When I beat Mass Effect 3, it was late into the wee hours, and so about its ending I felt: sleepy, and kind of jarred. Then I went to bed. When I woke up, I found I really wanted to read some inflammatory remarks about the ending. I wanted to try and find a comment or two or fifty that could articulate what it was I was pretty sure I disliked about that damn ending but couldn't articulate myself. I came to Giant Bomb and was not disappointed.

But somewhere along the way somebody mentioned Indoctrination Theory. Which is what the ME community has taken to calling the group effort to form a coherent interpretation of what might be a trilogy-wide, impossible-to-solidly-verify plot twist involving all that stuff that while we were playing we knew probably had to do with some kind of plot twist or other but didn't bother to keep track or make sense of in hopes that the game would just do that for us. I'll say it: I think Indoctrination Theory is about as close to correct as we can get right now, in this weird formless time between now and when this reportedly illuminating DLC is hopefully supposed to come out and actually give us some answers. The symbols themselves are baldly uncreative, (yes, and more on this in a moment) and their deployment is rote, by-the-book stuff, (if you don't "believe" the boy was a figment of Shepard's imagination, then fine, but just know I'm making this face :\ out of pity, not dissent) and so we'd have expected the ending to be, in due proportion, pretty conspicuously straightforward about, like, "Alright, here's your plot-twist (and all necessary background info)!" but damn it, no, instead they went for the noisy, weirdly dialogued, herky jerky, dangerously cheesy, over-confident, fuck-da-haters super-send-off. So bombastic, so confident, so kind of beautiful in its hideousness, its reckless hideousness.

The ending is confusing and we can't know what it means just yet. We might never get to just outright "know." My money is on Indoctrination Theory, as it's just generally consistent with the game's own standard of thoughtful, hard, sci-fi; and it will make more sense on its wiki page 10 years from now than "The franchise boasted uniformly solid, well-wrought writing and set the standard for its day, excepting of course its shitty, confusing ending."

If you want to really hit the writers where it hurts, (which you've already actually done, worse than anyone could ever repair, but, alas, spilled milk) then complain about their ugly, hilarious missteps: how contrived the whole dream-sequence-in-a-foggy-wood thing is, and how hamfisted the symbol of the ghostly little boy is, and how embarrassingly cheesy and overly one-linered all the major death sequences are (in a way that chafes more than endears), etc. That EA had its gun made of money and market analysts pressed to Bioware's temple the whole time they made this game is more conspicuous in how trite and shellacky the selection of story elements is than in how these elements are executed, which is almost uniformly as a masterpiece of fun and hard sci-fi, the product of passionate, titanically talented, underpaid writers trying their damnedest to make, no, contribute, something good.

And that is all I have to say about that.

Now, what, by the way, really irked me about the ending--and as far as I know these complaints have not been voiced nearly enough, if at all--are the following issues: (1) I must have zoned out for a second when the VI kid told me which path led to where in that last crucial, crucial moment, and I accidentally trudged to the Control console instead of the Destroy one, and then GET THIS: the game wouldn't let me walk away. As soon as the little prompt hologram thing appeared at the console, I was glued to the spot and couldn't go back around to the other one clearly intended for my Paragon Shepard. So I had to do the Renegade ending for my 100% Paragon Shepard. I mean, I rolled with that punch, but then came one I simply couldn't take. (2) That there was no epilogue, that I was simply sent back to before I'd invaded Cerberus, was to me an unforgivable sin. For a trilogy as massive as Mass Effect, how there could not be even the barest hint of post-completion gameplay--which is something I, yes, honestly, think is super important, and here I turn a teary eye to like Grim Fandango and Earthbound and all those magnificent games whose endings let you come back and absolutely bask in the dewy afterglow of a story well-told--is to me something Bioware can't even at this point come back and apologize for. And, erm, this is a weak argument against an incredibly, generously brilliant franchise, I know. A gentle breeze could blow it down. But it's mine, my one crucial little nitpick, and it's the number one thing I'll always hold against Mass Effect.