Reconciling ME3's ending with the Trilogy

Someone play me a dirge. Bioware, how did you let it come to this? I have to sit here and riddle through the garbage in order to mask your shortsightedness and inconsistencies, solely because I love Mass Effect more than you love honest good sense?

Hard truths, people. We're stuck with the stain of Star Brat and Hudson's ego. We can rail against them all we like, but it won't change. The only way I can make peace with that nonsense and enjoy playing the trilogy again is to find a way to reconcile the rest of the trilogy with the thematically grotesque and fundamentally brain-dead ending. I will attempt to do so with logic. This will not be easy. I may require help.

Broad strokes first. If the Star Brat controls the Reapers and lives in the Citadel, much of the central conflict of ME1 with Saren trying to find the Conduit is rendered moot. Wouldn't Sovereign just say, "Hey, don't sweat it, Saren my pal, my boss works on the Citadel and he can just open that baby up for us. No need to track down this kooky Prothean planet looking for a backdoor! We got one built in!"

Obviously Sovereign didn’t have that option, or ME1 would’ve been a short game. So logically this means one of either two things: either the Star Brat wouldn’t open the Citadel, or he was incapable of opening the Citadel.

So what do we know about the Star Brat? There’s never been mention of him before (thank Christ); the Reapers never suggested they had a doofy incorporeal midget for a boss, so I’m left to gather my facts from his ten minutes of screen time. In that period, I come to understand that the Star Brat likes to hang out by absurd machines, and he insists that he controls the Reapers. I know from speaking to the little twerp that he spews circular logic like normal people exhale, exhibits seriously flawed reasoning, and has a laissez-faire approach to endowing Messiahs. He’s admitted to being a virtual intelligence that turned the civilization who created him into the first Reaper, against their will. In my opinion, this is not a person to be trusted at their word.

We also know that he shows up at the Crucible and insists that he knows everything about it, and what the consequences of activating its various modes will be. How could he know that? This a strange new machine, never before built, and he’s been stuck on the Citadel for forty-million-odd years. I’m supposed to believe he knows what the Crucible does just because it hooked up to his home? What, is the Crucible plug-and-play like my frickin’ iPod?

No, sirs and madams. I think he’s full of it. He’s a dangerous, delusional program that is operating on flawed logic and has admitted genocidal tendencies. We are not taking him at his word. The Reapers have never acknowledged him, either. If they were operating as a hive-mind or if he was their overlord, the Reapers—who have demonstrated time and again that they dislike being destroyed—would have swooped down upon Shepard the moment s/he floated up to the Crucible and even ATTEMPTED to approach the Destroy option. Star Brat mutters something about changing variables, and this is why he’s helping Shepard, but I’ve established that the Plug-and-Play Leprechaun is not to be trusted. This leads me to believe that the Star Brat is lying, he has no control over the Reapers, and they’re oblivious to what’s happening on the Crucible because they’re busy duking it out with the Victory Fleet.

Back to my original query, I’m inclined to believe that the Star Brat has no power over the Citadel. He couldn’t open the Citadel for Saren and Sovereign; he didn’t even know what was going on out in the galaxy. He’s just a twitchy little program floating around the bowels of the Citadel. If he even created the first Reaper—and that’s one big if—I’d say Harbinger floated off and wanted nothing more to do with the little twerp. Else why would the ultimate goal of the Reapers be to assimilate organic life, while the Star Brat’s ultimate goal seems to be to encourage random passers-by to rewrite the genetic code of all sentient life? Unless they wanted to destroy the Reapers instead. They could do that, too. He’s fine with that.

This rant is getting long, so I’m going to stop here for now. I don’t feel that I’ve made a conclusive point, but it’s a step in the right direction. I’m going to proceed, and the next big problem I see is ME2, what with the main plot in the second game being the Collectors focusing on harvesting humanity in order to create a human Reaper. Without the original Dark Matter ending, this motivation is completely invalided. Star Brat has no reason to focus exclusively on humanity—again invalidating his claim that he controls the Reapers—so why did the Collectors care? That’s next on the list.

So, thoughts? Does empirical evidence suggest that the Star Brat is delusional?

I'm not sure that it matters.

The Catalyst's stated control of the Reapers totally cheapens them as villains, so I'd really love for him to be grossly exaggerating in that regard. I'd also agree with you that the consistency of the game's plot dictates he has no direct control over the Citadel, at least as of the Prothean interference 50000 years ago. He doesn't verbally contradict this either. Whatever the Protheans did to make the Citadel relay nonfunctional worked, but Vigil wasn't aware of everything they did to accomplish it. One way or another, they unplugged this particular AI from the controls. They never met the Catalyst if he is to be believed, but after this ending, I suspect they learned they had to do much more than merely alter the Keepers.

Even if he has no direct power over the Reapers though, he's still clearly Reaper-aligned, and you can check out the Refusal ending to quell any doubts there. Thinking he's just some random AI that "happens" to be there for no reason and has no genuine connection to the Reapers would be a bit of a stretch and then some.

The lore even foreshadows him a bit, if you take his stated purpose at face value: A Volus was investigating the planet Klencory for its connection to "beings of light" whose purpose was protect against the "machine devils." Those devils were previously assumed to be the Reapers, but the Catalyst's nature - and Jessica Merizan's Twitter comment indicating he is one of those "beings of light" - sheds new, uh, light, upon that tidbit.

Being Reaper-aligned, it's definitely out of character for the Catalyst to give Shepard a legitimate Destroy option that's not a trick though...or any other option that's not a trick. That by itself cheapens the Reapers' integrity as villains and perennial deceivers. Even if the Catalyst has devolved into little more than a quirky cheerleader for the Reapers, he's on their side and familiar with their methods (that said, I suspect he's telling the truth about being their designer and an avatar for their collective consciousness). By all rights, the Catalyst should be a totally unreliable source of information (particularly regarding how to stop the cycle) precisely BECAUSE he's aligned with the Reapers, yet the actual endings corroborate the Catalyst's honesty about Shepard's options and apparent omniscience regarding the magical Crucible.

The end result opens up a slew of thematic contradictions (spitting in the face of the rest of the series) and absurdity after the Reapers' billion year track record of deceit, especially considering what always happened to the people who believed their lies about Control and Synthesis...every other time. If we are to take the epilogues literally - as we pretty much have to in the wake of the Extended Cut - then not only do they vindicate the Catalyst's reliability as a source of practical information on ending the cycle (to my great dismay), but they make his sanity a bit of a moot point: Regardless, the Mass Effect series cannot be thematically consistent given the current outcome of the Synthesis and Control endings. Even the Destroy ending is as thematically broken as it is morally broken, because of the great pains the series took to establish synthetics as a valid form of life, and there's no reason for Shepard to trust up front that the Destroy option actually works as advertised...but unlike the other two options, at least it isn't a complete parody on every level of all the practical themes and lessons we've learned time and again from every other major conflict in the series (i.e. don't trust the Reapers, beware indoctrination, and be careful not to lose yourself to the point of doing their work for them).

If the Catalyst really WAS lying about all of these things, that would do a great deal to fix the ending...but only if the epilogues were changed to reflect his dishonesty. They haven't been, and Indoctrination Theory has been carelessly discarded and insulted, so I don't think that leaves much to salvage.

On the subject of Harbinger and his mission for the Collectors: Now that the dark energy plot has been scrapped, a lot of Mass Effect 2 seems superfluous besides the character development, but the human reaper could still be rationalized on other grounds: Harbinger could have simply viewed the humans as the best candidates for creating a Reaper capital ship (as opposed to a lesser Destroyer), which could resume Sovereign's role of trying to give the Reapers a shortcut back into the galaxy. Sure, the fact that it only took the Reapers two or so years to travel to the Milky Way "on foot" presents a plot hole, but that hole was always present: One way or another, Sovereign had been trying to get the Reapers into the galaxy for at least a century and a half (maybe several centuries?) before they finally gave up on shortcuts. They were STILL trying to avoid making a trip at the time of the Arrival DLC. Chalk it up to power conservation maybe?

As badly as the ME3 ending turned out though, scrapping the dark energy theme was actually a good thing in my opinion. It arbitrarily introduced a totally superfluous environmentalist theme to an already moving story about entirely different themes, and the idea of creating a human reaper to stop it was quite a contrivance in the first place. I like Drew, but that particular idea smelled horrible. It's like he decided midway through the series that he wanted to turn Mass Effect into a global warming Aesop for no good reason, then tried working backwards from this whim to draw some shaky connection to the main plot. If I'm correct in that assessment, it was functionally similar to the very mistake Casey Hudson and Mac Walters ended up making. The subplot intrigued me in Mass Effect 2, but I'm ultimately glad that particular cancer was stopped before it spread further.

In contrast, the organic-synthetic conflict explanation for the Reapers' cycle follows much more organically from the characters and themes present in the first game (from Eden Prime on), and it allows for deeper and more focused exploration of them. I feel as though it belongs in the series, and the dripping irony of the Reapers' motivation only adds to its appeal for me. If the team had moved forward with the dark energy story instead, I feel that it would have fit very poorly (despite foreshadowing) and created a lot of incoherence and confusion of purpose in Mass Effect 3 that would have presented itself much earlier than the ending. Leaving Mass Effect 2's relevance to the main story arc dangling was preferable to me in this case...I can live with leaving it as an wonderful exercise in character development, because that aspect paid off in the final installment (e.g. Mordin). The Mass Effect 3 ending was still completely botched so badly that it wrecked the credibility of the entire series, but up until the very end things were thematically clean and otherwise going pretty swimmingly (even though the Priority: Earth mission was underwhelming). Even after the original endings were released, the Indoctrination Theory left hope of "epic win" after all...until it became clear that Casey Hudson and Mac Walters wanted to stick with their "artistic" "integrity."

I refuse to accept that a highly advanced technological entity which created the doom machines like the Catalyst, hasnt got any emergency and safety protocols to secure its fluid operation. So when built it should have override controls for using the Citadel relay and repair programming control over the Keepers. Anything else is just bad writing and it is so that renders ME1 following ME2 completely pointless. This is what i am posting in some threads here for a couple of days.

But these problems surfaced with its introduction at the final stage of the game. The problem starts from the very beginning, with the introduction of the Crucible. I ve posted months before how stupid it was its convenient introduction, and because is the driving force of the main plot, as one it fails when you meet the Catalyst. I also have stated that the main plot is similar to the DA:O plot which was more than superb as a game and narrative, but that says much about Bioware's acclaimed "Artistic Integrity".

But what will have happened if the Catalyst was never there and we had to deal with the Crucible itself only?
Using the tested DA:O, i think we would have seen much better endings, better conclusions to Shepard's story with fewer inconsistencies and holes.
If we follow the same path a great battle with TIM could have occurred through the ruins of the Citadel for destroy, we could have battled Harbinger for control if we were persuaded by TIM's logic.
We could achieve human-only godhoud ascedancy after reasoning with TIM and fighting with Harbinger. Note that galactic wide Synthesis as it was presented it is simply space magic, but and since Shepard is human a Tuchanka genophage solution using human molecules could work for humans only.
Or and due to Paragon/Renegade points and EMS the crucible could not work so a conventional victory could be achieved or not, but after a fight with Harbinger and/or TIM. Shepard could survive or not dependant on those factors too on all endings, he could use Anderson or TIM for the Human Ascendancy (New Synthesis) ending or again use TIM or Anderson for the Control ending.
No Catalyst, no plot holes, no OOC Shepard at the end.

Hudson and Walters (along with Gamble) driven by arrogance and greed are the only responsible for the messy state of ME3, both original and EC (although EC is far better executed and retcons and polishes the stupid endings). Their biggest error was the speculation game that was played from the moment people finished vanilla and up to now to some extent.
An unknown to me decision maker from EA or Bioware or both, is the responsible for the ME3 PR mess and mistreatment of the majority of the fanbase. These are the ones i blame and that is what i keep. Bioware's emploees like Stanley Woo, Jessica Merizan, Chris Priestly and others were forced to take this stance and hard worked (with some problems in communication with their angry fans) to battle with the justified mob in BSN (and in a much lesser extent here), they are not to be blamed, because you cant blame a tool. If someone shoots you, you dont blame the gun. They told them to confuse and maybe lie, they did what were told.

For me ME universe is ME1 and ME2, there was a game called ME3 but is a rogue game not made by the same company that made the first two games.

I love the analysis, but did want to nit-pick one little point. The Catalyst openly admits that the Crucible changed him. How "just an energy source" (as he calls it) changed him is beyond me, but given the nature of the 4th ending (which I view as "overriding" his changed nature and allowing him to revert back to his "solution"), we are possibly justified in presuming he's not too favorable towards some of the choices he has to present.

In the general sense, I'm fine blaming both: A hitman's employer uses him like a gun and expects him to work on command like an unthinking machine, so the employer bears responsibility...but contrary to the employer's expectations, the hitman in fact has free will of his own and can always choose to do the right thing. It's a tall order to ask good people to forfeit their jobs rather than lie, but they're still responsible for their own choices in life, and that includes whether they carry out unethical policies. If someone lies on behalf of EA, it doesn't make them any less of a liar.

Regardless of the severity of the crime, the Nuremburg Defense is universally invalid. The same principle still applies to unethical acts that fall within the boundaries of the law. Heck, one of the reasons the world is such a mess is that ordinary, good (but fallible) people are corrupted by the totally sociopathic institutions that employ them (and nearly all collective institutions become this way over time, from companies to governments to nonprofits), and nearly everyone is willing to act contrary to their morals for a paycheck. If more people were more resistant to becoming a "cog in the machine," strength in numbers would make it easier for more to join in that refusal, and starving the machine would force it to change. As it stands, we're the ones changing, and our general refusal to take accountability for our actions under someone else's employ is gradually eroding our humanity. Nearly everyone faces this dilemma to some degree, so it's easy to empathize. The longer we continue to shirk personal responsibility for our own actions though, the worse this problem is going to become.

Public relations SHOULD be about developing honest, open relationships between a company and its customers. When a company screws up, it is their responsibility to humbly own their mistakes and learn from them to maintain a healthy relationship with their customers. Frankly, this would go over much better with customers and foster better long-term profits than stonewalling and issuing managed statements that consider "truth" irrelevant. Modern corporate PR works totally differently though, because this concept is totally foreign to puffed-up, narcissistic managerial types with no ethical grounding. They don't understand how to relate to other people except in terms of superficial charm and power plays, to the point where even an apparent concession (releasing a free DLC) is meant solely for the purpose of image control. Boards of Directors are largely populated with the same kind of people, and combined with a short-sighted corporate culture driven by quarterly profits über alles, this is toxic to the long-term health of a company. Their idea of "strength" equates to brazen sociopathic arrogance, so they naturally disrespect any genuine display of modesty, contrition, fair play, or honest admission of mistakes...instead, they think they can steamroll over any problem if they act "tough" and present themselves as justified in everything they do. If they're insistent enough that they're never wrong and lie enough about everything to promote this image, they can point to their unwavering "strength" as evidence of their perfection. Samsung has never had to update the firmware their hard drives...a flawless record they kept by fixing a fatal issue in a particular hard drive's firmware without changing the version number. EA is much, much worse, and pretty much nothing is beneath them in their shameless image management quest. I don't think I have to list any examples on this particular board, but I just love their smug response to winning an award for being the worst company in America. The truth has literally no bearing on the company's official stance on any matter. It's all image, image, image...corporate PR is a narcissistic corporation's exercise in self-righteous grandstanding.

Anyone who willingly acts as an enforcer for this kind of heavy-handed, destructively reality-averse "image management" has to recognize they're going to be tainted by it. Stanley Woo made his own bed of fan hatred with his haughty demeanor during the whole "END OF LINE" fiasco, and I don't have any real sympathy for him. Jessica Merizan and Chris Priestly deserve to be considered on their individual merits though, and I'm not familiar enough with either of them to make any judgment. Innocent until proven guilty, and all.

Regardless, a PR department can only be blamed for its own actions. Bad PR made this controversy explode where good PR could have quickly alleviated the anger, but the real failure here is ultimately in the game itself.

Oh, I know, but that's just adding more misery on top of the pile. The "change" in the Catalyst coming from the Crucible docking at the Citadel is pretty much an arbitrary contrivance driven by a writer's burning need to redirect the plot on a whim at the last possible moment instead of letting it flow from the existing characters, themes, and setting...I don't buy it. Actually, I ranted about it a bit the other day.

I still can blame the employees doing their hard work (and i believe it was very unpleasant for them) because they told them to do so. They were not personal contractors, just average Joes who's job is to stand forth and take the blame for others undeserved.
I may not like their way of doing things but i sympathize with them, i ve been in a more or less same situation my self and i had to do what i was told because i have bills to pay, even if that made me feel awfully bad.
Their decision makers, who ever are, are the ones to blame here. The persons deciding this damage control line of defense are the ones that made the fans angry of Bioware and (as you say @TroggleMonkey and i agree) the game itself.
And that was not a great crime, mistakes do happen. My hope is that any of us involved in this ugly situation has learned their lessons and act better next time.

Mistakes happen, yes. But when nearly 100 THOUSAND (using combined numbers from all the different anti-ender communities) people make known their preferences, and Bioware routinely dismantles or ignores them, we cross the line from mistake to willful defiance. No matter. I shall willfully deny them my money when Retake Omega comes around.

And that is a healthy thing to do @Gatsbyfollower because anything related to ME3 will refresh the memories of this terrible controversy. My advice for all is to let go in peace and be on stand by, hoping that Bioware can change for the better after this.

Thanks for your analysis, TroggleMonkey. I know I'm grasping at straws trying to discredit Star Brat, because what I'm really fighting is sloppy writing, but I feel that I have to try. His sole claim to validation is that the epilogues follow pretty much how he tells you they will, and simply taking part in the endings is thematically abhorrent to everything we've experienced prior to that moment in the story. Refusal is the only tolerable option, one in which there isn't an ending at all, but Destroy is the least bitter pill to swallow that provides any sort of resolution. It's still taking the Devil by the hand and asking for a dance, but at least I'm not getting raped afterwards. As much.

Basically all I'm trying to do is convince myself that Star Brat can still exist in the Mass Effect storyline and not sink the whole bloody structure with its logic flaws. Not because I want to, but because I'm left no other choice if I want to replay the trilogy without deluding myself about what's waiting at the end.

Ultimately, I prefer to think that the Reapers cut all ties with Star Brat after he created Harbinger. Sovereign famously says, "We have no beginning, we have no end." I'm not likely to take the word of one genocidal machine over another, but that does tell me something of Reaper psychology. He clearly was created, just as he clearly ended, and he knew he wasn't immortal, but Sovereign preferred to think of himself as being such and not having a creator. Either Harbinger lied to him about Star Brat, or Sovereign suffered from an oh-so-organic foible: arrogance. He chose to believe he was better than lesser beings. All Reapers felt this way, from Shepard's dialogues with them. They disdained the squishy, fleshy species, thinking we were only fit for Hoovering. Star Brat seems to fundamentally disagree, because he let an organic decide the future of the galaxy. The Reapers always seemed unified of purpose to me: gobble up organics. It contradicts Star Brat's decision to let Shepard roll the dice. The only explanation that make sense to me is that the motivation of the Reapers was separate from the Star Brat. They had common origin, and Star Brat still shares their ideology--thus him pushing Synthesis as the prime choice--but Star Brat feels like a relic to me, a starting point that the Reapers long outdistanced.

I agree on your thoughts about Dark Matter. Interestingly, in light of Shepard's conversations with the Reapers over the course of the trilogy, it seems to come out that we never learn what the Reapers were really doing. Harvesting us to make another capital ship is a proven and tangible motivation; every sentient species works towards reproduction. The motivation of the Reapers was never expanded in ME3 by anything outside Star Brat's ramblings. They still wanted to harvest us all, or kill the ones they felt were genetically unsuitable; they kept their higher purpose to themselves, if they had one at all. Star Brat claims he set them in motion millions of years ago, and I can buy that. But I think the Reapers left him behind on that same day.

The Crucible is fundamentally screwy, of course. If it's a desperate plan to destroy the Reapers, enacted by the races they've harvested over the cycles, why provide the options for Control and Synthesis? If it's a Reaper trap, why provide the option for Destroy? The easy explanation would be to point a finger at Star Brat himself. The time between the Crucible plugging in and Shepard arriving isn't terribly long, a matter of minutes. But as EDI has shown us, these synthetic programs are capable of working fast. It isn't hard to believe he might have sabotaged the Crucible, changing the way the device's creators intended it to work. How he did this is up in the air; if he's been hanging out on the Citadel for untold millions of years, one thing he'd have in his back pocket are contingency plans. Maybe some original Reaper genetic material to corrupt the Crucible into making Synthesis possible, the flavor of stupid he most espoused. The whole premise of him screwing with the Crucible is pretty thin, but then, how does one justify space magic?

This begs the question: if he did screw with the Crucible, why would he leave a Destroy option? Well, I've always believed his logic was pretty spotty. If he's a deranged and broken intelligence, why wouldn't he think that a different form of genocide is viable? He killed his creators, why not allow someone else to destroy his creations?

Anyway, that's how I want to justify it. Star Brat is a relic, the starting point of the Reapers but long abandoned; a flawed and broken ghost screwing with other people's machines. The Reapers are under no one's control but their own, with Harbinger as their de facto leader. They want to process organics in order to make more of themselves; if they have an ulterior motive, we never knew, because they didn't deign to share it with us squishy inferior types. And one thing held thematically true about the endings: just because the choices are offered, doesn't make them all morally correct. Accepting Synthesis is letting the Reapers win. Assuming Control is proving TIM right, corrupting Shepard, and letting the Reapers win. Destroy is the least repugnant offer. Refusal remains a middle finger to the fans, and I can't help but feel like they broke the fourth wall with that option, in very bad taste.

I think I can swallow Star Brat if I consider him in that light. It's bitter, and fallible, and I wrote more internally-consistent narratives when I was twelve, but I can deal with it. I can play Mass Effect again on these terms.

I pretty much just went and wrote my own ending, one that I felt made more sense, was thematically consistent and had Normandy fighting Harbinger, which is always awesome.