ZerebusPrime wrote...
So right after the infamous second "I was born in London" - "Really?" moment, Anderson gives Shepard an odd look and has an awkward pause before saying "The entire galaxy united... too bad it took the Reapers to bring us all together."
This is old news, but after rewatching it I couldn't help but think that the tone Anderson uses is deliberate, as though he's trying to tell us something. Or perhaps he's trying to warn us of something he can't say directly, possibly because he's being watched?
And then Anderson gets corrected by a squadmate: it was Shepard who brought everyone together, to which Anderson replies:
"That's exactly what I meant."
Again, he uses added emphasis. And then he says that no one could have done what Shepard has done - ok, Shepard's special, we know, we get it already.
REWIND!
Right before that sequence, we here that Admiral Anderson is apparently the reason anyone in the resistance is still alive. Wow. Well, ok, it's Anderson, after all. He was the Shepard before there was a Shepard. Makes sense that he could pull the resistance through this tough time.
And apparently Anderson will agree that winning this war is a matter of doing "whatever it takes," as also seen in the vid I've linked twice now.
Well, what if "whatever it takes" is delivering Shepard to the Reapers?
I know, Anderson as a traitor just sounds crazy. The Reapers would have to be holding the entire planet's population hostage or something equally heinous to force a guy like that to work for them. Oh wait. So just for a moment, let us posit that Anderson may have been forced to make a deal with the Reapers: deliver Shepard to the beam in exchange for... who knows what. Maybe the population of Switzerland. We don't know. In the same conversation, Anderson says that he had been avoiding contact with the Reapers until his men got to London. We are meant to belive that "contact" means combat, but it can also mean talking. But how would Anderson have ever come into that sort of contact with the Reapers?
Queue the warning sign mentioned yesterday with the Alliance symbol next to an arrow pointing to a lightning bolt, with Coats sitting right next to the lightning bolt. Aside from whatever else the Reapers were doing in London, the other thing that makes London special (other than Anderson being born there) is that it's where Anderson would have come into contact with Major Coats, the Big Ben Sniper from the first trailer, the guy who was sniping husks until a spotlight was shone on him, indicating that his sniping position may have been less secure than advertised late in the game. Maybe he limped out of sight... or maybe he was caught and turned into an agent of the Reapers with orders to worm his way into the resistance command structure. Either way, he somehow fixes his leg by the time we see him in ME3.
I'd best stop here before I move out of speculation territory and into fanfic territory. There's a lot happening behind the scenes that we just flat out don't know. What I've positted above fits in with the London as a Trap narrative with Harbinger showing up at the end specifically to capture and indoctrinate Shepard. It would also make Coats a candidate for Harbinger's missing mouthpiece in the game (surely he doesn't HAVE to use a reverbed voice when he controls someone). That in turn would fit in with the Coats as a mole idea but take it one step further.
Any thoughts?
Hmmm. Interesting.
Anderson turing on Shepard would make sense from a story telling perspective.
Let's assume Anderson did not turn on Shepard and is even still alive and well, and here we are as Shepard seeing him, talking to him...AFTER we already had this final goodbye scene with him on the Citadel - short, but still final.
Even if it wasn'T really him on the not-really-the-Citadel it was still in Shepards mind, or, Shepard already said his goodbye to him and it was moving.
So here we are talking to him again, and the emotional scene "you did good son, you did good" - probably the single best thing about the ending besides IT - becomes redundant.
So my take on this is, that we might've already said goodbye to 'our' Anderson back then so that the story can entrust us with another, 'bad' Anderson.
Modifié par MaximizedAction, 03 mai 2012 - 08:40 .