History Fridge / MassEffect1

** Garrus and Wrex are trained in Assault Rifles, which are normally only available to a Soldier Shepard. This is because in both of their societies, they were trained as soldiers. From a gameplay perspective, this also adds two more Assault Rifle specialists to the squad in addition to Ashley, which allows you to outfit the whole active party with [=ARs=] if Shepard is also a Soldier (or has [=ARs=] as their NewGamePlus bonus skill), and prevents them from being underused if they aren't.

** Garrus and Wrex are trained in Assault Rifles, which are normally only available to a Soldier Shepard. This is because in both of their societies, they were trained as soldiers. From a gameplay perspective, this also adds two more Assault Rifle specialists to the squad in addition to Ashley, preventing them from becoming near-useless if Shepard isn't a Soldier themself.

** Garrus and Wrex are trained in Assault Rifles, which are normally only available to a Soldier Shepard. This is because in both of their societies, they were trained as soldiers. This way, you can at least hand Assault Rifles off to one of them if you are not a Soldier.

* Sovereign refers to the Citadel and the mass relays as "the legacy of my kind." [[spoiler:It's not the legacy the Reapers left behind. It's the legacy they ''inherited'']].

** The MS Worthington is completely empty except for brain-dead Jacob and his psychotic biotic girlfriend Julia, meaning that sometime between killing the captain and Shepard's arrival Julia killed the entire crew. Why did Julia flip out like that when her boyfriend was placed on futile life support? She most likely was an L2 suffering from mental instability due to her implant. That ship had a ticking time bomb kept in check only through ThePowerOfLove. (Edit by other author: If you read/listen to the logs you learn that she attacked the others on the ship because they were going to turn his life support off, and let him die naturally, a choice that Shepard has the option to make. The logs also state that he was one of the few helping her maintain her sanity, although I can't remember if it states if her implant was an L2.)

** The missing survey team on Trebin were all converted into husks and - according to a data log - had previously discovered an alien artifact that turned them into mindless machine worshipers. When you enter the mine where you find the survey team, you realize that the only alien artifact in the room is this glowing orb inside a mechanical claw that looks just like the "geth temple" on Feros and remarkably similar to Reaper Tech. Which means that: 1) the survey team became indoctrinated and essentially huskified itself, and 2) the geth on Feros may have been indoctrinated as well, instead of being willing worshipers. What makes this even worse is that Shepard and his crew say that they have heard about such devices/artifacts before, meaning indoctrination has been around a lot longer than believed.

** Garrus and Wrex are trained in Assault Rifles, which are normally only available to a Shepard who is a Soldier. This is because in both of their societies, they were trained as soldiers. Without this training, Assault Rifles would be near-useless to any Shepard ''besides'' a Soldier. This way, you can at least hand them off to a squadmate.

** Liara is the only squadmate with ''no military training at all'', so she doesn't have access to ''any'' weapon skills (Adept Shepard at least has pistol training). The Electronics skill she has instead is hints towards [[spoiler:her future occupation as the Shadow Broker]]. This skill also ties to the fact that she's a scientist/archeologist; spending almost fifty years on remote dig sites deciphering complex Prothean artifacts helped too.

* [[spoiler:Being forced to choose between saving Ashley and Kaidan, which forces Shepard into having only one human squadmate before Ilos.]] This decision reinforces that even a renegade Shepard needs non-human help to succeed. “Humanity first doesn’t mean humanity alone” indeed.

* A lot of lampshading is done by various squadmates about how "untrained civilians with makeshift defenses" on Feros held out for so long against a geth onslaught. At first glance, it would reinforce that HumansAreWarriors, until you ask yourself how the same species of tenacious fighters crumbled so easily on Mindoir, Eden Prime and X57 near Terra Nova to similar enemy assaults? Only later do you realize that these colonists were under [[spoiler:Thorian control, and it was coordinating their actions to make any resistance meaningful. It was probably even reinforcing them with creepers and Shiala clones whenever necessary]]. Assuming they survive, their [[spoiler:telepathic coordination]] comes in handy for [[Videogame/MassEffect3 ''3'']] when they're fighting the Reapers.

** Tali can use shotguns because of her military training on the flotilla (which would favor close-quarters combat and having to fight through ship corridors). But because she's a starship mechanic and not a doctor, she doesn't get the Medicine skill that a Engineer Shepard has.

* In ''Retribution'', when Grayson is resisting against the Reapers' control, they subtly shift his thought processes to make him decide to find Kahlee, which is what the Reapers want. When Shepard and Saren meet on Virmire, Shepard begins to instill doubts in Saren's mind about Soverign's indoctrination, before Saren suddenly turns angry and declares that his plan will save countless lives before attacking Shepard to prevent them undoing his work. Sovereign was doing the same thing to Saren that the Reapers did to Grayson; subtly shifting his thought processes to make him attack instead of stopping to listen.

* When the Citadel Council (still mistakenly believing the Conduit to be the entry point for any invasion rather than the Citadel itself) decides to deploy fleets to guard every relay between the Citadel and the Mu Relay, they are caught off-guard by Sovereign and the geth fleet, which completely bypass these lines of defense. How Sovereign was able to do this seems unclear until the ''Arrival'' DLC of ''2'': the Alpha Relay. This relay has hidden capabilities that allow it to send ships to any other relay over half of the network. And since it's in batarian space, nobody allied with the Citadel would have known about it.

* The Citadel Fleet and the Alliance 5th Fleet are completely outmatched against Sovereign. A key detail that is easy to miss though: Sovereign was a full-up dreadnought (and a very powerful one at that), while the Citadel and Alliance ships (save for the ''Destiny Ascension'', which was not fighting under the conditions she was built for: Long range slugfests) were cruisers or smaller. Of ''course'' Sovereign has the upper hand, especially if the Alliance was also having to deal with the geth ships.

* At first the company spokesperson on Feros, Ethan Jeong, seems rather cheesy and 2-dimensional with how much he blatantly obsesses about company profits over of the lives of the colonists, until you realize that, by this point in time in galactic history, corporations have become so powerful that ''they barely need to hide their greed anymore.'' Jeong is an example of the arrogance corporations have now that they can ''own entire planets'' (e.g., Noveria), and don't even need any sort of a human face when dealing with colonists in the Traverse that nobody cares about. (If anyone in the galaxy did care about the colonists, Shepard presumably would not have been necessary to drive out the geth.)  

* [[spoiler:Being forced to choose between saving Ashley and Kaidan, which forces Shepard to have at least one non-human squadmate before Ilos.]] This decision reinforces that even a renegade Shepard needs non-human help to succeed. “Humanity first doesn’t mean humanity alone” indeed.

** Similarly, [[spoiler:cloning the rachni, curing the genophage, and making the connection between the Thorian and the Protheans]] seems like too much of a DeusExMachina to be real, until you realize that [[spoiler:a "machine god" (Deux Ex Machina translates to "a god from a machine") did indeed do all of these things: Sovereign!]]

* At the end, Shepard is given three choices. [[spoiler: Paragon: Save the Destiny Ascension. Renegade: Screw the Council over. Neutral: Focus fire on Sovereign, thus letting the Ascension be destroyed anyway.]] The neutral choice still gives you Renegade points, because [[spoiler: focusing solely on the main problem to the exclusion of everything and everyone else is ''still'' a Renegade solution. Even if your reasons are [[PragmaticVillainy practical rather than petty,]] the result is more or less the same.]]
* The loading screens in ''VideoGame/MassEffect1'' that depict the ''Normandy'' traveling between systems - the ones that show it using its built-in FTL drive with the red light heading "toward" the Normandy and the blue light heading "away" from it – seem like just a pretty cool effect. However, if you reread the Codex's entry on FTL drives and their appearance that you realize the light "approaching" the Normandy was being red-shifted by the mass effect field (as to an observer inside the mass effect field, everything outside is red-shifted), and the light moving away from it was being blue shifted (as an observer outside the field would see everything within the field as blue-shifted), ''exactly as it was described in the Codex.'' The sheer level of detail and dedication to internal consistency in the game's ''very loading screens'' is amazing.
* Manuel from Eden Prime may seem crazy at first, but looking back, everything that he babbled about was actually true. He was probably exposed to the beacon just before the attack. The doctor describes him as 'always a bit unstable', but maybe this is what happens to a 'lesser mind', as Liara put it.
* Remember the song that played every time you died? The one that you began to associate with death and eventually hated? Well, it's Saren's ''theme song'', which means the game developers have been conditioning the player for the ''entire game'' to hate him. Shepard was the only one that could stop Saren. Now they're dead and the Game Over music is Saren ''gloating''.
** How about the menu music? That's Vigil's Theme.
** The Citadel Tower theme is a near inversion of Sovereign's theme. It has more notes in its measure than Soveriegn's and it's played with strings instead of brass.
* The only time you hear two elcor speaking directly to each other is in ''Mass Effect'' in the elcor ambassador's office. Careful listeners will notice they do ''not'' preface their conversation with their emotions. Of course, this is because they ''can'' detect the minor physical and pheromone changes of each other, and have no need to express them verbally.
* A lot of lampshading is done by various squadmates about how "untrained civilians with makeshift defenses" on Feros held out for so long against a geth onslaught. At first glance, it would reinforce that HumansAreWarriors, until you ask yourself how the same species of tenacious fighters crumbled so easily on Mindoir, Eden Prime and X57 near Terra Nova to similar enemy assaults? Only later do you realize why. These colonists were under [[spoiler: Thorian control, and it was coordinating their actions to make any resistance meaningful. It was probably even reinforcing them with creepers and Shiala clones whenever necessary]]. Assuming they survive [[Videogame/MassEffect1 ME1]], their [[spoiler:telepathic coordination]] comes in handy for [[Videogame/MassEffect3 ME3]] when they're fighting the Reapers.
* After the Feros debriefing, you can chat with the Citadel Council. If you're following the Paragon conversation paths, a chilling bit of foreshadowing occurs. After the jerkwad turian councilor calls you out for protecting the human colony, the salarian says something along the lines of "just remember, Commander, sometimes you have to be willing to make sacrifices to get the mission done." [[spoiler:He probably wasn't expecting that you can choose to do exactly that to him and his fellow councilors as one of your final decisions]].
* [[spoiler:The developers of the game forcing you to choose between saving Ashley and Kaidan. With one of them dead after Virmire, you have no choice but to have at least one non-human squadmate for the rest of the game, including when you defeat Saren/Sovereign and save the galaxy.]] That decision shows that even a renegade Shepard needs non-human help to succeed. “Humanity first doesn’t mean humanity alone” indeed.
* In the first game, Sovereign refers to the Citadel and the mass relays as "the legacy of my kind." [[spoiler: It's not the legacy the Reapers left behind. It's the legacy they ''inherited'']].
* The Colonist and Sole Survivor origin stories give you both paragon and renegade points at the start. Initially, this makes no sense, since, how is everyone around you dying related to your morality? Then you realize: the experiences were so traumatic that Shepard's psyche was partially fragmented. How does the game show this inner fragmentation? It gives you ''both'' good and bad points toward your morality. It's also because those two backgrounds are morally neutral when compared to Spacer/War Hero (Paragon) and Earthborn/Ruthless (Renegade). Colonist Shepard was raised by loving parents (Paragon), but probably had to do some dirty things to survive (Renegade). It's implied that Sole Survivor Shepard tried to help the other marines (Paragon), but eventually gave up and decided it was every man for himself (Renegade).
* During the endgame of ''[=ME1=]'', Saren is marching into the [[spoiler:Council chambers]] and takes a potshot at one of the Keepers that maintain the station. Why did he do that, other than generally being a grouch? [[spoiler:Sovereign was frustrated that the Keepers had not functioned as they were designed to and was taking it out on them via Saren.]]
* Your squadmates in the first game each represent one of the classes: Ashley is a Soldier (all combat), Kaidan is a Sentinel (tech/biotic), Wrex is a Vanguard (combat/biotic), Garrus is an Infiltrator (combat/tech), Tali is an Engineer (all tech), and Liara is an Adept (all biotic). There are some differences, but the basics are there. Further, the only squadmates whose skills are ''identical'' to Shepard's are Ashley and Kaidan, because they got their training from the same place Shepard did. Everyone else's training is slightly different, and for good reason:
** Garrus and Wrex are trained in Assault Rifles, which are normally only available to Shepard as a Soldier. This is because in both of their societies, Garrus and Wrex were trained as soldiers. Also, without this training, Assault Rifles would be near-useless to any Shepard ''besides'' a Soldier. This way, you can at least hand them off to a squadmate.

** Wrex is [[MightyGlacier a tank on two feet]], so naturally he has access to both Immunity and Barrier, but not Adrenaline Rush like Vanguard Shepard would have
** Tali can use shotguns because of her military training on the flotilla (which would favor close-quarters combat because they typically have to fight through ship corridors), but because she's a starship mechanic and not a doctor, she doesn't get the Medicine skill you'd expect Engineer Shepard to have.
** Liara is the only squadmate with ''no military training at all'', so she doesn't have access to ''any'' of the weapon skills (even Adept Shepard at least has pistol training). The Electronics skill she picks up instead is a hint towards [[spoiler: her future occupation as the Shadow Broker]]. The Electronics skill also ties to the fact that she's a scientist/archeologist - and spending almost fifty years on remote dig sites deciphering complex Prothean artifacts helped too.
* In ''Retribution'', when Grayson is resisting against the Reapers' control, they subtly shift his thought processes so that he decides that best course of action is to find Kahlee, which is what the Reapers want anyway. Now, go back to ''VideoGame/MassEffect1'', where Saren and Shepard are fighting at the base on Virmire. Shepard begins to instill doubts in Saren's mind, but then Saren suddenly becomes angry, declaring that his plan will save countless lives and that Shepard's actions would undo his work, and then he attacks in a rage. Sovereign was doing the same thing to Saren that the Reapers did to Grayson: subtly shifted his thought processes so that he would conclude that Shepard was going to "undo his work" and then attack them, instead of stopping to listen.
* Try starting a new game of the original ''[[VideoGame/MassEffect1 Mass Effect]]'' and pay close attention to what Lt. Jenkins says... ''everything'' he says is foreshadowing the upcoming events. One of the things he says is that if a Spectre goes rogue, the Council will send another Spectre to deal with him. Chakwas dismisses this as romantic fantasy from a naive kid who watches too many vids. Turns out, that's exactly what ''does'' happen: Saren goes rogue, and Shepard is sent to take him down.
* A big deal is made of how unbalanced the battle was between the Citadel Fleet and the Alliance 5th Fleet against Sovereign. A key detail that is easy to miss though: Sovereign was a full-up dreadnought, and a very powerful one of those at that, while all of the Citadel and Alliance ships (save for the ''Destiny Ascension'', which was not fighting under the conditions she was for: Long range slugfests) were cruisers or smaller. Of ''course'' it would be a slaughter for the defenders, especially if they were also having to deal with the geth ships.
* Sovereign is [[spoiler: a sovereign derived from a social contract made by its constituent intelligences, as detailed in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The Social Contract]].
* The relationships with Kaidan and Ashley seem very reserved before Udina grounds the Normandy and the crew heads to Ilos. There's plenty of flirting and questions about the relationship, but really no signs of physical affection. So what's going on here? Shepard, Kaidan, and Ashley are all Alliance soldiers on an Alliance ship. Shepard is Ashley/Kaidan's commanding officer and fooling around with your subordinates while on a mission is a HUGE military no-no. They can talk about where they'll take their relationship when the mission is finished, but are holding back for now due to protocol. It is only after the council screws Shepard over and the team is willing to sacrifice everything to go after Saren that Shepard and their love interest essentially decide "Screw it, we might not have another chance" and take things to the next level. With Ashley, add to it that Shepard is an officer and Ash is a noncom. Enlisted/officer relationships are equally frowned-upon.
* At first, Saren's plan looks insanely stupid. A Spectre with virtually unlimited authority could walk right into Eden Prime, use the beacon, and then sabotage it to make it look like the humans couldn't handle the advanced tech properly. Instead, he grabs both the VillainBall and the IdiotBall, organizes a massive geth assault and reveals Sovereign, and while it would have been deemed a wholly geth assault had the Normandy and Nihlus and Shepard not been around, it makes sense when you factor in that it's ''Sovereign's'' plan, not ''Saren's''. Sovereign doesn't give a flying Reaper fart in space about Saren's Spectre connections or being subtle at this point (and with good reason, he's possibly facing a YouHaveFailedMe from Harbinger for fucking up so many times to open the Citadel relay), and they would actually benefit from getting organics up and in a tizzy. With the forces of the Citadel species out and about the galaxy guarding against another geth attack, Sovereign/Saren's forces could more easily break through at the Citadel. Also, since Saren is [[spoiler: trying to resist Sovereign's indoctrination]] it's quite possible he's ''deliberately'' grasping the IdiotBall and the VillainBall, hoping that someone will discover his plot and stop him. Saren's plan ends up setting the Reaper invasion back years, and even if he had succeeded, the council races would have gotten a good clear look at Sovereign.
** Similarly, [[spoiler:cloning the rachni, curing the genophage, and making the connection between the Thorian and the Protheans]] seems like too much of a DeusExMachina to be real, until you realize that [[spoiler:a "machine god" (Deux Ex Machina translates to "a god from a machine") did indeed do all of these things: Sovereign!]] 
* When the Citadel council (at this point still believing the conduit to be the entry point for any invasion rather than the Citadel itself) decides to deploy fleets to guard every relay between the Citadel and the Mu Relay, they are completely surprised by Sovereign and the geth fleet, which completely bypass these lines of defense. How Sovereign was able to do this was a complete mystery, but a significant clue comes in a DLC in the 2nd game: the Alpha relay. This relay has hidden capabilities that allow it to send ships to any other relay over half of the network. And since it's in batarian space, nobody allied with the Citadel would have known about it.
** It was never a mystery, they explicitly used the conduit to get to the Citadel. The conduit was an entry point for an invasion, but it was of the Geth rather than the Reapers it was an entry point for. The conduit was the mass-relay the Protheans built on Ilos that leads directly to the Citadel, and the one you use to get back there in time to stop him yourself.
* All the collection quests you can get may seem like nothing but the most annoying way to gain experience at first, but when viewed from a paragon point of view, they can also be interpreted as Shepard trying to further humanity's relationship with the council:
** Asari Writings improves relationships with the Asari, because you are essentially collecting a long-lost part of their cultural and literary heritage.

** Signs of Battle has you collect medaillons that belonged to a Salarian Shadow Organization that was disbanded upon discovery of the Citadel, but whose operatives were never apprehended, so you are essentially finishing the Salarians' job for them.

* A small detail that falls between FridgeBrilliance and FridgeHorror: If you [[spoiler:kill Wrex]] on Virmire you will get all his equipment back as if it were ordinary enemy loot.
* In Mass Effect 1, all armor is race specific. Humans can only wear human armor specifically tailored for humans, ditto for the other races. Except for the Asari. There is no asari specific armor probably because the asari can tune the nervous systems to that of any other race, so they can adapt to their armor as well. More specifically, the asari are the only race who are the same basic shape as a human female with no other biological factors to consider when making armor. Even a quarian (the next closest species) wouldn't have the same number of digits on their hands and feet, so they'd need their armor to be at least partially customized.
* [[EvilMatriarch Benezia]] doesn't fight like her commandos do. While the commandos move very nimbly, use warp and throw at range, then close in to finish you off with shotguns, Benezia can only use Throw and Stasis, stands in one place and fires at you with an assault rifle. Why this discrepancy? Because Benezia never went through the huntress training that her commandos went through. Stasis and throw are defensive powers, befitting a typical noncombatant asari.
* Why are the Normandy's emissions blue shifted when she jumps to FTL? Shouldn't they be red shifted from moving away faster? Because of relativity. At subluminal speeds the light from your destination always reaches an observer after the light from your source has reached it. Because that observer perceives light from farther and farther away, it appears to red shift to lower frequencies. At superluminal speeds, things work bass ackwards. Because you are moving faster than light, the light or EM radiation from your destination reaches an observer before the light from your source does. They would perceive you as coming towards rather than going away. Your emissions therefore apparently increase in frequency, hence the blue shifting.
** Why does this give away the Normandy's position? Because everything in the universe is normally red shifted owing to The Big Bang. So a sudden speck of blue shifted radiation would stick out big. Technically an observer would see this for any ship transiting systems via FTL, but you rarely if at all find patrols in between systems.
* In the cutscene after Eden Prime, Benezia reports that not only had the colony not been destroyed as Saren had ordered, but one of the humans from the ship that touched down might've used the beacon. As Saren loses his temper, the lighting in the room pulses a very angry red...and then snaps back to cold, stark blue when Saren abruptly shifts from UnstoppableRage to TranquilFury. The game is {{Foreshadowing}} [[TheManBehindTheMan the truth about Saren's "flagship"]] before [[spoiler: the Reapers]] were ever introduced to Shepard or the player.
* Why are all crew members, even Wrex, so willing to follow Shepard and ignore even their most evil deeds? All of them lost their fathers under tragic circumstances, and Shepard, a charismatic leader, might have become a fatherly figure for their crew. See for yourself: Wrex murdered his militarist dad and was exiled for being too liberal for Krogan - and then he encounters the very man willing to end all wars. Liara has never met Aethyta and was raised by a strict mother; Ashley grew up in patriarchal family with father guiding and supporting her, until he passed away; Garrus' father was a military man, a bureaucrat and a real Turian, who always mistreated his son for his rebellious nature; Tali's dad never paid attention to her and her talents; and Kaidan was forcefully separated from his father as a child.
* At the end of the ''Cornucopia'' mission, the freighter full of huskified crew, it's surmised that the crew found a strange artifact that indoctrinated them and made them fly into the Perseus Veil, where the Geth reside, then came back with husks as a "warning" to others not to go into the Veil. Knowing that the Reapers are ''not'' allies of the True Geth, it becomes clear it was a FalseFlagOperation by Sovereign and the Heretics to keep people from contacting the True Geth.

* At first the company spokesperson on Feros, Ethan Jeong, seems rather cheesy and 2-dimensional with how much he blatantly obsesses about company profits over of the lives of the colonists, until you realize that, by this point in time in galactic history, corporations have become so powerful that ''they barely need to hide their greed anymore.'' Jeong is an example of the arrogance corporations have now that they can ''own entire planets'' (e.g., Noveria), and don't even need any sort of a human face when dealing with colonists in the Traverse that nobody cares about. (If anyone in the galaxy ''did'' care about the colonists, Shepard presumably would not have been necessary to drive out the geth.)  

* Why are all crew members, even Wrex, so willing to follow Shepard and ignore even their most evil deeds? All of them lost their fathers under tragic circumstances, and Shepard, a charismatic leader, might have become a fatherly figure for their crew. See for yourself: Wrex murdered his militarist dad and was exiled for being too liberal for Krogan - and then he encounters the very man willing to end all wars. Liara has never met Aethyta and was raised by a strict mother; Ashley grew up in patriarchal family with father guiding and supporting her, until he passed away; Garrus' father was a military man, a bureaucrat and a real Turian, who always mistreated his son for his rebelous nature; Tali's dad never paid attention to her and her talents; and Kaidan was forcefully separated from his father as a child.

* At first the company spokesperson on Feros, Ethan Jeong, seems rather cheesy and 2-dimensional with how much he blatantly obsesses about company profits over of the lives of the colonists, until you realize that, by this point in time in galactic history, corporations have become so powerful that ''they barely need to hide their greed anymore.'' Jeong is an example of the arrogance corporations have now that they can ''own entire planets'' (e.g., Noveria), and don't even need any sort of a human face when dealing with colonists in the Traverse that nobody cares about. (If anyone in the galaxy ''did'' care about the colonists, Shepard presumably would not have been necessary to drive out the geth.)