Mass Effect Legendary Edition: ME2 Ep 14 – Dossier: Tali – Tali and Tali: Treason

This was supposed to be a fairly simple Tali-focused night: recruit her, get her aboard the Normandy and hopefully move straight into her loyalty mission. Instead, we got planetary scanning, a sun determined to remove my shields, a Geth Colossus that refused to cooperate, an unexpected shopping trip and, eventually, a full treason hearing.

Friday Mass Effect is mandatory, of course, and chat treated it accordingly. Between Hunger Games, challenges, cake-related accusations and the occasional technical distraction, we somehow managed to make a lot of important progress while still finding plenty of ways to get sidetracked.

🌌 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, armour and additional content, remastered and optimised for 4K Ultra HD.

In Mass Effect 2, we’re aboard the Normandy with Commander Shepard, building a crew for the suicide mission ahead. Recruiting people is only part of the job; their personal problems and loyalty missions matter as well, which is exactly why Tali became the centre of this episode.

🛰️ Where We Are in the Journey

We’re continuing the 100% run through Mass Effect 2, with the larger goal of getting everyone through the eventual suicide mission alive. That means exploring thoroughly, picking up the upgrades we need and making sure the crew are loyal before we reach the point of no return.

For this episode, the plan was to recruit Tali on Haestrom and hopefully deal with her loyalty mission immediately afterwards. By the end we managed both, although the route between those two objectives was rather less direct than expected.

⚠️ What Happens in This Episode

Before landing anywhere dangerous, there was important Commander Shepard business to handle: scanning planets and firing probes at anything that looked vaguely rich in platinum. This is a 100% playthrough, so apparently even an urgent recruitment mission has to wait until we’ve made absolutely certain there isn’t a valuable mineral deposit hiding somewhere on the other side of a planet.

Chat, meanwhile, had already found other ways to keep busy. Challenges were being thrown around, dysentery was spreading with alarming efficiency, and the newly updated Hunger Games were getting an early test. A Smith 501 took the first victory while Raven discovered that his own chances of surviving his creation seemed considerably lower. Between checking profile pictures, talking through future improvements and wondering whether the latest bits of coding were actually behaving themselves, we’d barely left the Normandy before the evening had already developed several distractions of its own.

Then came Haestrom, and the mood changed almost immediately.

The planet’s failing sun was powerful enough to burn through Shepard’s shields whenever we stepped into direct light, turning what might normally have been a fairly straightforward advance into a constant search for the next patch of shade. Grunt and Miranda came along for the operation, although their enthusiasm for actually joining in with the fighting occasionally seemed negotiable. Grunt’s repeated confidence that “nothing can hurt me” became increasingly entertaining when Raven pointed out that this philosophy worked especially well if you simply avoided being anywhere near the combat.

The deeper we pushed into the ruins, the more awkward the whole operation became. Geth were attacking from elevated positions, demolition charges had to be recovered to open the route forward, and ammunition had an unfortunate habit of running low exactly when it would have been useful to have some. Raven also kept forgetting just how quickly the sunlight stripped away Shepard’s shields, which made several encounters considerably more exciting than they needed to be.

Naturally, none of this stopped the completionist instincts from taking over. Every side passage still needed checking, every container still needed opening and any suspicious corner had to be investigated just in case the game had hidden something there. If the sun wanted to cook Shepard alive while we searched for one more box, then the sun was simply going to have to wait its turn.

In the middle of all that, we hit 750 followers, which gave the stream a much happier interruption. Raven thanked the “750 maniacs” who had somehow chosen to stick around, while chat celebrated the milestone between firefights. It was a lovely community moment, although it did happen while Geth were still trying to kill us and the squad AI was still being accused of doing very little to prevent that.

Eventually we reached Kal’Reegar and the real wall of the recruitment mission: the Geth Colossus.

Reegar was badly injured but still determined to fight. Rather than let him throw himself back into the battle, Raven told him to stay put and keep himself alive while Shepard dealt with the problem.

That went flawlessly.

By which I mean it absolutely did not.

The Colossus could repair itself, Geth were advancing from the sides, and Raven’s plan to solve matters with the Cain rapidly encountered the small problem that the Cain did not seem particularly interested in firing. Attempts to get it charged at the right moment repeatedly went wrong, Shepard repeatedly died, and the whole encounter started looping back on itself.

EntertainJD’s Death Loop gag could not have arrived at a better time. Before long, Raven was openly blaming “JD’s Death Loop Incorporated” for trapping us in the same fight again and again. Chat naturally encouraged this rather than offering anything resembling sympathy, and when a raid arrived in the middle of the struggle, the newcomers received perhaps the most accurate possible introduction to the channel: welcome to the 100% Mass Effect 2 playthrough, this is the third time we’ve done this bit because Raven keeps dying.

Eventually the heavy weapon was abandoned in favour of something that would actually cooperate. The Colossus finally went down, Kal’Reegar survived, and Tali was rescued.

That gave us the first major victory of the night. Tali joined the Normandy, another important squadmate was safely aboard, and Raven immediately went to engineering to speak with her and pick up the shield upgrade she could provide for the ship. The next objective seemed obvious: move straight into Tali’s loyalty mission while the evening was already focused on her.

Except nothing happened.

There was no immediate loyalty mission waiting for us, so the stream took an unexpected detour through the Citadel and Omega instead. Raven went shopping for upgrades, cleared out anything useful that could be afforded and generally tried to make the Normandy and crew as prepared as possible for what lies ahead. That matters because the wider goal of the playthrough remains unchanged: when the suicide mission eventually arrives, the intention is to bring everyone home alive.

With Tali still refusing to produce the conversation we needed, we headed back out into space for some more planetary exploration before taking on the N7: Quarian Crash Site assignment. There we found a crashed quarian ship, a stranded survivor and waves of varren closing in. It was a much shorter diversion than Haestrom, but apparently it was exactly the sort of distraction the game had been waiting for.

Back aboard the Normandy, Tali finally wanted to talk.

The Migrant Fleet had charged her with treason.

Suddenly the evening shifted from recruitment mission to political drama. Tali explained that she was accused of sending active Geth to the fleet—something she insisted she would never knowingly do. She had been collecting and sending disabled Geth components to her father for research, but as far as she knew everything had been rendered harmless before it left her hands.

Conviction would mean exile.

So we travelled to the Migrant Fleet, where things immediately became worse.

The Admiralty Board revealed that the Alarei, the ship where Tali’s father Rael’Zorah had been working, had been overrun by Geth. Everyone aboard was believed dead, including Rael himself. Tali had not even been told before the hearing began, and the shock of hearing it in front of the admirals made the entire trial feel less like a careful search for the truth and more like several political agendas crashing into one another.

Because Tali was now part of the Normandy’s crew, Shepard had the right to stand beside her as captain and represent her. Chat immediately settled into the courtroom spirit. There were objections, suggestions that Tali be sent to the gallows that were very quickly corrected into suggestions that Shepard should probably help her instead, and eventually a very clear instruction from chat: yell at the admirals.

Before heading to the Alarei, Raven took the time to speak with the people gathered around the hearing. Those conversations made it increasingly obvious that Tali’s case was only one part of a much larger argument inside the Migrant Fleet. Some of the admirals wanted to prepare for war and retake the quarian homeworld from the Geth. Others believed another colony should be found, while still others had their own ideas about the future relationship between quarians and synthetics.

Even the admirals who were supposed to be judging Tali were bringing those competing views into the hearing. The question of whether she had actually committed treason was becoming tangled up with arguments over war, peace, artificial intelligence and the future of the entire fleet.

Chat mixed genuine Mass Effect discussion into the usual chaos. There were conversations about whether the Geth had been sentient since their rebellion, arguments over Tali’s point of view and comments about some very familiar voices among the quarians. Then, without missing a beat, everything would swing back into Hunger Games, challenges, photo mode or another command idea.

That contrast ran throughout the stream. One moment we were discussing whether the quarians could ever coexist with the Geth; the next, cake had apparently vanished and Happy Cat Lady was under suspicion. SnowRunner continued to be treated less like a videogame and more like something Raven might have to be protected from, while chat suggested upgrades to the custom games: sword-clashing effects for challenges, better Hunger Games presentation and even a flying potato to accompany the mangoes already travelling across the screen.

There was also the continuing mystery of AIDA and the squirrels. Raven remained slightly concerned that the bot had once started talking about squirrels despite there apparently being nothing about squirrels in the database. It had never happened again, which somehow made the whole thing less reassuring rather than more.

Eventually, though, it was time to board the Alarei.

The ship had become a graveyard. We fought through Geth, searched the rooms and listened to the surviving logs as the story of the disaster slowly came together. Tali had done what she claimed: she had sent disabled Geth components to her father believing them to be safe.

Rael’s research team had then gone further.

They reactivated the components and connected them together, trying to learn more about the Geth and develop technology that might give the quarians an advantage. Instead, the experiments escaped their control. The Geth took over the ship, the crew were slaughtered and the research that was supposed to help the Migrant Fleet became the thing that destroyed everyone working on it.

Eventually we found Rael himself.

He was dead, leaving Tali to discover not only what her father had done but how much of it had been tied to his hopes for her future. His final message made the whole thing considerably harder, especially with his talk of one day building Tali a home on the quarian homeworld.

There was evidence aboard the Alarei that could have proven exactly what happened. It would have cleared Tali by showing that her father had been responsible for reactivating the Geth.

There was just one problem: using it would destroy Rael’Zorah’s name.

Tali didn’t want that. Whatever mistakes her father had made, she didn’t want his legacy publicly torn apart after his death.

So when we returned to the hearing, Raven took another route.

Rather than handing over the evidence, Shepard turned the argument back on the Admiralty Board. Tali had fought beside Shepard against Saren. She had helped save the Citadel. She had just helped retake the Alarei. Her entire record showed exactly where her loyalty lay, and yet the admirals had allowed their own arguments over the Geth and the future of the fleet to turn her into the centre of a political trial.

Chat had asked Shepard to yell at the admirals.

Shepard delivered.

The argument worked. The board found there was not enough evidence to convict Tali, the treason charge was dismissed and Rael’s research remained out of the official case. Tali kept her place among her people, her loyalty to Shepard and the Normandy was secured, and we got exactly the result Raven had been aiming for without sacrificing her father’s reputation.

One viewer provided the perfect summary of the entire hearing:

Shepard is the best lawyer in the galaxy.

There was still time afterwards to speak with the admirals again, check in with Tali and see some of the political consequences of what had happened. The arguments over the Geth had certainly not gone away, but Tali was no longer standing in the middle of them as an accused traitor.

One final Hunger Games round followed, with Frodo taking the victory, before Raven returned to engineering for a quieter conversation with Tali. She thanked Shepard for being there through the trial, the discovery aboard the Alarei and everything surrounding her father.

With Tali recruited, her ship upgrade researched and her loyalty mission complete, the evening had achieved considerably more than the original plan.

There was only one final job left before saving the game: head upstairs and feed the Normandy’s fish.

Unfortunately, the fish were already dead.

We’ll buy more fish.

Probably.

🎥 Watch the Episode

If you want to see the Haestrom fights, the Death Loop, Tali’s trial and everything chat managed to add around them, you can watch the full episode on YouTube.

You can also follow the complete playthrough through the Mass Effect Legendary Edition playlist and find the rest of my videos on the Dr Ravenholm YouTube channel. If you enjoy the episode, leave a like, let me know what you thought in the comments and subscribe so you don’t miss the next part.

🔴 Join the Adventure Live

A lot of what made this stream memorable happened between the missions: chat turning the Colossus fight into a Death Loop, Hunger Games running alongside serious quarian politics, and a raid arriving while I was still trying to survive Haestrom.

If you want to be there when the next plan goes off course, come and join us live on Twitch or YouTube. At the end of this stream, we carried things on by raiding into DashDucks.

📡 Community & Links

The stream may end, but the conversation rarely does. If you want to keep up with the games, community and everything else happening around the channel, these are the places to find us.

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🐟 Tali Loyal, Fish Less Fortunate

We finished with Tali recruited, her Normandy upgrade researched, Kal’Reegar alive and her loyalty mission successfully completed without sacrificing her father’s reputation. More importantly for the long-term plan, that’s another crew member prepared for what lies ahead.

The Normandy fish were considerably less successful, but we’ll deal with that next time. Probably before they become another recurring casualty of the 100% playthrough.

— Dr Ravenholm