Note: spoilers follow for both the Mass Effect series and Battlestar Galactica.
In no way do I intend to write solely about Mass Effect here, but having listened to the soundtrack heavily over the last two days, I've been thinking more about the ending to the series and what Bioware my potentially have in store for their "extended" DLC that has been promised to only clarify the ending with some additional cutscenes and no new gameplay. This is very disappointing because if the beloved "Indoctrination Theory" of the ending was found to be correct, it seems like there must be new gameplay of some sort because the game otherwise ends with Shepard unconscious amongst the rubble of London (or just waking up depending on how much your "Effective Military Strength" rating was at the end).
I am a fan of "Indoctrination Theory", and find the concept behind it to be fascinating and supported by enough evidence in the game to be feasible, but at this point I'm seriously doubting if that's what Bioware had in mind. At the time of this writing, Mass Effect 3 has been out for almost a month and a half. If Bioware intended to troll players with this ending, they are seriously taking a long time to reveal an actual conclusion to the storyline. "Summer" has been the announced release date for the ending DLC, and that could potentially mean date between June and September. It will likely be at least three months since the game's release date. I think trolling the players with a false "Indoctrination" ending would have been a masterstroke, but given that timing would be everything in this idea, I highly doubt that this is what Bioware had in mind now.
Secondly, the Mass Effect 3 script was leaked last November, and it included the ending as we know it, only a bit more concrete with the Catalyst's dialogue. Additionally, the script makes it pretty clear that "synthesis" is the ideal ending (the ending I originally picked at 4am when I first played through the sequence), and though I agree it seems to fall right in line with Saren's goals from the first game, it's still in concordance with the Battlestar Galactica-ripoff ending that Casey Hudson was apparently channeling. "Controversial" was a goal that was apparently desired for the ending, and while Daybreak certainly was that, it was also not Ron Moore's finest hour, and the "big question" of synthetics and organics living in harmony was more than adequately handled by the Geth/Quarian storyline by that point.
I think the in-game evidence for Indoctrination is both accidental and inadvertently intended. At one point, Indoctrination was going to figure into the gameplay mechanics, but was ultimately scrapped. How far into the process did this idea get? Was it part of the actual game at one point or just on paper? If the former, then perhaps there simply wasn't enough time (or an oversight) to remove all of the elements from this sequence, resulting in "evidence". Perhaps the ending was originally different enough that the elements that make up Indoctrination Theory were actually correct, but then it was changed sometime in production at the point where there were enough clues implemented in-game, but the change in script turned them into red herrings.
We'll find out what Bioware has in mind in the near (-ish) future, but ultimately, I don't think it'll be enough to really turn opinions around on this game. It will suffer the same fate as BSG, with potential new players having to determine if the journey is worth an ending that doesn't do the storyline justice. It can be a hard decision to make (much like watching the entire season of Odyssey 5 knowing that there is no ending and the last episode is a cliffhanger).
Perhaps the "real" ending will be Mass Effect 4?
