User blog comment:SilencedSkies/The Illusive Man: Good, Evil or just bad writing?/@comment-1900300-20120412065117

It was somewhat disappointing what became of TIM. He was an interesting example of a villian you could buy. He had motives and goals and was willing to do anything to achieve it and never even tries to deny it. From the moment he appeared you knew he was a monster and would have alternate objectives. But the fact that, once faced with the Reapers, he unashamedly joined forces, offered resources and did everything he could to prepare was interesting. It was not a case of "we need a villian" and making a villian as stupid as possible to the point where you wonder how he got into this postion of power to begin with, it was the case of a powerful, intelligent villian acting like a powerful intelligent villian.

Imagine if Bioware continued this in ME3, and you find TIM helping the Alliance, but its the Alliance and the other races that are too proud and too unwilling to compromise that Cerberus STILL seems like the rational one. That would have been interesting and would have opened up a lot of possible moral choices for Shepard.

Then TIM showed up in ME3 and it became painfully obvious his character was broken simply so Bioware can have a villian in their game you can interact with. Not only was the villian entering "Stupid Evil" territory and he became less a villian and more like an annoyance. And the whole indoctrination of TIM was nessicary to justify his own stupidity, and is a massive cop out. Its basically a twist everyone saw coming and when the alternative would have made your villian stronger and have made the story far more awesome, interesting and emotionally conflicting. We find out that TIM was right at the end, and the Reapers could be controlled, which opens up a whole new moral debate about the virtues of taking control of them and enforcing peace through the Reapers. But by the virtue of being indoctrinated, anything TIM says is automatically pointless and his entire involment in the game is reduced to yet another reminder how bad the Reapers are and how weak we are.