58 réponses à ce sujet

[Linkenski]

 As you approach one of the vid terminals in Priority: Sanctuary, Shepard outright says something in the gist of: "I thought Cerberus was getting along with the Reapers... but now they're fighting them. What changed?" and I believe one of your squaddies comments saying "I guess they exposed a weakness of the Reapers".

Now I'm probably not doing the actual script justice here, but I'm sensing a dropped plot-point because to me it felt like in that moment it was foreshadowing that Cerberus was actually subverting the indoctrination efficiently and becoming a threat to the Reapers and it could've made a very interesting endgame if all three factions were in a struggle of power where Cerberus/TIM wasn't just being "puppets" as it ended up being.

What do you think?
http://www.youtube.c...uzwTetH5E8#t=86
Here's the scene I'm talking about.

[Linkenski]

Yes but the rest of the Cerberus arc is just downhill from here. It feels like the plot is really telling you, at that specific moment in Sanctuary, that Cerberus is actually not just indoctrinated but they are outsmarting the Reapers. I think they wanted to do that but because of time-restraints they went with the safer route that TIM was Saren 2.0

[cap and gown]

Actually, I don't understand the whole "Cerberus are Reaper puppets" line of thought. One moment they claim they are working for the Reapers, the next they forget that line of thought altogether. For instance, Liara tells Aethyta that Cerberus troopers are indoctrinated early on, but then later lines of dialogue pretend that is new news, like when EDI tells Shepard how Cerberus is able to waste so many troopers when they are fighting through Cronos Station.

They really need a continuity editor. (Like Anderson telling Shepard twice that he was born in London. Duh, I got it the first time dude!)

[Linkenski]

I think the whole "born in London twice" thing was meant to be where Anderson simply reminiscences the second time he says it, looking at the rubble thinking "damn... what's become of my home...?" but they screwed it up when Shepard says "really?"

But back to topic. Throughout the whole game they try to hint pretty obviously that TIM and Cerberus are indoctrinated, every step of the way UNTIL Sanctuary where it felt like it was leading up to a twist showing they were actually in more control than we thought, and TIM wasn't just being completely arrogant or ignorant. He was actually getting closer and closer, but then they kinda regretted that plot-point just one mission later.

I also don't buy TIM was "always" a Saren 2.0. He was always like that becaus of ME3 and there's a lot of evidence that Bioware write stories as they go a long, so ME2 TIM wasn't intended to be indoctrinated, or at least, I don't think so, but I can't really prove anything regarding it either. Just speculating a bit here.

Modifié par Linkenski, 01 décembre 2013 - 07:23 .

[SwobyJ]

Indoctrinated just means indoctrinated.

The point was that the troopers are indoctrinated into TIM's organization. That Cerberus found a way to get people loyal to the organization by mental force.

No one in Cerberus, not even TIM, says that they're working FOR the Reapers.

All we get in the script is the Catalyst saying "We controlled him (TIM)."

If they exerted only partial control over TIM, that means they only had partial control over Cerberus. Some things likely went according to Reaper plan (disrupting Alliance operations, accepting more and more reckless use of Reaper tech, keeping a united galaxy from happening), but other things were getting out of hand (understanding of indoctrination, limited control over husks and the huskification process).

Control choice = Accept Reaper means, giving them a foothold, but struggle against their goals

Think of Catalyst as God (barf, I know) and TIM as Lucifer. He can struggle against the grand plan all he wants, and even get a few legit hits in, but he will always be subject to God's plan.
(Fun fact, the stair walls leading downward to TIM's first meeting room in ME2 are labelled 6-66)

And then it is Shepard, the Destroyer, the (essentially in this topsy-turvy story) Anti-Christ that also fits into God's plan to at least some extent. He can embrace the Destroyer nature, take the place of God, or 'surprise' God with a new solution of 'peace and harmony'.

TIM was written to never be able to surpass the Reapers himself, but he DOES instill that seed of ambition in Shepard's... and OUR minds. And many of us take up that idea, even as we regard TIM himself with some level of disgust (depending on how much of a Cerberus supporter the player is by that point, if at all).

[SwobyJ]

TIM was shocked by a Reaper signal that fried his eyes with cybernetics and infused him with a growing 'understanding' of how the Reapers think and work.

While I wouldn't say he's directly controlled by the Reapers/their Intelligence, he certainly could be viewed as indoctrinated INTO the Reapers as an organization or belief system. He gives me the impression of the upstart follower that wants to be as powerful as the guys at the top so he can shake up the system, not realizing that he's given up his ability to truly change things a good while ago.

That said, I agree, I always thought he had a trick up his sleeve

Modifié par SwobyJ, 01 décembre 2013 - 07:55 .

[Linkenski]

But wasn't Evolution also written after ME2? Then Drew screwed him up, and yet again I dislike how the side-story novels and comics create new canon events that eventual sequels have to adress :/

[SwobyJ]

StreetMagic wrote...

If he was directly controlled, he'd end up a useless husk. That's how indoctrination works, apparently. The more control the Reapers exercise, the more they turn to mush. Saren was avoiding the same thing, for awhile.

Sorry, I mean a direct signal.

We don't know which Reaper the Monolith was attached to (and they ARE attached to specific Reapers).

Looks more like Shepard is cybernetic (Laz Project) but not networked with anything 'Reaper', but TIM is cybernetic yet indirectly networked with the Reapers.

And Saren at the end of ME1 is implanted to be tapped into their intelligence and understanding their 'full plan'.

[SwobyJ]

Linkenski wrote...

But wasn't Evolution also written after ME2? Then Drew screwed him up, and yet again I dislike how the side-story novels and comics create new canon events that eventual sequels have to adress :/

Why do they? They're sidestories.

[StarcloudSWG]

By the end of the game, TIM was *directly* networked with the Reapers. He ignored the fact that the Reapers could tap into and control the exact same signal that his research found, and implanted himself with what he *thought* was Reaper-controlling tech.

Only to find out too late that this cemented and solidified the Reaper's control of him.

[Linkenski]

At the point in time he implanted himself I believe it was still the reaper's control that made him "willfully" indoctrinate himself further. Same as with Saren.

[Daemul]

This is the most frustrating moment of ME3 for me. Cerberus succeeded in finding a way to control Reaper Husks(though not the Reaper themselves), Shepard manages to get this data and at that moment I'm thinking, "Oh yeah, here's where we turn the war around", but then, to my dismay, Hackett and Shepard got his with the stupid hammer and discard the use of the data because, "It wasn't worth it"

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Bioware, I may be wrong here, but I thought you were writing a war story? Was part of this not also to show that to win a war one must be prepared to put their morality aside? I mean, I may have imagined it, but I'm sure Javik has a popular quote about a trillion dead souls and honour, but I must have dreamt that.

*sarcasm off*

No competent war leader would EVER discard data such as this on nonsensical moral grounds, even if it was tainted with the blood of millions, since it could eventually leading to saving the lives of billions more. I have never seen such worse reasoning for not using a potential game changer, yes, the Reapers would still probably ROFLstomp everyone in the end, but being able to cut them off from their ground troops would be a huge advantage to have. But nope, it supposedly wasn't worth it, so lets instead put our faith in a device which we know nothing about.

This cycle lucked out, they were saved by the fact that the ME universe is a video game, because in RL their awful decisions would never have worked in their favour, partly due to the fact that the Reapers wouldn't have been morons.

I always laugh when I watch the Refuse ending and Liara says, "We did everything we could to stop them". Did you f**k. 

Modifié par Daemul, 01 décembre 2013 - 11:05 .

[Linkenski]

...but Bioware's teams of "talented writers" know what they're doing. Aren't they??

[Oni Changas]

He was always a bit of Saren 2.0. They're both originally indoctrinated years before, and both are well aware of it from the start. For Saren, he thought that his usefulness made him safe from being fully controlled by Sovereign. For TIM, he thought being "partially immune" was an excuse to dabble even further.. like he had some innate ability to defy the Reapers. That's why he put that crap in his head. It wasn't going full retard, per se. Just arrogance.

No, TIM being indoctrinated wasn't a thing till ME3 ****ed that up. He was a perfectly gray character until Thessia/Cronos/Citadel. Sanctuary tried to salvage but fell short when the glowy piece of crap said he was being controlled by the reapers.

[JasonShepard]

Daemul wrote...

This is the most frustrating moment of ME3 for me. Cerberus succeeded in finding a way to control Reaper Husks(though not the Reaper themselves), Shepard manages to get this data and at that moment I'm thinking, "Oh yeah, here's where we turn the war around", but then, to my dismay, Hackett and Shepard got his with the stupid hammer and discard the use of the data because, "It wasn't worth it"

I didn't think they discard it. We just never got to see the results. Hackett does refer to it as "Useful data", he just also believes that "the cost was too high."

I took that to mean "we can use this data, but the experiment to get it is not an experiment that I'd ever perform". A bit like Mordin's perspective on Maelon's data.

I'd assume we never see the results:

• partly because of game-development constraints,
• partly because that data is recovered barely before the final few battles of the war,
• partly because over-riding Reaper control is one thing when husks are isolated on a planet light-years away from any actual Reapers, and entirely another thing when those Reapers are sitting directly above you, broadcasting the Reaper control signal at full strength.

If you want, you can view the domination bonus ability as something that came out of the data, especially if you only use against Reapers, and only for the last few missions of the game.

***

OP: Yeah, as a Controller, I view Sanctuary as foreshadowing of the Control ending. The threat to the Reapers is that Cerberus has demonstrated that it actually is possible to control Reaper forces, even if only on a small scale.

As for the Reapers indoctrinating TIM to pursue Control... I don't see it like that. The Reaper's influence was to make TIM view Control as the only answer, putting him into conflict with everyone else and preventing Cerberus from being one of Shepard's allies.

[Wulfram]

They should have had the Control option be something TIM added, rather than something that was just there - without TIM there would just have been Destroy. Say that TIM betrayed the Citadel to the Reapers so that he could get the opportunity to do that (since his previous attempt to take the Citadel during the coup failed), even have him contribute to the effort to get to the Citadel by using the techniques he learnt at Sanctuary to disrupt the Reapers.

But then he can't go through with his plan in the end, because he is indoctrinated to an extent, and it falls to Shepard to decide between Control and Destroy.

Modifié par Wulfram, 02 décembre 2013 - 12:24 .

[Farangbaa]

Wulfram wrote...

They should have had the Control option be something TIM added, rather than something that was just there - without TIM there would just have been Destroy. Say that TIM betrayed the Citadel to the Reapers so that he could get the opportunity to do that (since his previous attempt to take the Citadel during the coup failed), even have him contribute to the effort to get to the Citadel by using the techniques he learnt at Sanctuary to disrupt the Reapers.

But then he can't go through with his plan in the end, because he is indoctrinated to an extent, and it falls to Shepard to decide between Control and Destroy.

In Javik's cycle a splinter group already wanted to control. Would be nonsensical if TIM added that function.

[JasonShepard]

@StreetMagic, RE your edit:

I guess it depends on how many cycles the Crucible design has been around for. We only have evidence for three cycles - us, the Protheans, and whoever they got it from. The Catalyst refers to first seeing it "several cycles ago". I think it makes more sense for the Crucible to be a recent thing that has survived a handful of cycles than for it to have been around for ages (when hardly anything else seems to slip through from one cycle to the next...)

So Control might be a new function that TIM installed - the Prothean splinter group having worked out some of the theory, then Cerberus actually finishing it off. The only problem is how Cerberus could have gained access to the Crucible to install a Control module - I guess they're really sneaky...?

In conclusion: Cerberus, the Prothean splinter group, or some other, older cycle - it could have been any of them to install Control. Sometimes I really wish our Reaper-solving-device had a bit more backstory.

My bet? Leviathans designed Control. Seems like the sort of thing that they'd want built in...