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[Nightwriter]

I wanted to tell off the Council like I told off that volus and C-Sec officer for mistreating that quarian on the Citadel.

[ckriley]

Sapienti wrote...

GnusmasTHX wrote...

Sapienti wrote...

Its politics. A government figurehead is not going to announce a threat to the public without knowing how to handle it because it would cause mass panic. The best way to go about handling an unknown threat is to pretend it does not exist, to politicians thats a great idea. Wipe out all evidence and worry about whatever it is when you know how to do something about it in the mean time you send private operatives to look into the problem so if they get busted there is no political blowback. Not understanding politics does not mean the devs "went brain dead".

Thing is Shepard isn't asking them to inform the public... He's asking for help. Which they don't give in any capacity.

Still the same basic political concept though. They just want to keep their hands clean. If you tell the lie enough you begin to believe it or behave as if it is the only truth. It'd be similar to a CIA operative not getting support because he'd be a political liability.

Like I said, they have to stay clear and keep public interests in mind. They can't interfere in human abductions because it would seem like favoritism to some or meddling to others. Can't fund Shepard because he is outside of council space and them having a hand in anything there could be taken as hostile. It isn't to hard to grasp. And its stupid when people see this and say "wow the council is so stupid, the story is stupid because of that".

I don't agree with the council at all, but the motivations behind their actions are clear if you have even a little understanding of politics.

Agree except for one simple thing that Shepard never had a chance to ask, either in ME or ME2:  "Why would the geth suddenly attack the Citadel?"

I would have loved to see the Council try to answer that with a straight face.  Here is a people that hadn't been outside the veil in, what, centuries?  Suddenly they are following an organic?  For what?  Why?  What possible reason could they have to follow Saren?  Why would they attack the Citadel like that?

And if you want evidence of the reapers, I'd present Legion.  A geth that can actually communicate in the Common speech.  Let it tell the council about the heretics and how not all geth followed Saren or Sovereign. This should be proof enough that the geth as a whole would have zero reason to attack the Citadel.  Their only real concern are the quarians.

The only thing I can think of is that the council has been indoctrinated.

[cronshaw8]

Where does it say the council rules the galaxy? Each race has sovereignty over its own space. The council is brought in on inter-species matters and matters of galactic security. They are much more like the UN than a governing council.

[Terraneaux]

AtreiyaN7 wrote...

You forget that the Council was always like this throughout 90% of ME1. They ignored Shepard, nay-sayed him/her and refused to listen at all. They're politicians, so don't you think it's possible that what you saw at the end of ME1 was lip-service? I think it was meant to placate Shepard and humanity in general. If you recall, at the beginning of ME2 the Alliance has basically sent the Normandy out to the boonies to eliminate geth stragglers. They're ignoring the Reapers, and they want to hide Shepard away too. The behavior of the Council seems comparable to that of the average slimy politician as far as I'm concerned.

ME1 seemed to make it pretty clear that you changed their viewpoint.  Essentially, I feel that their characters are very contrived, and contrived in such a way to make Cerberus, and the Illusive Man, look very good.  You don't get a chance to convince them otherwise, even the new human council after the 'kill the council' option.  The writing team wanted to see Shepard working for Cerberus, despite this making little to no story sense based off of what we know from ME1 (Cerberus being a murderous, uniformly evil organization that really seems focused on evil science projects, some of which may be have involved Shepard, and Shepard knows it.).  

[Benndak]

AtreiyaN7 wrote...

You forget that the Council was always like this throughout 90% of ME1. They ignored Shepard, nay-sayed him/her and refused to listen at all. They're politicians, so don't you think it's possible that what you saw at the end of ME1 was lip-service? I think it was meant to placate Shepard and humanity in general. If you recall, at the beginning of ME2 the Alliance has basically sent the Normandy out to the boonies to eliminate geth stragglers. They're ignoring the Reapers, and they want to hide Shepard away too. The behavior of the Council seems comparable to that of the average slimy politician as far as I'm concerned. It seems realistic to me and is not bad story wrting.

[/agree]

[Doug84]

AtreiyaN7 wrote...

You forget that the Council was always like this throughout 90% of ME1. They ignored Shepard, nay-sayed him/her and refused to listen at all. They're politicians, so don't you think it's possible that what you saw at the end of ME1 was lip-service? I think it was meant to placate Shepard and humanity in general. If you recall, at the beginning of ME2 the Alliance has basically sent the Normandy out to the boonies to eliminate geth stragglers. They're ignoring the Reapers, and they want to hide Shepard away too. The behavior of the Council seems comparable to that of the average slimy politician as far as I'm concerned. It seems realistic to me and is not bad story wrting.

Pretty much - add into that Vigil was broken, not enough of Sovereign was left to work out it was an AI, and the Geth where involved in the attack, heh.

[Giantevilhead]

There's no actual evidence that the Reapers exist. It makes much more sense to believe that Sovereign was built by the Geth using newly discovered Prothean technology.

[Doug84]

Terraneaux wrote...

AtreiyaN7 wrote...

You forget that the Council was always like this throughout 90% of ME1. They ignored Shepard, nay-sayed him/her and refused to listen at all. They're politicians, so don't you think it's possible that what you saw at the end of ME1 was lip-service? I think it was meant to placate Shepard and humanity in general. If you recall, at the beginning of ME2 the Alliance has basically sent the Normandy out to the boonies to eliminate geth stragglers. They're ignoring the Reapers, and they want to hide Shepard away too. The behavior of the Council seems comparable to that of the average slimy politician as far as I'm concerned.

ME1 seemed to make it pretty clear that you changed their viewpoint.  Essentially, I feel that their characters are very contrived, and contrived in such a way to make Cerberus, and the Illusive Man, look very good.  You don't get a chance to convince them otherwise, even the new human council after the 'kill the council' option.  The writing team wanted to see Shepard working for Cerberus, despite this making little to no story sense based off of what we know from ME1 (Cerberus being a murderous, uniformly evil organization that really seems focused on evil science projects, some of which may be have involved Shepard, and Shepard knows it.).  

wait a second... you TRUST what politicians say? Why on Earth would you do that? And as has been said, their is no real evidence from the council's point of view beyond Shepard's word that Sovereign was anything other than a Geth Dreadnought.

Plus, they've had 2 years to convince themselves it was so without Shepard trying to reinforce the truth...


AND THAT assumes the Council aren't just playing you - after all, you're working for Cerberus, you where brought back by Cerberus, and so that makes Shepard suspect. Its wholy possible the Council do accept their are Reapers, but don't trust Shepard enough to trust them with that knowledge.

[Terraneaux]

Doug84 wrote...


wait a second... you TRUST what politicians say? Why on Earth would you do that? And as has been said, their is no real evidence from the council's point of view beyond Shepard's word that Sovereign was anything other than a Geth Dreadnought.

Plus, they've had 2 years to convince themselves it was so without Shepard trying to reinforce the truth...


AND THAT assumes the Council aren't just playing you - after all, you're working for Cerberus, you where brought back by Cerberus, and so that makes Shepard suspect. Its wholy possible the Council do accept their are Reapers, but don't trust Shepard enough to trust them with that knowledge.

The idea that the Council are such slimy politicians that they would shoot themselves in the foot is ridiculous.  Stop trying to talk like it was anything other than a contrived reason for you to be working with Cerberus despite your character having about a billion reasons not to (and the writing team still didn't make it work, judging from the amount of people like me complaining about it).

[AtreiyaN7]

Terraneaux wrote...

AtreiyaN7 wrote...

You forget that the Council was always like this throughout 90% of ME1. They ignored Shepard, nay-sayed him/her and refused to listen at all. They're politicians, so don't you think it's possible that what you saw at the end of ME1 was lip-service? I think it was meant to placate Shepard and humanity in general. If you recall, at the beginning of ME2 the Alliance has basically sent the Normandy out to the boonies to eliminate geth stragglers. They're ignoring the Reapers, and they want to hide Shepard away too. The behavior of the Council seems comparable to that of the average slimy politician as far as I'm concerned.

ME1 seemed to make it pretty clear that you changed their viewpoint.  Essentially, I feel that their characters are very contrived, and contrived in such a way to make Cerberus, and the Illusive Man, look very good.  You don't get a chance to convince them otherwise, even the new human council after the 'kill the council' option.  The writing team wanted to see Shepard working for Cerberus, despite this making little to no story sense based off of what we know from ME1 (Cerberus being a murderous, uniformly evil organization that really seems focused on evil science projects, some of which may be have involved Shepard, and Shepard knows it.).  

Well, you're entitled to believe what you want. I find that after years of watching real-world politics in action that you generally can't take a politician at their word. Regardless of their parties, they will say one thing and do another when they can get away with it, despite all their grand promises. Now you might think you changed the councilors' minds, but I'm of the opinion that they quickly reverted to their true natures when the opportunity to cover things up presented itself. While humanity's sacrifice elevated our position in some eyes, it's made quite clear that many alien races are still jealous/resentful of our rapid rise. Just talk to Bailey in C-Sec about how the sudden increase in human C-Sec officers is viewed by the alien populace of the Citadel.

[Kuari999]

Unfortunately there are plenty of politicians like the council in real life, so I'd actually say it was pretty good design on part of the devs. Some people don't want to believe things different to their views no matter what evidence is right in front of them.

[Sapienti]

Doug84 wrote...

Terraneaux wrote...

Yeah, it's a bad story, but it's what we got. It just frustrates me that the Illusive Man is written the way he is, and that you don't get to call out Cerberus to the degree they deserve. *sigh* maybe in ME3. Hopefully Drew gets put back on lead writer and Mac gets pulled off...

Yes, its a bad story that a group incharge of the Galaxy would want evidence of a threat like that before acting on it on behalf of the word of a man who for all they know is being mind controlled by Cerberus.

WE know he's right, but the council have looked and found all the evidence Shepard pointed out either was inconclusive at best, gone altogether at worse (Vigil was offline by the time the council's team got to him).

Story lines aimed at older audiences nowadays tend to be too much for younger people, or stupid people. Or both. They assume the audience has an idea of how certain things work so they go ahead and toss in an adversary who is strictly political. The informed people will get it, the stupid people (or just uninformed to be fair) will bash story points for lack of understanding and call them "bad stories because I don't understand". Its almost sad.

[Offkorn]

Blameless77 wrote...

Their position isn't totally unreasonable from a detached perspective. No one knows anything about the Geth so it's possible that they pooled resources and built a massive flagship.

I'm not saying the Council's treatment of Shepard is right, just that their position isn't totally untenable.

Actually... it is.

Simply analyzing even the tiniest fragment of Sovereign would date its existence to long before the Geth appeared.

You get an E-Mail to this effect from some random researcher halfway through the game or so.

Modifié par Offkorn, 12 février 2010 - 11:17 .

[Nightwriter]

Eventually I expect the Council to put the safety of the galaxy above this convenient lie that they keep telling themselves, to choose an uncomfortable truth over their personal comfort of mind. Eventually, I expect them to shoulder the reality of the situation as their responsibility as the defenders of this galaxy, like Anderson has, like I have.



And I expected it of them now, in ME2. Not in ME1, but in ME2, yes.

[GnusmasTHX]

Nah. They're still pretty stupid.



It's not that they're not helping Shepard, it's that they're not helping Shepard. What, you ask?



Let me explain. For one, they cannot see that Sovereign is a Reaper. That alone is just stupid. Their reasoning is literally that since the geth are more advanced than the Council, and Sovereign is also more advanced than the Council, then the geth must've created Sovereign, regardless of the giant chasm of technological difference between the two.



Second, even if they did KNOW, as people, and even as a head of Government, they should help Shepard, instead of dismiss him. The reassigning of Spectre status was just an attempt to get Shepard away from the public eye.



It's asinine to believe that an agent like Shepard couldn't get a leg up from the Council every now and then, even if he was operating outside of his jurisdiction, if they did it covertly. Anderson already does this, to an extent, because he KNOWS Shepard's claims to be true. IF they knew, the magnitude of the situation is beyond whatever politics may be involved, and Shepard should at least get covert aid.



Shepard operated in the Terminus Systems in ME1, and still received aid from the Council.



The only thing to decide now is which is worse, that they know, and don't act, or that they are delusional, and believe even just a little that the geth hypothesis is accurate. The former seems worse.

[BobbyTheI]

I posted a big long rant on this subject a while back, so I'll just go with the Cliff Notes version.

As they say in ME2, what exactly IS the evidence of the Reapers?  Shepard's word, and the word of his teammates.  That is the ONLY thing there is to go by as far as the Reapers existing.  From the perspective of the Council and everyone else,  a giant ship showed up at the head of the Geth fleet, blew up a lot of people, and then got beaten.  They haven't seen the beacon messages.  They haven't seen the conversation Shepard had with Sovereign.  Sure, the Reaper was a big advanced ship, like nothing anyone had ever seen before.  But that's a big, BIG leap to go from "it's an advanced ship the Geth built with technology we've never seen before" to "It's a TALKING ship that's really alive, and it's going to bring more of its talking ship buddies to come get us."

If anybody ever played Dragon Age, you know what happens when everybody takes the big hero at his word, with no evidence other than his own hearsay to say that a specific group is the enemy.  The only difference in Mass Effect is that you're not the one at the receiving end of it.

And another part about this: say the Council did believe Shepard.  We all saw how big the Reaper fleet is.  Pretty much every council race, and the non-member species as well, is going to have to devote pretty much ALL of their time and resources to building up anything even remotely big enough to combat that.  Every single dollar of their budget would have to go toward building ships, training soldiers, fortifying defenses.

It's not as if Shepard is saying, "The Reapers are coming.  We need to get a reasonably sized armada in place to combat them."  If the Council said no to that, it'd be a little dodgier.  But no, Shepard is saying, "I want you to, based on no evidence other than what me and at the most four other people have seen (your squads on Virmire and Ilos), devote EVERY SINGLE RESOURCE you have toward defending against this threat.  Band together everybody, make them forget all prejudices and past hatreds, and focus them all SOLELY on this threat."

Yeah, I see that happening.  Now, if the council sees whatever evidence we got at the end of ME2 and STILL doesn't want to act, then I might be a little more inclined to hate on them.  But while the Council might be wrong about the Reaper threat, I'd be wondering a little more about their sanity and intelligence if they DID trust this one guy at his word without needing any further proof.

EDIT: As I was finishing typing this, I realized there is one more piece of evidence regarding the Reapers: the geth recording that got Saren declared a rogue Spectre.  But again, this is VERY flimsy evidence to devote all of your resources toward a singular threat.  If a terrorist attacks some place and you get a recording of him saying, "It was all in honor of this deity that most people don't believe in," you don't go, "Well, I guess that means that deity must exist, then."

And I think the "Cliffs Notes" version of my rant ended up longer than the original one. 

[Offkorn]

BobbyTheI wrote...

EDIT: As I was finishing typing this, I realized there is one more piece of evidence regarding the Reapers: the geth recording that got Saren declared a rogue Spectre.  But again, this is VERY flimsy evidence to devote all of your resources toward a singular threat.  If a terrorist attacks some place and you get a recording of him saying, "It was all in honor of this deity that most people don't believe in," you don't go, "Well, I guess that means that deity must exist, then."

Again:

Sovereign itself. You just have to date the smallest fragment to see that it is not a Geth ship.

You get an E-Mail from a private researcher saying exactly that in the game.

Modifié par Offkorn, 12 février 2010 - 11:29 .

[Sapienti]

GnusmasTHX wrote...

Nah. They're still pretty stupid.

It's not that they're not helping Shepard, it's that they're not helping Shepard. What, you ask?

Let me explain. For one, they cannot see that Sovereign is a Reaper. That alone is just stupid. Their reasoning is literally that since the geth are more advanced than the Council, and Sovereign is also more advanced than the Council, then the geth must've created Sovereign, regardless of the giant chasm of technological difference between the two.

Second, even if they did KNOW, as people, and even as a head of Government, they should help Shepard, instead of dismiss him. The reassigning of Spectre status was just an attempt to get Shepard away from the public eye.

It's asinine to believe that an agent like Shepard couldn't get a leg up from the Council every now and then, even if he was operating outside of his jurisdiction, if they did it covertly. Anderson already does this, to an extent, because he KNOWS Shepard's claims to be true. IF they knew, the magnitude of the situation is beyond whatever politics may be involved, and Shepard should at least get covert aid.

Shepard operated in the Terminus Systems in ME1, and still received aid from the Council.

The only thing to decide now is which is worse, that they know, and don't act, or that they are delusional, and believe even just a little that the geth hypothesis is accurate. The former seems worse.

Yea politicians the world over are really stupid if you ask me. There are times where I hear about things and just can't understand why people can't make exceptions or something sometime. But its not asinine to believe Shepard wouldn't get a leg up because it can happen easily in real life. The game happened over a relatively short span of time. In that time he saw the council one time and got denied. You can choose to not burn bridges in the future and then leave to continue to operate free of politics. It'd be different if Shepard had multiple meetings, but he didn't, nor did he really need to.

As for them blaming the Geth. The reasoning behind that is the same as the reasoning behind them denying the Reaper existence. They need someone to blame so the public has a target to focus on. The US did the same thing with Bin Laden and Sadam. Political scapegoats that people can understand. And its not so stupid for them to believe Sovereign is a Geth creation. They have no evidence to believe otherwise. They didn't beat the game, they didn't talk to Sovereign themselves or experience him firsthand. To them its walking like a duck, quacking like a duck so why assume its actually a wizard when all signs are pointing to duck?

Not to mention Shepard is working with the enemy and can't just be openly trusted.

Terraneaux wrote...

The idea that the Council are such
slimy politicians that they would shoot themselves in the foot is
ridiculous.  Stop trying to talk like it was anything other than a
contrived reason for you to be working with Cerberus despite your
character having about a billion reasons not to (and the writing team
still didn't make it work, judging from the amount of people like me
complaining about it).

If you're not like 16 or 17 years old, I don't see how you can justify having such a lack of understanding of world politics to even begin to understand the reasoning behind the council's behaviour. And name 5 good reasons why Shepard should have just ditched Cerberus from the get go. I challenge you to do that.

[Blameless77]

Offkorn wrote...

Blameless77 wrote...

Their position isn't totally unreasonable from a detached perspective. No one knows anything about the Geth so it's possible that they pooled resources and built a massive flagship.

I'm not saying the Council's treatment of Shepard is right, just that their position isn't totally untenable.

Actually... it is.

Simply analyzing even the tiniest fragment of Sovereign would date its existence to long before the Geth appeared.

You get an E-Mail to this effect from some random researcher halfway through the game or so.

I don't remember getting that e-mail, but I'll take your word for it I suppose. In any event, the devs seemed pretty determined to dodge that particular avenue with the whole "none of it could be recovered because of chaos/looters. If that e-mail exists, and again, I'll take your word for it, I'm not really sure how to reconcile the two divergent plot strands. 

[GnusmasTHX]

I think the fact that the giant ship was leaps and bounds more advanced, and like someone said, easily determined to be older, solidifies that the threat is real for me.

If not. Try when it attached to the Citadel Tower and sent tubes into the structure and started emitting a red energy. Tubes that went somewhere. Hidden places along the structure, specifically tailored to match the Reaper.

Not to mention other evidence. Prothean ruins, data discs and archives, as well as millions of year old dragon's teeth, the same technology in Sovereign, the same age probably... Discovered ALL over the galaxy.

It's really hard to believe that all of this evidence allegedly just disappeared, considering a giant chunk of it landed right in the Council's office.

It's about the equivalent of someone saying a stampede of horses is about to run over my house, and a second later, a horse flies through the window. I mean for God's sake... You would look out the window for more horses, right? The Council apparently doesn't. Would rather tell you it was an isolated incident, and was actually a squirrel, no less.

Modifié par GnusmasTHX, 12 février 2010 - 11:36 .

[ckriley]

BobbyTheI wrote...

I posted a big long rant on this subject a while back, so I'll just go with the Cliff Notes version.

As they say in ME2, what exactly IS the evidence of the Reapers?  Shepard's word, and the word of his teammates.  That is the ONLY thing there is to go by as far as the Reapers existing.  From the perspective of the Council and everyone else,  a giant ship showed up at the head of the Geth fleet, blew up a lot of people, and then got beaten.  They haven't seen the beacon messages.  They haven't seen the conversation Shepard had with Sovereign.  Sure, the Reaper was a big advanced ship, like nothing anyone had ever seen before.  But that's a big, BIG leap to go from "it's an advanced ship the Geth built with technology we've never seen before" to "It's a TALKING ship that's really alive, and it's going to bring more of its talking ship buddies to come get us."

If anybody ever played Dragon Age, you know what happens when everybody takes the big hero at his word, with no evidence other than his own hearsay to say that a specific group is the enemy.  The only difference in Mass Effect is that you're not the one at the receiving end of it.

And another part about this: say the Council did believe Shepard.  We all saw how big the Reaper fleet is.  Pretty much every council race, and the non-member species as well, is going to have to devote pretty much ALL of their time and resources to building up anything even remotely big enough to combat that.  Every single dollar of their budget would have to go toward building ships, training soldiers, fortifying defenses.

It's not as if Shepard is saying, "The Reapers are coming.  We need to get a reasonably sized armada in place to combat them."  If the Council said no to that, it'd be a little dodgier.  But no, Shepard is saying, "I want you to, based on no evidence other than what me and at the most four other people have seen (your squads on Virmire and Ilos), devote EVERY SINGLE RESOURCE you have toward defending against this threat.  Band together everybody, make them forget all prejudices and past hatreds, and focus them all SOLELY on this threat."

Yeah, I see that happening.  Now, if the council sees whatever evidence we got at the end of ME2 and STILL doesn't want to act, then I might be a little more inclined to hate on them.  But while the Council might be wrong about the Reaper threat, I'd be wondering a little more about their sanity and intelligence if they DID trust this one guy at his word without needing any further proof.

EDIT: As I was finishing typing this, I realized there is one more piece of evidence regarding the Reapers: the geth recording that got Saren declared a rogue Spectre.  But again, this is VERY flimsy evidence to devote all of your resources toward a singular threat.  If a terrorist attacks some place and you get a recording of him saying, "It was all in honor of this deity that most people don't believe in," you don't go, "Well, I guess that means that deity must exist, then."

And I think the "Cliffs Notes" version of my rant ended up longer than the original one. 

Or just ask the Council what I said above.  Why would the Geth suddenly follow Saren and attack the Citadel?  What reason or motivation would they have.  Their only real concern are the quarians.

[Nightwriter]

Ugh. It is the RESPONSIBILITY of the people in power to face scary and uncomfortable truths in order to protect the people they are responsible for.



Denying the existence of the Reapers might be okay if it was really for lack of evidence. But we all know that the real reason they refuse to believe the Reapers exist is because they don’t WANT to believe they exist.



That is unacceptable. As a leader, you can’t put your own comfort of mind over the galaxy. You can’t wave off a threat because it is unpleasant to think of – which is exactly what they’re doing.

[Sapienti]

GnusmasTHX wrote...

I think the fact that the giant ship was leaps and bounds more advanced, and like someone said, easily determined to be older, solidifies that the threat is real for me.

If not. Try when it attached to the Citadel Tower and sent tubes into the structure and started emitting a red energy. Tubes that went somewhere. Hidden places along the structure, specifically tailored to match the Reaper.

Not to mention other evidence. Prothean ruins, data discs and archives, as well as millions of year old dragon's teeth, the same technology in Sovereign, the same age probably... Discovered ALL over the galaxy.

It's really hard to believe that all of this evidence allegedly just disappeared, considering a giant chunk of it landed right in the Council's office.

It's about the equivalent of someone saying a stampede of horses is about to run over my house, and a second later, a horse flies through the window. I mean for God's sake... You would look out the window for more horses, right? The Council apparently doesn't. Would rather tell you it was an isolated incident, and was actually a squirrel, no less.

Well again all the things we find easily believably we only find so because we've got a different perspective on everything. The council doesn't know everything about the Geth. We don't even know everything about the Geth and we're playing the game. To them they can't determine that its "easily seen as older" because there is no way to even tell how old it would be. What are they going to do say "That design looks ancient" or something. Sure they may be able to find parts of him but they wouldn't understand them, no real way to date technology from space either. Its too ambiguous. They also don't know how advanced the Geth could really be. We do though because we play the game. To the council its just another synthetic.

As for prothean evidence, the beacon is the closest you'd get, and Shepard and Saren were really the only ones with those things. A more fitting analogy would be a a someone telling you a stampede of zebra are coming and then you hear hoofbeats while living in the middle of texas on a horse ranch. Why not think horses rather than zebra? Only thing that would change your mind would be hard evidence right? Sovereign was as good as the hoofbeat of a Reaper fleet as far as the council was concerned.

[CmdrFenix83]

Blameless77 wrote...

Offkorn wrote...

Blameless77 wrote...

Their position isn't totally unreasonable from a detached perspective. No one knows anything about the Geth so it's possible that they pooled resources and built a massive flagship.

I'm not saying the Council's treatment of Shepard is right, just that their position isn't totally untenable.

Actually... it is.

Simply analyzing even the tiniest fragment of Sovereign would date its existence to long before the Geth appeared.

You get an E-Mail to this effect from some random researcher halfway through the game or so.

I don't remember getting that e-mail, but I'll take your word for it I suppose. In any event, the devs seemed pretty determined to dodge that particular avenue with the whole "none of it could be recovered because of chaos/looters. If that e-mail exists, and again, I'll take your word for it, I'm not really sure how to reconcile the two divergent plot strands. 

The e-mail is from Chorban if you did his 'Scanning the Keepers' sidequest in the first game.  He's also referring to the age of the Keepers and not Sovereign.

[Adon 9]

It is consistent at least. The Council are VERY conservative in decision making, and always have been. And I will categorically state that they did indeed backpedal from the stance they had at the end of ME1, where they acknowledged the Reapers were real.

The reasoning goes like this: If the Reapers are indeed real, we are in very, VERY deep trouble. We would need to completely focus everything we have on them, because they are a threat so huge that they WILL wipe out everything if they aren't stopped. There's no way we could keep a lid on it either... fighting the Reapers would require total dedication.

Then Shepard dies, and the Reapers don't materialize. You let yourself relax a bit. Maybe... maybe Shepard was just ranting and raving after all? I mean, we can't really prove that Sovereign was anything other than an advanced geth ship. Sure, it's bigger than anything we've ever seen, and it dwarfed the Destiny Ascension in size and firepower, but a reaper? No, no, better to think it was just a geth superproject. So... no Reapers. Yes, that MUST be it... Shepard was just taken in by Saren's rhetoric is all. That has to be all.

Yes, it has a bunch of holes in it, and it requires a big dose of wishful thinking on the part of the Council. But considering that they are VERY big on maintaining the status quo and reluctant to make drastic decisions, it's something that doesn't really seem out of place. Shepard is the sacrificial lamb here... better to write him/her off as a loon than face the possibility that armageddon is on the way.

Modifié par Adon 9, 12 février 2010 - 11:49 .