From the link I provided in my OP.
http://jmstevenson.w...-mass-effect-3/"Imagine Frodo, dangling the One Ring, over the fiery chasm of Mt. Doom. He turns, and says, “The Ring is Mine!” and slips the One Ring onto his finger.
Suddenly he’s whisked into a universe contained inside the One Ring, an entire world trapped in the essence of the ring. He meets the Keeper of the Ring, an ethereal spirit who has dwelled within the ring since its creation and now Frodo must make the ultimate sacrifice. He has to become the ring, in order to destroy it.
How many people in the theater, watching the Lord of the Rings trilogy, would have stood up and said: “What the **** is this ****?”
All of them, that’s how many, and do you know why? Because it introduces a new element that, by its very existence, shatters everything we, the audience, have come to understand about the world of Middle-Earth. If the Ring possesses a consciousness, why didn’t it destroy Sauron? Why is the Keeper of the Ring only now showing up when Frodo has put the Ring on before? Why does Frodo have to die to destroy it?
See throughout all three movies of Lord of the Rings we came to understand the universe, and how it worked; the rules and limits the characters were forced to work under. The Ring was a corrupting influence but could make the wearer invisible, it could only be destroyed in the fires of Mt. Doom, and Sauron created it. Suddenly introducing a new element, right at the end of the story, puts everything the audience knows into doubt including everything they enjoyed about the movie before the horrible ending came. That is exactly what happened with Mass Effect 3.
Meet God:
(Picture of Catalyst).
It's the glowing blue thing masquerading as a literary device
This is the Catalyst. Now throughout Mass Effect 3 there are plenty of mentions about the Catalyst, it’s the whole focus of the game, but never, never, was it foreshadowed as being some all-powerful Super AI. And even if Bioware had spent the entire game foreshadowing that fact, it still wouldn’t make up for the fact that the appearance of this character completely screws the rest of the preceding Mass Effect games by opening up plot holes so huge that they could be classified as quantum singularities. For instance, the Catalyst claims that the Reapers are his solution. So then why, in Mass Effect 1, did the Catalyst not simply call the Reapers himself? Why did Sovereign need to do it himself? In fact why was Sovereign even still in the Milky Way when the Catalyst could simply have monitored organic life himself and summoned the Reapers. Why did the Catalyst allow the Protheans to reprogram the Keepers?
You see, the existence of this Catalyst renders not only the entire ending of the game as pointless and confusing, but retroactively does the same thing to everything that’s come before. And I remind you, that this is in the final few moments of the game, on the Dramatic Arc I showed you, this is the Resolution. Bioware was supposed to be tying up loose ends here, resolving plot points and character arcs, not creating all new ones in the final few seconds. I’ve never seen a good story that managed to incorporate a last minute change like this and still be good. Even stories with twist endings, like The Usual Suspects and The Sixth Sense all foreshadow the twist in subtle ways so that when the twist comes we can look back and say “Oh yeah, now it all makes sense” rather than “that was such bull****”. Just ask M Night Shyamalan what happens when you use twist endings without any previous foreshadowing.
I think the absolute worst part of the Catalyst is that it completely destroys the menace of the Reapers."
There is far more content on the site, and you'd be best off reading the whole thing.
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