ME3 Indoctrination theory analysis

[rcs619]

Yeah, I'm hoping for the indoctrination theory too. There's just so many little things that seem to point towards it. The ending just does not make sense on so many levels.

Why is the supreme reaper AI looking like a kid? Other than to try and earn some sympathy?

Why is there human lettering in a previously unknown portion of the citadel?

The Citadel was made BY the reapers. The crucible was made completely separately by many different people. Why would there be control panels on the Citadel that control the Crucible? Why does one of them require you to shoot it? No one, much less the reapers, would ever design that. The choices have to be symbolic, not literal.

The reversal of Anderson and TIM's alignment, the piles of corpses, the fact that the SAME trees from your dreams are right by the beam.

It just doesn't add up. If it were one or two things, I would dismiss it as wild fan-theory, but there does seem to be something more to the ending than the face value.

It would make sense in-character for Harbinger as well. It tries to hit Shepard, and everyone else, to prevent them from making it to the conduit. The reapers have no idea what the crucible does, and NOTHING like this has ever happened to them before, Harbinger was in panic-mode.

...But he misses Shepard (maybe on purpose, maybe accidentally). All the humans rushing to the beam have been dealt with, and Shepard is half-dead and buried under some rubble. She is no longer a threat to him or the Reapers. Let's not forget that, one, reapers are notoriously arrogant and dismissive of organics and two, Harbinger has a personal score with Shepard. He doesn't want to just kill her if he can help it... he wants to break her, to twist her, to destroy her hope.

If her perceives the threat as gone, why wouldn't he revert to his original plan of indoctrination? Hell, for all we know, the events with the catalyst could have happened in the span of a few seconds inside Shepard's head. There are a lot of ways to handle things.

It's all just speculation, but it is damned interesting. Personally, I just want a final fight with Harbinger. He needs to pay. The Protheans, Kaiden, Mordin, Thane, Legion and all the others. Harbinger's gotta go boom before this series can properly come to an end

 

[Lithan]

Just read all the "cryptic" tweets.

I Still think they lazed out, rushed it out the door thinking "Hell with it maybe it'll fly". And now they're O SHIT O SHIT'ing because the only websites not calling them assholes for this ending are calling their customers whiny bitches who only want a happy ending... aka party-liners who haven't got a clue. They LUCKED into this whole indoctrination possibility through pure chance thanks to some incredibly lucky screw-ups from their laziness... and I'm betting now that they run with it, and get a chance to fix their mistake with DLC, possibly (probably) getting it bought and paid for by selling it to us. And fact is, I'm so disappointed with the ending, at this point I wouldn't care all that much. Though it would/will DEFINITELY reduce the likelyhood I'll ever buy anything from them ever again if they do charge for it, seeing as 'it' will be the end that should have shipped with the game.


Have no doubts, they are capable of a decent end and I expect one. They just screwed up massively on this one.

 

[Darkmantle]

um...

The problem I have, is that the didn't give us an ending then. and will LITERALLY charge us to finish the game. That's what's offensive to me.

Although, I will stick to my guns. if they release a free DLC that contains the real ending, I forgive them completely.

you know thats not going to happen.

Hence I said "if" not when

 

[Cranky]

I also like to bring up the possibility that when shepard got hit with the laser in the end, it knocked him unconscious where he experienced a coma like dream which is where the ending comes from. Each choice represents the strength of Shepards will to resist the Reaper indoctrination. Control and synthesis both being, essentially, what the reapers wanted, where destroy represents the repears failure to break his will. Also when you get the "real" ending for having a high galactic readiness, shepard wakes up in the rubble. Now what does this mean? does it mean that everything was destroyed or is he simply waking up from the blast he took on earth and the reapers actually won?

Yeah, I've pondered this outcome as well, and that 2 second scene of Shep waking up may be more than we think.

 

[Major_Tom]

I've been reading some of the massive 500-page indoctrination thread on the BSN and I don't think they've mentioned this: If there is no indoctrination, if the starchild is not the construct of Shepard's mind then why is the Citadel AI (VI or whatever the hell that thing is) in the shape of that kid only Shepard saw back on Earth? How would it know about him?

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

I've been reading some of the massive 500-page indoctrination thread on the BSN and I don't think they've mentioned this: If there is no indoctrination, if the starchild is not the construct of Shepard's mind then why is the Citadel AI (VI or whatever the hell that thing is) in the shape of that kid only Shepard saw back on Earth? How would it know about him?

Exactly. It's because someone is in his head.

 

[Jaeke]

I felt so dumb the first time i made the control ending, don't blame me, it was a combination of me still being shocked and confused from the horrible monstrosity that was in front of me and sleep deprivation (it WAS 3:30 a.m.), note: this was before the indoctrination theories started, and I just saw blue and said "oh look, Paragon". The next day I immediately went back and chose destruction i still felt guilty for letting my Shepard down.

I do think the Indoctrination Theory is true, Im just not sure if that's a good thing or not. Either we have the crappiest ending of all time, or the biggest rip-off of all time
.

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

It must be nice to be able to just turn off all critical thinking skills and just react emotionally at everything. You're like a 16 year old girl on her sweet 16 when she doesn't get the car she wanted. Can you just for a second stop whining and try to analyze the ending? Maybe you'll actually contribute something useful to one of these topics for a change.

Oh the irony. xD

Hey might think he's being a dick about it, but to me atleast, it seems like you are gripping at straws while he is more likely to be right.

If this is supposed to all be some kind of Mindfuck, it's all in his head ending, why wouldn't they just come out and say after this huge backlash? That will still mean that they did a bad job of conveying that to the player. So, yeah, it seems like you are trying to trick yourself into believing that the ending had some kind of hidden meaning to justify that it was apparently shitty.

Now, before you get on me, I don't play Mass Effect. But I have been watching this entire ordeal and have thus read up on the series a bit. This could absolutely be possible, I just don't see anything that is really their supporting it. You are literally filling in the holes, bending the reality to fit the theory instead of the other way around.

Like you said, you don't play Mass Effect. No one is bending the reality.

The reality is that Bioware pretty much confirmed single player DLC. The reality is that no one will buy single player DLC unless it's the one that fixes the ending. The reality is that EA loves to milk fans with DLC. The reality is that Bioware said "if you knew what we're planning, you'd hold on to your Mass Effect 3 copy forever".
Taking all that into account, you can't honestly say that someone is bending the reality to fit the theory. We're simply using what we know so far to generate a theory that makes most sense.

And don't use the word literally when you don't know what it means.

 

[Alandoril]

I've been analyzing the indoctrination theory and I am starting to believe it might be true. A lot of things about Mass Effect lore seem to suggest that. It's really the most logical explanation.

Consider this:

"good" ending (blue) one is about controlling the Reapers. The very same thing that The Illusive Man thought he could do. And that was considered the wrong choice all along.

-The middle ending is the most vague one of them all and it's basically making Shepard kill himself. Or is he allowing Reapers to implant him with Reaper tech the same way Saren allowed Sovereign in ME1?

-The "bad" ending (red), is actually the one that makes you do what you've been trying to do all along. It's what the game was all about. And now it's presented with a color that represents a bad moral choice (sneaky Bioware).

That's actually the good choice. We've just been manipulated into believing it is the bad one because Bioware knows that we think red color symbolizes bad moral choice. They manipulated with us like we were sex slaves.

The last sequence wasn't a choice of ending at all, it was a battle of will. Choosing the red ending, Shepard survives if your EMS is over 5000, and he wakes up in a pile of rubble. The Citadel was destroyed in that ending. No one could have survived that. Especially not without any armor in space.
And do you really believe that someone can write an awesome script and then ruin it completely in the last 5 minutes? Or is it possible that we are missing something? Especially since EA and Bioware are big on DLC's.

There is another thing to consider. If you remember in ME2 derelict Reaper level, Cerberus scientists went crazy. Even a 37 million years old derelict Reaper was able to manipulate their thoughts. God only knows what Harbinger is able to do to your head.
We can definitely expect him to be able to implement false memories into our mind. That would also go along well with what Sovereign said about Reapers being beyond our understanding.



I would like to hear your own thought about the indoctrination theory. Do you think it's plausible? Why? Why not? And if you have something to add that would be nice.

All very good points, but yes, it is actually possible for game writers to come up with an excellent and then ruin it in the closing sequence. In fact,most games written in this generation have cop out endings. Either because the writers find themselves in over their heads (as is clearly the case with Mass Effect 3, it seems like they just had no idea how to actually end the story) or they are setting up for sequels/IP expansions.

 

[weirdee]

http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/355/index/9727423/1

That's the thread I've been reading.

After taking a long, hard look at it, I've decided that there is too much evidence for it to not be true.

You have all been played. Played HARD. Like "Stairway to Heaven" from under the fingers of an infinite amount of people learning to play guitar. You simply do not realize it yet.

I can only hope to scrape at a mere shred of the amount of magnificent, maddened glory they have created.

I mean, reading your responses, it's so awesome how they've done this. You've accepted the 'inevitable' so easily that when they've documented the game's history, it's gonna be studied by academics for years.

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

snip

Stargazer can be real and set in the distant future even if the endings were perfect. He doesn't even say if space travel is possible or not. We just assumed it's not because of the ending. But it can mean anything, really.
And I didn't say "I don't know - therefore indoctrination" I said "I don't know - therefore THEORY"
I'm not trying to make theory into a fact.

And news posted here didn't say a god damn thing about the ending being their final choice. They just defended what they've done, saying how that's what they wanted to do. They never said that future DLC won't be set after the ending.

Besides, it's only a matter of time before we see if the ending was real or not.

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

Like I said, it's only a matter of time before we know who was right.

 

[RJ 17]

One of the most frustrating things about the endings is the fact that there's plenty of evidence to support both sides of the argument: "It Really Happened" vs "It's An Indoctrination Dream". Yet there's nothing that proves either side one way or the other, and there's plenty of faults that go against both theories as well.

It Really Happened: How did your final squad get back to the Normandy to crash land with it at the end? If you pick Kill All Reapers, if you have enough military strength you get the bonus cutscene suggesting that Shepard survived...so what's Shepard doing back down on Earth in a pile of rubble? Did he/she ride the wreckage all the way down from orbit? Anderson said he followed you up to the Citadel, but came in through a different path...yet there's only one path leading up to the platform where you find him, and you didn't pass him. Why does the Illusive Man just appear out of nowhere? Why are there still the lights of cars flying around in the background of the Citadel?

Indoctrination: If it's really a battle taking place inside Shepard's mind, why do the Reapers still fly away if you pick one of the two trap choices? Wouldn't they laugh evilly and keep on the Rampage? If the Reapers flying off is just part of Shepard's hallucination because he/she failed to stop them and now they're just placating him/her, then that apparently means that Shepard's either dead (in which case there'd be no need for such a vision) or Shepard's now fully Indoctrinated and thus failed to destroy the Reapers. However there is absolutely nothing in the ending that suggests that any choice leads to Shepard's failure. To accept that would be to say that Bioware wrote the ending in such a way that would say "The Reapers won, everyone dies" without actually saying/showing it. For that matter, what's up with Star Gazer? No matter which ending you pick, he's there telling his granddaughter about the heroic triumph of Shepard? If you pick one of the two "trap" endings shouldn't he...you know...be dead? And on a side-note, people point to the backwards writing in the Citadel as proof that Shepard's dreaming. Go back and play Mass Effect 1, there's plenty of reverse writing in that game, particularly on the Normandy's walls.

It's really disgusting writing, but it's hard to not believe Bioware's statement that they intentionally made the ending as crap-tastic as it was specifically for this purpose: to get people arguing and debating over it. The problem is that people aren't arguing about what makes it a good ending, they're arguing about which theory makes the ending suck a little bit less. Now I was never in the "LET'S BURN DOWN BIOWARE AND EA!!!" camp. I accepted the endings for what they were and used my own logic to fill in the blanks (personally I fall in the It Really Happened camp as I think the evidence based on purely what we see and experience points more towards that). The thing is there's a difference between leaving enough small holes that leave your ending open to interpretation and leaving so many massive holes/problems that it becomes impossible for anyone to say what actually happened.

 

[Merrick_HLC]

I thought of one bigger problem with the indoctrination theory stuff.

Doesn't the synthesis ending only pop up if you (ignoring multiplayer) do like EVERY sidequest?

It'd be a GIANT F YOU to those who invested the time and hard work trying to get the 'best ending' to have that ending be "Ha-ha we fooled you, now he's totally controlled by the reapers!"

(Admittedly those who dislike the endings could argue the entire thing is already a massive F you, and indoctrination DLC alone would be an F you to some players who aren't online, which there are still many of nowadays)

 

[TaL0s]

I'm not sure if the indoctrination therory is what BioWare had intended or not, but I believe that if BioWare wants to come out of this PR nightmare alive, they will go with it and retcon the entire ending to include and support this theory.

However, I'm going to remain cautiously optimistic that BioWare will do the right thing for their, up until this point, loyal fanbase.

 

[RJ 17]

Like I said, it's only a matter of time before we know who was right.

That's not necessarily true. At the moment, as I mentioned in my response a couple posts above this one, there's no clear way to prove it one way or another...and Bioware is under absolutely no obligation to redo the ending and make it DLC. It's quite possible that we'll never know what really happened.

But no matter which theory you apply to, so long as it works and fits and makes the ending acceptable for you, that's all that really matters isn't it?

 

[Athinira]

The indoctrination theory is ridiculous.

It's people simply trying to make sense of things that... well, doesn't make sense. You might as well argue that god come down to earth and held the BioWare development team at gunpoint until they created the ending he wanted for the game. People like to see connections where there is none, and because they can't make sense of the ending, they start making up their own ridiculous theories.

But the truth is that the indoctrination theory is as full of plotholes as the actual ending BioWare gave us and it doesn't hold up. First of all, it goes against how BioWare established Indoctrination works (time-consuming process that has several physical and mental symptoms before the process is complete, not something you do in the blink of an eye, not to mention that there is never any mention of Indoctrination being able to create dream-world hallucinations), and second of all because there is no motive for it. The Reapers have no motive for inducing Shephard into a hallucination when Harbinger could have just finished him (or her) off with his big fat red laser instead of leaving while you were getting your pieces together.

If you people have to come up with your own endings for ME3 because the BioWare ones were crap, at least come up with something that isn't as terrible (if not even worse).

 

[Poomermon]

The indoctrination theory is ridiculous.

It's people simply trying to make sense of things that... well, doesn't make sense. You might as well argue that god come down to earth and held the BioWare development team at gunpoint until they created the ending he wanted for the game. People like to see connections where there is none, and because they can't make sense of the ending, they start making up their own ridiculous theories.

But the truth is that the indoctrination theory is as full of plotholes as the actual ending BioWare gave us and it doesn't hold up. First of all, it goes against how BioWare established Indoctrination works (time-consuming process that has several physical and mental symptoms before the process is complete, not something you do in the blink of an eye, not to mention that there is never any mention of Indoctrination being able to create dream-world hallucinations), and second of all because there is no motive for it. The Reapers have no motive for inducing Shephard into a hallucination when Harbinger could have just finished him (or her) off with his big fat red laser instead of leaving while you were getting your pieces together.

If you people have to come up with your own endings for ME3 because the BioWare ones were crap, at least come up with something that isn't as terrible (if not even worse).

I think the idea behind indoctrination theory is that it allows the story to continue with dlc. We don't know why reapers want Shepard alive but maybe there is reason they will tell us at later date. I agree it is a crappy ending if they just leave it like it is now. As for the time consuming process of indoctrination there are some hints that suggest Shepard may been affected by subtle indoctrination through the game (dream sequences, humming in normandy).

 

[Athinira]

I think the idea behind indoctrination theory is that it allows the story to continue with dlc. We don't know why reapers want Shepard alive but maybe there is reason they will tell us at later date. I agree it is a crappy ending if they just leave it like it is now. As for the time consuming process of indoctrination there are some hints that suggest Shepard may been affected by subtle indoctrination through the game (dream sequences, humming in normandy).

I don't buy it. Like i said, of all the symptoms that indoctrination carries with it, dream sequences have never been established to be one of them (at most, minor hallucinations). The small amount of time Shephards spends in areas where indoctrination is possible also doesn't leave much up for it. You spend maybe around 30 minutes on the dead Reaper in ME2 while the science team there have spent several weeks. I also considered the events of the Arrival DLC and found them equally unlikely.

The humming in the Normandy i also don't buy as being an indoctrination device (which is the original theory on that part). None of the crewmembers show any sign of indoctrination, and beyond the dream sequences above (which i have already explained i don't buy as indoctrination, given that it moves outside of the established process) neither does Shephard. No voices, no hallucinations (not dream-sequences), no headaches, and Shephards morale isn't affected at any point (starts having doubts about the Reapers). No indication.
And who would have snuck that device on the Ship? The Illussive Man didn't have proper access to reaper tech by the time Shephard broke loose from Cerberus, and the Reapers were only confirmed when they attacked earth, meaning they wouldn't have had time to Indoctrinate any alliance members working on refitting the Normandy. And even if there was something planted on board, EDI would likely have caught on.

Again, this is simply peoples fantasy running wild, seeing connections that doesn't exist. To me, the dream sequences were obvious (and terrible) attempts of BioWare of trying to impose a more human element on Shephard (who most of the time is a rock-solid soldier that cannot be bent or broken mentally), indicating that the war might take a higher mental told on our hero than he/she would seem to indicate when out there kicking ass, likely to remind Shephard of Earth using the boy from the ventilation duct (and his eventual death on the shuttle) as a focus point given that most people remember it. It's a cheap way to try and play with our emotions as players, and likely failed in 99% of all cases, but people believing it has something to do with indoctrination are just delusional.

Also, if it only was a dream sequence, then what's the point of showing the end cinematics? What's the point of showing the Normandy crash if it was all just a dream and Shephards crew stepping out to their new home? If it was just a dream, they could have left that out. Now, assuming the theory was true, they would have to explain themself about that (including how the Normandy crashed if the explosion of the Relays were just a dream).

Of course, one thing I've learned in my time is to 'never say never', in the sense that i could in fact see BioWare running along with this idea in future DLC now that players have thrown it out there (and some seem to like it more than the BioWare ending). But if they do that, I'm not in doubt for a single minute that it wasn't their original intention. At best, it would be a poor attempt of damage control. Like i said, the theory is full of holes from top to bottom.

And i can't wait to be proven right.

 

[Slycne]

I thought of one bigger problem with the indoctrination theory stuff.

Doesn't the synthesis ending only pop up if you (ignoring multiplayer) do like EVERY sidequest?

It'd be a GIANT F YOU to those who invested the time and hard work trying to get the 'best ending' to have that ending be "Ha-ha we fooled you, now he's totally controlled by the reapers!"

(Admittedly those who dislike the endings could argue the entire thing is already a massive F you, and indoctrination DLC alone would be an F you to some players who aren't online, which there are still many of nowadays)

The Destroy and Shepard lives is the hardest ending to achieve actually.