User blog comment:Diyartifact/Shepard's adversaries/@comment-3581090-20120409174351

Nice analysis. And, actually, if you squint a little, I think TIM would actually be a little of both the Harbinger and Saren villain models you described: he is obviously far too powerful (or prepared) for Shepard to take on directly; and he is ultimately a dark mirror of Shepard in ME3, pulling out the stops to end the Reaper threat. (I did say to squint a little.)

A real shame about TIM's indoctrination is that it diminishes the exact threat he poses as a villain (because he's just another Reaper footsoldier, just one more thing they throw at you, and not his own obstacle) but also taking away what could have been a really interesting choice at the end:

What if, after all of his talk of controlling the Reapers, after all of Cerberus's research...what if you ran into TIM at the end--free of indoctrination--and he actually knew how to control them? What if you had to choose between trusting Anderson's "blow 'em up" solution and TIM's "turn indoctrination back on them" solution?