**WARNING** This series will contain Mass Effect 2 spoilers. Before I get into spoiler territory, I will try to note how far along I was when each entry was conceived, but I make no promises. Proceed at your own risk.

Intro

I make a habit of keeping a small notebook next to me when I play games at home. Sometimes, it just kind of sits there while I busy myself with shooting people in the face. Other times, I use it to jot down ideas, record quotes, or describe memorable moments from the game I'm playing. It's become an amusing log of my gameplay adventures

Given the volume of pages that has thus far been taken up by Mass Effect 2, I decided that it's high time I use these notes in a more productive manner. To that end, I'm starting a blog series called The Quotable Mass Effect 2. Using quotes I pulled from the game as touchpoints, I'll be revisiting moments from the game and sharing my thoughts about them. With any luck, some of those moments will have resonated with you folks as well, and you'll add your own perspective in the comments. And should you feel so inclined, please feel free to write your own volume of The Quotable Mass Effect 2!

The Collectors

Note: This entry deals with an enemy encounter about 11 hours into the game, and I will try to write as if I was at that point in the game. As of this writing, I have currently played 30 hours of the game, and recruited every squad member currently available to me. I have at least one mission left before presumably rocking the Omega 4 Relay.

"We are the harbingers of your ascension."

This ominous bit of battlefield chatter comes from my first encounter with the Collectors on Horizon. I love how sinister and full of portent the word "harbinger" is. And speaking of sinister: insects. The cinematic before you land on Horizon shows the Collectors' first assault wave, those nasty flying bugs that paralyze their victims. As I watched the insects overtake the colonists, I thought to myself that the swarm was like an organic WMD. Of course, the point of the swarm was the opposite of mass destruction, so maybe chemical warfare would be a more appropriate comparison?

Either way, the swarm was such an effective weapon of war that it hardly seemed fair. How do you combat a plague of paralyzing locusts? Recruit a genius Salarian, apparently. As I prepared to land on the planet, I wondered about the Collector ship. It has the hard metallic lines of a proper spaceship, but the rough brown growths on the outer hull look organic. They remind me of termite mounds. Maybe that's where the Collectors house their insect swarm? Even the Collector weaponry mirrors the look:

It feels very organic. The o-word raises some questions about our suppositions about the Collectors. One current theory is that they may be working with the Reapers. But, don't the Reapers visit the Milky Way every 50,000 years to destroy all civilized organic life? It makes sense for them to work with the Geth, their little robot murder buddies, but the Collectors seem like a civilized organic race. Why would the Collectors collaborate with anti-organic genocidists?

SO HERE'S MY THEORY: The Collectors are avid harvesters, showing up intermittently on the fringes of galactic space to trade for odd things, then disappearing. This we know. Maybe they are trying to harvest the best elements of organic life and civilization in order to combat the Reapers! By incorporating technology and genetic code from the most advanced species, maybe the intelligent Collectors are constructing organic superbeings to wage war on the Reapers. Maybe they've been plotting this for hundreds of thousands of years, for many Reaper cycles, awaiting the day that they can strike at the Reapers and make the universe safe for organic civilization -- or to take their place as near-omnipotent galactic overlords?

Perhaps this is the "ascension" mentioned in the quote above. The Collectors come to assimilate humanity and, in their view, elevate them to a higher, more powerful, more evolved state. In the mission it seems that Shepard's Reaper-beating history and growing influence is showing up on their radar. If Shepard knew this was their plan, would Shepard collaborate or see them as an equal threat to humanity and galactic civilization?

It raises some interesting possibilities. Anyone up for some creative conjecture?

Bonus Codex Note

When you take your first steps on Horizon en route to the besieged colony, you pass a tree that is swarming with large insects. I instinctively went on high alert, because I just saw similar insects playing freeze tag with the colonists. But further inspection revealed that the insects were actually swarming around what looked like a nest in the tree. The Collector swarm couldn't have nested that quickly, I figured, as that wouldn't jive with the Collectors' hit-and-run strategy. So this must be a local species, which feels kind of like BioWare telling me a scary story and then saying, "BOO! Haha, gotcha!"

Of course, BioWare wouldn't just leave it at that. would they? As it turns out, no. From the codex entry on Horizon:

"Large flying insect analogues take advantage of the thicker-than-Earth atmosphere and low gravity to grow enormous."

Love the thoroughness, the attention to detail. Also, using "analogue" in this biological sense is my new goal. "I know this puzzle might seem tricky to you, but try to use your primitive brain analogue to figure it out."

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Thus concludes Volume 1 of The Quotable Mass Effect 2. Let me know what you think, and share any inspirations or reflections of your own in the comments. Try to keep things on the same spoiler level as this post, and if you say anything about the endgame I will be very very displeased. Cheers!