stopping shepard.
Still that idea works well with your theory too. And yes we are putting a real nice tuxedo on an otherwise pitiful piece of writing!
Traveler
Actually, that is another theory I've seen bandied about, and it is plausible, in my opinion. It's still theory, as it works with the evidence, but can only be supported as interpretation when in opposition to IT. Altogether, the lack of concrete information is just too much of a flaw to ignore. An ending that is open to interpretation should only be open to emotional or subtextual interpretation, not a debate on the text itself.
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