The ending of Mass Effect 3 was the most disappointing thing since the ending of Beast Machines.
That’s probably because they were exactly the same, and made an equal
amount of sense. Which is to say none at all. The only difference is
that, with Beast Machines, the stupid ending was actually a step up from the majority of the show.
Mass Effect, as you may have heard, is a science fiction videogame trilogy released by BioWare from 2007 to 2012. In all three games, the player assumes the role of Commander Shepard, an officer in the twenty-second century Earth space military. Like in all BioWare games, the player must recruit a team of eccentric specialists with unresolved family issues, travel the game world forging alliances and gathering clues, and defeat an ancient force of evil being used by a once-respected traitor to the protagonist’s faction. In this franchise, the eldritch horrors in question are the Reapers, a mechanical race of giant intelligent starships who purge the galaxy of all advanced civilizations every 50,000 years. As Commander Shepard, you, of course, are the only one who can stop them from doing it again.
But let’s take a minute to recap for readers born since the turn of the century. Back in the mid- to late-’90s, one of the best kids programs on TV was Beast Wars, a computer-animated show that was kind of a sequel to the original Transformers cartoon from the ’80s, except with robots that turned into animals instead of robots that turned into cars, jets, and lampposts.
Mass Effect, as you may have heard, is a science fiction videogame trilogy released by BioWare from 2007 to 2012. In all three games, the player assumes the role of Commander Shepard, an officer in the twenty-second century Earth space military. Like in all BioWare games, the player must recruit a team of eccentric specialists with unresolved family issues, travel the game world forging alliances and gathering clues, and defeat an ancient force of evil being used by a once-respected traitor to the protagonist’s faction. In this franchise, the eldritch horrors in question are the Reapers, a mechanical race of giant intelligent starships who purge the galaxy of all advanced civilizations every 50,000 years. As Commander Shepard, you, of course, are the only one who can stop them from doing it again.
But let’s take a minute to recap for readers born since the turn of the century. Back in the mid- to late-’90s, one of the best kids programs on TV was Beast Wars, a computer-animated show that was kind of a sequel to the original Transformers cartoon from the ’80s, except with robots that turned into animals instead of robots that turned into cars, jets, and lampposts.
But where the original cartoon was made purely to sell toys, Beast Wars had a little more artistic integrity. True, it would not have existed
if Hasbro didn’t think it would help promote the corresponding toyline,
but there was a creative spark evident in the writing that the crass
commercialism of the original cartoon didn’t really allow for.
While
Season 1 consisted largely of forgettable stand-alone episodes, it also
laid the basis for the characters and mythology that would drive the
highly serialized second and third seasons. And despite all the running
plot threads and character arcs screeching to an abrupt conclusion when
Hasbro canceled the show at the last minute, Beast Wars still
managed to wrap everything up pretty well. Characters we cared about
died nobly (or futilely), Optimus Primal and Megatron had one last
bare-knuckle brawl, and the most interesting character in any iteration
of Transformers finally got his moment of redemption (I’m
speaking of course about Waspinator). Sure, it was a little rushed, I
guess, but all in all it was a pretty satisfying conclusion to the
characters and the series.
Then the sequel came out.
Then the sequel came out.
That’s not to say that Beast Machines
was all bad. Completely unnecessary? Yup! But it had some interesting
ideas and promising setups. Enough to make up for completely butchering
the personalities of almost every returning character and being BORING
AS FUCK? Nope! And certainly not enough to overcome the pseudo-Zen
nonsense-philosophy of “technorganic balance” that despite making no
sense and never being explained at all was touted as the ideal outcome of the story.
Like I said before, the three-part series finale was a step up from the show’s usual fare, but Megatron’s ascension to godhood and his final one-on-one battle with Optimus Primal, while somewhat cathartic, were still soured by the ridiculous bullshit ending. An ending in which the main character heroically throws himself into a glowing thing, thereby killing himself and dispersing his half-organic, half-robotic essence throughout the planet, fundamentally altering all forms of life at the genetic level by turning them into technorganic hybrids through the power of space magic.
Like I said before, the three-part series finale was a step up from the show’s usual fare, but Megatron’s ascension to godhood and his final one-on-one battle with Optimus Primal, while somewhat cathartic, were still soured by the ridiculous bullshit ending. An ending in which the main character heroically throws himself into a glowing thing, thereby killing himself and dispersing his half-organic, half-robotic essence throughout the planet, fundamentally altering all forms of life at the genetic level by turning them into technorganic hybrids through the power of space magic.
First of all, what does “technorganic” even mean? They talked about this concept for two whole seasons but never explained what it was. If it’s just a combination of technological and organic parts, aren’t the Transformers already technorganic life forms? They’re robots that turn into animals! We know that they’re not just made of metal, because in Beast Wars Dinobot was cloned . . . twice! There’s a risk of their beast modes taking over their robot minds, Megatron mentions something about cells, and purging Megatron’s beast mode from his body creates a brand new, completely biological organism. So what’s the difference between Optimus’s idealized “reformatted” Transformers and any Transformer that has a beast mode? Except that the new Transformers don’t even transform, they just kind of morph or shapeshift or something. Apparently the perfect Transformers utopia is just having palm trees made out of metal. (But if they’re made out of metal, how are they technorganic? Are they cyborg trees? What would that even entail?)
So after spending the whole series talking about an idea that made no sense, the show ended with an idea that made no sense. Que sera, sera. But even though Beast Wars was essentially ruined by having all its resolution undone, its characters’ personalities completely rewritten, and several members of its surviving cast killed off for no reason, you can kind of just ignore Beast Machines and pretend it never happened, because Beast Wars already showed us a conclusion to these characters and their story. And it did it without turning everyone into poorly-designed robot-animal hybrid things or introducing vine grenades.
Also keep in mind
that this was a late-’90s Saturday-morning cartoon made to sell toy
robots to children. In some ways, that makes the bullshit armchair
philosophy even more obnoxious, but it also puts things in perspective.
The only reason anyone was upset that Beast Machines was so bad was because Beast Wars had happened to be so unexpectedly good. You can’t catch lightning in a bottle twice. Time to grow up and get over it.
Okay, so now that we’re grownups, we can relive that same sense of betrayal and disappointment in the ending to Mass Effect 3. At the end of the game, the Starchild, a brand new character introduced in the last five minutes of a ninety-plus-hour gaming experience, reveals that the root of the main conflict of the entire trilogy is the inevitability of organic life creating synthetic life and that synthetic life rebelling against its creators and destroying all organic life in the galaxy. To prevent this from happening, the Starchild created the Reapers, synthetic life forms that periodically destroy organic life in the galaxy before it has a chance to create synthetic life forms that will destroy organic life in the galaxy. No, I’m not making this up, that’s really in there. That is actually what he says.
There are several things wrong with this abrupt plot shift, not the least of which is what it does to the series-long subplot of the geth and the quarians. One of the most intriguing characters in the second and third games was the geth sniper Legion. The geth, a race of synthetic life forms created by the quarians, who were subsequently driven to the brink of extinction by their creations, were the main enemy foot soldier in the first game. Allowing the player to recruit one of them to his or her party was a brilliant move that showed how the Reapers were a threat to all life in the galaxy, organic and synthetic alike. In the face of such unknowable horror, the old grudges of the galactic races became unimportant. Several recurring themes ran throughout the Mass Effect trilogy, but if it can be said to have a central one, surely it’s this: we are stronger together than we are alone. That’s the idea that was there since day one, from the moment Commander Shepard invited a quarian street rat, a krogan mercenary, and a turian cop aboard an experimental human warship in a xenophobic military. That’s the idea it would have made sense to end on, especially after spending a significant portion of the final game finding a peaceful resolution to the centuries-old feud between the geth and the quarians.
But since they didn’t do that, we have to talk about this dumb bullshit. The nonsensical ass-pull with the Starchild goes on and on, with almost no input from the player, until he finally explains what Shepard has to do to save the galaxy. At this point the player is given three different options for how to proceed, but they are functionally identical; all involve Shepard dying and nearly the same cinematic. The first two options are to control the Reapers or destroy the Reapers, but the third, the Starchild promises, is the best choice (a.k.a. the one the writers really want you to make), because it involves the main character heroically throwing himself into a glowing thing, thereby killing himself and dispersing his half-organic, half-robotic essence throughout the galaxy, fundamentally altering all forms of life at the genetic level by turning them into techno-organic hybrids through the power of space magic.
Okay, so now that we’re grownups, we can relive that same sense of betrayal and disappointment in the ending to Mass Effect 3. At the end of the game, the Starchild, a brand new character introduced in the last five minutes of a ninety-plus-hour gaming experience, reveals that the root of the main conflict of the entire trilogy is the inevitability of organic life creating synthetic life and that synthetic life rebelling against its creators and destroying all organic life in the galaxy. To prevent this from happening, the Starchild created the Reapers, synthetic life forms that periodically destroy organic life in the galaxy before it has a chance to create synthetic life forms that will destroy organic life in the galaxy. No, I’m not making this up, that’s really in there. That is actually what he says.
There are several things wrong with this abrupt plot shift, not the least of which is what it does to the series-long subplot of the geth and the quarians. One of the most intriguing characters in the second and third games was the geth sniper Legion. The geth, a race of synthetic life forms created by the quarians, who were subsequently driven to the brink of extinction by their creations, were the main enemy foot soldier in the first game. Allowing the player to recruit one of them to his or her party was a brilliant move that showed how the Reapers were a threat to all life in the galaxy, organic and synthetic alike. In the face of such unknowable horror, the old grudges of the galactic races became unimportant. Several recurring themes ran throughout the Mass Effect trilogy, but if it can be said to have a central one, surely it’s this: we are stronger together than we are alone. That’s the idea that was there since day one, from the moment Commander Shepard invited a quarian street rat, a krogan mercenary, and a turian cop aboard an experimental human warship in a xenophobic military. That’s the idea it would have made sense to end on, especially after spending a significant portion of the final game finding a peaceful resolution to the centuries-old feud between the geth and the quarians.
But since they didn’t do that, we have to talk about this dumb bullshit. The nonsensical ass-pull with the Starchild goes on and on, with almost no input from the player, until he finally explains what Shepard has to do to save the galaxy. At this point the player is given three different options for how to proceed, but they are functionally identical; all involve Shepard dying and nearly the same cinematic. The first two options are to control the Reapers or destroy the Reapers, but the third, the Starchild promises, is the best choice (a.k.a. the one the writers really want you to make), because it involves the main character heroically throwing himself into a glowing thing, thereby killing himself and dispersing his half-organic, half-robotic essence throughout the galaxy, fundamentally altering all forms of life at the genetic level by turning them into techno-organic hybrids through the power of space magic.
Ummmmmm . . . what’s that doing
here? How did it get in there? Why? Seriously, I’m not the only one who
sees that that is the exact same damn ending, am I? The main character,
separated from his companions by a much larger mechanical villain
(Megatron in Beast Machines, Harbinger in Mass Effect 3),
is left to save the world by himself. Told what he has to do by a
mystical entity (the Oracle/the Starchild), the hero flings himself into
a chasm filled with green shit and slowly dissolves as he is consumed
by a white light. His death and absorption into a magical apparatus
triggers a beam of light that shoots into the sky and gradually envelops
the entire planet, rewriting everyone’s genetic code to turn them into
some unexplained fusion of man and machine. His companions then awaken
on a paradisiacal garden world and two romantically involved secondary
characters (one of which is a robot with boobs) embrace as they look in
awe over the new Eden that the protagonist’s sacrifice has built for
them. I know BioWare suddenly got inexplicably cheap when designing
original art assets for Mass Effect 3, but would they really rip
off the ending from this largely forgotten children’s cartoon from 1999?
Probably not; it seems pretty unlikely. Maybe the hack writers for both
series just had the same goofy idea.
Defenders of Mass Effect 3’s ending have written at length about the sanctity of the creators’ vision
and how they shouldn’t be censured for maintaining their artistic
integrity. Except that’s garbage. The ending was a complete non sequitur
and a betrayal of the franchise’s artistic integrity. Everything
that had been built up over the trilogy—the strength of a unified
galaxy, the mysterious increase in galactic dark matter, the possibility
of redemption for those once considered enemies—was thrown aside and
replaced with an incongruously absolute assertion never before alluded
to at any point in the series. It’s like you awoke inside a completely
different game. Or inside the mediocre sequel to a great
Saturday-morning cartoon.
But here’s the thing about Beast Machines: the ending may have been disappointing, but they basically told you what it was going to be from the very beginning. Much of the dialogue in the series finale pertaining to technorganic balance and reformatting was lifted verbatim from the series premiere. Optimus Primal spent two whole seasons trying to decipher the clues given by the Oracle in the first episode before finally realizing what they meant in the final minutes of the show. Beast Machines may have been monotonous and unintelligible, but it earned its lame ending; its story was structured to take the viewer from Point A to Point Z, and almost all the points along the way facilitated that journey. Hell, the show even opened and closed with bookended shots of a flower. The structure of Mass Effect, conversely, turned out not to matter much at all because all it led to was getting the rug pulled out from under your feet, and not in a good way. Mass Effect 3 showcases the rarely used art of anti-foreshadowing; it shows us a gun hanging on the wall in the first act, then in the third a bear comes out of nowhere and eats everyone.
So which is the worse sin: ending a weak show with a conclusion that fits its story, or ending a great game with a conclusion that retroactively ruined everyone’s lives, even those of starving children in Cambodia? If it hadn’t been the botched follow-up to Beast Wars, Beast Machines might not deserve half the scorn it gets; it did, after all, try to be fairly introspective and philosophical for a children’s cartoon, even if it failed horribly in its execution. But it was still a failure, and a mostly joyless one at that. Outside of an unhealthy curiosity or some poisonous nostalgia, there isn’t much reason to watch it. I still find myself drawn back to Mass Effect, however, from time to time. A story that’s pretty great for the first ninety hours can’t be completely negated by the last ten minutes, can it? Still, I can’t help but wish the writers really had stolen those ten minutes from the ending of Beast Machines. At least then it would have followed logically from everything that had come before, and we still would have gotten one last kickass battle before the crushing disappointment.
But here’s the thing about Beast Machines: the ending may have been disappointing, but they basically told you what it was going to be from the very beginning. Much of the dialogue in the series finale pertaining to technorganic balance and reformatting was lifted verbatim from the series premiere. Optimus Primal spent two whole seasons trying to decipher the clues given by the Oracle in the first episode before finally realizing what they meant in the final minutes of the show. Beast Machines may have been monotonous and unintelligible, but it earned its lame ending; its story was structured to take the viewer from Point A to Point Z, and almost all the points along the way facilitated that journey. Hell, the show even opened and closed with bookended shots of a flower. The structure of Mass Effect, conversely, turned out not to matter much at all because all it led to was getting the rug pulled out from under your feet, and not in a good way. Mass Effect 3 showcases the rarely used art of anti-foreshadowing; it shows us a gun hanging on the wall in the first act, then in the third a bear comes out of nowhere and eats everyone.
So which is the worse sin: ending a weak show with a conclusion that fits its story, or ending a great game with a conclusion that retroactively ruined everyone’s lives, even those of starving children in Cambodia? If it hadn’t been the botched follow-up to Beast Wars, Beast Machines might not deserve half the scorn it gets; it did, after all, try to be fairly introspective and philosophical for a children’s cartoon, even if it failed horribly in its execution. But it was still a failure, and a mostly joyless one at that. Outside of an unhealthy curiosity or some poisonous nostalgia, there isn’t much reason to watch it. I still find myself drawn back to Mass Effect, however, from time to time. A story that’s pretty great for the first ninety hours can’t be completely negated by the last ten minutes, can it? Still, I can’t help but wish the writers really had stolen those ten minutes from the ending of Beast Machines. At least then it would have followed logically from everything that had come before, and we still would have gotten one last kickass battle before the crushing disappointment.
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