Mass Effect Retrospective 21: Geth of Honor
This is the last post on the squad members in Mass Effect 2. Next time we will finally start talking about the plot. But now, I’ve saved the two best[2] for last:
Tali
Tali’s recruitment mission has you rescuing her from a Geth attack during a research project. She’s studying a star that’s burning out too quickly because of mumble mumble dark energy space magic. According to lead Mass Effect 1 writer Drew Karpyshyn (who departed BioWare just before Mass Effect 2 was completed) this was supposed to lead in to the overall Reaper plot. PC Gamer has a transcript of a podcast where Karpyshyn discussed an early concept for the big Mass Effect 3 reveal:
Dark Energy was something that only organics could access because of various techno-science magic reasons we hadn’t decided on yet. Maybe using this Dark Energy was having a ripple effect on the space-time continuum.
Maybe the Reapers kept wiping out organic life because organics keep evolving to the state where they would use biotics and dark energy and that caused an entropic effect that would hasten the end of the universe. Being immortal beings, that’s something they wouldn’t want to see.
Then we thought, let’s take it to the next level. Maybe the Reapers are looking at a way to stop this. Maybe there’s an inevitable descent into the opposite of the Big Bang (the Big Crunch) and the Reapers realize that the only way they can stop it is by using biotics, but since they can’t use biotics they have to keep rebuilding society – as they try and find the perfect group to use biotics for this purpose. The Asari were close but they weren’t quite right, the Protheans were close as well.
Again it’s very vague and not fleshed out, it was something we considered but we ended up going in a different direction.
I’m a little wary of talking about this here, if only because it strays dangerously close to the blame-game stuff I’ve been trying to avoid. Also, it’s a little unfair to compare this half-baked idea to the Actual Ending, because this Dark Energy plot has a lot of blanks that need to be filled in. It’s entirely possible this idea would have fallen apart just as violently as the one we got.
Sure, it might sound like a promising idea[3] when Karpyshyn outlines it, but if you put this explanation in the mouth of the Star Child and offered a Red, Green, Blue ending-o-tron then it probably would have been just as big a disaster as the ending we got.
But I bring this up because this is the only part of the entire game that makes any effort at all to set something up for Mass Effect 3, and it sets up an idea they abandoned later. You don’tneed to do some kind of “big mind-blowing reveal” at the end of the series. But if you are going to go that way, then you really need to set it up properly ahead of time. A big twist is more than just “unexpected information”.
Everyone points to the end of Mass Effect 3 as this point of failure, but I maintain the seeds of that eventual failure were planted much, much earlier. Yes, the eventual reveal of the purpose of the Reapers was awful, but it would have been easier to deliver a good ending if there had been something to build on here in Mass Effect 2.
Tali’s Trial
While stopping the Reapers (and later, stopping Cerberus) remains the overarching plot, the Mass Effect series also has two major sub-plots that cover all three games: The Quarian / Geth conflict, and the Genophage. While the Reaper / Cerberus plot eventually disintegrates into frustrating nonsense, the other two plots remain uniformly excellent. Mordin’s loyalty mission advances the Genophage plot, while Tali’s advances the Geth / Quarian plot.
Tali is called back to the flotilla and put on trial for smuggling live Geth onto their ships. Tali isn’t actually the one to blame. It was her father. But Tali wants to take the blame to protect the memory of her father. I just want to point out that last week on Spoiler Warning, we ran into that exact situation in KOTOR, where one Wookiee wanted to take the blame for another, to protect the honor of the dead. Everyone notices when BioWare re-uses the Towers of Hanoi puzzle, but little ideas like this often show up again and again without being noticed.
I’d love to know if the same person wrote both stories.
The entire quest is fantastic. You get to see the famous Quarian flotilla up close. (A payoff to something ME1 set up!) You get to meet the Quarian leadership. (Worldbuilding!) You get to participate in the trial and make some fairly weighty decisions that aren’t just lame paragon / renegade binaries. (Choices that matter and make sense!) You get to shoot some Geth and hear all their delightful robo-noises, which was one of the most aurally pleasant parts of Mass Effect 1[4].
Also, this quest introduces characters and ideas that will return in Mass Effect 3 for a large dramatic payoff. We get character development, story development, choices, worldbuilding, and continuity between games. It’s wonderful, but it also highlights how much the main plot failed to do these things.
Legion
Legion is a fan favorite. He made the rounds in the memes and comics when the game was fresh. Why do people like him so much? That cool voice? The fact that he’s a rare sci-fi robot that doesn’t suffer from Pinocchio Syndrome? Is it that intriguing N7 chestplate that the writers are smart enough to not explain?
Those are all good reasons, but I think an overlooked reason for Legion’s popularity is that he’s a character made almost entirely out of worldbuilding. Legion is a payoff to numerous questions posed in Mass Effect 1. His explanations about Geth existence, motivations, and behavior are all interesting. It expands on what we already know without rewriting existing lore or clashing tonally. Since the moment Tali explained their shared history, I’ve wanted to hear the Geth side of the story.
His recruitment takes place during a main story mission, so we’ll talk about it in a later entry. For now let’s talk about his loyalty mission, which poses the most interesting question of the entire Mass Effect series…
Link (YouTube)
The Geth have broken into two factions: One believes that they should join with the Reapers, and the other believe they should remain independent. Legion is with the independants, and calls the other faction the “heretics”, (Which makes me wonder if the pro-Reaper Geth think of themselves as “normal Geth” and Legion’s faction as the heretics.) The two sides don’t openly war on each other, but they have broken contact and avoid one another.
So then Legion hits you will this conundrum: The pro-Reaper Geth have a base where they are developing a software virus. This virus will alter the anti-Reaper faction, making them pro-Reaper. This is a pretty big danger. The Geth are already a pretty formidable foe[5], and now you’re discovering you’re only facing some sub-section of them. So Legion asks for Shepard’s help in eliminating the threat that this base poses.
During the mission, Legion offers Shepard a choice: Blow up the base along with the virus, or turn the virus around and use it to convert the heretics to our side.
As Extra Credits describes it:
Imagine this Geth sect is you, and the belief in question is something you feel very strongly, or hold very dear. Now imagine someone could take that belief from you – say, the religion of your father, or the belief in the worth of your own individuality. Imagine they could do it without asking you, without you ever knowing, and without your volition at all. Imagine that they could wipe away your beliefs to thoroughly that if you met your former unaltered self, you would disagree so violently that you probably couldn’t stand each other. Now imagine that the only way to prevent that from happening was a struggle to the death.
It’s a shame the writers tried to map this decision to the paragon / renegade system. This question is much too nuanced for so crude a tool. On the other hand, leaving out paragon or renegade considerations would have felt wrong from a gameplay perspective.
Some people come at this from the practical approach: Which is best for the galaxy as a whole? Other people come at it from a moral perspective: If it were me on the receiving end, would I prefer death, or alteration? Or maybe you could view alteration using some sort ofMAD doctrine: If you don’t want to be at risk of alteration, then don’t try to alter others. Since these Geth made the first move towards this kind of weapon, turning it on them might be an important lesson for the Geth. Then again, it might just break the taboo and cause the Geth to abandon all attempts at dialog and embrace “brainwashing-via-hotfix” as a means of debate.
You could argue that your decision doesn’t matter because the damage was already done when the heretics opted for this sort of solution. Up until now, Geth have always disagreed peacefully. But this virus demands aggression. No matter what you choose, this conflict makes them more like organics, who solve large conflicts by settling who has the best guns instead of who has the best ideas. This change in behavior might damage their intelligence and development in the long run.
This. This is why I love details-first sci-fi. The rules of a well-defined universe give us some frame of reference so we can examine this question in detail.In a drama-based universe where robots are just human-style personalities inside a metal body, it would be really awkward to slow the story down to ponder something like this and lay all the ground rules for what technology can and can’t do.
In a drama-based world, if someone reprogrammed C3P0 to hate Luke, the expectation would be that Luke could appeal to him as a friend to break the “spell”. Maybe right before he kills Luke, he would be reminded of some moment of friendship they shared, and he would realize his mistake at just the last second, proving that evil can’t win over good because love is true. Actually, since C3P0 is a comedy character, he’d probably be “fixed” by (say) hitting his head or being electrocuted. Or whatever. I’m sure you’ve heard that story before.
I’m not knocking those drama-based stories. They’re good. In Return of the Jedi, the good guys win because of love. Luke finds the strength to overcome Vader without resorting to the dark side because of his love for his sister. In turn, Vader betrays the dark side because of his love for his son. Han and Leia overcome the stormtroopers because of their love for each other, which Han finally professes right at a crucial moment. And the Ewoks overcome the Empire because of George Lucas’ love of merchandising.
The point I’m making is that while I enjoy having good drama pluck at my heart strings, sometimes what I really want is a challenging[6] philosophical exercise within a properly framed hypothetical, and the question of what to do with the Heretic Geth is exactly that. The quandary is endlessly fascinating, and every time I think about it I find a new idea to play with or a question to ask.
Speaking of questions…
What do these guys argue about?
Legion makes it clear that this particular Geth conflict is the result of Reaper influence, but he also makes it sound like this is not their first disagreement. The Geth presumably have the same hardware, they begin discussions with the same priorities, and they spend the majority of the time loaded into massive server racks where they aren’t going to have divergent sensory experiences. So how is it that they have differing opinions?
Humans are wildly divergent. We’ve got different genes, different conditioning, different experiences, and different outputs of hormones resulting from different behaviors and diets. But in Geth? Where would these differences come from? They presumably run on the same hardware. They spend most of their existence downloaded into server farms, which means they’re not out in the world having different sensory experiences.
Let’s say uncle Bob would drag us kids out to the lake every summer and feed us burgers that were raw meat inside and scorched carbon outside, and we were all tormented by mosquitos while we ate them. The repeated negative experience has conditioned me to hate the entire grilling experience regardless of location or skill of the chef. This makes me a bit of an oddball in my culture, where people love grilling outdoors.
How would such a divergent opinion arise among the Geth? What would make any of them diverge? If the same hardware takes the same input and rates it according to the same priorities, then disagreement isn’t diversity, it’s a software bug.
All of this is an exhaustive way of asking: What do the Geth talk about all day?
I’m not saying that Mass Effect should have answered this question. I’m saying that the detailed framework provided by the worldbuilder has created a universe where we can play around with ideas like this. This sort of exploration of hypotheticals wouldn’t work[7] in a schlock-based story where robots are just humans who are bad at idioms and have chrome skin.
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In contradiction, the only fun I had was with the Sniper (or whatever it was called).oldmanpaco said:
Mass Effect Retrospective 22: Under New Management
Mass Effect 2 is a strange game. As the previous entries made clear, some of the writing is smart, witty, and interesting, and other parts of it are appallingly clumsy, idiotic, and tone-deaf. It’s not that the quality follows a broad gradient, it’s that the quality is incredibly modal. If you’re in a bad scene, then everything is generally bad: Characters can’t maintain a consistent personality or motivation, the player dialog becomes railroading and doesn’t line up with the prompts on the dialog wheel, established rules are discarded carelessly, and important details go unexplained. Then you get to the next scene and suddenly the characters behave sensibly, your dialog wheel is useful, the universe stops contradicting itself, and your actions are given proper context and justification.
It’s like having slices of Michael Bay’s Transformers interspersed with scenes from Gattaca, or Moon. It’s maddening.
We’re going to look over the main plot of Mass Effect 2, but instead of viewing facts in isolation as a first-time player would be forced to do, we’re going to examine them in light of things that are revealed later. We’re also going to examine the plot missions in order, instead of doing them with a half-dozen recruitment and loyalty missions between them.
Also, we’re probably going to re-tread a couple of things I said about the opening of Mass Effect 2 in previous entries, because I really want the through-line of the plot all in one place. Sorry about that. I’ve been editing this as I published it, but I can’t go back and re-arrange stuff that’s already published. (Well, I could, but it would be chaos.) Hopefully this isn’t too annoying or distracting.
Mass Effect 2 Mission Structure
I think this modal quality is a big reason for the constant controversy. If the game just sucked, that would be sad. But this game isn’t just a pile of dumb schlock. It’s a pile of dumb schlock mixed with a pile of awesome stuff. And if we’re simply measuring by time, then the good far outweighs the bad. The core of the Mass Effect 2 plot is only six-ish missions long:
In contrast, you get 8 recruitment missions[1] and 10 loyalty missions. The recruitment missions alone outnumber the story missions, and that’s without including DLC characters. When you consider that story missions are really combat-heavy and recruitment and loyalty missions have comparatively more dialog, it becomes clear that the vast amount of storytelling in this game is completely divorced from the main plot.
- Escape project Lazarus.
- Investigate Freedom’s Progress.
- Stop the Collector attack on Horizon.
- Blunder into the Collector Trap like a dumbass and escape again.
- Visit the Dead Reaper.
- Fend off the Collector attack on the Normandy. (Okay, maybe this doesn’t count as a “mission” for Shepard, but it’s still an important part of the plot.)
- Assault the Collector base and stop their plans.
So I can understand when some people become incredulous at my belabored criticisms. To them, the story was 80% awesome and 20% dumb.
The game sort of demands our suspension of disbelief, and it holds our in-game friends at ransom for it. “You like Garrus, don’t you? And Mordin? And Legion? If you stop believing in this story then you can’t be in this universe with your cool friends. You don’t want that, do you? Just go with it.”
Intro
At the end of Mass Effect 1, the Reapers were revealed to the galaxy in the form of a massive-scale attack, directly on the galactic seat of power. If anyone still had doubts, there was an ancient VI on Iilos that could tell you the whole story. Shepard didn’t just defeat Sovereign, he defeated the doubts that had been preventing the galaxy from taking action. It was part of the player’s victory.
But at the start of the game, the council no longer believes Shepard about the Reapers. Shepard stole the Normandy at the end of Mass Effect 1 to go face Saren, but now that he’s a Big Damn Hero who showed everyone how right he was, he’s lost his initiative and is just going to dutifully fly around hunting for Geth while the great big unknown Reaper clock ticks down the seconds to our collective doom. What was he going to do if the Collector’s didn’t attack to kick-start this plot? Fly around out here doing nothing forever?
But the Collectors do show up, and they do kick-start the plot by attacking the Normandy, which is… strange, given what we learn about them later.
Their eventual plan is to sneak around swiping colonists. Here here the intro shows them randomly ganking Alliance ships (it’s hinted that they’ve attacked at least three other ships) for no explained reason. Why pick a fight with ships that weren’t in their way and weren’t a threat to their plans?
What is the Collector’s main goal? To abduct humans. How do these attacks further that goal? We see that after the death of Shepard, humanity begins a big push to colonize new territory. We see that Alliance refuses to do anything about the Collectors when they start abducting those colonists. We see Shepard is the only one who will. For this attack to make sense to them, they would need to know all three of those things ahead of time.
From what we see in-game, we can’t even tell if this was a deliberate attempt to kill Shepard, or if the Collectors were just flying around blowing up ships for the lulz and Shepard got in their way.
In the short-term: Did the Collectors also somehow know that the Alliance wouldn’t send any ships to investigate the destruction of the Normandy? (During the intro, Shepard seemed to think the Alliance would show up in force any second.) What if attacking such a high-profile target had brought the fleets out to the Terminus systems? The Collectors would have needed to face those fleets or withdraw, and their kidnapping plans would have been jeopardized. What if the attack scared off potential colonists?
Obviously the writer wasn’t thinking about any of this from a character perspective. They just needed to shove the pieces around the game board and so they wrote this scene. The attack miraculously killed Shepard but spared all the other important characters, and then the Collectors flew away without mopping up and without gathering up all those escape pods filled with healthy human specimens with heads full of intel[2].
The Alliance didn’t respond. People colonized space anyway. These various sides are enslaved by the needs of the plot and none of them are acting like characters who have goals and agency. At least, nothing the writer cares to articulate to us.
Cerberus Employee Orientation
Shepard is back from the dead and it’s time for our combat tutorial. You can tell we’re in a Cerberus base because all the machines have gone crazy, everything is on fire, there are massive casualties, and they’re all human. The team was betrayed by one of their own. He blew up half the base and killed all the staff in an attempt to kill one guy in a coma, over whom he had total medical authority. His plan killed everyone except his intended target. And then Miranda murdered him without making any attempt to make sure he was guilty[3], find out why he did it, or figure out who he was working for[4].
Welcome to Cerberus, where we can’t even betray ourselves properly!
Leaving behind the first of many Cerberus disasters, we fly to another base that is – by some miracle – not on fire. We have a meeting with The Illusive Man where the writers try to dazzle us with their Mary Sue by showing how cool and stylish he is and not by making him smart, interesting, or being connected to the world.
Imagine how much more punch this scene would have if we were meeting an established mysterious figure like the Shadow Broker, instead of one introduced literally in the last sixty seconds.
Think about what we know about the Shadow Broker based on the events of Mass Effect 1: He’s powerful, secretive, and knowledgeable. What did Mass Effect 1 tell us about Cerberus? Almost nothing. Most players probably won’t remember them because unlike Shadow Broker, Cerberus wasn’t part of the main plot of Mass Effect 1. But the little bit the game did show us revealed that they’re evil, stupid, and incompetent. So players will either be indifferent or hostile towards this new character, which is bad because the plot requires us to believe what he’s saying. The Shadow Broker is simply a much better fit for what the writer is trying to do.
I’m not saying that working for the Shadow Broker would have made for a great story. I think trying to put Shepard under new management was a mistake in any case. But if the writer is going to make this mistake then at least they should try to maximize player interest and minimize the damage.
Taking Orders
Shepard was pretty autonomous (fake videogame autonomy, but you know what I mean) in the first game. Shepard could forbid the Alliance admiral to board the Normandy, and he could hang up on the council. This game would have been free to give the player even more autonomy and agency. Shepard already had a ship, a mandate, and a team. All he needed was for a character to point him at a mission that would advance his goal.
Instead the writer decided to put Shepard on a leash. And instead of handing the leash to a trusted character, they gave it to someone unknown. But not completely unknown. You must take orders from TIM, and you have to take TIM’s word for things. TIM is actually the character with the agency in this story. TIM picks the team, TIM holds all the intel, TIM chooses the missions, and TIM decides when you’ll carry them out. Not only has the writer upended the entire structure and obliged themselves to introduce lots of new characters and ideas in a short time, but they’ve done it in a way that will maximize player resistance. Note that this is player resistance. Not character resistance.
Sure, there’s character resistance, too, but instead of creating character drama it just widens the chasm between the player and Shepard. When TIM tries to be your friend, you can’t rebuff him by calling out Cerberus on their previous war crimes, or the debacle at Project Lazarus, or any of the other things that have given Cerberus such a horrendous reputation. You can’t argue for idealism to counter his appeals to pragmatism. Instead you can say, “You have to earn the right to talk to me like that.” Resisting Cerberus in dialog just makes Shepard pout like a sullen child. Instead of making TIM smart and forward-thinking, the writer has made Shepard petulant and narrow-minded. Shepard’s arguments are based on his ego, and not on his (our) goal to save the galaxy from the Reapers.
The player wants to fight with TIM, but when they try to do so they end up fighting with their own character. The writer is ignoring the fact that these conversations need to engage and persuade both Shepard and the player. TIM convinces Shepard due to writer fiat, but he never actually says much to persuade the player. If you think working for Cerberus is a bad idea when you meet TIM, then nothing he says is likely to change your perception of things, because the dialog wheel won’t allow you to voice your objections so they can be addressed.
Mass Effect Retrospective 23: Assumed Empathy
Once the introduction is over, TIM sends Shepard to the human colony of Freedom’s Progress to see what the Collectors have been doing. He claims that we’ll find proof that the Reapers are behind our disappearing colonies.
Freedom’s Progress
The colony is empty. Well, empty except for Tali, who we just happen to bump into here at random, in an out-of-the-way location neither one of us has ever visited before, just a few hours after Shepard wakes up for the first time after being dead. She’s literally one of the first people you meet.
Look, if the galaxy was the size of Rhode Island this would be a shockingly unlikely happenstance. It would be implausible enough to warrant some sort of hand-wave, lamp-shade, excuse, or some other storytelling trick to smooth over the contrivance. If the galaxy was the size of the United States, the odds against this meeting would be astronomical[1], far more unlikely than winning the lottery. If the galaxy was the size of Earth, this would be a one-in-billions chance encounter. But the galaxy is the size of the galaxy, and thus this meeting is a hilarious miracle contrived by the author.
Even worse is that she’s not even needed here. She brings no special knowledge or skills to this encounter. Her friend Veetor is the one that solves all the technical problems. If nothing else, the Veetor character should have been dropped and his feats of technical wizardry[2]could have been performed by Tali. It’s bad enough to have this chance encounter, but having it happen and then not using the character is just strange.
You could perhaps argue that she’s here to reassure the player that this is indeed the Mass Effect universe they remember by throwing in a fan favorite. Still, this seems like a sledgehammer solution to that problem.
And just to push this conversation over the top into maximum awkwardness, one of the Quarians immediately clocks your team as “Cerberus operatives” before you identify yourselves or even say a word. We’re still reeling from the last contrivance and the writer hits us with this? If you want to suggest that it’s Jacob’s yellow icon on his uniform, then portray that with a close-in shot to focus on the logo so we understand that this Quarian hasn’t been reading the script. And once you’re done with that, you could follow-up with an explanation for WHY IS JACOB WEARING IDENTIFYING MARKINGS OF A CLANDESTINE ORGANIZATION?!?
According to the game, nobody knows who has been kidnapping our tens of thousands of colonists. They erase all traces of themselves when they leave, and when the next ship arrives all they find is a ghost town. Well, it only takes one delirious Quarian (Veetor) to recover the security footage and see the Collectors stealing all the people.
This also ties into the lack of agency I mentioned last time. Shepard is told to come here. He didn’t even know what he was looking for. He just kept walking forward and shooting stuff until someone else gave him what he needed.
If Shepard brought a tech expert to this location and told them to scan the computer, then it would feel like Shepard was an active participant in the story. If Shepard had contacted Tali and asked her to meet him here, it would both make him proactive and rid the need for the massive contrivance of bumping into her at random. But in this scenario he makes no decisions and makes no contributions aside from shooting shit.
A Lack of Worldbuilding
A later mission reveals that the Collectors have to land their skyscraper-sized vessel to load all the colonists on board. This ought to leave a stadium-sized footprint, which would then be turned into a “stadium, plus parking”-sized crater when they blast off again. And yet nobody knows who is doing this, the colonists aren’t fleeing back to earth, nobody is doing anything about it, and we don’t even know why they’re coming out here to begin with.
For contrast, everyone vanished from the English colony of Roanoke Virginia back in 1580. That was 400 years ago and involved just over 100 people, and yet we’re still captivated by the mystery today. Yet here in the world of Mass Effect, nobody cares about “tens of thousands” vanishing in mysterious circumstances.
I’m not saying this is an impossible outcome. I’m saying this is a curious enough outcome that it warrants some sort of exploration. But the complete lack of exploratory dialog regarding this setup makes it clear the author never spent time pondering how these events would shape politics, military, or even human behavior. They thought, “I’ll have bad guys kidnap people and send my main character to stop their plan” and that was the end of their attempts at worldbuilding.
In Mass Effect 1, Wrex gets angry at the Salarians because of the Genophage. The Genophage exists because of the Krogan rebellions. The Krogran rebellions happened because the Salarians uplifted the pre-spacefaring Krogan and gave them space-weapons. They uplifted them because they needed help in the Rachni wars. This chain of events has shaped technology, politics, and galactic development for hundreds of years.
This is what worldbuilding looks like. Things happen for reasons and actions have consequences. The events of the past shape the present, and the resulting history puts the whole thing into some kind of context. For contrast: What events are driving this colonization effort? What’s preventing anyone from helping? What’s making the human leadership so apparently ineffectual?
The author wants us to work for Cerberus because they think Cerberus is cool. And then to make it work they have to make all of humanity[3] dumb, incompetent, or apathetic so that we have no choice but to work with for Cerberus.
Assumed Empathy
Film Crit Hulk has an essay on the failures of Man of Steel where he talks about the lazy blockbuster shorthand of “assumed empathy”. It’s how you end up with forgettable movies of epic battles, and sensory experiences that you can’t remember the next day and you never feel like re-watching:
“This person is the main character, so the writer assumes you will care about them without the writer having to do the difficult work of characterizing them.”
“These are humans so the writer assumes you will care about them, without having to depict or humanize them.”
“This person is the mother / girlfriend / brother / father / husband / barista of the main character, so the writer assumes you will care about them without needing to portray their relationship.”
It makes for a story with no emotional core. It follows the framework of a story, but is lacking in the personal connection that makes the thing worth watching in the first place. It’s all hole, no donut.
The story of Mass Effect 2 revolves around saving human colonists from the Collectors. This is presented in the laziest and most abstract form possible. Do you know how many of those colonists we meet in this game? I’ll give you a hint: It’s three less than the number of Quarians we meet here on Freedom’s Progress. In a game all about saving colonists we meet exactly one.
And that doesn’t happen until the halfway point of this game.
And he’s not even a sympathetic character.
Somehow, the subject of this videogame isn’t actually portrayed in this videogame. In Mass Effect 1, we met the colonists on Eden Prime. Then we met about a dozen different people on Feros. We met a few dozen more named, voice-acted, developed characters on Noveria. The Mass Effect 1 writer understood that if you want a story to work, you need to develop things like characters, motivations, and stakes.
Leaving the colonists out of the game is a pretty staggering omission, but we could still build up the colonists by proxy. If the other characters in the story care, then our existing relationship with them will let us see the colonists from their point of view and want to help them. In Star Wars, when the Empire blows up Alderaan the storyteller has an established sympathetic character (Leia) react to it so we have some kind of framework. Later, Kenobi reacts as well. The writer conveys the enormity of the crime not just by telling us “this is really bad” but by showing us through the characters.
But the Mass Effect 2 writer didn’t do that, either. Not only does the writer not give us a reason to care about the colonists, they don’t even create any developed characters that care about the colonists.
Your team doesn’t care.
Well, they “care” inasmuch as it’s their job to solve this problem, but they don’t “care” in any kind of way that bulds up the world, the story, or the characters. They don’t “care” about these colonists the way Leia cared about Alderaan or the way Frodo cared about the Shire.
Jacob and Miranda never really discuss the colonists. Their loyalty missions don’t involve colonists. They don’t know any. They don’t have any sob stories that might give us an emotional connection to the problem. Same goes for Joker and Chakwas.
You’d think that maybe one or two of your dozen or so crew members would have a mission related to the plot. Maybe someone has a relative they lost contact with, and they’re worried the Collectors nabbed them. Maybe someone wants to look into the Collector-based trade in genetic specimens that the game tells us about but never shows us. Maybe Mordin is dealing with a couple of refugee families on Omega who are fleeing the abduction threat and trying to buy their way back to Earth. Maybe Shepard could help them secure transport?
Tell us something about the people we’re trying to save.
But no. None of them have stories that contribute to the plot at all. If anything, their concerns trivialize the problem even further: “Oh Shepard, I know the lives of thousands of people are supposedly on the line, but I have a problem with my dad so can we go take care of that?”
Okay, one of the Cerberus people in engineering mentions they have a colonist relative. It’s not part of a dialog with Shepard. It’s actually one of those walk-by-and-eavesdrop deals. Is this single line of overheard dialog supposed to be the emotional foundation for our entire journey?
The writer is willing to have the amazingly unlikely coincidence of bumping into Tali on the first planet you visit, for basically no reason, but they couldn’t contrive that any of our dozen or so friends would have some connection to the colonists we’re supposed to be saving?
The Alliance doesn’t care.
Anderson says at one point that, “Those people went out there to get away from the Alliance.” And suddenly I sit up, because we’re about to learn something about the colonists and the universe they inhabit. What do they have against the Alliance? How deep does this antipathy go? Are people still going, despite the abductions? How does Anderson feel about all this? Does he know any colonists? Has he dealt with them? What kind of political or cultural shakeup caused these people to leave earth? Is this a headache Udina has to deal with? What do the people back on Earth think of all this?
Tell us something about the people we’re trying to save.
But no. This isn’t worldbuilding, it’s hand-waving. The Alliance won’t help, or can’t help, or their help isn’t wanted, or something. The game isn’t interested in explaining the central conflict. They threw some helpless colonists into deep space and unleashed bug aliens on them, and if you need more motivation than that you’ll need to write your own fanfiction.
The Colonists themselves don’t care
Why are they still living out in the fringes? Why don’t they flee back to Earth? The game never tells us. You can theorize if you want, but in a story about “Save these people from danger” it needs to answer rudimentary questions like, “Why are they still in danger?”
And just how many colonies are left there? Dozens? Hundreds? Three? Is Freedom’s Progress a typical colony, or a small one? What is the scale and scope of this problem? How many people am I trying to save? TIM mentions “tens of thousands”. Is that how many people have been taken, or how many are left? What percent of the colonists remain? Across how many worlds?
Tell us something about the people we’re trying to save.
But Shamus! The first game had you saving the whole galaxy! Isn’t that pretty abstract, too?
It would have been, except the galaxy was full of interesting characters to care about. Anderson, the Sha’ira, Kirahee, Barla Von, Lizbeth Baynham, the people of Zhu’s Hope, Agent Parasini, Dr. Michel, Lorik_Qui’in, Chorban, Han Olar, Dr. Cohen, the Hannar evangelist, General Septimus, and dozens of others are given personalities and goals and agendas. You are fighting for all of them. Who are you fighting for in Mass Effect 2? What is Shepard’s relationship to them? How do they feel about Shepard?
The game abandoned it’s details-first approach to telling a story. Fine. We’re going to have a drama-based story now. Except this writer has absolutely no idea how to create drama. They’re not willing to give us the worldbuilding to explain this problem, but they’re also not willing to give us any characters to give the problem any emotional weight. They just wave in the vague direction of “humans are in danger” and expect drama to happen. It’s like a version of Spider-Man’s origin story where we never see Uncle Ben and he dies entirely off-screen.
There’s actually quite a bit of smart, powerful drama in this game, but it’s all in the character side-quests and none of it is here in the main plot.
Drat the Luck
It’s really astoundingly bad luck for the galaxy that Shepard just happened to bump into Tali here on Freedom’s Progress. If they’d missed each other, then Shepard would have found no proof of the Collectors. He would have gone back to TIM and said, “Nope, not convinced.” And then maybe he would have rounded up his team and gotten back to work on solving the space-mystery of trying to defeat the Reapers.
But instead he discovers that yes, the Collectors are abducting humans. And then the entire scope of the Mass Effect story takes a massive step down from, “Stop the unstoppable machine gods that want to kill the galaxy” to “Stop these dudes who are kidnapping humans on the edge of space and who nobody else will help because the writer says so.” And that would be fine – not every story needs to be an epic about saving the galaxy – except the writer has no interest in establishing these humans or telling their stories. We’re supposed to care about characters the writer doesn’t care about.
Note that we haven’t hit on any universe-shattering plot holes in the sense of “This couldn’t possibly happen”. It’s just ill-fitting. Thematically wrong. Poorly justified. Emotionally empty. Discussions of the plot like this one tend to be heated. Some people look at this list of flaws and think, “That’s not a big deal. That one only bothered me a little. That one bugged me but I got over it. That one is just petty. I came up with an excuse for why this one isn’t necessarily as bad as it seems at first. Okay, that one was bad, but they sort of justify it a little in a later mission. That one was stupid but it made me laugh.” This story wasn’t slain by a single plot hole. It died by tripping over its own feet a thousand times.
Sure, the writer could’ve gotten away with a couple of these. If they nailed the feel on everything else, then randomly bumping into Tali wouldn’t be quite so obnoxious. We could perhaps grudgingly accept a Council that still doesn’t believe in the Reapers if we were still on the same quest for knowledge given to us in the first game. We might be able to accept an uneasy alliance between Shepard and Cerberus if they didn’t kill the main character and revive him again before the tutorial started.
But there are just too many writer-imposed “miracles” going on here. None of this feels genuine. And even once you choke down all the contrivances, all you get is an empty story with no emotional stakes.
Mass Effect Retrospective 24: Collectors Addition
After the mission on Freedom’s Progress we discover that Cerberus managed to build the Normandy 2. There’s a lot to unpack with this idea, and so I’m going to take the problem of Cerberus and their unlimited (yet somehow secret?) GDP, and put that discussion off until Mass Effect 3. For now, let’s just roll with it.
Besides, as ridiculous as it is for Cerberus to build a better version of the most advanced ship in the galaxy, this reveal is only the second most implausible thing in this scene. The real stunner is that Joker is already working with Cerberus.
Joker
I love Joker in Mass Effect 2. Seth Green completely nailed this character. He’s just irreverent enough to be funny, but not such a clown that you can’t picture him joining the military[1]. Even better, Joker is actually funny this time around. His jokes in Mass Effect 1 mostly fell flat[2] but here in Mass Effect 2 the writer seems to have found his voice.
On the other hand, Joker’s signing up with Cerberus is at least as implausible as randomly bumping into Tali on Freedom’s Progress. This guy worked his ass off to get to the top of the class at the Alliance despite his serious disability. He had an incredible assignment on the first Normandy, and there’s no reason to expect he wouldn’t be given another equally prestigious position.
I realize that not everyone goes to the military and so not everyone really gets how ferociously loyal military people tend to be, but there’s just no way he left the Alliance. And note that Joker says he was “grounded”. The Alliance grounded their best pilot? For no reason? Once again, instead of making Cerberus smart, the writer has made the Alliance stupid.
The idea of Joker taking a civilian job is enough of a stretch, but Cerberus? And if he did actually join with Cerberus, it would be a gut-wrenching decision that haunted him. But here he acts like the move is about as controversial as switching cable providers.
But Shamus! The Normandy was a dream ship and he loved it! He left the Alliance so he could fly his old ship!
Nice try, strawman apologist, but Joker didn’t know about the Normandy 2 until after he took a job with Cerberus.
The game claims that Joker signed on with Cerberus because he heard they were bringing Shepard back to life[3]. That’s a really incredible claim. Given the reputation of Cerberus, why in the galaxy would Joker believe them? He’s going to sacrifice his entire career (remember in the last game the incredible struggles he faced to get where he was?) because terrorists claim they can bring his commander back to life? Does that sound like something he would believe? How did he know they weren’t going to feed him to a thresher maw to test the effects of feeding pilots to thresher maws?
When you meet him again, does he express a level of affection matching these actions? Does he act like he loves Commander Shepard more than his career and his reputation? More than his own self?
So Joker being here isn’t just one implausible thing. It’s three.
Sure, you could devise a story where this happens. But this idea is too unlikely to be hand-waved in a single line of dialog. If the writer has a story to tell, they need to put up or shut up. You can’t gloss over stuff like this and expect us to continue to take the world seriously. Especially not with regards to characters. Especially not in a game selling itself so hard on the idea of “it’s all about the characters”.
- The Alliance would ground their best pilot, who had done nothing wrong[4].
- Joker would leave the Alliance, even though he dedicated his entire adult life to his career.
- Joker would then join up with a known terrorist organization. Not only that, but the move doesn’t even seem like a big deal to him.
If nothing else, at least let us ask Joker about this. Use a give-and-take dialog with Joker to portray a more nuanced picture of Cerberus. Maybe Joker thinks their reputation is all propaganda? Maybe Cerberus did something nice for someone that he knows? Based on what we see in the game, they’re either monsters or idiots[5] and not someone Joker would ever trust, much less join.
Heck, at least make Shepard go to the Citadel and recruit Joker personally. It would still be a stretch, character-wise, but at least it wouldn’t require Joker to take the word of Cerberus at face value. And the shock of seeing Shepard alive might help smooth out the implausibility of going AWOL.
The Normandy is Back!
Do you remember in the Superman movie when he lost his powers in the opening scene and then got them back ten minutes later? No, because that would be a lame, nonsensical story.
The game plays all this dramatic music when the Normandy-2 is revealed. The writer clearly thinks this is supposed to be a big emotional moment. But they don’t know how to build emotion, so they mimic the most superficial elements of the medium: Camera angles and music.
When young John Connor lowers his pet Terminator into the molten steel, we don’t get choked up[6] because of the music or the camera angles. Those things heighten the emotions we’re already feeling because this moment is the culmination of the last two hours of drama. Music and camera angles do not create drama by themselves.
We haven’t even needed the Normandy yet, so it’s no like we’ve had a chance to reflect on how much we miss it. It’s like Superman losing his powers for ten minutes, and in those ten minutes nothing happens that requires the use of his powers.
From a storytelling perspective, this feels flaccid because Shepard didn’t do anything to earn this. Shepard made no sacrifices. He didn’t fight for it. He didn’t even have to ask for it. It was just given to him. The appearance of the bigger, better Normandy is just another writer-imposed miracle.
We’re a couple of hours into the game now. This rearranging of plot elements is both overlong and rushed. The writer needed to change too many things at once, and so we’ve spent all this time contorting the old story into this new direction. A lot of it didn’t make sense and the rest of it wasn’t needed, but they finally have the stage set now: Shepard is back, he’s got his old crew, a rebuilt ship, a new boss, and he’s rounding up people to stop the Collectors from abducting human colonies.
And you know what? The game could still recover from this. It’s a messy and ugly hack job to bend the plot into this shape, but now that the worst of it is over we could probably settle in and enjoy the adventure and drama.
Except, we came all this way and the story has nothing to offer us.
Who are the Collectors?
So we’re fighting to save people that we don’t know, never see, are never depicted in the story, and are barely acknowledged by the dozen or so main characters in this game. So to make up for this lack of dramatic motivation, the story needs to present a really vibrant, interesting villain. They need to be provocative and engaging. I’m talking about Hans Gruberlevels of interesting, here. The player needs to spend the whole game thinking, “Man, I can’twait until I get to kill these assholes.” They need to be the guys we love to hate.
I’m sure you can see where this is going.
The Collectors are our adversary in this game. They’re replacing the role performed by the Geth in Mass Effect 1: They’re the guys you shoot on your way to the goal. But they’re a new addition to this universe. They weren’t mentioned in Mass Effect 1. So the writer needs to quickly build them up and explain how they connect to the rest of this universe. In Mass Effect 1, that was done by having characters talk about the Geth on Eden prime. But in this game we spend the intro shooting Cerberus robots. So now the introduction is over and we still don’t know who we’re fighting against.
Let me ask you some questions about the Collectors:
What do the other races think of the Collectors?
I don’t mean, “What does the codex claim people think of the collectors?” I’m talking about the stuff that’s part of the dramatic framework of this story. I’m talking about stuff that appears in the cutscenes and is conveyed by established characters.
Do the other races think of the Collectors as a loser race because they seem to be so few, and have no political power? Or are they wary because the Collectors seem to have so much advanced technology? Have the Salarians ever tried to spy on them? Have the Asari ever tried to contact them? Do the Turians consider them a military threat? Does anyone ever remark that they’re the only sapient bipeds in the galaxy who run around stark naked? Does anyone have an opinion on that?
Apparently not. They never seem to come up in conversation.
The codex claims the Collectors trade technology for biological specimens. How does this work? Do they speak intelligibly? Are people afraid of them? Intrigued?
What do your companions think of the Collectors?
Based on what we see in the game, they don’t. They never characterize the Collectors through commentary.
If you want them to be mysterious and reclusive you could put some dialog in the game to show that people are curious about them:
“It’s hard to believe we’re actually going to see the Collectors up close. I’m over 500 years old and I’ve never seen one.”
If you want the player to hate them:
“After what the Collectors did to my mother / village / squad / dog, I’m going to make them pay!”
If you want them to seem ominous:
“They used to show up sometimes when I was standing guard on the Citadel. As far as I know, they never spoke to anyone. I don’t even know what they were doing there. They’d just show up and stare right through you. They were never armed, but everyone was always on edge anyway. It wasn’t like they hated us. It was like they didn’t regard us at all. We don’t matter to them. It still gives me the creeps.”
Just, you know, establish your villain. Make them part of the world. Make us care. Make us want to stop them. Tell a story.
But no. In a game all about building a team, not one of the 10 core characters has a backstory or loyalty mission connected to the main villain or plot of the game.
What does the average peasant think of the Collectors?
Spooky? Frightening? Are they even aware of them? Just how fringe are the Collectors?
The Geth sprang from one of the most interesting events in the history of the Mass Effect Universe. Their appearance alarms the council and Tali’s stories reinforce their mystery and menace. Ashley and Kaiden are both surprised to see Geth up close, which again reinforces their mystery. Ashley is shaken by the damage they’ve done and has a very personal grudge against them. On top of this, the Geth are led by Saren, who has complex relationships with both the Council and Shepard’s best-buddy Anderson. He’s got a story and an agenda. Saren also has Liara’s mother as his chief advisor. On top of all that, Saren is himself led by Sovereign, who gets a bit of dialog with Shepard and manages to spook his companions.
My point is that we know who the villains are, our allies know who the villains are, and this knowledge contributes to the drama. We see other characters in the world form opinions, talk about, and react to the villains.
In contrast, the Collectors don’t seem to be connected to the gameworld. They’re just generic space-bug mooks. They don’t have any stories, or backstories. Don’t don’t seem to have an impact on galactic history or a relationship with any of the numerous existing factions or characters. The people on the Citadel aren’t worried about them, your team doesn’t seem interested in them, and we don’t have any connection to their victims.
(Yeah, they have Harbinger, but we’ll talk about Harbinger later.)
TIM says they’re “enigmatic”. Of course, TIM himself is called “enigmatic” by the codex. I think this writer liked the word enigmatic because they thought it would let them weasel out of having to fill in all these blanks in their story.
And no, this doesn’t make them “more mysterious”. Keyser Soze is mysterious. But his mystery doesn’t come from the fact that we don’t know who he is. His mystery comes from the stories Verbal Kint tells us, and from the terrified way his victims react to him. For the Collectors to be mysterious, we’d need the other characters in the story to react to them. This isn’t “mysterious”, it’s vague.
Later it’s revealed that they’re descended from the Protheans, but that doesn’t happen until halfway through the game, and it doesn’t make them any more interesting or connected to the rest of the world. It might make them more interesting to Liara in an academic sense, but the writer already ditched her.
Mordin has a couple of lines about how the Collectors are “culturally dead”. That’s certainly the start of an interesting idea for a spooky villain. And that would be fine if we wanted to keep them distant and mysterious. That would be a bit like the Aliens franchise, where the Xenomorphs are just space-monsters and the story is really about the potential victims.
But like I said last week, the colonists are a no-show in this story. The story doesn’t engage us emotionally with the Collectors and it doesn’t engage us with their victims. Leaving the Collectors vague would have been fine if it meant more screen time of the colonists we’re trying to save. But this writer refuses to spend time building up the villain or their victims, and instead they’re spending all their screen time on cutscenes where TIM chain-smokes and Shepard acts like a dunce.
The writer had to retcon half the galaxy to get Shepard into this position of working for Cerberus, and when it’s over we’re saving people we never see from monsters with no personality by building up to a suicide mission that isn’t really explained until the story is nearly over.
Having Your Cake
The writer simultaneously wants to make sweeping changes to the established universe, but they have no desire to explain, justify, explore, or even lampshade most of it.
They want to blow up the Normandy in a dramatic battle to get the story going, but they also want you to still have the Normandy. They want to have a character come back from the dead, but they don’t want to explore how that would impact Shepard’s character, or the worldview of the people around him. They want to have a plot about saving people, but they don’t want to characterize those people. They want us to work for a mystery man who Shepard dislikes, but they don’t want to characterize that conflict through opposing ideologies. They want Liara to have a badass personality but they don’t want to depict or even explain the transformation from Old Liara to New Liara. They want us to fight an “enigmatic” villain but they don’t want to do anything to build that villain up to make them scary, interesting, unsettling, mysterious, or worthy of our Shepard-powered wrath. They want you to have your friendly and loyal crewmates around, but they also want you to work for terrorists, and they don’t want to reconcile these two conflicting ideas.
People love the characters in this game so much, you can see the lengths they’re willing to go to in order to make this mess fit together in their head.
“Maybe Shepard is only pretending to work for Cerberus.”
“I always just assumed that…”
“Maybe Anderson has secret plans he can’t tell us about.”
“Maybe what the character really meant was…”
“It’s possible that TIM is actually…”
“Have your cake and eat it, too.” That’s how we usually describe someone who wants something but doesn’t want to deal with the consequences of having that thing. But this is incrementally worse. Here the writer is breaking the setting because they’re so in love with Cerberus, and they value Cerberus more than they value the established tone, themes, or givens of the previous game. And so the audience is obliged to try to repair it with headcanon. This is a story for the gratification of the author, not the audience.
The writer wants you to bake the cake. And then they want to sell you the cake. And then they want to eat the cake.
Speaking of cake…
This certainly is a long-running series, and this entry marks the halfway point[7]. We’ll be close to the start of summer before we reach the end of Mass Effect 3.
This year, Christmas Eve and New Year’s eve both fall on Thursday. Those are traditionally times when nobody reads the blog, so it would probably be a waste to post one of these 2,000 word behemoths on those days. So we might take a few weeks off for the holidays. We might not. Maybe I’ll move Mass Effect to a different day on those weeks. I dunno. We’ll see.
Thanks for reading.
