When it was announced yesterday that Amazon was MGM Studios continues with his long-dormant TV series “Mass Effect.”I had a wistful thought: Wow. I wonder what Mass Effect would even be without Commander Shepard.
(If you run to the comments and say “BioWare did this, it was said Mass Effect: Andromeda!” Light up. Amazon is not I’m going to do a show based on the worst received game in the series. Be real.)
But then, just as suddenly, I realized the fundamental flaw in my assumption. oh GodI thought Please don’t let them just make a show about Shepard.
See, the main character of the Mass Effect trilogy is customizable, but still far more specifically implemented than, say, the main characters of the games that inspired Amazon’s latest video game hit. Stand out. Forget the broshep vs. femshep argument; How do you condense the multiple love options and Paragon/Renegade setups into a single representation? While it would be very funny if Shepard appeared in a Mass Effect TV series the same way adults do in Charlie Brown specials – just to the left of the screen, and every time they speak they’re drowned out by them a Reaper explosion and you have to read a subtitle – I don’t know if that would be great television.
Shepard aside, Mass Effect is a very rich setting, ripe for introduction to a new medium and a wider audience. The question is not whether anyone should Try doing a Mass Effect show. It’s about whether Amazon Studios has it engagement. Because a half-hearted Mass Effect is simply a naive Star Trek. Or even worse: Halo with boinking.
You could film almost any kind of space opera show in Mass Effect’s Milky Way. Militarized space adventures with a multi-species crew? You got it. Daring smugglers in the galactic underbelly? It’s here. The series lead, Liara T’soni, would be a great character Charlie A sort of character for a group of Star Wars-style villains with hearts of gold. They could do a small series about characters trying to get by on Omega Station, Mass Effect’s “miserable hive of scum and villains.” A space detective procedural set in the politics and bureaucracy of the Citadel. Pulp adventure in search of ancient alien artifacts.
The question is, how nerdy are you willing to get and how much money are you going to spend to get there? With a few exceptions, there are no Star Trek-style aliens in Mass Effect, where you slap a few pieces of latex on a few extra aliens. How committed will Amazon be to the franchise where people (and I include myself here) recognize this guy’s validity as a sex icon:
Are we going to reduce the universe to humans, asari (a really rich concept that can be extremely easily reduced to “sexy space babes”), and just cameo appearances from all of Mass Effect’s other alien races?
You will have that Men Characters? Elcor? What would a Mass Effect story be without the Krogan (T. rex Aliens), turians (locust faces) or salarians (the Platonic ideal of a Doug Jones character)?
Listen if Amazon wants Hire Doug Jones and tear down the Henson Creature Shop to make fully animatronic Krogan and Turian suits? If you want to Farscape in Mass Effect? I’m here for it. Doug Jones would play that shit from a Salarian. But do they?
If your budget is really tight, First Contact War/Relay 314 Incident is a great part of the Mass Effect canon to expand on as an introductory season. Going back a generation from the main events of the trilogy, it chronicles humanity’s first contact with a sentient alien species, a brief but deadly back-and-forth between human and turian space fleets that erupted after a misunderstanding about the danger of accessing an ancient one alien device, and that ended with humanity being welcomed into the larger galactic community.
It’s a story where you could get away with not only fewer alien characters, but also fewer alien species. Come up with some compelling original characters as the main cast and use them as an introduction to the broader canonical foundations of Mass Effect for curious people to explore further in later seasons.
But there are so many other things that would have to be done for this story to still feel like Mass Effect. The franchise managed to remix, reflect and rebuild other extremely well-known military space operas – Star Trek, Halo, Starcraft, Starship Troopers – synthesizing ideas and making them greater than the sum of their parts. If you don’t get that special mix right, every show will look like microwaved leftovers. Not least because in the decade since the conclusion of the Mass Effect trilogy, franchises like Star Trek have done so generous And apparently Some of its biggest twists have been carried over (or accidentally recreated, however you want to assign the blame).
Will Amazon have the courage to highlight everything that sets Mass Effect apart from the other titans of its genre? To adapt the strange galaxy that Mass Effect could precisely realize Because It wasn’t a live-action medium? Exactly Because Can 50-hour-plus RPGs delve into world-building and characters in a way that eight- to 10-episode TV seasons can’t?
I guess we’ll find out.
