Stuff: the whatever week this is edition

I don't normally comment on Cracked.com's photoplasty contests because they're stupid, classicist, or just plain incomprehensible, but #5 on this list jumped out at me.

When I was in film school, one of the instructors said that good writing is about forcing your character to choose one of two bad outcomes. Now, I'm not saying that this is a catch-all, but it seems to be pretty common, particularly in recent fiction.

Spoilers.

Battlestar Galactica: in the much-maligned ending, Lee "Fraktard" Adama tells everyone to give up their technology and live like savages in order to break the cycle. You know, the cycle that led to not one, not two, but three civilizations being nuked and the survivors trying to start over, only to do it all again? Given that the cycle repeated itself every 3,000 years or so (I'm averaging because the writers couldn't be bothered to keep the timeline straight), and the epilogue set 150,000 years after the events of the series says the cycle hasn't repeated itself yet, I'd say he won. At a hell of a cost. Y'know, like dying of dysentery.

Mass Effect 3: There's no getting around it: every single option available to Shepard at the end of this game sucks. The option I took (because my Shepard just didn't consider it a good day unless she got to blow up a mountain of stuff at the end of each game) wiped out all the Reapers, but it also killed EDI and the geth. The only other option that was available to me (because I neither saved the collector base in 2 nor played any multiplayer) would let me control the Reapers and make them leave, but I'm not going to trust a hologram, even if it is that kid, when it comes to the fate of the galaxy. (By the way, given how hard ME3 tried to ape BSG, I'm not convinced that kid was ever actually real. Maybe he was a Messenger the entire time.) The third option has you playing God and forcibly re-writing everyone's DNA. Fun times for all. But look, wasn't that what the entire franchise was about? Making the hard choices? Because, as Mordin says ad nauseam in the third game, "someone else might have gotten it wrong."

Look, I'm not trying to say these endings were perfect, because my reaction to both of them at the time was "that was crap." Just, keep an open mind.