I've finally come to the conclusion that the only way the story of mass Effect 2 makes any sense at all is if the Illusive Man is lying the entire time, to everyone, even Miranda and Kelly. We watched him outright lie about Liara (he knew very well Liara would not be working with the Shadow Broker, as did Miranda), presumably in an effort to keep her away from Shepard as long as possible, so it's within his modus operandi to do so when it serves his purposes. All along he feeds Shepard dribs and drabs of information, always far less that he has on hand. He knew (or "suspected", as he puts it) what Shepard would find on Freedom's Progress, meaning that mission was more to get Shepard on board with the program than anything. He knew the Virmire survivor was on Freedom's Progress, since he engineered the whole thing. He knew the "derelict" Collector ship was a trap, again because he set it up. As soon as Shepard finishes infiltrating the Collector base, he's
right there, demanding Shepard preserve said base. How'd he know that there would even be a base on the other side of the relay that would require a ground team to infiltrate? From all the intelligence gathered by Shepard's team (which isn't much), we would be more likely to find a pure space engagement on the other side of the relay, nothing but ship-to-ship encounters and combat in deep space. Yet we spend
all this time gathering a ground team of specialists that is likely to be utterly useless. Why would the Illusive Man have Shepard spend so much time in a potentially wasted activity, unless he knew it would not, in fact, be wasted? Nothing that happens in the game happens without his say-so, at least until the very end when you have the chance to tell him to suck it.
"Information is my weapon, Shepard." I think it's safe to say that the Illusive Man knew exactly what we'd find on the other side of the Omega 4 Relay. The story makes a whole heck of a lot more sense that way, if the entire thing was just his massive gambit to acquire Collector/Prothean/Reaper technology for his own purposes. Why he would do it this way isn't terribly important, presumably to make Cerberus into a galactic power organization the equal or better of the STG and the Spectres and the Shadow Broker's operation. It makes a lot of things fall into place that wouldn't otherwise.
The only thing that still doesn't make sense is, why bring Shepard, specifically, back for this at all? Beyond the horrendous expense of it all, there is nothing that Shepard ultimately ends up accomplishing that couldn't have been accomplished by any crack commando squad. The explanation is there if only BioWare had inserted one line of dialogue to highlight it: the Prothean visions and the Cipher. It would make a whole ton of sense if Shepard's translation matrix implanted in the neural patterns by the Beacon and Shiala had turned out to be necessary to accomplish anything in the base. But no, Illusive Man mentions not a word of this. I suppose it's a good thing, then, that the Collectors use convenient haptic adaptive holograms just like everyone else in the galaxy and their technology is easily interfaced to an omnitool.
But that aside, everything in the story makes a whole lot more sense if it's a lie.
... Which is almost satirically funny, come to think of it.
Modifié par Sable Phoenix, 17 janvier 2011 - 09:22 .
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