The Illusive Man. Really?

[Johnny_Angel]

I was certain for a long time that they must have just mistyped ‘Elusive’ through the whole game. But the comic that came with the Collector’s Edition made it clear that they knew the difference. However, I still hold that it was a big fuck-up that they decided to bite the bullet on and explain away rather than re-record dialogue (though the difference in pronunciation is so slight). In any case, it was a mouthful and sounded ridiculous every time somebody wedged it into a conversation. The writers were good enough that you would think they would have noticed how cringe-worthy it was every time. Why didn’t any of the NPCs just call him Lou, like I did? Or, TIM, like a lot of people on the Straight Dope do?

[Mr.Kobayashi]

@Kobal2

Of course there’s a reason : Shepard’s operating in concert with Cerberus, a known pro-human unethical organization, noted for its duplicity and manipulations. Therefore, any data handed out by them is suspicious, especially if it furthers the human agenda. And even if it doesn’t, well, it could all be a Xanatos gambit by TIM, so best not trust it anyway. Except of course, he might have known that the Council knew that his data wasn’t to be trusted, and [head asplode from Sicilian thinking].

Old Timmy-boy’s resources are great, but I doubt even the Council would believe he could construct a clone of Sovereign, smash it up a bit then date it 37 million years - they don’t doubt for a second that Tali’s omnitool is accurate (when Shep has a vested interest in forging it). This time they’ve got loads of measurements, none of which are forged - plus the word of the man who saved their stupid asses two years ago.

As it is, there are naval restrictions on big ass dreadnoughts : for every one the humans are allowed to build, the Asari get three and the Turians five. Or maybe the other way around, I forget. The point is : human military expansion is kept in serious check.

A yes, the treaty of something-or-other. I don’t see why humans would suddenly be able to outstrip the turians or asari, though - races who have been established in space for millennia. The turians have 37 dreadnoughts compared to humanity’s 6 - it would be one hell of a feat to outstrip that.

One assumes that, should the Council recognize the Reaper threat and order an “Oh SHIT” massive, rapid build up of ships to counter them, those restrictions would be removed, allowing humans to build ships up to their full manufacturing capabilities.

And everyone else. Turian military doctrine would no doubt have them pumping out capital ships like nobody’s business, and the asari are no slouches either. No reason to limit themselves, after all.

Whether the Asari and/or Turians can match or even outpace them is probable (since they’ve been building ships for much longer, and thus presumably have shipyards all over the place), but unknown. In any case, that’s still more relative power for humanity - and we know everyone thinks humanity’s got too much of it, too fast already.

Ha, my point exactly. Humanity’s power would still be kept in check in this ‘arms-race’ even by the production of the other races.

Well, they’d just barely survived the biggest space battle in history. They got carried away, that’s all. Emotions running high, can’t be blamed for a little exuberance. After they’ve had time to cool down and re-examine the facts under a critical eye, it’s become *quite *obvious Sovereign was no Reaper.

Well, there was a huge enemy fleet coming in. Inappropriate to quibble on the details of one’s allies HOLD THE LIIIIIINE! speech, really :). If the humans need to believe in those silly Reaper stories to get their ass in gear, so be it. As long as they do their part.

Tact, even from the turian?! Perhaps they felt it gracious to indulge the humans a little. But it doesn’t change the fact that everything Shep said about Sovereign being a Reaper was true and can be backed-up by eye witnesses.

Well, there’s still the matter of trusting any data coming from A) a Cerberus AI B) built from bits and pieces of a [del]Reaper[/del]geth ship. But yes, agreed, rubbing those idiots’ collective faces in it will be soooo worth it.

When the whole galaxy burns, I’ll be buzzing the Citadel’s traffic control tower, trailing a banner saying “TOLD YOU SO, ASSCLOWNS”.

Or even better -
Turian Councillor: “Shepard - the Citadel is under attack by Reapers!”
Shep: “Ah yes, ‘Reapers’…”

Not fully huskified, but turning himself into a cyborg through similar, albeit partial implants - as Saren says, giving himself “the strengths of both [synthetics and organics], the weaknesses of neither”. And when he died, his synthetic part kept going for a bit, that’s all.

Which is pretty much what really happened, too, except Saren didn’t exactly choose the implants.

And went mental with it. Sovvie’s kinetic barriers fell when Saren’s uberhusk was defeated, implying a direct link between husks and Sovvie. The first time we see husks (and Sovvie) is on Eden Prime. It’s too much of a coincidence. Although the Council would probably dismiss both as a geth plot…

He…It’s a geth. The normal reaction to the idea that they built Sovereign would be to wipe the fuckers out before they make any more of those, which if I’m not mistaken the Council’s more or less ramping up to do while Shepard’s faffing around the Terminus systems. At the very least, the Quarians are, and nobody’s going to object when they do.
So, yes, in the face of the complete annihilation of its species from orbit cuz it’s the only way to be sure, it’d damn well have a reason to lie

Here Shepard is doing quite a good job as a Spectre - he’s gathering intelligence about the perceived enemy. Tali says a geth has never been taken intact, making Legion a valuable source of information (even if his word is ‘suspect’). Another Spectre sent into the Perseus Veil to investigate the debris left by the heretic station going boom will corroborate Shep’s story. No doubt Legion himself can provide ample additional evidence of the split.

OTOH, he’s been zapped in the head by a bunch of ancient bad juju beacons, not to mention been in contact with the consciousness of a plant being thousands of years old. Through the intervention of an Asari ally of Saren’s, no less, who could have done all manner of things to his brainpan.
It’s not that far fetched to believe he could come back a bit… touched from all that.

And yet the Council give Saren the benefit of the doubt (crediting him with the whole thin), and he had the same thing.

Remember, that recording was taken from a dead geth, meaning Saren said that in the presence of at least one of them (which in turns means all of them, since they share consciousness). Since the Council believes Saren controlled the geth by manipulating their religious beliefs in the Reapers, to them it means he could have said that for the sole benefit of his audience. As in “Ha HAH ! One step closer to the return of the Reapers !..suckers”

This goes back to the ‘if Sovereign was a geth construction, how would Saren be able to like to the geth about it’ point. Unless the geth are the stupidest creatures in the galaxy - which they aren’t if they build a dreadnought that can give the finest piece of asari engineering a good spanking.

Right, forgot about those.

The Alliance and/or Cerberus has probably confiscated the remaining bodies. But Ash/Kaiden was linked with the Council, and if they have any sense they’d take some readings from this completely unknown enemy.

Hence the possible collusion of the two races some time between Saren’s defeat and now, in a “hey, you’re organic machines, we’re organic machines, we have so much in common ! Here, have those husks of ours and go wreck some shit while we reprogram our entire race, then we’ll give you a hand to finish the job, deal ?”.

The Collectors only started abducting people *en masse *after the defeat of Sovereign, since Harbinger’s plan was to create a new Reaper from the species that had proved strong enough to kill the old, as well as avenging him. It. And, presumably, use that new Reaper to try and send the Citadel signal again.
But prior to that, the Collectors were harmless albeit mysterious tech brokers from far away who made weird requests. The ships vanishing through the Omega 4 relay all got there of their own volition, trying to find out why ships were vanishing in it in the first place.
Even if we, that is the Council, do accept that Collectors = Protheans, it’s neither here nor there to prove the existence of the Reapers, quite the contrary in fact, since now we know that they actually didn’t get completely wiped out, they just moved on beyond our reach.

But the question of how the Protheans became Collectorised is still up in the air. The Council is already stretching it with the ‘Sovereign is geth’ claim - geth turning Protheans into Collectors is more supposition. Especially given the age of the Omega 4 relay, Collector base and Collectors themselves. The geth initially stuck to the Perseus Veil - in ME1 everyone crapped themselves that the geth had come beyond the veil and attacked Eden Prime. What on earth are the doing gathering some unknown Prothean colony (which we have archaeological records for) in the Styx Theta cluster, let alone immediately engineering them into Collectors and giving them a base beyond the Omega 4 relay? None of it makes sense. Legion says that the geth have only been knocking about in their present form for a few centuries, building a Dyson Sphere. The ‘Morning War’ is also a matter of historical record. Equating the geth to Collectors on the basis of husks corroborates Shep’s story - the common factor between geth and Collectors are the Reapers. The derelict Reaper was crawling with 'em.

Presumably to give the young races (which many believe the Protheans created in the first place, esp. the Hanar) some breathing space, observing them from the fringes, and dissecting them from time to time. As mysterious & technologically advanced aliens are wont to, dontcherknow :).

An entire empire reduced to one base, voluntarily?! For observation?

Why they suddenly quit doing that is anyone’s guess, but doesn’t necessarily mean the Reapers are coming.
Their means are different, but their goals could be entwined, since the end result of both is a planet devoid of human life.

Anyone’s guess indeed, but the fact that Sovvie’s destruction woke them up speaks of the link between them and the Reapers (backed up by their use of husks and the fact that they’re freakin’ building another Reaper in their base - with no geth in sight).

No need for a miracle weapon, when you can unite the entire damn galaxy behind you, including the (cured) Krogan, the (ultra-fast breeding) Rachni, the (tech wizards) Geth and the Migrant Fleet, the largest collection of ships in the Universe. Thanks to that Harbinger data collected from the base before it’s destroyed, and EDI’s new anti-Reaper algorythms, it’s also conceivable that Shepard’s team could cook up some anti-indoctrination thingamabob, allowing small teams to invade individual Reapers and dispatch them from the inside out.
Or just the King Reaper, in order to reprogram it to send a disabling signal to the rest of them as the Heretic geth were trying to do… heck, maybe even try to reverse-indoctrinate it, see how it likes *them *apples !

That’s still a big stretch - but would be more conceivable with the base intact.

The Rachni were ‘soured by a yellow note’ - not much use against the Reapers. I dunked the queen in acid, the risk was too great. Likewise I blew up the heretics and wiped the genophage data - too great a risk to the galaxy as a whole in the hopes that a few disparate, aggressive races could aid you.

50,000 years ago the Prothean Empire was about as united as it gets, but it didn’t help them. One Reaper wiped out the Citadel fleet, which was on guard against the geth. Once the Reapers sweep in, it’s all over - like one F-16 fighting ten biplanes. The biplanes are gonna lose.

Not to mention the Reapers can shut down the mass relays, isolating systems and picking them off one by one. The only advantage we have this time is the fact that they can’t use the Citadel straight away. Once thousands of Reapers turn up at the Citadel I doubt the Council or Shepard will be able to do much to prevent them shutting down the network.

The Reapers aren’t linked like the heretic geth - Sovvie says “We are each a nation. Independent and free of all weakness.”.

Given that the Reapers were behind the virus that heretic’d the heretic geth (something even the quarians thought impossible - their experiments with hacking geth ended up with a bunch of dead quarians), I’d wager any virus attempt would be pissing in the wind.

[/QUOTE]

@Johnny Angel

I was certain for a long time that they must have just mistyped ‘Elusive’ through the whole game. But the comic that came with the Collector’s Edition made it clear that they knew the difference. However, I still hold that it was a big fuck-up that they decided to bite the bullet on and explain away rather than re-record dialogue (though the difference in pronunciation is so slight). In any case, it was a mouthful and sounded ridiculous every time somebody wedged it into a conversation. The writers were good enough that you would think they would have noticed how cringe-worthy it was every time. Why didn’t any of the NPCs just call him Lou, like I did? Or, TIM, like a lot of people on the Straight Dope do?

“Shepard.”
“Who are you?”
“There are some who call me…Tim.”

[tanstaafl]

I’m not going to try to comment on everyone point-by-point but I just wanted to throw out a few more items.

If you talk to Miranda just after speaking with The Illusive Man for the first time she says something about how she wanted to install implants in you while rebuilding you that would have allowed Cerberus to control you if necessary but that the Illusive Man prevented it. Given that, it is certainly possible that the Council (or anyone else for that matter) may not completely trust you because they don’t know how much of what you are saying is being controlled by Cerberus. Even Anderson admits he feels uncomfortable talking to you because you are with Cerberus (no matter how often you deny it).

Also, when the Council reinstates your Spectre status one of them says something to the effect of your status only being valid outside of Council space, so it sounds like they may have reinstated you just to please Anderson and get rid of you.

That said, it is possible that the Council is being somewhat indoctrinated. The Citadel itself was built by the Reapers after all. And then there are the Keepers. There was an entire side-quest involving scanning them in ME1 and if you did it you get an e-mail from the scientist involved in ME2. And the Keepers are still around in ME2.

So there could be something else involved but I think it is possible that the Council just doesn’t trust Shepherd, Cerberus or humanity in general enough to follow up. They probably think this is just some sort of political ploy by Cerberus.

After all, we’re talking about humans here. It’s not like human politicians have never made up an external threat just for political power, is it?

[Kobal2]

[spoiler]

@Mr. Kobayashi

Old Timmy-boy’s resources are great, but I doubt even the Council would believe he could construct a clone of Sovereign, smash it up a bit then date it 37 million years - they don’t doubt for a second that Tali’s omnitool is accurate (when Shep has a vested interest in forging it). This time they’ve got loads of measurements, none of which are forged - plus the word of the man who saved their stupid asses two years ago.

…and then died. And then came back, “allied” with his/her former enemies. No reason to be suspicious there, I’m sure

Besides, I get the feeling that Shepard was already a bit of a thorn in the Council’s side *before *he got killed : why else would the Savior of the Galaxy have been sent on some bullshit anti-geth errand in some backwater part of the Universe ? Since the Council operates pretty much like the Roman Republic, it makes sense they’d be wary of a very popular, very charismatic war hero… Especially if Shepard’s Renegade, and therefore more “foul mouthed teenager with an attitude problem” than Sulla material

A yes, the treaty of something-or-other. I don’t see why humans would suddenly be able to outstrip the turians or asari, though - races who have been established in space for millennia. The turians have 37 dreadnoughts compared to humanity’s 6 - it would be one hell of a feat to outstrip that. And everyone else. Turian military doctrine would no doubt have them pumping out capital ships like nobody’s business, and the asari are no slouches either. No reason to limit themselves. […] Humanity’s power would still be kept in check in this ‘arms-race’ even by the production of the other races.

Right, I don’t doubt that the balance of power between humanity and the other Council races would be more or less unchanged - but humanity would get quite the leg up against every OTHER race. Which they could then invade with even more ease, now that they’ve got a guy on the galactic triumvirate to back their expansionism up. Well, quatrumvirate now. Quatrumalienate. Four-headed dictatorship, dammit !

For one thing, they could end the Batarians once and for all in the Skyllian Verge, and take over their planets. They’d even have a cool casus belli to present to the rest of the galaxy : Batarians keep raiding human colonies for slaves. And then the balance of power shifts some more…

And went mental with it. Sovvie’s kinetic barriers fell when Saren’s uberhusk was defeated, implying a direct link between husks and Sovvie.

Or a coincidence. Or maybe the geth crewing Sovereign panicked when they saw their messiah killed. Or maybe Saren had put fail-safes in place, linked to his vitals, to make himself indispensable to the geth army and make sure their fates would be intertwined - that way they wouldn’t betray him. He was paranoid like that. Very skilled Spectre, very skilled.

And yet the Council give Saren the benefit of the doubt (crediting him with the whole thin), and he had the same thing.

At the time, they were only aware of him being in contact with the one beacon - and he had used it while it was more or less intact, while Shepard got it to blow up in his face. Probably because while Saren knew how to use the beacons thanks to his in depth knowledge of the Protheans, Shepard’s a bumbling human amateur. Typical, really. Your species is always in a rush & impatient ! And humans are all racists, too !

       This goes back to the 'if Sovereign was a geth construction, how would Saren be able to lie to the geth about it' point. Unless the geth are the stupidest creatures in the galaxy - which they aren't if they build a dreadnought that can give the finest piece of asari engineering a good spanking.

Weeeell he was pretty much off the chart on Renegade points. Surely he came up with some speech or other. Pushed a geth against a wall and shoved a gun in its face.
Or maybe he reprogrammed them ! Like Legion said ! Only it wasn’t Sovereign messing with their floating point divisions, but Saren. And Legion believes it was Sovereign, because like all geth he believes in their Reaper gods, even though his faction might be more ecumenical than militant about their religion. I see no flaw in that explanation.

But the question of how the Protheans became Collectorised is still up in the air. The Council is already stretching it with the ‘Sovereign is geth’ claim - geth turning Protheans into Collectors is more supposition. Especially given the age of the Omega 4 relay, Collector base and Collectors themselves. The geth initially stuck to the Perseus Veil - in ME1 everyone crapped themselves that the geth had come beyond the veil and attacked Eden Prime. What on earth are the doing gathering some unknown Prothean colony (which we have archaeological records for) in the Styx Theta cluster, let alone immediately engineering them into Collectors and giving them a base beyond the Omega 4 relay? None of it makes sense. Legion says that the geth have only been knocking about in their present form for a few centuries, building a Dyson Sphere. The ‘Morning War’ is also a matter of historical record. Equating the geth to Collectors on the basis of husks corroborates Shep’s story - the common factor between geth and Collectors are the Reapers. The derelict Reaper was crawling with 'em.

No, the geth couldn’t have turned the Protheans into Collectors, for one thing it happened a long time ago, and for another the geth aren’t bio-engineers. When you’re on the Collector derelict, EDI mentions that the Collectors share their DNA structure with the Protheans, but it’s a shortened version of it, like they’ve been engineered to be a slave race (besides, the Collectors look nothing like the statues of Protheans on Ilos - who look much more like Husks than anything).

Well, the Protheans *themselves *could have done that, 50k years ago. Using their superior genetic skills to get themselves a subservient race to do the dangerous and dirty jobs. Only it backfired, and that slave race was still too much sentient. And revolted. And eventually sent the Protheans packing (although not before being greatly weakened themselves). Now where have we seen this before ?

That kind of scenario would also make a geth/Collector alliance more likely, since they’d share a history of oppression and rebellion. So, it was maybe the other way 'round, then. The Collectors taught the geth how to make Husks. And when the geth got beaten back, they pleaded with the Collectors to avenge them by killing Shepard, and buy them time to regroup and rearm by distracting the Alliance with raids on their colonies, taking them away from their ongoing geth safari. The Collectors agreed, because they’re untouchable behind the Omega 4 relay anyway, and abducting sentient organics is what they do in any event.

Neat, huh ?
As for the husks on the derelict “Reaper”… well, we have not been informed of the existence of such a thing. Possibly it was a Prothean ship. Yes, yes, and that’s why Sovereign looked like it : the Collectors had also given the geth hints on ship building ! And… and Saren could take control of it because he was the link between the Collectors and the geth, having made contact with both races during his Spectre days !
Man, this formulating theories thing is easy when you can play fast and loose with the facts. I could so be on the Council :).

That’s still a big stretch - but would be more conceivable with the base intact.

The Rachni were ‘soured by a yellow note’ - not much use against the Reapers. I dunked the queen in acid, the risk was too great. Likewise I blew up the heretics and wiped the genophage data - too great a risk to the galaxy as a whole in the hopes that a few disparate, aggressive races could aid you.

The Krogan could totally headbutt the Reapers into submission :D. As for the Rachni, well, now that they know how the Reapers messed them up the first time, presumably they’ll watch out for indoctrination this time around, and hide their queens more thoroughly. Same about the geth.

50,000 years ago the Prothean Empire was about as united as it gets, but it didn’t help them. One Reaper wiped out the Citadel fleet, which was on guard against the geth. Once the Reapers sweep in, it’s all over - like one F-16 fighting ten biplanes. The biplanes are gonna lose.

But they were taken by complete surprise, and their mass relays immediately swept out from under them. That won’t happen to us, because…

Not to mention the Reapers can shut down the mass relays, isolating systems and picking them off one by one.

They need the Citadel for that. I think. At least, when Saren shut them down, I was able to re-activate them, allowing the Arcturus fleet to swoop in just in time, in the tradition of the cavalry since time immemorial. Now that we’re watching for any sign of a squid trying to get anywhere near the Citadel, the Reaper fleet is forced to slog through dark space the old fashioned way.

The only advantage we have this time is the fact that they can’t use the Citadel straight away. Once thousands of Reapers turn up at the Citadel I doubt the Council or Shepard will be able to do much to prevent them shutting down the network.

Yup. But since they can’t do that, they’ll have to get in from the fringes, and *we *could possibly turn off the mass relays in the vicinity of their invasion path, turning them back on when we want to launch a raid on them. It’s gonna be the Reaper’s march on Moscow, man !

The Reapers aren’t linked like the heretic geth - Sovvie says “We are each a nation. Independent and free of all weakness.”.

They’re still synthetics, and we’ve got lots and lots of data on them now. And since it’s going to take them a bit of time to reach us without the help of the mass relays, we’ve got copious free time to engineer counter-measures, at least against indoctrination.

Given that the Reapers were behind the virus that heretic’d the heretic geth (something even the quarians thought impossible - their experiments with hacking geth ended up with a bunch of dead quarians), I’d wager any virus attempt would be pissing in the wind.

Well, EDI managed to shake their shit off and take control of the ship back from under them. So there’s that.
She’s part Reaper, hyper advanced and she said herself that “AI vs. AI always goes on the side of the bigger AI, but having human input on top of the AI gives it an irrational, unpredictable edge”. Which I think is a load of crap, BTW, but I know foreshadowing when I see it ;).
Either that, or she’ll turn out to be on the Reaper side. In which case, we’re pretty much fucked as she’ll fry Shepard in his sleep and stop feeding his fishes. Ah well.[/spoiler]

[Johnny_Angel]

@Kobal2

Either that, or she’ll turn out to be on the Reaper side. In which case, we’re pretty much fucked as she’ll fry Shepard in his sleep and stop feeding his fishes. Ah well.

You can get EDI to feed your fish?

[Kobal2]

@Johnny_Angel

You can get EDI to feed your fish?

Nope, only your PA [del]Marilyn[/del]Kelly Chambers can in the actual game. But one assumes EDI could be programmed to do it itself.

[Mr.Kobayashi]

@Kobal2

[spoiler]

…and then died. And then came back, “allied” with his/her former enemies. No reason to be suspicious there, I’m sure

Besides, I get the feeling that Shepard was already a bit of a thorn in the Council’s side *before *he got killed : why else would the Savior of the Galaxy have been sent on some bullshit anti-geth errand in some backwater part of the Universe ? Since the Council operates pretty much like the Roman Republic, it makes sense they’d be wary of a very popular, very charismatic war hero… Especially if Shepard’s Renegade, and therefore more “foul mouthed teenager with an attitude problem” than Sulla material

But ParaShep is more of a Cincinnatus…although I doubt the Council reads Earth history. They make it pretty clear that Shep is an annoyance in ME1 - the turian councillor especially.

Right, I don’t doubt that the balance of power between humanity and the other Council races would be more or less unchanged - but humanity would get quite the leg up against every OTHER race. Which they could then invade with even more ease, now that they’ve got a guy on the galactic triumvirate to back their expansionism up. Well, quatrumvirate now. Quatrumalienate. Four-headed dictatorship, dammit !

For one thing, they could end the Batarians once and for all in the Skyllian Verge, and take over their planets. They’d even have a cool casus belli to present to the rest of the galaxy : Batarians keep raiding human colonies for slaves. And then the balance of power shifts some more…

It’d serve the slaver bastards right - they are a rogue state, after all. The Vol-clan were moaning about the balance before humanity became a Council member. So screw them, too. I’d like to see them, the elcor or hanar fleets rush in at the nick of time to save the entire Citadel!

Or a coincidence. Or maybe the geth crewing Sovereign panicked when they saw their messiah killed. Or maybe Saren had put fail-safes in place, linked to his vitals, to make himself indispensable to the geth army and make sure their fates would be intertwined - that way they wouldn’t betray him. He was paranoid like that. Very skilled Spectre, very skilled.

I doubt he’d have fail-safes in place in case of his own suicide, though…

At the time, they were only aware of him being in contact with the one beacon - and he had used it while it was more or less intact, while Shepard got it to blow up in his face. Probably because while Saren knew how to use the beacons thanks to his in depth knowledge of the Protheans, Shepard’s a bumbling human amateur. Typical, really. Your species is always in a rush & impatient ! And humans are all racists, too !

“Sir, it’s a 15cm serrated blade…”
This still doesn’t explain why the asari Councillor doesn’t mind-meld with you to find out what you know about the fate of the Protheans. Shiala and Liara both ‘embrace eternity’ at a drop of a hat. Maybe the asari councillor just isn’t that into Shep…

Weeeell he was pretty much off the chart on Renegade points. Surely he came up with some speech or other. Pushed a geth against a wall and shoved a gun in its face.
Or maybe he reprogrammed them ! Like Legion said ! Only it wasn’t Sovereign messing with their floating point divisions, but Saren. And Legion believes it was Sovereign, because like all geth he believes in their Reaper gods, even though his faction might be more ecumenical than militant about their religion. I see no flaw in that explanation.

But geth platforms are of no particular consequence - threatening an individual geth would get even the most renegade of Spectres nowhere. It has nothing to fear, neither pain nor the fear of death applies to a geth.
Reapers, as incredibly advanced AIs, are the obvious explanation for the heretic geth and their attacks on organics. The quarians (and even Shep) know that you can’t hack geth - period. The new files are deleted and the original programme reuploaded from archives. EDI says (and it’s common sense to assume) that in an AI vs AI fight the AI with superior hardware will always win. The Reapers are the most advanced AI in existence, explaining why they follow this new ship and how the geth split off and suddenly moved beyond the Perseus Veil.

No, the geth couldn’t have turned the Protheans into Collectors, for one thing it happened a long time ago, and for another the geth aren’t bio-engineers. When you’re on the Collector derelict, EDI mentions that the Collectors share their DNA structure with the Protheans, but it’s a shortened version of it, like they’ve been engineered to be a slave race (besides, the Collectors look nothing like the statues of Protheans on Ilos - who look much more like Husks than anything).

Well, the Protheans *themselves *could have done that, 50k years ago. Using their superior genetic skills to get themselves a subservient race to do the dangerous and dirty jobs. Only it backfired, and that slave race was still too much sentient. And revolted. And eventually sent the Protheans packing (although not before being greatly weakened themselves). Now where have we seen this before ?

As Mordin would say - supposition! The Prothean beacon in ME2, a similar warning, shows the Collectors instead of Sovereign. The message is otherwise identical, with synthetics killing organics. Too deliberate to be coincidental.

That kind of scenario would also make a geth/Collector alliance more likely, since they’d share a history of oppression and rebellion. So, it was maybe the other way 'round, then. The Collectors taught the geth how to make Husks. And when the geth got beaten back, they pleaded with the Collectors to avenge them by killing Shepard, and buy them time to regroup and rearm by distracting the Alliance with raids on their colonies, taking them away from their ongoing geth safari. The Collectors agreed, because they’re untouchable behind the Omega 4 relay anyway, and abducting sentient organics is what they do in any event.
Neat, huh ?

The Collectors are a slave race, with no free will - replaced by tech. This still leaves the question of who they are a slave of. I wouldn’t be surprised if Veetor has a recording (if Shep doesn’t) of a Collector being Harbinger-ed - his jibba-jabba also links to them being Reapers - “We are the harbinger of your perfection” - “Prepare these humans for ascendance…” “Shepard - you cannot stop us.” “Our power is unmatched - we are your genetic destiny.” “You worlds will be our laboratories…”
Very similar to Sovvie’s bragging on Virmine. His trash-talk makes no sense for a rebelling slave race, every sense if it’s a Reaper behind 'em. Shep has always stood against the Reapers, explaining the Collectors (and Harbinger’s) personal interest in Shepard particularly, even 2 years ago.

As for the husks on the derelict “Reaper”… well, we have not been informed of the existence of such a thing. Possibly it was a Prothean ship. Yes, yes, and that’s why Sovereign looked like it : the Collectors had also given the geth hints on ship building ! And… and Saren could take control of it because he was the link between the Collectors and the geth, having made contact with both races during his Spectre days !
Man, this formulating theories thing is easy when you can play fast and loose with the facts. I could so be on the Council :).

Good job you weren’t a choice! Although you’d still have been better than Udina…
Why would Prothean ships destroy their own empire, as shown in the beacons? 37 million years old also places the ship far far earlier than the Protheans, especially any hold-out in the Styx-Theta cluster.
The cluster the derelict Reaper is found says much about it. We know Klendagon’s ‘Great Rift’ is a glancing blow from an ancient mass-accelerator weapon. Clearly there was some sort of ancient battle in the cluster. Around the star Schwarzschild there are several planets showing evidence of a space-borne extinction, centred around the planet Etamis (also around Atahil and Linossa). The planets weren’t conquered, they were destroyed from orbit - wiping out all organic life. Relics found there suggest this civilisation flourished 40-20 million years ago. The derelict Reaper is 37 million years old. Shep says the Reapers wipe out organic life. A derelict Reaper is found in a cluster with such an extinction event. The timeline is exact.
The planet Joab in the Enoch Rosetta Cluster is exactly the same - although only several thousands of years ago rather than millions. The Prothean beacon warning of the Collectors is on this planet, confirming Shep’s claim that the Reapers wiped out the Protheans. Laban in the same system shows similar attack, an ancient, systematic planetwide extermination of organic life, in the same system as a Prothean beacon warning of Collectors and showing synthetics killing Protheans. Like the ancient Schwarzschild extinction, everything points to the Reapers - it’s too much to be dismissed as coincidence.
In all cases the bombardment appears to have come from a dreadnought. Sovereign was so dreadnought it made the Destiny Ascencion look like a frigate - as was the derelict Reaper.

The Krogan could totally headbutt the Reapers into submission :D. As for the Rachni, well, now that they know how the Reapers messed them up the first time, presumably they’ll watch out for indoctrination this time around, and hide their queens more thoroughly. Same about the geth.

I regret giving the Rachni Queen an acid bath in ME1, since she appears to be keeping her word in ME2. Still, without hindsight releasing her was dangerous and naive, this time we’ve no krogan to save us if they decide to take revenge on the Council races. The collective nature of the geth made reintegration into the ‘good’ geth too risky. That one idea could corrupt the entire geth - and we know the Reapers have no trouble haxx0ring them.

But they were taken by complete surprise, and their mass relays immediately swept out from under them. That won’t happen to us, because…

They need the Citadel for that. I think. At least, when Saren shut them down, I was able to re-activate them, allowing the Arcturus fleet to swoop in just in time, in the tradition of the cavalry since time immemorial. Now that we’re watching for any sign of a squid trying to get anywhere near the Citadel, the Reaper fleet is forced to slog through dark space the old fashioned way.

Which, judging from the end scene in ME2, they’re gonna do. Imagine those thousands of Reapers ploughing their way straight to the Citadel - quite literally, as a turian cruiser being smashed on Sovereign’s hull didn’t even slow it down. Their mass effect fields are impregnable, even to dreadnought fire. Sovereign with a bunch of geth wiped out the Council fleet - even the Alliance (who weren’t taken by surprise) took significant casualties. Now imagine thousands of Sovereigns - they don’t even need to take the Council by surprise.

Yup. But since they can’t do that, they’ll have to get in from the fringes, and *we *could possibly turn off the mass relays in the vicinity of their invasion path, turning them back on when we want to launch a raid on them. It’s gonna be the Reaper’s march on Moscow, man !

Or the Battle of Gaugamela. Bar a miracle, we’ve currently got no weapon capable of taking down even one Reaper in open combar, let alone a fleet of the squiddy bastards. As for the Council races shutting down the relays - even the asari haven’t a clue how to manipulate them (the asari matriach bartender states that the rest of the asari “laughed the blue off her ass” when she suggested they build more relays.
Even if the council could shut down the relay network - the Reapers built the relays. They’d no doubt reactivate them, or build a new one straight to the Citadel (something the Protheans could do). It also prevents us from using them, which is just what the Reapers want. No need to bother going to the Citadel - simply wipe out isolated system after isolated system. Slow, but the Reapers took 300 years to wipe out the Protheans, so it’s no skin off their nose.

They’re still synthetics, and we’ve got lots and lots of data on them now. And since it’s going to take them a bit of time to reach us without the help of the mass relays, we’ve got copious free time to engineer counter-measures, at least against indoctrination.

But no way to implement them - FTL takes far too long. We may end up like the Etamisians - able to fire off one last defiant shot before the end, too little to late. They were able to disable a Reaper in open combat, but it didn’t help them. Although it is the best chance we’ve got, which is why I saved the Collector base - more information to fight them. Find an exhaust pipe to shoot down or something.

Well, EDI managed to shake their shit off and take control of the ship back from under them. So there’s that.
She’s part Reaper, hyper advanced and she said herself that “AI vs. AI always goes on the side of the bigger AI, but having human input on top of the AI gives it an irrational, unpredictable edge”. Which I think is a load of crap, BTW, but I know foreshadowing when I see it ;).
Either that, or she’ll turn out to be on the Reaper side. In which case, we’re pretty much fucked as she’ll fry Shepard in his sleep and stop feeding his fishes. Ah well.

Ha, indeed. But the Reapers still disabled the Normandy, and it was one hell of a Xanatos Gambit - how did they, 37 million years ago, know the Normandy - containing their own tech - would install their IFF to go through a relay to take out a puppet of theirs which didn’t even exist yet? And yet the IFF still got the crew abducted! Bear in mind most starships don’t have an AI as advanced as EDI - so if the Reapers were so inclined a custom-made virus could no doubt format EDI’s hard drive and the systems of every starship in the galaxy. That is if they even bother; Reapers can simply ram through most ships.

If EDI turns out to be a traitor I’ll be pissed off. The Reapers clearly want Shep’s body - or at least Shep out of the way. In the prequel comic about Liara the Collectors are negotiating with the Shadow Broker for Shep’s body after it was spaced. Harbinger frequently voices his crush about Shepard - “Preserve Shepard’s body if possible” “Neutralise Commander Shepard.” “Shepard - you could have been useful…” “You escaped us before, Shepard - not again…” - not to mention their initial attack on the SR-1.
After the blocks are lifted EDI has able time to cut the life support and contact the Reapers, yet she helps wipe out the Collectors. She could have easily prevented the Normandy from destroying the Collector cruiser, leaving Shepard helpless in the heart of Reaper power. But she doesn’t. [/spoiler]
[/QUOTE]

[FoieGrasIsEvil]

Jesus Christ, is this a series of sci-fi novels or a videogame? I’ve never played either, and am intruiged to do so, but it sounds like…work!

How do you guys remember all this stuff?

[Mr.Kobayashi]

Well, there’s a wiki, which helps. There’s also a narrated in-game Codex explaining history, biology, tech, how the eponymous mass effect works, the works. Plus the conversations and background in the gameplay itself.

[Todderbob]

@FoieGrasIsEvil

Jesus Christ, is this a series of sci-fi novels or a videogame? I’ve never played either, and am intruiged to do so, but it sounds like…work!

How do you guys remember all this stuff?

I have a borderline eidetic memory.

[FoieGrasIsEvil]

@Mr.Kobayashi

Well, there’s a wiki, which helps. There’s also a narrated in-game Codex explaining history, biology, tech, how the eponymous mass effect works, the works. Plus the conversations and background in the gameplay itself.

Yeah, thank you, I recall you posting that somewhere else (or maybe it was for the backstory on Bioshock?), but I can’t help but wonder…many of you have played these games immediately upon release, so there probably wasn’t a resource like that available at the time, so how did you learn all these storylines? Simply through repetition of playing the game? Or is there a really thick manual that comes with them that tells the gamer a lot of the relevant information?

It sounds like this game is, er…massive in scope and breadth. Is that accurate? I don’t visit gamer forums or anything, and I’m a pretty lite-core gamer myself, but I want to be able to play this game without needing to study first! Can I? And by that I mean I intend to play the first game first…

ETA: is the in-game Codex something that occurs while you’re going along and playing, or is it a resource that you have to watch/listen to on the disc before playing?

[Mr.Kobayashi]

@FoieGrasIsEvil

Yeah, thank you, I recall you posting that somewhere else (or maybe it was for the backstory on Bioshock?), but I can’t help but wonder…many of you have played these games immediately upon release, so there probably wasn’t a resource like that available at the time, so how did you learn all these storylines? Simply through repetition of playing the game? Or is there a really thick manual that comes with them that tells the gamer a lot of the relevant information?

It sounds like this game is, er…massive in scope and breadth. Is that accurate? I don’t visit gamer forums or anything, and I’m a pretty lite-core gamer myself, but I want to be able to play this game without needing to study first! Can I? And by that I mean I intend to play the first game first…

ETA: is the in-game Codex something that occurs while you’re going along and playing, or is it a resource that you have to watch/listen to on the disc before playing?

The Codex is like an in-game encyclopaedia, entirely option but very rich in information. Accessible through the main menu, it lists various topics about the 'verse; ships, planets, etc.

Massive is right, its scope is the entire galaxy (and beyond). You can slip into the first one pretty easily (you pick the main character, Commander Shepard’s, background and service history). There is a lot of dialogue, the story is very character driven. You might be a bit lost jumping straight into the second, though.

I highly recommend it for even casual gamers; it’s not particularly difficult (unless, of course, you crank up the difficulty levels - ‘insanity’ is just that). It also has two novels set in the 'verse, with a third on the way, as well as comics and the games themselves.

[Todderbob]

@FoieGrasIsEvil

Yeah, thank you, I recall you posting that somewhere else (or maybe it was for the backstory on Bioshock?), but I can’t help but wonder…many of you have played these games immediately upon release, so there probably wasn’t a resource like that available at the time, so how did you learn all these storylines? Simply through repetition of playing the game? Or is there a really thick manual that comes with them that tells the gamer a lot of the relevant information?

It sounds like this game is, er…massive in scope and breadth. Is that accurate? I don’t visit gamer forums or anything, and I’m a pretty lite-core gamer myself, but I want to be able to play this game without needing to study first! Can I? And by that I mean I intend to play the first game first…

ETA: is the in-game Codex something that occurs while you’re going along and playing, or is it a resource that you have to watch/listen to on the disc before playing?

You can play the second game as a stand alone, however I wouldn’t recommend it. There’s a lot of stuff in the second that just feels so much richer if you’ve played the first.

You can play the first and second without ever cracking open the Codex or a novel or a comic on the subject. The games are entirely stand alone, and just from playing you get the entirety of the storyline (that Shepherd is exposed to – there are lots of optional side quests that aren’t ‘necessary’ to the main plot).

[Tanbarkie]

@Todderbob

I have a borderline eidetic memory.

eyes widen

*four in the morning
i have been playing for seven hours now

a stranger on the internet
seeks my advice
he is overwhelmed by the breadth of the universe ahead

i review the codex
of my mind
mass effect fields, biotic powers, a station among the asteroids like a red, metallic jellyfish
normandy sweeping past inverted towers

there is no need to pause
no need to push up-and-to-the-left
no need to select the space encyclopedia and seek the appropriate article

i remember everything.*

[StarsApart]

@FoieGrasIsEvil

Yeah, thank you, I recall you posting that somewhere else (or maybe it was for the backstory on Bioshock?), but I can’t help but wonder…many of you have played these games immediately upon release, so there probably wasn’t a resource like that available at the time, so how did you learn all these storylines? Simply through repetition of playing the game? Or is there a really thick manual that comes with them that tells the gamer a lot of the relevant information?

It sounds like this game is, er…massive in scope and breadth. Is that accurate? I don’t visit gamer forums or anything, and I’m a pretty lite-core gamer myself, but I want to be able to play this game without needing to study first! Can I? And by that I mean I intend to play the first game first…

ETA: is the in-game Codex something that occurs while you’re going along and playing, or is it a resource that you have to watch/listen to on the disc before playing?

The really cool thing about Mass Effect, which I love, is how easy it is to get into the universe. It’s very immersive and you learn a lot just by walking around and through dialogue. I actually don’t think I’ve read a single Codex entry but I am able to follow every discussion in this thread easily, because so much of it is revealed in the dialogue and in the game world. It all feels very logical and follows naturally.

[FoieGrasIsEvil]

@StarsApart

The really cool thing about Mass Effect, which I love, is how easy it is to get into the universe. It’s very immersive and you learn a lot just by walking around and through dialogue. I actually don’t think I’ve read a single Codex entry but I am able to follow every discussion in this thread easily, because so much of it is revealed in the dialogue and in the game world. It all feels very logical and follows naturally.

OK, so its kinda like Fallout 3 in that regard then? I could play that.

[Todderbob]

@FoieGrasIsEvil

OK, so its kinda like Fallout 3 in that regard then? I could play that.

ME and ME2 are like Fallout 3, but way, way better and more flowing.

[Mr.Kobayashi]

@FoieGrasIsEvil

OK, so its kinda like Fallout 3 in that regard then? I could play that.

The dialogue tree isn’t dissimilar, in that you can be a saint or jerkass (paragon and renegade, respectively). A large part of the game is spent chatting. The second adds interrupts, though.

Paragon and renegade aren’t exactly good and evil, like Fallout 3 has, though. Paragon favours diplomacy and working with other races, which renegade is a xenophobic ‘I did what I had to do’ mentality. Or, as Yahtzee puts it, Captain Picard vs Dirty Harry.

[FoieGrasIsEvil]

I think I know what my next game purchase is going to be then. That is, after I wallow through Bioshock 2, which I just got. I’m always way behind the curve because I’m broke and/or married with children, but in a way it helps me not jump all over crappy games upon release and waste my money. I’m the same way with movies.

Thanks for the advice, guys! Sounds like my kind of game. Singleplayer, immersive, long and involving story, endless hours of gameplay, re-playability…

[Kobal2]

@StarsApart

The really cool thing about Mass Effect, which I love, is how easy it is to get into the universe. It’s very immersive and you learn a lot just by walking around and through dialogue. I actually don’t think I’ve read a single Codex entry but I am able to follow every discussion in this thread easily, because so much of it is revealed in the dialogue and in the game world. It all feels very logical and follows naturally.

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.

@Mr.Kobayashi

But ParaShep is more of a Cincinnatus…although I doubt the Council reads Earth history. They make it pretty clear that Shep is an annoyance in ME1 - the turian councillor especially.

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.

It’d serve the slaver bastards right - they are a rogue state, after all. The Vol-clan were moaning about the balance before humanity became a Council member. So screw them, too. I’d like to see them, the elcor or hanar fleets rush in at the nick of time to save the entire Citadel!

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

I doubt he’d have fail-safes in place in case of his own suicide, though…

Death is death. I doubt he planned on topping himself, but vitals monitors don’t care about the manner in which you die.

“Sir, it’s a 15cm serrated blade…”
This still doesn’t explain why the asari Councillor doesn’t mind-meld with you to find out what you know about the fate of the Protheans. Shiala and Liara both ‘embrace eternity’ at a drop of a hat. Maybe the asari councillor just isn’t that into Shep…

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 ?

But geth platforms are of no particular consequence - threatening an individual geth would get even the most renegade of Spectres nowhere. It has nothing to fear, neither pain nor the fear of death applies to a geth.

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 !

Reapers, as incredibly advanced AIs, are the obvious explanation for the heretic geth and their attacks on organics. The quarians (and even Shep) know that you can’t hack geth - period. The new files are deleted and the original programme reuploaded from archives. EDI says (and it’s common sense to assume) that in an AI vs AI fight the AI with superior hardware will always win. The Reapers are the most advanced AI in existence, explaining why they follow this new ship and how the geth split off and suddenly moved beyond the Perseus Veil.

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.

As Mordin would say - supposition! The Prothean beacon in ME2, a similar warning, shows the Collectors instead of Sovereign. The message is otherwise identical, with synthetics killing organics. Too deliberate to be coincidental.

Wait, what ? There’s a Prothean beacon in ME2 ? Where, when, how ? I missed that.

The Collectors are a slave race, with no free will - replaced by tech. This still leaves the question of who they are a slave of.

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.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Veetor has a recording (if Shep doesn’t) of a Collector being Harbinger-ed - his jibba-jabba also links to them being Reapers - “We are the harbinger of your perfection” - “Prepare these humans for ascendance…” “Shepard - you cannot stop us.” “Our power is unmatched - we are your genetic destiny.” “You worlds will be our laboratories…”
Very similar to Sovvie’s bragging on Virmine. His trash-talk makes no sense for a rebelling slave race, every sense if it’s a Reaper behind 'em. Shep has always stood against the Reapers, explaining the Collectors (and Harbinger’s) personal interest in Shepard particularly, even 2 years ago.

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.

Good job you weren’t a choice! Although you’d still have been better than Udina…
Why would Prothean ships destroy their own empire, as shown in the beacons? 37 million years old also places the ship far far earlier than the Protheans, especially any hold-out in the Styx-Theta cluster.

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.

The cluster the derelict Reaper is found says much about it. We know Klendagon’s ‘Great Rift’ is a glancing blow from an ancient mass-accelerator weapon. Clearly there was some sort of ancient battle in the cluster. Around the star Schwarzschild there are several planets showing evidence of a space-borne extinction, centred around the planet Etamis (also around Atahil and Linossa). The planets weren’t conquered, they were destroyed from orbit - wiping out all organic life. Relics found there suggest this civilisation flourished 40-20 million years ago. The derelict Reaper is 37 million years old. Shep says the Reapers wipe out organic life. A derelict Reaper is found in a cluster with such an extinction event. The timeline is exact.
The planet Joab in the Enoch Rosetta Cluster is exactly the same - although only several thousands of years ago rather than millions. The Prothean beacon warning of the Collectors is on this planet, confirming Shep’s claim that the Reapers wiped out the Protheans. Laban in the same system shows similar attack, an ancient, systematic planetwide extermination of organic life, in the same system as a Prothean beacon warning of Collectors and showing synthetics killing Protheans. Like the ancient Schwarzschild extinction, everything points to the Reapers - it’s too much to be dismissed as coincidence.
In all cases the bombardment appears to have come from a dreadnought. Sovereign was so dreadnought it made the Destiny Ascencion look like a frigate - as was the derelict Reaper.

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.

I regret giving the Rachni Queen an acid bath in ME1, since she appears to be keeping her word in ME2. Still, without hindsight releasing her was dangerous and naive, this time we’ve no krogan to save us if they decide to take revenge on the Council races.

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 collective nature of the geth made reintegration into the ‘good’ geth too risky. That one idea could corrupt the entire geth - and we know the Reapers have no trouble haxx0ring them.

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.

Which, judging from the end scene in ME2, they’re gonna do. Imagine those thousands of Reapers ploughing their way straight to the Citadel - quite literally, as a turian cruiser being smashed on Sovereign’s hull didn’t even slow it down. Their mass effect fields are impregnable, even to dreadnought fire. Sovereign with a bunch of geth wiped out the Council fleet - even the Alliance (who weren’t taken by surprise) took significant casualties. Now imagine thousands of Sovereigns - they don’t even need to take the Council by surprise.

Yup. We’re gonna be living in interesting times, that’s for sure.

Or the Battle of Gaugamela. Bar a miracle, we’ve currently got no weapon capable of taking down even one Reaper in open combar, let alone a fleet of the squiddy bastards.

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.

As for the Council races shutting down the relays - even the asari haven’t a clue how to manipulate them (the asari matriach bartender states that the rest of the asari “laughed the blue off her ass” when she suggested they build more relays.
Even if the council could shut down the relay network - the Reapers built the relays. They’d no doubt reactivate them, or build a new one straight to the Citadel (something the Protheans could do).

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.

It also prevents us from using them, which is just what the Reapers want. No need to bother going to the Citadel - simply wipe out isolated system after isolated system. Slow, but the Reapers took 300 years to wipe out the Protheans, so it’s no skin off their nose.

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.

Ha, indeed. But the Reapers still disabled the Normandy, and it was one hell of a Xanatos Gambit - how did they, 37 million years ago, know the Normandy - containing their own tech - would install their IFF to go through a relay to take out a puppet of theirs which didn’t even exist yet? And yet the IFF still got the crew abducted!

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.

Bear in mind most starships don’t have an AI as advanced as EDI - so if the Reapers were so inclined a custom-made virus could no doubt format EDI’s hard drive and the systems of every starship in the galaxy. That is if they even bother; Reapers can simply ram through most ships.

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 !

If EDI turns out to be a traitor I’ll be pissed off. The Reapers clearly want Shep’s body - or at least Shep out of the way. In the prequel comic about Liara the Collectors are negotiating with the Shadow Broker for Shep’s body after it was spaced. Harbinger frequently voices his crush about Shepard - “Preserve Shepard’s body if possible” “Neutralise Commander Shepard.” “Shepard - you could have been useful…” “You escaped us before, Shepard - not again…” - not to mention their initial attack on the SR-1.

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.

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.

After the blocks are lifted EDI has able time to cut the life support and contact the Reapers, yet she helps wipe out the Collectors. She could have easily prevented the Normandy from destroying the Collector cruiser, leaving Shepard helpless in the heart of Reaper power. But she doesn’t.

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