I really, really love(d) the Mass Effect series of video games by the company BioWare. I also love(d) their Dragon Age series, or rather, the first game in said series since there are only two games in it thusfar. In fact, the Mass Effect series is my favorite video game series. Mass Effect 3, the last in the series, was almost universally lauded, but its ending was almost universally panned. The game gives you three final options to determine the fate of all life in our galaxy, and the reason that ending was so badly panned was because those three options sounded like they would do different things, but they didn't. Pretty much the exact same thing happened in all three of the endings, no matter what you picked, no matter what choices you had made in the first game, the second game, and earlier in the third game, you got a big explosion that was either red, blue, or green, and an ending that left a thousand more questions than it answered. This was the ending to a game series that had taught you since the very beginning of the first game that came out four years ago that what you do, what you decide, matters. And now it's grande finale tells you no, what you choose doesn't matter. Colorful explosion, gaping plot holes. That's what you get, no matter what.
Fans of the game, myself included, were outraged by this. To be told for four years that our decisions mattered only to be shown that they didn't in the end was unacceptable. People began posting videos and writing articles explaining why the ending was so unacceptable, pointing out its many, many plot holes and most all of them made excellent points that I agreed with fully.
Out of this fan displeasure (to put it lightly) spawned a prevailing theory about the ending, referred to as the Indoctrination theory, which you may notice I mention a lot in my questions up there. There are numerous videos, blog posts, etc. expounding on this theory, (example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZ7bsIpEKIg&feature=player_embedded), so I will not go into details here, but I was on board for this theory. It still left a lot of questions unanswered and opened up some new questions of its own, but it at least made more sense than the original ending, and made the three endings actually seem a bit different.
BioWare heard the outrage and quickly set to work on what they called the Mass Effect: Extended Cut, which was just an expansion of the ending to answer some of fans' most important plot-hole-related questions, and to make sure they feel like the decisions they made over the course of four years really did have an impact on the outcome. It would be entirely free to download and play. Now, here I am forced to give BioWare some serious props for listening to their customers. Not many companies, especially in the entertainment industry, are not very willing to go back and change something because their fans and customers are upset about it. But I just played through the extended cut last night, and I may be more pissed now than I was back in March when Mass Effect 3 first came out.
There are some positives to the extended cut. Firstly, the three options are now explained in more detail, so you understand more of what it is you're doing to the galaxy. Secondly, there is now a refusal option, where you can refuse to pick any of those three outcomes, though I would suspect this results in Earth's annihilation and likely that of the rest of the populated galaxy as well. Thirdly, some minor plot points, such as why your pilot was leaving you behind, and how did crew members who were just with you on Earth suddenly appear inside your ship, millions of miles away, were answered. So they managed to quell some things, but they still left open the biggest plot hole in the ending, and instead of addressing it, covered it up with some vague, sentimental monologue about rebuilding.
I must first mention that the Indoctrination theory, though it made, (to me), perfect sense, was shown to be untrue. So all of the evidence people on the internet compiled to support that theory, and support it damned well, was just a coincidence, I suppose.
So the Reapers, giant sentient machines that wipe out all higher organic life in the galaxy every 50,000 years, have finally begun their full-fledged attack and you--Commander Shepard--and the vast majority of the rest of the galaxy are making your final stand at Earth; I say "at" rather than "on" because there are both ground battles and space battles. Prior to this, you have discovered the blueprints to and built a giant weapon called the Crucible which should, if activated, blow the Reapers to kingdom come. The problem being, the Crucible has to be attached to the inside of a space station called the Citadel, which is under Reaper control and currently closed off. So as Commander Shepard, you and your comrades fight one hell of a battle on the ground and against all logical odds, Shepard manages to teleport to the space station to try to open it, despite being mortally wounded. Once Shepard gets there, after some shenanigans, he/she is transported to a room where the three options are presented: 1.) Destroy the Reapers for good, but also destroy all other synthetic life, 2.) Gain control of the Reapers and gain the ability to have them do as you wish, but lose your life, or 3.) Synergize your human, organic DNA with the info contained in the Crucible, thereby achieving the ultimate evolution of life, organic + synthetic, so that there will never be another reason for conflict to arise between these two groups, (which is accordingly why the Reapers were created in the first place; to stop this "chaos" between organics and synthetics. I'm choosing to ignore the flaws in this logic at this time).
So huzzah, you pick one of those. I picked destroy, because it is the only option where Shepard can live, and damnit, I'm attached to my Shepard. She's saved the galaxy three times at this point. She deserves her life, (and a promotion. Kaidan technically outranks her by two entire ranks. When did that asshole save the galaxy?). But here is where the ending--and by extension the extended cut, since it does nothing to rectify this--starts getting just straight-up nonsensical. The power exerted by the Crucible destroys, or in the extended cut, "badly damages" the Mass Relays, the portals in the ME universe used to make intergalactic space travel possible. I repeat: the things that make travelling between all these different worlds possible blow up. In the Sol system, (i.e. our solar system), fighting with you are a bunch of ships belonging to different races who have come together with humans to defeat this threat. And the portal that got them there to help you fight is gone. So...what? They're all stranded in our system now? With an extremely damaged Earth below that can barely even sustain those who live there after the war's devastation? No, no, the extended cut fixes this plot hole by showing the fleet casually flying past the blown-up mass relay like it's no big deal, while a voice-over spouts some sentimental sentences about "we can rebuild what was lost". While I don't doubt that with time things could indeed be rebuilt, in the extended cut I was shown one of my friends of another race happy back on his home planet with his wife and newborn baby. Now, I don't know much about Krogan, (his race), reproduction, but unless they have an extremely long gestation period and age extremely slowly once born, I don't see how this is possible. Never to my recollection was it mentioned that things like warp speed, (sorry to borrow from another Sci-Fi franchise), exist in this universe. They have faster-than-light travel thanks to the technology that's used in the Mass Relays, but faster than light is still not instantaneous when you're talking about thousands upon thousands of lightyears of distance. That would mean that the Mass Relays are utterly essential to getting around, at least with any great haste, and right now they are crazy broken. Well, fine. We fix the Sol relay so that it can be used again in a relatively short amount of time, even though we're not the original ones who built the things and no one knows 100% how they were originally constructed, (I'm ignoring this other plot-hole as well). But the relays work like portals; you go in one, you come out the other. So if all of the other ones in the galaxy are also inoperable, like we are shown in all of the possible endings, that means fixing the Sol relay wouldn't ultimately be helpful to fixing the rest; they'd still have to get there without them to fix them. Unless I utterly missed something, this would take months and months to do, if not years, and it would certainly be years and years before all of the relays in the galaxy were fixed, since they'd have to travel to each in turn without their aid. So how is Wrex back on Tuchanka with his baby so quickly? I don't know, and I never will.
(At this juncture I will point out that it is possible that that is not Wrex's first child, but one of many, so it could indeed be years ahead of time. But that still doesn't answer how we managed to fix the relays when no one in the galaxy was around when they were first constructed.)
This is the biggest plot-hole and the biggest bother to me, though there are many smaller ones, as I've pointed out above. The reason BioWare is like George Lucas is because, quite simply, they are getting in the habit of taking a crap on things I love. I loved 99.9% of Mass Effect, but those last 15 minutes killed me, and when I heard they were "fixing" it, I was so happy they were listening to their fans. But ultimately, they weren't, because the things that made fans upset--primarily the same-y-ness of the endings--remains. George Lucas tries to "expand" things, and fans just frown. BioWare is starting to do the same thing. I only hope they come out of this trend before I started wanting to punch them in the face as much as I want to punch Mr. Lucas.
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