We jump back into the Mako and book it to the Conduit. We manage to get through it just before the facility’s power dies, and crash our tank into the Presidium. We make a run for the elevator up to the Citadel Tower.

Me: Hey, another elevator!

Mom: Love the elevators. Get to kick back and do nothin’.

The elevator stops abruptly. Shepard shoots out the window and the squad starts running up the side of the Tower.

Mom: Son of a bitch.

We head into the bunker and speed through the tunnels in the Mako. After a while, we’re stopped by a kinetic barrier. We’re forced to exit the Mako and head through a side room.

Mom: I feel like we’re marching to our death.

Me: Haha, what?

Mom: Well we’re near the end of the game, and this is like a creepy tomb place… it seems like we’re about to die.

We’re not. Instead we end up in a room with a VI. It introduces itself as Vigl, the VI in charge of this facility. It explains that the scientists here went into stasis to outlive the last Reaper attack, and that afterward they got to work developing Mass Relay technology of their own. The Citadel is secretly a relay activated by the Keepers, and the Reapers use it to warp into the galaxy from dark space, slaughter the leaders of the galaxy, and then use the Citadel to shut down all the Mass Relays, isolating planets to make them easier to conquer. The Prothean scientists created a Relay of their own, the Conduit, and linked it to the Citadel. Once they made it there, they reprogrammed the Keepers to stop from activating the Citadel’s relay. Now Sovereign is attempting to use the Conduit to bypass the Citadel’s defenses and activate it manually.

Mom: Wow this is REALLY boring.

Me: What?

Mom: We’re talking to a stupid night-light!

Saren seals himself inside a bunker, leaving us no choice but to scour the planet to find some way to gain access. It’s swarming with Geth. After a massive shootout with a Geth Prime, we find a console to open up the bunker doors. We also accidentally activate a recorded message.

The message is too damaged to make out more than a few words. It seems like it’s a warning about the Reapers. Our squad is shocked we can even understand as much as we do, since the recording is in Prothean.

Mom: I didn’t understand any of that.

Me: You weren’t supposed to. The recording was too garbled to make out.

Mom: Oh, okay. I wasn’t sure because I usually don’t understand it when someone talks for a long time in this game.

We start heading back for the bunker.

Mom: Where’s my boyfriend?

Me: He’s behind us.

Mom: For someone who’s supposedly not interested in me he sure is checking out my ass a lot. Come to think of it so is that lizard guy.

Mom: So after killing Ashley and the big guy we only have two guys to pick, right?

Me: Well no, we just picked up that blue girl on Therum, remember.

Mom: Oh right, ugh. So there’s three of us.

Me: Actually, we also have that alien girl with the space helmet, the one you wanted to kill on Virmire with Ashley.

Mom: Jesus, is this a space ship or a clown car? And I’m still not happy I couldn’t kill what’s-her-face. I don’t see why it’s any of the game’s business if I want to kill one of my people. I should be able to kill who I want, when I want.

Me: Well, you’re gonna like Mass Effect 2.

Me: Well, this would normally be where the love scene takes place, but since you messed up I’m actually not sure how this plays out.

Mom: You know, if I’m not gonna be able to marry him for his money I really have no reason to keep playing.

Me: …

Mom: Well, since he didn’t want to be my boyfriend he’s clearly gay. Maybe I can get Joker to go halvesies with me and HE can seduce him instead. Since Joker’s also into me.

Me: …We’ve made it to Ilos. It’s a pretty long combat section so… you can just not pay attention for a while.

We sit down with Anderson. As usual, there aren’t any actual drinks.

He apologizes for not being able to warn you about Udina’s plan, but explains that he has an idea for getting the Normandy back. If he can break into Citadel Control, he can give the Normandy authorization to take off. Mom’s fine with that idea, but Kaidan and Garrus think it’s too risky. Anderson suggests that, instead, he could bust into Udina’s office and hack into his computer. Mom tells him to go for the first idea.

We head back to the Normandy while Andeson punches his way through the guards. He gets to the command console, but gets shot in the back as he’s freeing us.

We don’t care and fly away.

Me: I guess let’s go see what Anderson wants.

Mom: Are we getting our ship back?

Me: Well, he’s calling us to meet him at a bar, but maybe he’s got a plan.

Mom: He certainly knows how to get my attention. Let’s go get some drinks!

We head over to the Wards. On the way to the bar we’re stopped by a human diplomat that wants us to get some stimulants for him.

Mom: Ahhhhh, another fan of the ‘shrooms.

Me: It sounds more like some kind of upper.

Mom: Oh, okay. Can we get some for us?

Me: I don’t think so.

Mom: Then screw him. We don’t have time for this, we’ve got a galaxy to save.

Mom: I don’t understand, what did I do wrong that they’re mad at me?

Me: You didn’t do anything wrong, they’re screwing you over.

Mom: Oh. Those jerks.

Me: Also, at this point you would be getting a pep-talk from Kaidan if you hadn’t screwed up the romance.

Mom: I told you ONE THING at the start of this. “Make him hot for me.” And did you do it? No.

Me: I can’t change what decisions you make!

Mom: Whatever. That just means I don’t have to be nice to him, either.

Joker calls us on the intercom to tell us that Anderson wants to meet us at the bar.

Mom: I’ll just get with Joker instead.

Me: I’m impressed that you even know that his name is Joker.

Me: Alright, so we’ve completed all the planets, and have assembled all the clues. We’ve found out where Saren’s going, and are headed to the Citadel to request a fleet to pursue him.

Mom: Okay.

Me: Also, you totally struck out with Kaidan

Mom: Shut up.

We land at the Citadel and meet with the Council. They tell us that they’ve posted patrols at every relay leading to the Citadel, to prevent an attack. We tell them that that’s not good enough, that if Saren gets ahold of the Conduit it won’t matter.

Udina grumbles. He tells us that we’ve helped up ‘til now, but we’re becoming more trouble than we’re worth. He locks up the Normandy, grounding us.

Me: He just took our spaceship away.

Mom: Eh, we’ll just steal it back.

Since mom’s out of town today and since we’re just about to start the endgame, I thought it would be worthwhile to go back through the Tumblr and try and figure out just what the hell my mom imagines the plot of this video game to be.

Some thirty to forty years ago, Udina and Matriarch Benezia, also known as Betty, went to college together on Virmire (asari do not have super-long lifespans in mom’s version of the story). They went to school for some kind of biology, and were also huge stoners, having a lot of wacky misadventures along the lines of such classic films as Dazed and Confused and Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle.

Fueled by drugs, sex, and youthful ambition, the two create several genetic mutants. These include the Thorian, a massive plant designed to get you higher then even the dankest nugs, a perfect clone of the long-dead Rachni Queen, and Saren, a test-tube-born turian. Somewhere along the line something went wrong. Presumably, Saren escaped and joined the Spectres, and Betty managed to somehow become part Rachni. She wears that headdress to hide her antennae. The Thorian also escaped, and evolved the ability to control the minds of any who attempted to smoke it.

The college was shut down and the two abandoned the lab. Betty, now an outcast from society and likely pregnant with Liara by this point (could the father be Udina???), went into seclusion, while Udina transferred schools, changed his major to Political Science, and started getting involved in interstellar government. Eventually, he’d become the Ambassador for the Human Embassy on the Citadel. Presumably they had some kind of “I Know What You Did Last Summer”-style pact to never discuss what happened in the science lab of Virmire Community College ever again. He couldn’t have been happy that Saren ALSO worked on the Citadel.

Meanwhile, back on Earth, the Calvin Klein company is still going strong in the future. Two orphan twin sisters get jobs in a Klein blue-jeans factory. The more troublesome of the two, Robyn Shepard, joins The Reds, a local gang. They use the basement of the factory as their hideout. Robyn’s sister, meanwhile, attracts the attention of the owner of the factory, one of the sons of the Klein family. They begin an illicit affair, and Klein falls madly in love with her. He has his will re-written to give all of his vast riches to her when he dies.

Kaidan Klein, the factory owner’s younger brother, is furious when he hears the news. He murders his brother and Shepard’s sister, destroys the new will, and falsifies one that bequeaths all of the money to him instead. The police are obviously suspicious, and his assets are frozen. Kaidan goes completely off the grid, and has his last name changed to Alenko. He joins the Alliance Navy to get off the planet, and makes up a dumb backstory about how he was in love with a girl at kid’s bootcamp and how he killed his turian drill sergeant when he hit her. Now he just needs to find a woman as rich as he is to marry, so that he can use her to get at the money he’s stolen and also rob her on top of it.

What he didn’t count on was Robyn Shepard, known better on the mean streets of Vancouver as simply “Mama.” She joins the Alliance with the hope to one day hunt down and get revenge on the man who killed her sister/the man who screwed her out of mooching off of a billionaire for the rest of her life. Over the course of her time in the military, her single-minded determination and no-nonsense attitude help her acquire an impressive service record, and she is inducted into the N7 Program. She’s finally assigned to the same ship as Kaidan, the Normandy, but before she can put her revenge plan in motion she has a fateful encounter with a Prothean beacon.

The Reapers, a race of omnipotent machine devils, are preparing to return. The Reaper Sovereign has taken advantage of Saren’s easily-influenced mind (owing to the fact that the man who made him was high as a kite when he was doing so) and has made him into his servant. Saren has gone rogue, and is using his knowledge of all of Udina’s dirty little secrets to throw the galaxy into disarray while he searches for the Conduit. He recruits Betty, and also manages to get the Geth on his side. He heads back to the college on Virmire and repurposes its laboratories to establish a krogan-breeding factory.

Now Mama Shepard has no choice but to put her revenge on hold while she cleans up Udina’s mess and stops the Reapers, killing anyone who slows her down or who just sort of rubs her the wrong way. She attempts to proceed with seducing Kaidan during her downtime, but either he can see through her plan and doesn’t fall for it, he’s too distracted by the mission to notice, or she’s just not as attractive as she thinks she is.

That explains everything but this odd statement made near the beginning of the game. How can Calvin Klein be involved in the Reapers’ plot? The key here is to remember that The Illusive Man is the third, eldest brother of the Klein family. Presumably, he’s the patriarch of the family. Which would mean that Cerberus is actually the clothing company’s private army! They’re likely researching the Reapers and attempting to repurpose indoctrination technology to use as a new form of advertisement. Their human supremacy stance is simply because it’s not cost-effective to produce different cuts of jeans for every species in the galaxy. Cerberus’ endgame is to create the most powerful and lucrative clothing company the galaxy has ever seen!

Which raises an interesting question. Did Kaidan actually join the military as a Cerberus mole, or is he an unbalanced and violent liability to the family who acted without The Illusive Man’s permission, a figure sort of like Joe Pesci in Goodfellas? That remains to be seen.