further thoughts on the Mass Effect 3: Extended Cut ending
On Monday I got a bit more work done on SOUL OF SKULLS than I had planned, so I decided to reward myself by watching the various endings for MASS EFFECT 3 on YouTube, since while I have all the games, Lord knows I’ll never have the time to finish them all.
So, my thoughts. Note that this discussion WILL CONTAIN SPOILERS.
First, the original endings were definitely too short. In fiction, I’m a big fan of the law of conservation of detail – of telling as much story using as little detail and as few words as possible. (Think of the famous six-word short story: “For sale: baby shoes. Never worn.”) The reader’s imagination, if properly fired, can create images far more vivid and emotionally resonant than 10,000 spilled words of description.
But.
The ending of a story, whether a novel or an interactive RPG like MASS EFFECT, is absolutely critical, since it must provide emotional resolution to the story. It doesn’t matter if the ending is sad or happy or ambivalent or whatever, so long as it provides emotional resolution to the story. (I think Aristotle in his POETICS called this the “catharsis” for the story – for better thoughts on Aristotle’s POETICS than I have, go read Tom Simon’s excellent essays on the topic.) The original endings, prior to the Extended Cut, were simply too abbreviated to provide the necessary emotional closure. Commander Shephard sacrifices himself/herself, a weird light shoots out of the Citadel, the Normandy crash-lands on an alien planet – and that’s all. So the Extended Cut DLC definitely improved upon the endings.
Now, as to the possible endings.
If you’re familiar with the MASS EFFECT series, you know that the premise of the games involves the Reapers, a race of intelligent machines. The Reapers wait outside the galaxy, monitoring any civilizations advanced enough to develop spaceflight. When the civilizations develop artificial intelligence, the Reapers move in and destroy them. Eventually, new civilizations grow, and then discover artificial intelligence…and then the Reapers destroy them, a cycle that has been going on for billions of years.
At the end of MASS EFFECT 3, Commander Shephard fights his/her way to the Catalyst, the control program behind the Reapers. The Catalyst explains that the purpose of the Reapers is to protect organic life from artificial intelligence, since AI inevitably turns on its creators and tries to destroy them. The Catalyst then presents Shephard with three choices:
-Destroy the Reapers, which will end the cycle, but render faster-than-light travel impossible, thereby ending galactic civilization.
-Control the Reapers, killing Shephard, but reincarnating him/her as the control program behind the Reapers, free to do as he/she wishes.
-Synthesis – the Reapers merge with organic life, with Shephard’s death acting as the template, creating a new order of organic/machine hybrids.
Of the three endings, I think my favorite is the Synthesis one. In it, I think the developers (purely unintentionally, I suspect) turned Shephard into a Christ figure. Just as the death of Christ reconciled God and man, so does the death of Shephard in the Synthesis ending reconcile the Reapers and organic life, ending the endless cycle of futile destruction and creating something new. The conflict between artificial intelligence and organic life is at last ended, and a new civilization of organic/artificial hybrids arises to colonize the stars.
Though the ending where Shepard becomes the immortal, invincible Space Tyrant of the galaxy is pretty creepily cool, too.
-JM