Mass Effect Legendary Edition: ME2 Ep 11 – Jack: Subject Zero and Jacob: The Gift of Greatness
Friday night meant mandatory Mass Effect Friday, although the plan changed slightly before we even got started. I had originally intended to tackle Jack and Miranda’s loyalty missions, but with the heat making a longer exploration of Illium less appealing, Miranda was moved to next week and Jacob stepped into her place.
That gave us two fairly personal loyalty missions to deal with, although the first problem of the night was considerably less dramatic: all the fish in Shepard’s cabin were dead. I briefly wondered where they had gone before discovering the wonderfully direct “clean out dead fish” prompt. Apparently keeping an entire Normandy crew alive does not automatically make Shepard qualified to own an aquarium.
🌌 About the Game
Mass Effect Legendary Edition brings together the single-player content from Mass Effect, Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3, along with more than 40 DLC packs, weapons and armour, all remastered and optimised for 4K Ultra HD.
We are currently working through Mass Effect 2, following Commander Shepard aboard the Normandy while preparing the crew for what is becoming an increasingly dangerous endgame. Loyalty missions are an important part of that preparation, but they also give us some of the best opportunities to learn exactly what the people travelling with Shepard are carrying with them.
🧭 Where We Are in the Journey
This is Episode 11 of my 100% Mass Effect 2 playthrough. We have already been building the Normandy’s crew and working through their unfinished business, and the focus is now increasingly shifting toward getting everyone ready for the eventual suicide mission.
This time Jacob and Jack are the priority. By the end of the stream both loyalty missions are complete, along with an unexpected N7 side mission, while Miranda and the fuller exploration of Illium remain waiting for next Friday.
⚠️ What Happens in This Episode
Before we can get anywhere near the two planned loyalty missions, planetary scanning throws an anomaly into the route. With this being a 100% playthrough, ignoring it was never really an option, so Shepard heads down to an archaeological dig site with Miranda and Garrus. The newly acquired burst-fire rifle gets its first proper workout and immediately feels much better than the weapon we had been using, while the rocket launcher comes along despite the fact I almost never use it. “What could possibly go wrong?” remains a dangerous philosophy, but for once it works out reasonably well.
The dig site itself is fairly brief, although completionist rules mean every corner still has to be checked before we leave. Hostiles are cleared, ammunition and anything useful are collected, and the archaeological artifact is recovered. After another round of planetary scanning—and carefully avoiding deposits we cannot actually store because some of the resource tanks are already full—we finally turn toward the first major objective of the night: Jacob’s loyalty mission.
Jacob takes us to the wreck of the Hugo Gernsback, where his father Ronald Taylor disappeared years earlier. Miranda joins us as well, and almost immediately the crash site starts raising questions. The ship came down violently enough that survival should have been difficult, yet somebody clearly lived long enough to maintain control of the emergency systems. More troubling is the discovery that the beacon had been functional but deliberately kept silent for eight years, 237 days and seven hours on the authority of Acting Captain Ronald Taylor. Captain Fairchild died during the crash, leaving Jacob’s father in command, and the local food supply presents an even bigger problem: the planet’s plant life causes rapid neurological decay, damaging memory and higher cognitive functions within weeks.
Following the beach and listening to the surviving crew only makes things worse. Their speech is fragmented, memories are disappearing, and some talk about “the leader” as though Ronald has become something more than a captain. Others—the so-called hunters—have been exiled and are now fighting his mechs. One conversation is interrupted because I look over at chat and miss an on-screen prompt entirely, which means a reload and a quick run back through the dialogue. Frodo’s distraction command naturally arrives around the same time, so responsibility for the whole incident is assigned in the traditional manner.
The records inside the settlement finally reveal what happened. Ronald and the officers kept the remaining shipboard food for themselves while forcing the wider crew to survive on the toxic local plants, supposedly so somebody would retain enough mental capacity to repair the beacon. That decision might have begun as a brutal survival calculation, but it did not stay there. When crew members resisted, Ronald used the security mechs to suppress them. Over time, the male survivors were exiled or killed, while women were assigned to officers and treated as possessions. The other officers eventually died as well, leaving Ronald alone at the top of a system he had no intention of exposing once rescue became possible.
By the time we reach him, there is very little mystery left. Ronald still tries to explain everything through the “realities of command,” arguing that discipline became necessary as the crew deteriorated and that the situation simply escalated. Jacob is having none of it. The father he remembers is nowhere to be found, and when Ronald talks about disappearing rather than facing what he had done, Jacob tells him plainly that he is not the man he remembers as his father. Shepard chooses to have him taken away for an Alliance trial, giving him plenty of time to answer for what happened rather than killing him or leaving him for the hunters.
Back aboard the Normandy, there is one more surprise. Miranda denies being the person who leaked the information about the Gernsback—because it was actually the Illusive Man who passed it along after finding the obscure report in Cerberus channels. Jacob is remarkably composed about the whole thing. Ronald can rot in prison, but Jacob has already mourned the father he once knew, and what happened on the planet does not change the lessons he took from him before everything went wrong. With that, Jacob’s loyalty is secured and another member of the Normandy crew is ready for what lies ahead.
Chat, meanwhile, is running an entirely separate storyline alongside Mass Effect. Frodo spends several attempts trying to get the horoscope command working before receiving the encouraging prediction that his love life will run into trouble when his fiancée throws a javelin through his chest. Fish and chips with mushy peas becomes a surprisingly important discussion, Red Dwarf leads into Police Squad!, The Naked Gun, Spaceballs, John Candy and a growing collection of old films, and the sight of enemies shooting from absurd distances brings back memories of Police Squad! characters taking cover only a few feet apart.
The chat games add their own problems. Gary defeats Mr Smith in a challenge, only for a Bouncy, Marry & Kill result to decide that Gary wants to bounce with himself, marry johnsmithgamer69 and then kill himself. Not long after that, dysentery begins spreading through chat by way of a harmonica, because apparently we did not have enough going on already. Frodo also takes on the increasingly important role of reminding me to manually save, particularly after the earlier reload. By the end of the night, “save before chat causes another problem” has effectively become part of the Mass Effect strategy.
From there we head to Pragia for Jack’s loyalty mission and the abandoned Cerberus facility where she spent her childhood as Subject Zero. The atmosphere changes immediately. The place is ruined and overgrown, but Jack remembers enough of it to know exactly what it was used for. With this being a 100% run, we move room by room rather than rushing through, uncovering logs that slowly dismantle Jack’s own understanding of what happened there. She had always thought she survived because she was stronger than everybody else, but the records reveal that Cerberus actively protected her because she was the experiment that mattered. Other children were drugged, pushed into dangerous biotic tests and even forced to fight, all so the researchers could learn how far Jack could be pushed without killing her.
Right in the middle of this return to one of the darkest places in Jack’s life, a raid entered the stream with 20 viewers. The new arrivals walk straight into mandatory Mass Effect Friday while we are exploring rooms where Cerberus kept children for experiments, which is quite an introduction to the evening. Around the same stretch of the stream, DaftPhoenix9024 drops 100 bits, SilverApocalypse joins the Mass Effect discussion, and chat continues wandering through films while the mission itself gets progressively more uncomfortable.
The facility is not as abandoned as Jack expected. A survivor named Aresh has returned and hired mercenaries to help rebuild it. Like Jack, he was one of the children experimented on here, but rather than destroy the place he has convinced himself that the suffering must have had a purpose. He wants to restart the programme and rediscover whatever Cerberus learned about unlocking human biotic potential. Jack understandably wants nothing to do with that explanation. When Aresh admits that children had been bought from poor families or kidnapped from colonies and still insists there must have been some reason for what happened, it becomes clear that he has never really escaped the facility at all.
Jack wants him dead, but Shepard pushes her to let him go. Aresh is trapped in the past and rebuilding the facility is his way of endlessly reliving it; killing him would not undo what happened to Jack. She eventually accepts that and sends him away rather than chasing him down. What follows is quieter but probably more important. Jack asks for a moment to look around the room that was essentially her entire childhood. She remembers the bed where she was tortured, tying sheets around her wrists and trying to break free, the table she crawled beneath when she needed somewhere to cry, and the marks on the wall where she killed her first man after a guard tried to stop her escape. Once she has seen enough, she is ready to stop wallowing in it and blow the place apart.
Back on the Normandy, Jack admits that destroying the facility has not simply erased what it did to her. She still carries it, but sparing Aresh showed her exactly what she does not want to become: someone permanently trapped inside the worst part of their own past. She promises Shepard she will keep herself together, and her loyalty is secured. We also pick up her biotic upgrade, check the Normandy for anything else we can improve, discover that more palladium is going to be needed for another armour upgrade, and make the usual post-mission rounds before heading back toward the galaxy map.
By the end of the stream, both major objectives are complete and the unexpected archaeological dig has been cleared as well. Jacob has faced what became of his father, Jack has finally returned to the place that created Subject Zero and reduced it to a crater, and two more loyalty missions are safely ticked off ahead of the eventual suicide mission. IThinkImAPenguin8P also arrives late enough to immediately defeat Mr Smith in a challenge before joining a successful heist, while the final Normandy checks include one more manual save—because Frodo would complain if we didn’t. The plan for next Friday is Miranda’s loyalty mission and Illium, assuming the heat, the weather, chat, and the surviving contents of the Normandy aquarium allow it.
🎬 Watch the Episode
You can watch the full session here: Mass Effect Legendary Edition: ME2 Ep 11.
If you enjoy the episode, leave a like, let me know your favourite moment in the comments and subscribe to Dr Ravenholm on YouTube. You can also follow the whole playthrough through the Mass Effect Legendary Edition Playlist.
🔴 Join the Adventure Live
The edited journey is on YouTube, but the live streams are where missed prompts, questionable chat commands, unexpected side missions and dead Normandy fish become part of the evening.
Come and join us live on Twitch or YouTube. a raid brought 20 viewers aboard during this stream, and when we finished for the night we passed things on by raiding thecozybeastie.
🛰️ Community & Links
There is plenty happening between streams as well, whether you want to join the community, follow what I am working on elsewhere or simply keep track of where the next bit of chaos is happening.
Live — Come aboard when the next stream begins:
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Socials — Follow the various transmissions across the wider network:
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Music — If you want something different from the gaming side of things:
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Support — Help keep the streams and everything around them moving:
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More — Explore the other projects and work beyond the channel:
Business Centre | Download the Brochure | About Me | Blog
🐟 Two Loyalties, One Empty Fish Tank
So we finish the night with Jacob and Jack both loyal, an extra side mission completed and another couple of important pieces in place before the suicide mission. Jack has finally destroyed the facility that shaped so much of her life, while Jacob has discovered exactly what happened to his father and chosen to leave him to face the consequences.
Next Friday we should be returning to Miranda’s loyalty mission and Illium. Before then, I may also have to deal with the most pressing unresolved issue aboard the Normandy: apparently buying fish is easier than remembering to feed them.
— Dr Ravenholm
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