This is the first in what I hope will become a series of essays about the Mass Effect franchise. Rather than do what I've done in every post with the "Mass Effect" tag up until this point, i.e, bitch about the third game's ending, I want to discuss certain aspects of the game's 'verse. And as I've previously stated that the best part of Mass Effect 3, by a wide margin, was the game's first act, where you are forced to determine the fate of the krogan, I thought I'd start there.
What prompted this essay? Well, as you know, I'm (slowly) making my way through the first season of Babylon 5, and the episode "Signs and Portents" is the most recent one I've seen. Here we're introduced to a character named Morden, who is pretty obviously evil, in contrast to Mass Effect's Mordin, who is good, but only for certain values of "good."
And it was this comment, certain values of "good," that made me want to revisit the topic of the Genophage and rant to you about it. Buckle up, dear reader.
Introductory stuff (go ahead and skip if you were paying attention to virtually anything Wrex said in Mass Effect or Mass Effect 3): 1,500(ish) years ago, the Krogan Rebellions were brought to a sudden end when the turians deployed the salarian-made Genophage against the krogan. The Genophage is utterly incurable (until we need a miracle in the third game and a cure drops out of nowhere for us), and is basically, if inaccurately, referred to as a sterility plague. Only one in 1,000 pregnancies will actually make it to term. This hasn't completely killed off the krogan, however, because not only are they stupid difficult to kill (unless it's during a cutscene), but their lifespans are unbelievably long. (It's implied that Wrex was born around the time the Genophage was deployed, which puts him at 1,500ish.)
Now, why do I say Mordin is only good for certain values of "good?" Because his entire arc in Mass Effect 2 and 3 revolves around the fact that he modified the Genophage because the krogan were beginning to adapt to it (and by the time the third game rolls around, he's clearly struggling with that decision, however much he might try to hand-wave it away as "the best solution with avaliable data"). A renegade Shepard can ask why Mordin didn't just modify the Genophage to completely wipe the krogan out, instead of maintaining what another character calls "the gentle genocide." Mordin gives some answer about not being completely evil.
And that's where the title of this essay comes in. At the close of the Krogan Rebellions, the turians and salarians had three options. They had the evil option, which would be to us a virus like the Genophage to completely wipe the krogan out (the Destroy option, if you will). They had the stupid option, which would be to lie down and let the krogan steamroll them (alas, there were no glowy holograms to shoot). Or they had the evil and stupid option, which was to use the Genophage.
So let me get this straight. Your solution to an entire species of marauding, nigh-impossible-to-kill sentient monsters was to deploy a virus that had no effect whatsoever on their combat abilities and denied them any hope for a future? Really?
So if you knew your civilization was utterly doomed, would you a) rationally surrender, or b) gather as many of your buddies as you could and launch a suicide attack on the people responsible in an effort to take them down too?
Hell, even Wrex, who Mordin acknowledges is one of only two people preventing the Krogan Rebellions from repeating,* gave up on trying to build a future for his people for an extremely long time.
*Yes, Mordin doesn't phrase it quite like that. It's very obvious, in either of the renegade endings to his arc (either if you shoot him, or especially if you convince him to sabotage the cure), that his guilt has interfered with his judgment.
So that's why using the Genophage was stupid. Why was it evil? How many pregnancies never made it to term? How many krogan died in brutal experiments aimed at curing it? Do I need to go on?
In conclusion, other than to give Wrex a unique backstory, I can't think of a good reason for the Genophage. Either wipe them all out or don't. Don't leave around a handful of extremely pissed-off survivors with nothing to live for.
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