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[FlyingSquirrel]

As I was saying in the suggestions thread, I agree with those saying that clarification is actually *not* what is most needed for any potential additions/changes to the ending, but rather something that brings the ending more in line with the sorts of issues and choices that have characterized the Mass Effect series as a whole.

To draw what is admittedly a broad analogy to a couple of popular science fiction cultural landmarks, this ending to me felt a bit like if Star Trek: First Contact had ended with the monolith from 2001 suddenly appearing to Picard and telling him that he can stop the Borg, but only if he travels through the portal that David Bowman used and becomes a Starchild, that this will instantaneously render warp drive impossible, and that he can and must now decide how millennia of human and alien evolution will proceed (and, by the way, at least one of his choices will kill Data and every other android, hologram, or other form of artificial intelligence he's ever encountered).

If that had happened, I don't think it would have worked, no matter how much detail the movie had shown us about what happens to the Enterprise crew and the Vulcans afterward. And that's because Star Trek and 2001 are simply very different types of stories. Trek (at least when it's on top of its game) revolves around characters and situations that we can broadly recognize and understand from real-life human experience - the weirder sci-fi concepts still tend to play out as intellectual puzzles for the characters and can be analogized to our own attempts at scientific discovery and other forms of intellectual exploration. Even the "Next Generation" finale, while it tackles the general idea of expanding human intelligence and understanding, does not suggest that Picard has achieved some sort of fundamentally new view of the universe or of existence, and Q still has more of an individual identity and viewpoint than something like the Monolith. 2001 (the film version, at least) is a more abstract story - while I don't want to get too deeply into debates over how to interpret it, I would reckon that I am in decent company in saying that I *don't* understand exactly what happens at the end of the film, and it *isn't* easily analogized to real-life experience. Thematically, it does address issues of human (and AI) nature, evolution, and our place in the universe, but with less focus on the actions and mentalities of different individuals.

While there are certainly differences between the two, and while Mass Effect's universe is arguably much more conflict-riven and less optimistic, it's still closer to Star Trek than it is to 2001 - we can recognize in it our own issues of international cooperation, racism, political corruption, economic exploitation, etc., and the movers and shakers like Shepard, Anderson, Udina, Wrex, the Illusive Man, etc. have viewpoints that we can understand and are not superbeings. (Though TIM probably *wants* to be one!) The story has revolved primarily around Shepard's choices in how to navigate these issues while mounting a defense against the Reapers - *not* about what Shepard would or should decide if suddenly given three different choices for how to completely upend galactic society and the nature of sentient life. Frankly, the Shepard I was playing, as I conceived her, would recoil at even being given at such a choice and insist that it's not her place to make that kind of decision for everyone else.

The notion that this has to involve destroying the mass relays seems especially out of left field given that this is all imaginary technology anyway - there's no reason Bioware *had* to write that as one of the consequences. Is the idea here supposed to be that the galactic order as it exists in ME is unworkable and the survival of organics is only possible in smaller and more isolated (albeit still racially diverse) societies? If so, that seems at odds with the numerous opportunities the games give you to forge peace between rival spceies, and the "aesthetics" of the ending sequence with the Normandy survivors emerging and the father and his kid watching the stars actually seem to be downplaying the potentially grim nature of all this. What happens in our solar system if Wreav is the Krogan leader and decides he really *does* want Australia, or in general that he's not willing to play nice in dividing up the resources among the various stranded survivors? Probably not something that guy would want to tell his kid about.

That's not to say a downer ending shouldn't at least be possible - I think it should be, and I'd be fine with it if even the best ending required Shepard and/or some of the Normandy crew to die. But it ought to flow more naturally from the player's decisions and be understandable on a human level, not something that happens just because some abstract superbeing says it has to. And while I'd have liked to see more of what happens to the rest of the characters at the end, I think I could have lived without that *if* the fate of the galaxy in general fit with the themes and ideas that have characterized most of the ME series rather than resulting from such a sudden and jarring turn at hte last minute.