User blog comment:The Milkman/The Writing of the Ending/@comment-30764484-20120605044952/@comment-1900300-20120605125011

The very fact that it solves everything is what is wrong with it. It is a deus ex machina in its own way since once we say it was indoctrination then people can handwave anything without giving acurate context, allegory or symbolism for it. It comes out of nowhere to solve all your problems.

The problem is indoctrination needs to abide by certain rules otherwise your going to get to outlandish and a solve all. But the truth is it was not impemented because it "solved the problem and made sense", since the very leap to indotrination has its own problems anyway. The story still does not solve the issues with the game:

Indoctrination victims has always expressed hearing voices, headaches, irritablity, the slow corrupting of previous values to be replaced by the Reapers, wanting to trust friends and be suspious of enemies, viewing the Reapers as gods, a gradual dismissing of cognetive functions and sanity.

No mention of detailed halucinations of ghost children, or real children for that matter. No mention of halucinations repersenting phycological aspects of an individuals mental struggle. No mention of wierd detailed origin stories for Reapers. And the crucial aspects of indoctrination are missing. Shepard constantly stands against the Reapers to the end, never suspected or turned against his friends. People claim indoctrination was a trick to make him fight on the Reapers side, but indoctrination never was about "tricking" people. They lose their original motives and goals and serve the Reapers willingly, without trickery or deception. The very idea that the Reapers have to trick Shepard to work for them should be insulting to the Reapers, who consider all organic life, even Shepard despite everything, so completely below them that even talking to them is ridiculous. These are the Reapers who have so little interest in orgainic life they cant even be bothered to explain why they are killing them in the first place. They just know it is above them to act in this manner. So the idea that they degrade and destroy their victims to serve them willingly makes sense. The idea that they have to mainpulate, lie and trick them is just lame, and below the Reapers who wouldnt consider organics worth tricking since they are so much smarter and better anyway.

Any if you wish to compare this to Saren or the Illusive Man, well they followed the rules of indoctrination. Their values were slowly corrupted to believe that serving the Reapers would get them what they wanted. Saren believed serving the Reapers would spare the most amunt of people and continue civilzation. TIM believed serving the Reapers would give him what he needed to betray them in the end. Shepard followed the Star Child's words because he still wanted to stop the Reapers without any corrupted actions. None of the previous characters have mentioned halucinations or other outlandish claims.

In a final point i would like to add that many people claim Shepard's indoctrination occured during Arrival. This was because he was near Object Rho for two days, and sublte indoctrination takes days. No other times has Shepard been around such devices for that long. All other cases took approximatly a few mins to an hour of exposre at most, which cant work effectively. And no, indoctrination does not stack up. You cannot claim that subliminate messages given to someone for a short while with large intervals of time between them work effectively. The point is Arrival is the only chance indoctrination got. Putting aside the likelyhood that Shepard could have been placed a fair distance away from Object Rho after being knocked out, since the med bay may be far from the docking bay, but the fact remains this is DLC. It may not happened in a playthrough but the ending stays the same. In short, the Arrival DLC has no effect on Shepard.