David Bridges
Key Facts
- Original Story: The Amazon TV series will tell an original story in the Mass Effect universe.
- No Retread: It will not retell Commander Shepard’s story.
- Timeline: The show is set after the events of the first three Mass Effect games.
- Unexplored Period: The narrative will explore a previously unseen timeline.
We still don’t know a lot about Amazon’s planned TV show adaptation of Mass Effect, so there’s already been plenty of speculation about just what a thorny path to adaptation of a series defined by player choice (for good and ill) could even look like in the first place. Well, now we have some semblance of an idea… but if anything, it’s only going to make all that speculation even more fervent.
In a blog post released today on the BioWare website to mark “N7 Day,” Mass Effect executive producer Mike Gamble briefly touched on the development of Amazon’s TV series, in lieu of providing much, if any, tangible updating on the development of the long-awaited fifth game in the series. “We’ve been partnering closely with Amazon on it,” Gamble said, “and we’re really excited with what the talented team over there is coming up with.”
He did, however, confirm a couple of crucial details about the show: it will tell an original story within the Mass Effect universe that takes place some time after the events of the first three games in the series, and it will explicitly not be a “retread of Commander Shepard’s story.”
While many fans had expected that, if a Mass Effect show were not to adapt the events of the Reaper invasion seen across the first three games, it may establish itself as a prequel, perhaps exploring humanity’s first real contact with interstellar civilization and its early days on the galactic stage, it’s surprising to see that the show will instead go after those events and explore an as-yet-unseen period of time, no matter how far after Mass Effect 3 it goes (Andromeda, the fourth game in the series, takes place in the titular Andromeda galaxy, 600 years after the first three games).
But even knowing that it will be at some point after Mass Effect 3 raises plenty of fascinating questions. Over a decade on from the legacy of Mass Effect 3‘s controversial ending, even moving on from its impact on fans still means the Mass Effect TV show will now have to, in some way, touch upon the different ways the Reaper saga came to an end.
While there are broad similarities across a majority of Mass Effect 3‘s three primary endings (which was part of that longstanding controversy in the first place)—the seeming sacrifice of Commander Shepard, the end to the Reaper threat, the implication of the broad loss of the galaxy’s primary FTL transit system, the Mass Effect Relays—how each of those endings reached that conclusion had very different, long-reaching ramifications that would presumably impact the TV show in significant ways. Does synthetic life like the Geth still exist, or has it been redeveloped in the wake of the “Destroy” ending? Did all of galactic civilization become transformed into a hybrid techno-organic society like in the “Synthesis” ending? Or will the show adapt “Control,” in which Shepard transforms the Reapers into a dominated thrall army that their spirit now commands?
Whatever the show chooses, fans will no doubt have something to say about their own choices in the trilogy no longer feeling “canon,” even if the show is set hundreds or even thousands of years after (but at that point, are you still necessarily making a Mass Effect show people could get invested in if it’s so disconnected?). That is, seemingly, why the show wants to avoid Shepard’s story in the first place—”because after all,” as Gamble writes in his blog post, “that’s YOUR story, isn’t it?”
Time will tell just how the show will tackle this untapped part of Mass Effect‘s world, even if we now have a slightly better picture of what it’s planning to do. But maybe it wouldn’t be Mass Effect if fans didn’t do a lot with a little to enact some feeling of trepidation over the future of the franchise.
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Daniel Mercer
