Mass Effect Legendary Edition: ME2 Ep 17 – Thane: Sins of the Father and Samara: The Ardat-Yakshi

Mass Effect Friday came back with a fairly organised plan. We were heading to the Citadel for Thane’s loyalty mission, picking up the forged ID side quest while we were there, then moving across to Omega for some unfinished business with Ish and whatever else we could fit in afterwards.

That plan lasted about as well as expected. We lost an assassination target, spent far too long looking for two asari who were practically standing in front of us, uncovered two very different family disasters and somehow still found time to worry about whether the Normandy’s fish would survive another night.

🌌 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, promotional weapons, armour and other extras, all remastered and optimised for 4K Ultra HD.

We are currently working our way through Mass Effect 2, where a big part of the journey is getting to know Shepard’s crew and dealing with the problems they have brought aboard the Normandy. This episode put two of those relationships firmly in the spotlight with Thane and Samara.

🚀 Where We Are in the Journey

This is Episode 17 of our Mass Effect 2 playthrough and we are now well into the loyalty-mission stage of the 100% run. The Normandy crew is filling out, but there is still plenty of unfinished business scattered across the galaxy before we can move on.

The plan for this stream was mainly character-focused rather than combat-heavy. Thane needed help with his son on the Citadel, while Samara had finally reached the point where she could tell us more about the Ardat-Yakshi she had been hunting. We also had a couple of smaller jobs hanging around, because apparently my journal is never allowed to become too tidy.

⚠️ What Happens in This Episode

The first stop was the Citadel, where Thane needed help finding his estranged son, Kolyat, before the young drell could complete an assassination. That was the sensible objective, at least. Before things became serious, the stream took a very familiar detour when a viewer shared an Xbox gamertag and Dr_Ravenholm disappeared into the console menus trying to work out where everything had moved. There was also the small matter of the forged ID side quest, which meant keeping an eye out for two asari somewhere on the station. They were definitely around. Finding them was another matter entirely.

At least the important priorities were handled. The aquarium needed more fish, so a stop at the Citadel shops added a few more potential victims to the Normandy’s increasingly questionable fish-care programme. With that taken care of, Thane’s search for Kolyat could properly begin.

C-Sec Captain Bailey pointed Shepard towards Mouse, a former “duct rat” who knew Thane from years earlier. Mouse had grown up surviving in the station’s ventilation system and remembered Thane as one of the few people who had ever treated him well. It made the conversation unexpectedly uncomfortable for Thane: Mouse remembered the small gifts and kindnesses clearly, while Thane was forced to confront the fact that he had somehow managed to be an important figure in this street kid’s life while barely being there for his own son.

Mouse revealed that Kolyat had been looking for assassination work through Elias Kellem, a local criminal who had become powerful enough to reach an understanding with Bailey. Kellem caused just enough trouble to remain useful without causing enough to force C-Sec’s hand, which made dragging him into an interrogation slightly awkward for everyone involved.

That interrogation became a race against the clock. Shepard and Thane needed the name of Kolyat’s target before Kellem’s advocate arrived, with Thane taking the calmer approach while Shepard applied pressure. Kellem remained confident for as long as he thought normal rules still applied. Then his lawyer finally arrived, Shepard mentioned being a Council Spectre, and suddenly the room became considerably less comfortable for him. The target was Joram Talid, a turian politician campaigning in the wards on an anti-crime platform wrapped up in increasingly ugly anti-human politics.

From there, the mission became a tailing operation. Shepard had to follow Talid through the ward while Thane watched from above and searched for Kolyat. It should have been fairly simple. Instead, Dr_Ravenholm managed to lose Talid completely and had to restart the entire section.

The second attempt went considerably better, although it still involved squeezing through restricted areas and convincing one unfortunate employee that Shepard was apparently with Citadel health and safety investigating vermin reports. This time Talid stayed in sight long enough for the pursuit to reach its conclusion, with Kolyat finally making his move.

Shepard and Thane stopped the assassination, but the real payoff was the conversation afterwards. Kolyat’s anger was not really about the failed job; it was about a father who had been absent through most of his life and had waited until everything was falling apart before returning. Thane admitted his failures, including the consequences of the life he had chosen, and told Kolyat that although he had taken many bad things out of the world, his son was the one good thing he had ever added to it.

It should have been a clean ending to the mission. Instead, the expected loyalty achievement never appeared.

That immediately raised a problem for a 100% run. Something somewhere had gone wrong, which meant that despite getting through the story and seeing the reconciliation play out, Thane’s loyalty mission would need to be revisited later. It was one of those distinctly Mass Effect moments where an emotional scene finishes, the music settles, and the next thought is simply: “Right, why hasn’t the box ticked?”

Before leaving the Citadel, there was still the mystery of those missing asari. Another sweep of the station finally found them, revealing that Dr_Ravenholm had apparently run past them several times already. They had been prevented from leaving because their names had ended up on a security watch list connected to possible geth infiltration. Shepard questioned the logic of treating two clearly asari travellers as potential geth agents, pointing out that the noticeable lack of “flashlight heads” was something of a giveaway. C-Sec would not completely clear the case, but agreed to flag it for review, which was enough to let them travel in the meantime.

Back aboard the Normandy, the pace slowed for a while. Thane opened up more about his childhood, his relationship with the hanar and the compact that eventually shaped him into an assassin. There was also time for a longer conversation with Miranda, touching on Cerberus, Shepard’s command and Miranda’s own tendency to measure her achievements against the genetic engineering that created her. After so much running around the Citadel, it was a quieter stretch of character work before the next loyalty mission took the stream somewhere considerably darker.

Omega came next. Before getting into Samara’s business, there was an old loose end to clean up involving Ish. Rather than simply returning the information directly to him, Shepard passed it to one of Aria’s people, finally clearing a task that had been sitting around waiting for another reason to return to Omega.

Then Samara — still frequently referred to as “Boots” — explained what she had been hunting.

Morinth was an Ardat-Yakshi, an asari whose condition turned intimate melding into something lethal. Worse, she had embraced it, becoming addicted to the power and deliberately hunting victims. The larger revelation was that Morinth was not simply Samara’s target. She was her daughter. Samara had spent roughly four hundred years pursuing her, turning the mission from another hunt for a dangerous criminal into something much more personal.

Their investigation led to Nef’s home. Her grieving mother described a quiet, creative young woman whose behaviour had changed after meeting Morinth. Nef’s room filled in the rest of the picture through her journal entries: Morinth liked the band Expel 10, the drug hallux, the elcor artist Forta and the vid Vaenia, along with people who were adventurous, dangerous and confident enough to keep her interested.

That information became Shepard’s survival guide for the next part of the plan. Samara could not approach Morinth directly without immediately giving the game away, so Shepard had to enter Afterlife’s VIP section alone, get Morinth’s attention and become interesting enough to earn an invitation back to her apartment.

The nightclub sequence became one of the best mixtures of tension and stream chaos from the night. Shepard worked through the room, helped a worried woman get a warning to her friend using the code words “terminal” and “eternity” — with chat helping make sure the order stayed straight — and stepped in when a dancer was being harassed. There was also dancing, because apparently saving the galaxy occasionally requires Commander Shepard to demonstrate nightclub credibility.

Eventually Morinth approached. The details pulled from Nef’s room suddenly mattered, with Shepard steering the conversation through Expel 10, hallux and Forta without exposing the trap. Morinth remained interested and eventually invited Shepard back to her apartment.

Once there, the situation became much more dangerous. Morinth attempted to dominate Shepard, only for Samara to arrive and force the confrontation that had been building for centuries. Mother and daughter fought, Shepard was given the choice, and this time there was no hesitation about how the mission had ended: Morinth was killed and Samara’s loyalty was secured.

Away from the mission objectives, chat was running a parallel storyline of its own. Cats were repeatedly accused of plotting their owners’ deaths after stories involving people being tripped, injured and generally betrayed by apparently innocent household pets. That gradually became the working assumption that every cat was secretly planning something from behind the sofa.

There was also the continuing problem of viewers donating their unwanted “degrees” to Dr_Ravenholm, conveniently explaining why the room kept getting warmer while the Xbox was running. Happy_Cat_Lady’s ongoing feud with AIDA kept resurfacing through jokes about spankings and cake-based traps, while Hunger Games, heists and challenges continued in the background. Penguin once again seemed particularly cursed by the automated games, producing the entirely reasonable conclusion from chat that the whole thing must be rigged.

Conversation wandered through Ghost of a Tale, Warframe build timers, spiders being compared with Shelob, chocolate theft, chickens, Star Trek and the alarming possibility that connecting AIDA to Alexa might be the final step required to create Skynet. None of this did much to help Shepard deal with Omega’s criminal underworld, but it did keep the journey appropriately unpredictable.

The stream finally returned to the Normandy, where Samara reflected on what had happened. Four centuries of pursuit were over, but victory did not erase the fact that Morinth had been her daughter, giving the successful loyalty mission a much quieter and more bittersweet ending than the fight itself.

Research was collected, Joker and Kelly were checked in on, the game was saved and — most importantly — the fish were fed again. By the end of the night, Samara was loyal, the forged ID situation was resolved, the Ish package was dealt with, and Thane’s mission was sitting there waiting for a future replay because the loyalty result had stubbornly refused to appear.

The next Mass Effect Friday was already pointing towards Legion’s missions, while the stream itself closed by raiding into IThinkImAPenguin8P. A session that had started as a relatively neat Citadel checklist had somehow turned into failed surveillance, two separate family disasters, an Omega nightclub trap and another successful night of keeping the Normandy’s fish alive.

🎬 Watch the Episode

If you want to see the full Citadel chase, the failed first attempt, Morinth’s nightclub trap and all the chat distractions in between, you can watch the complete episode here:

Watch Mass Effect Legendary Edition: ME2 Ep 17 on YouTube

You can follow the playthrough from the beginning through the Mass Effect Legendary Edition playlist, and there is plenty more on my YouTube channel.

If you enjoy the episode, leave a like, let me know what you thought in the comments and subscribe so you do not miss the next part of the run.

🔴 Join the Adventure Live

The edited story is one thing, but live is where we discover whether I can keep track of the target, remember two code words and keep the fish alive at the same time.

Come and join us live on Twitch or YouTube. You can join the chat, contribute to whatever tangent we have wandered into and occasionally help stop me from forgetting something important.

🧭 Community & Links

The stream might end, but the conversation normally carries on somewhere else. If you want to stay connected between Mass Effect Fridays, you can find the rest of the community here.

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🐟 At Least the Fish Survived

We went into the stream expecting two loyalty missions and came away with one successful loyalty unlock, one job that needs repeating, several finished side quests and another evening where chat managed to create an entirely separate storyline around the game.

Next time we return to Mass Effect 2, Legion’s missions are looking increasingly likely, and Thane’s unfinished loyalty result is still sitting there waiting to be fixed. Until then, the Normandy is saved, the game is saved and the fish have been fed.

— Dr Ravenholm