Cerberus: Hypercompetent or incompetent?

[GabeZhul]

So, I just finished replaying Mass Effect 3 with all the DLC and whatnot, and I am planning to write a long-ass essay about it on my blog (maybe even turn it into a podcast if I have the time), but as I was running through the games' issues I noticed something that I never paid much attention to but seemed glaringly obvious in retrospect:

Cerberus. They start out as a crazy pro-human terrorist organization in the first game, proceed to become a Illuminati-style secret society with vast resources in the second and then end up as the secondary antagonists of Mass Effect 3 alongside the Reapers, using Reaper-tech and having enough forces to take over colonies and attack Alliance bases with impunity.

The problem is, throughout the games Cerberus have been shown to be catastrophically incompetent. In the first game, practically every single one of their experiments ended up with something getting loose and killing all their researchers, such as the rachni on Binthu or the thorian creepers on Nodacrux.

Then in Mass Effect 2 they suddenly have the technology and resources to "resurrect" Shepard and make the Normandy SR2, but guess what, then a rogue scientist kills all the researchers save for Shepard, Miranda and Jacob. All the other dozens if not hundreds of researchers? Dead.

Then we learn in Jack's back-story that she was kept in a Cerberus research facility on Pragia until, guess what, the biotic test subjects rioted and killed most of the researchers.

Then in the Hammerhead Pack we learn that they developed a great survey vehicle... and consequently lost it by being overrun by the geth and killed most of the researchers.

Then there is project Overlord, where... guess what? The project goes awry and the geth and security mechs controlled by David kill all the researchers save for his brother.

THEN, as if this wasn't enough, they manage to find a derelict Reaper and their first idea is to study it while disregarding indoctrination which leads to, say with me kids, the entire research-team dying. Again.

And then, in the third game, when they are apparently a galactic force with an army big enough to assault alliance bases and even friggin Sur'Kesh of all places, and the still manage to not only lose their top science team to defection, getting beaten out of Eden Prime by a militia (if the colonists are given the intel), get foiled by Shepard at every turn (save for when Kai Leng friggin cheats by using his cutscene powers), they even get an implausibly huge research station massacred by the husks and Reaper forces escaping their experiments at Sanctuary. You know, like in the good ol' times.

So yeah, why are these guys the secondary threat in ME3? If you ignore all the extended universe fluff that gives them credit (and that hax Kai Leng asshole), they pose as much if not more threat to themselves as to everyone else. Did no one at BioWare notice this?

 

[Estelindis]

I think that someone (or someones) at Bioware might have been a little too keen on making Cerberus cool, because you have to be "on their side" in ME2. Their enthusiasm led them to neglect the overall plot cohesion concerning Cerberus. But, in fairness, this is hardly the only topic where there was a change in tone and focus over the course of the trilogy.

 

[krazykidd]

I never noticed , Cerberus is basically Mass effects Team rocket . I'm just sad i didn't get to side with them the last game.

 

[AD-Stu]

There's a few ways to look at this I guess. One is the in-universe canon version:

Spoiler: Spoilers for the Mass Effect: Evolution comic

Jack Harper / The Illusive Man has been indoctrinated since the end of the First Contact War. So for pretty much its entire existence, Cerberus has been under Reaper control.

Sure all their subsequent screwups look bad from a human point of view. But from a Reaper point of view they were probably quite successful

That still leaves all sorts of plot holes though (like why in the hell would they resurrect Shepard?!?) so you can also take a meta view of this:

Mass Effect is a story that was started without an end in mind. IIRC there's some interviews with Drew Karpyshyn getting around that say Cerberus was never intended to play anywhere near as big a role in the series as they ended up having. Which is why in the first game they really are just the goofy Bond-villainesque generic bad guys who you only come across on side quests - and if anything in the first game was rushed and held together with spit and tape, it was definitely the side quests.

From that beginning, they've basically been playing catch up and retcon with them ever since.

But it kind of works, because Bioware always has the magic get-out-of-jail-free card to play with them:

Spoiler

They're controlled by Reapers, and they have been the whole time. Resources, tech, motivation, whatever... you can just say "Reapers!" and space magic the problems away

 

[Asita]

The problem is, throughout the games Cerberus have been shown to be catastrophically incompetent. In the first game, practically every single one of their experiments ended up with something getting loose and killing all their researchers, such as the rachni on Binthu or the thorian creepers on Nodacrux.

Correction: Every single one of their experiments that you encounter. That's a very important qualifier, as often times you become aware of these events specifically because things turned south, they run silently otherwise. We don't actually have figures suggesting their overall success rate, to say nothing of how many their failures still yielded salvageable results[footnote]For the sake of example: We can easily infer that while Jack escaped Cerberus's clutches they gained valuable data on biotics during her captivity. The question there is not whether the project succeeded in its primary objective, but whether or not the secondary goals that were completed made the project worthwhile[/footnote]. As such we're left mostly with speculation, though a basic inference suggests that their track record is likely less bleak than you suggest.

 

[Generalissimo]

I never noticed , Cerberus is basically Mass effects Team rocket . I'm just sad i didn't get to side with them the last game.

You just gave me a humorous image of TIM, leng and and a grunt clinging onto eachother as they rocket skywards, with a cry of "we're blasting off agaaaaaaaaaaaaaaain!" *ding*. Lawlz.

OT: that wouldn't be great because you wouldn't get most of your team, and the endings would be yet worse.

 

[Zhukov]

Did no one at BioWare notice this?

Yeah, they noticed.

There's a conversation in the Citadel DLC when Shepard, EDI, Joker and a couple of others sit around listing all of Cerberus's projects that ended with the subjects getting out of control and killing all their guys.

It ends with someone pointing out that, hey, at least they brought Shepard back to life. To which Shepard replies, "Yep, then I ditched them and started killing all their guys."

 

[TheCommanders]

Well as I see it the biggest inconsistency is Cerberus between 1 and 2. Between 2 and 3 they gain a lot of soldiers, but they actually go out of their way (and dedicate an entire mission) to explaining how they did that (plus the Omega DLC). However the big problem is that in ME1 they were supposed to be brand new. In ME2, Miranda's been working for them for 18 years... so apparently for 15 years before they were founded. The books are more consistent, but also contradict the lore established in ME1. Basically, if you ignore the first game, they make a lot more sense. But they do have a massive casualty rate...

 

[AD-Stu]

However the big problem is that in ME1 they were supposed to be brand new. In ME2, Miranda's been working for them for 18 years... so apparently for 15 years before they were founded.

I don't know that they were supposed to be 'brand new' as such in ME1, I think it was more just that a lot of people were only finding out about them for the first time during ME1.

The in-game codex in ME1 dates the original Cerberus manifesto back to the First Contact War, and they're implicated in other events between then and the time of ME1 too. IMO one of the biggest problems in ME1 is that more of the people you encounter don't already know about them, especially people in the military, government and law enforcement

 

[Daaaah Whoosh]

I just assumed it was part of Cerberus's 'thing' that they just had a bunch of stuff behind the scenes that they could whip out on a moment's notice. Maybe they were bigger than you knew in ME1, and I know there was that part of ME3 where Shepard realizes they were hiding their evil side from him in ME2. I just assumed they have endless resources, including brilliant scientists to murder.

Now, as for their public relations department, it seems they could have benefited from a few more employess.

 

[RJ 17]

I believe Admiral Hacket said it best when he said "The Illusive Man has always found new ways to subvert science. It's never worked for him before, and it won't work for him now." or something along those lines. Quite simply: TIM has a fetish for doing outlandish and dangerous research...the type of research that often ends with entire teams being wiped out. It should be noted that we only see bits and pieces of Cerberus' operations. According to what you learn about the group in ME2, it is apparently quite massive with military, science, and political branches. Just because we often see the messes that their military and science branches get into doesn't mean that EVERYTHING they do ends up that way. The Reaper Mods that all the troops in ME3 are outfitted with, for example, come from the science branch and it's what allows them to convert ordinary civilians into fully-trained combat troopers, which in turn allows them to continue mass producing forces for their army simply by rounding up anyone they can get their hands on.

Now you could argue that those mods are, themselves, another failure because it's essentially ensuring that all of Cerberus forces are Indoctrinated, but at that point Cerberus itself is working for the Reapers so from their perspective it's a massive success.

Look at it this way: the only reason Shepard would visit a Cerberus research base is if the shit hit the fan and things went bad...there's likely countless other research bases out there were everything was going just fine. Take, for instance, the research facilities that all the refugee scientists flee from...their work was progressing smoothly with no inherent danger.

The real point is look who they're going up against: Commander frickin' Shepard. When going against Shepard, ALL enemy forces look hilariously incompetent. Look at all the mercenaries you slaughter in ME2. The Blood Pack, Blue Suns, and Eclipse are all notorious for being ruthless gangs of killers who are VERY good at what they do. Yet Shepard and company show up and wipe the floor with them every time. The Mercs didn't suddenly forget how to fight, Shepard just has a way of making his/her opponents look foolishly silly.

So yeah, it's kinda like watching the local news: you're not going to hear too much about all the good things that happened in your town, you're going to hear about how many people got shot, raped, arrested, robbed, etc. You're just hearing about all the bad news while the good news is marginalized. The thing is, though, that Cerberus has plenty of other operations going on that we never even hear about and it's assumed that those endeavors are more successful.

 

[wulf3n]

Cerberus. They start out as a crazy pro-human terrorist organization in the first game

I'm gonna have to stop you right there.

In ME1 they were a black ops branch of the Alliance Military (in the vein of the STG or Spectres) that went rogue. Not a crazy pro-human terrorist organization.

 

[AD-Stu]

I'm gonna have to stop you right there.

In ME1 they were a black ops branch of the Alliance Military (in the vein of the STG or Spectres) that went rogue. Not a crazy pro-human terrorist organization.

This is probably an issue with Cerberus being a bit ill-defined in the first game and/or being retconned in later material, but the canon version is that they were only an Alliance black-ops division during the First Contact War - they went rogue after that, which means by the time of the events of ME1 they're already supposed to be the pro-human terrorist organisation we've come to know and love, without their Alliance ties: http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/Cerberus

I do remember a few characters in ME1 saying stuff that either contradicts that or, at best, confuses the issue and the timelines (Kahoku, for example), but I think that's just a consequence of Cerberus not really being a fully-formed idea at the time.

 

[Olas]

So,Yeah, why are these guys the secondary threat in ME3? If you ignore all the extended universe fluff that gives them credit (and that hax Kai Leng asshole), they pose as much if not more threat to themselves as to everyone else. Did no one at BioWare notice this?

[sup]Not really, I've just been looking for an excuse to use this.[/sup]​

Really there are 2 things you need to consider here:

1. Cerberus is a high risk high reward organization. So many of their experiments ended in failure not necessarily out of incompetence, but because they were dealing with very unstable very dangerous subjects to begin with. The flipside to this however is that when they are successful they reap huge rewards.

2. Basically what Asita said. You're only being called to help fix their mistakes, not the projects that go as planned which inevitably remain secret. For all you know for every experiment that gets out of control there could be a hundred where everything goes well. And even the ones that do go south could still yield useful results possibly even making it still worthwhile in the end.

 

[ERaptor]

Eh, i dunno. Considering we're so far in the future that human populace is probably MASSIVE, i wasnt really bothered that Cerberus went trough Scientists like smarties.

Correction: Every single one of their experiments that you encounter. That's a very important qualifier, as often times you become aware of these events specifically because things turned south, they run silently otherwise. We don't actually have figures suggesting their overall success rate, to say nothing of how many their failures still yielded salvageable results[footnote]For the sake of example: We can easily infer that while Jack escaped Cerberus's clutches they gained valuable data on biotics during her captivity. The question there is not whether the project succeeded in its primary objective, but whether or not the secondary goals that were completed made the project worthwhile[/footnote]. As such we're left mostly with speculation, though a basic inference suggests that their track record is likely less bleak than you suggest.

Also, this. Characters repeatedly mention that Cerberus operation across the Universe are numerous, the few bases you encounter had to be found first (and if i remember correctly, the Admiral states that this is no easy matter), and usually only popped up because shit was about to go down, or allready went down.

Still, there is a certain comedy to this.

There's a conversation in the Citadel DLC when Shepard, EDI, Joker and a couple of others sit around listing all of Cerberus's projects that ended with the subjects getting out of control and killing all their guys.

It ends with someone pointing out that, hey, at least they brought Shepard back to life. To which Shepard replies, "Yep, then I ditched them and started killing all their guys."

I pretty much made fun of that with a mate way before the DLC. Especially funny if you picture the Illusive Man sitting in his chair, and getting calls every 5 minutes:

"Sir, we have report from reasearch centre 4561..."
"They're all dead arent they?"
"Yes Sir."
"Whatever. Build a new one."

 

[Terminal Blue]

I think from what little is revealed about the structure of Cerberus in the first few games, most of their incompetence can be put down to the fact that they're a secret society organized around cells with limited cooperation.. So the guys running random labs out in the middle of nowhere are just literally out there running random labs out in the middle of nowhere with no real support or oversight. Heck, the guys who were running Pragia managed to hide a huge facility (and the resources needed to build and staff it) from their supposedly omniscient leader.

The Illusive Man also comes off as whacked out paranoid, and he seems to over-rely on a few key individuals (Miranda, Kai Leng, his doctor) rather than actually putting any faith in his own organization. Perhaps justifiably, given the above.

Also, I think the reason for the sudden change in threat level in ME3 is actually explained in the story, so I'm going to put it in spoiler tags.

Spoiler

The Cerberus troops in ME3 are mostly forcibly indoctrinated civilians, in particular the people who try to take refuge in the Sanctuary facility. The reason Cerberus suddenly have infinite manpower and are attacking the citadel and stuff is because they now have the ability to take large numbers of human colonists and turn them into an unquestioningly loyal super-soldiers. There do seem to be limits, the "quality" of the initial recruit does seem to matter for example (which is why capturing the students at Grissom academy is high priority) and the logs on horizon suggest that not everyone is genetically suitable. But I think it is very adequately explained why they've gone from skulking idiots with an inexplicably good human resources department to a galactic-level threat.