So I played through Mass Effect 3 last week and finished it on Wednesday evening. By that time I had already heard about the widespread complaints about the ending, but I didn’t actually believe it until I saw it for myself – and now I kind of wish I hadn’t gone there at all. Despite my lowered expectations due to all the disappointment floating around on the net, it was worse than anything I could have expected. Absolutely nothing about that ending makes any kind of sense.
*** SPOILERS AHEAD ***
Naturally (for me), the first thing I did after exiting the game was jump on Google to find out what other people were saying about this. There is hope, it seems, with the rumors about it not being the “true ending”, but what especially piqued my interest are the dream- / indoctrination theories.
So I decided that I had to play through the last mission again and pay some more attention to the details. Thankfully I had saved the game right after the raid on the Cerberus base, so I was able to go back right away – this time with FRAPS running. Having played through it a second time, I have come to notice one thing that would indeed indicate (almost beyond doubt) that the ending is not what it seems:
The little boy
More specifically the dream sequences featuring him, aswell as their weird parallels to the final scene. Now these dreams are immediately recognizable as such because they take place in an eerie forest and contain a lot of surrealistic elements, but they have a few specific themes that stick out:
- The boy himself, who was killed right at the beginning of the game when Sheperd left Earth, appears in all of the dreams. (Although there are theories out there that he may be completely imaginary, since only Sheperd seems to perceive him.)
- Heavy use of echo/reverb with the voices.
- Sheperd moving very slowly.
Consider the three elements above, then look at the end sequence. Sheperd being limited to moving slowly can of course be explained by his/her injuries, but it is a parallel all the same. The echo/reverb in the voices is more interesting – when Sheperd is talking to the ghostly boy on the citadel, both their voices reverb, although it is very subtle for Sheperd. Leaving aside the fact that there is no air in space, this reverb seems quite out of place in that particular situation (huge open space).
The biggest WTF, however, is the boy himself. No matter which way you spin it, the fact that the “citadel-catalyst-entity” takes the form of this boy has very interesting implications. Think about it: the fact that the catalyst took this form means that he/it got into Sheperd’s head at some point. There is no other explanation. Either the catalyst read Sheperd’s mind and chose to take that form (for whatever reason), or it chose that form first and was projecting it into Sheperd’s mind from the beginning. In both cases, the catalyst has some kind of access to Sheperd’s mind – and by extension, so do the Reapers.
