User blog comment:Ygrain/Leviathan: Do you know what you are doing, Bioware?/@comment-4237253-20120915082834/@comment-2228120-20120915184509

@Mr. Mittens: Thanks for the info.

@LilyheartsLiara: Fair enough. So. I guess we’ve run into a little semantic problem here: foreshadowing. As I understand it, and I suppose as does the Milkman, it is a set of clues leading to the major reveal. Building the Crucible provides no clues to the Reapers’ origin and purpose as we learn it at the end. You can call it means to reach this end, but it does not foreshadow a thing. The closest it ever gets to foreshadowing is its role in acquiring Priority: Thessia and the information from Vendetta, which is the only instant of foreshadowing the existence of the starbrat, by stating that the Reapers are the servants of the cycles, not their creators, and hinting that something created and controls them.

Now, the Catalyst – here I'm excerpting the crucial part from under the other blog:

"You must distinguish between the Catalyst as the device which you need to attach to the Crucible to make it work, and the Catalyst as the AI which created the Reapers. The former is basically a Conduit analogy – you don’t know what it is but you know you need to find it and use it somehow, and story-wise, it plays little role. The latter is the big secret behind the main storyline, and way more important than the former."

In order to make this work well, you need TWO separate sets of clues/information, which finally intersect in the big reveal that the device and the AI are actually one and the same thing. While the device is – well, not really foreshadowed, since you know from the beginning that it is supposed to take out the Reapers somehow, so let’s say rather introduced from the very beginning, the other set of clues is almost nonexistent except for that above-mentioned Vendetta line. This is the reason why people feel that the introduction of the Catalyst as the AI behind the whole mess came too abruptly and has almost zero basing in the game. This story-telling error is rectified by the Leviathan, without affecting negatively the big reveal of the device = the AI. If the Leviathan was a part of the story from the very beginning, the whole ending issue would never have arisen.

“the real conflict of the Mass Effect series has always been the Reapers, and the three options in the end all resolve that conflict, not the Catalyst's problem” – I must say I fail to see your reasoning here. The Catalyst’s problem, whether real, imaginary or merely blown out of proportion, is the very reason why the Reapers are here in the first place, and our ignorance of it changes nothing about the fact that we got caught in the grander scheme of their “solution”.

Also, I have to disagree that the three solutions are an answer to Shepard’s problems and not the Catalyst’s. “It changed me, it opened new possibilities” – these new possibilities for the Catalyst, not Shepard. The Reapers were its previous solution which doesn’t work anymore, therefore the Reapers are no longer needed for these new possibilities, and in this respect, the Catalyst’s interests sort of overlap with Shepard’s: one doesn’t need the Reapers, the other wants to get rid of them. Win-win, in a way, but this doesn’t mean that Shepard is the one dictating the conditions; very much the contrary. The energy of the Crucible now allows these options: Destroy – sacrifice the unsuccessful solution and remove the current roots of the organics x synthetics conflict; Control – use the previous unsuccessful solution to patrol the galaxy and prevent the o. x s. conflict by force; Synthesis – prevent the conflict forever and preserve the unsuccessful solution. Thus, even the Destroy as the option which is the worst for the Catalyst, is still designed as at least partially solving its problem. And finally, what happens in Reject? The Catalyst sticks to the previous, non-functional solution. In none of the options, the Catalyst merely stops the harvest; it always strives to follow the original plan and somehow deal with the o. x s.