# The Illusive Man. Really? **URL:** \ **Category:** The Game Room\ **Created:** [March 3, 2010, 11:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-illusive-man-really/531201 "2010-03-03T23:26:27Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Mr.Kobayashi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/4af34b/32.png) [@Mr.Kobayashi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mr.Kobayashi)\ **Post date:** [March 10, 2010, 1:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-illusive-man-really/531201/41 "2010-03-10T13:12:13Z")
> [@Kobal2](#): > > Well, except the very first few scenes of ME 1. From speaking to Joker in the cockpit, to navigator Presley’s barely disguised infodump, to Jenkins foreshadowing the game’s plot in big, bolded, block letters, and the briefing of the first mission. Shepard’s dialogue options are quite funny in that regard, if you remember he’s supposed to be N7, that is to say an intelligence operative at the highest possible level of training and security clearance. So, he’s supposed to be James Bond, knowing everything about everyone, yet he goes “Protheans ? Spectres ? Beacons ? Eden Prime ? What the hell are you guys talking about ?!!” 😃 > > Now, I admit the first time around, it worked… but on replay it’s really noticeable. The second has this too; you can ask who the hell Cerberus is, who the Collectors are, what Illium’s deal is, the works. Flows surprisingly well, though. > [@](#): > > Cincinnatus ! That’s the cat I meant. I got my Romans mixed up. And yes, well, the turian councillor is a bitter, angry man. You ask me, I think he hasn’t got laid in a long, long time. Or maybe it’s just turians : come to think about it, with the exception of Garrus, they more or less all were either dicks, or passive-aggressively gruff. Makes sense, since they’re dwarfs, for all intents and purposes. Probably lingering resentment over the Relay 314 Incident. Garrus is my main main, though, but as he says - he’s not a very good turian, > [@](#): > > Barely concealed pride : I’m here to save you all. Honest clarification : except you, turian councillor. You’re an ass. Bombastic : all ships focus fire on Sovereign. To no-one in particular but dramatic : now it’s between you and me, Saren. > > Man, they _need_ to make a game with an elcor protagonist 😛 With enthusiasm: They should also add [, the first hanar Spectre, to the third as a squadmate. “This one has forgotten whether its heat sink is over capacity. It wonders if the criminal scum considers itself fortunate.” > [@](#): > > Death is death. I doubt he planned on topping himself, but vitals monitors don’t care about the manner in which you die. But as the Council is keen to remind you off - Saren is such a brilliant genius he can convince geth that the ship they built is a Reaper. Why would he shoot himself in the head if he knew he would come back anyway? > [@](#): > > Well, from the way asaris describe their sex process, I really believe the mind meld is very close to foreplay to them, so… Consider this : the green one melded with you at gunpoint (you rapist, you !), and Liara’s of course all gooey for The Shep. > Besides, would _you_ want to get in the head of a paranoid intelligence operative ? True, but the fate of the galaxy is at stake! Besides which, the asari councillor is presumably a matriach, renowned for their mental strength. Liara was a maiden (well, not any more - giggidy!) and managed to pull the location of the Conduit from Shep’s head. > [@](#): > > Nonsense. Pushing someone against the wall and shoving a gun in their face works every time. \*Every \*time. It’s in the Spectre handbook and everything. The geth shared conciousness makes it even better : you’re not shoving just that platform against the wall, but the entire collective ! 😛 It even works if you didn’t actually shove a gun in their face - people with remember that anyway! Good old Conrad. > [@](#): > > Meaning you merely have to hack into the archive to infect the entire bunch depending on it, they do all the work for you. How Saren did it remains a mystery he took to his grave, but since he was physically part geth, it’s possible he had access to means which quarians don’t. Especially if the geth considered him to be one of theirs and thus didn’t put defences against him the way they’d do confronted with their would-be genocidal creators. A whole freaking lot of what Saren did remains a convinient mystery nobody can be bothered explaining. Since he’s dead, no need to worry about his ‘flagship’ which happened to be the most advanced dreadnought in the entire galaxy, that’s dead too! And the geth are on the backfoot, despite only a few months earlier they developed a weapon that could rip through an Alliance cruiser like piss through toilet paper. > [@](#): > > Wait, what ? There’s a Prothean beacon in ME2 ? Where, when, how ? I missed that. It’s on [url=[N7: Archeological Dig Site | Mass Effect Wiki | Fandom](http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/N7:_Archeological_Dig_Site)]Joab](]Blasto[/url), you have to fight your way through a bunch of Blue Suns to get it. > [@](#): > > Correction : that dead Collector being experimented on had no free will and was all teched up - no word on the higher ups. Presumably that general who keeps Assuming Direct Control is the brains of the operation. Aren’t all Collectors teched up? Even if the Collector General was the brains, this still leaves the question of why they are abducting humans - something we have video evidence of. Like Timmy-boy says; why not just kill them if it’s simple revenge? > [@](#): > > Except the ‘Reapers’ don’t have laboratories - they supposedly go in and kill you all dead. So all that talk of genetics doesn’t match with the synthetic squid overlords. As for Sovereign’s sweet talking to Shepard on Virmire, well, he was alone to hear that. _Again_. Well, him and his squad. The Collector base fits the description, though. > [@](#): > > Besides Liara with her absurdly vague theories, I don’t think anyone really knows how far back the Protheans go, and since their archeological remains have pretty much all been destroyed or looted to hell and back over the centuries… > > Come to think about it, 50.000 years to go from primordial soup to space-faring civilization is awfully short, assuming the Reapers cleanse the galaxy of all life each time they barge in. It’s only advanced organic life that is targeted. “The pattern has repeated itself more times than you can fathom. Organic civilisations rise. Evolve. Advance. And at the apex of their glory, they are extinguished.” I don’t know of anyone who would suggest that the Protheans were around 37 million years ago - not supported by archaeology or…well, common sense. It was a battle raged while “mammals took their first steps on Earth.” I doubt the Protheans were doing much better back then either. > [@](#): > > Hey, no fair quoting the token planet descriptions ! No one reads \*that \*! 🙂 But if we assume the derelict “Reaper” was really a Prothean warship, well, maybe the Protheans were genocidal jerks back in their day. And the beacons their Triumph of the Will manifesto : “The Protheans were here, and wrecked that. Remember Carthage. DON’T FUCK WITH US.” Since the Prothean only known remnant, the Collectors, are all kinds of unsavoury in their own right, it’d make sense. Back in their day was 50,000 years ago - all evidence points to a great collapse at the apex of their glory (hmm…). The beacons show their own destruction, not exactly a triumph… > [@](#): > > Well, no. We’ve got better now : we’ve got humans. Lead by that guy who single-handedly wiped out at least one crazed rachni infestation (two if you count Peak 15), not to mention an untold number of krogan battlemasters. The Rachni Wars ? Please. To Shepard, that’s Wednesday. The humans, depleted after the Battle of the Citadel, stretched too thin to even investigate attacks on their own colonies? Even Shep is just one person. > [@](#): > > I admit, I had to ponder that one quite a bit more (not to mention the notion of essentially brainwashing the Heretics in the first place). But then, only a fragment of the geth collective got turned, which means it’s not one great shared consciousness, only local pockets and clusters of geth. So I don’t think there’s really a chance of the Heresy spreading to all geth at once. > The Reapers turning them against us when they arrive… well, that’s a more threatening possibility, but then again you could say the same of every single race, even humanity. On paper, they don’t even need to come in blasting, all they have to do it jack the indoctrination to 11 and we’re all toast. According to Vigil, that’s just what they did, then left their indoctrinated slaves to starve to death. Turning the geth (even 5% of them, which turned out to be quite a lot) didn’t seem to be a problem for one Reaper - imagine what thousands of 'em could do. > [@](#): > > Yup. We’re gonna be living in interesting times, that’s for sure. > > I beg your pardon ? The turians have reverse-engineered Sovereign’s guns, giving us the Thanix cannon which was eventually mounted on the Normandy. And it teared straight through a Collector ship a hundred times its size like it was butter. Now imagine a dreadnought-sized version of it. Oh we’ve got weapons capable of taking down Reapers : theirs. Which is another advantage we’ve got on every race before us. The Thanix cannon is a miniaturised version of Sovereign’s main guns, not an exact replica. The Codex notes that it gives the firepower of a cruiser to a frigate - which is why the Normandy SR-2 gives the Collector cruiser a good spanking. Greater manoeuvrability and parity in firepower. But, as EDI says - Reaper kinetic barriers are impervious to dreadnought fire. Even with the Thanix the Normandy couldn’t blast through the barriers on the derelict Reaper. > [@](#): > > But when the Protheans built that one relay into the Citadel, they were on it themselves. Presumably you have to already be at both ends of the trip to be able to build a relay between them. Besides, I doubt even the Reapers built them themselves, at least not the manual labour involved. Presumably they had some indoctrinated bastards do it for them - it’s not like those giant tentacles of theirs are fit for precise manipulations of fragile mechanisms. > > No, I meant we turn them down whenever \*they \*try to use them, while we retain their full operations. If I am correct and everything is controlled from the Citadel, and can only be so, then they’d have no way to re-activate them at will. This assumes that we can even shut them down in the first place, let alone fire them up to deny their creators access. Although Vigil’s data file he gives Shep to access the Citadel’s master control unit is further proof of Shep’s story - why would Vigil, a Prothean VI, have the foresight to predict that Saren (and a bunch of geth) would stop by Ilos, then have the means to sabotage the Citadel in the even that it is attacked by them? Reaper cycle would explain the data file and Vigil’s foresight. > [@](#): > > Yeah, that puzzled me as well. I figure the IFF was an individual AI as well. It would make sense considering their “each of us a nation” shtick : each single part and process of a Reaper would also be a self aware construct, which also makes sense considering what they’re made of. The Reaper’s “identity” would then be a gestalt of all those individual consciousnesses. > Sucks being the waste management system, though. Indeed, Legion confirms this, in that the ‘programmes’ within Sovereign referred to itself as Nazara. “One ship. One will. Many minds.” > [@](#): > > Yes, but as you said the Battle for the Citadel was peculiar in that it happened at such close ranges. Regular space battles happen with each fleet thousands of kilometers apart. Heck, even the derelict Reaper got shot down from a planet in another _system_. Isaac Newton is the deadliest son-of-a-bitch in space ! 🙂 That’s also assuming we can even shoot mecha-Cthulhus down from a distance. If we can figure out how the Etamisians took the shot (too late) we might have a chance. Or if that Volus figures out what the “lost crypts of the beings of light” on Klencory can do against the “machine devils”. > [@](#): > > I think they wanted Shepard’s body and genes to be part of the new Reaper. After all, if he managed to destroy the Vanguard (not to mention half the geths in the galaxy) while in his soft, gloopy and suboptimal organic shell, think of what he could do in the body of a Reaper ! > That, or they wanted Shepard to be the waste management system. Or the equivalent of the Collector General. Harbinger’s lines make it clear that he’d prefer Shepard’s body intact. > [@](#): > > More disquieting possibility : we know The Shep’s rugged good looks (or action chick-fu) work on almost every single member of the opposite sex in the galaxy no matter their race or even basic biology, so… Harbinger as a romance option in ME3 ? Now picture the nookie scene. Also a possibility, and an explanation of why he wants Shep intact… **ASSUMING DIRECT CONTROL…OF YOUR HEART!** **I KNOW YOU FEEL THIS!** > [@](#): > > Yep, but bear in mind she hasn’t been anywhere near a live and kicking Reaper yet. She hasn’t had a chance to be indoctrinated for real… she may not even realize she’s half a Reaper. > That being said, I don’t bank on EDI turning on Mr. Moreau. Shepard she can probably give or take, but Jeff clearly makes her blinkenlights sparkle 😉 Been near a larval Reaper, though. If she disabled the Normandy in the Collector base they could have turned Shep’s squad into Reaper-goo and simply waited for the Collectors to finish building the T-800…er, I mean Human-Reaper. AIs are patient, after all. EDI’s proven her loyalty by now though. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-illusive-man-really/531201.md?page=2)