What happens if you do NOT recruit LIARA in ME-1?

It's true that it's weird that Liara never goes back to Ilos. For that matter, if no one ever made it to Ilos before, how could she have seen it in vids? Were those prothean vids? I thought the protheans didn't use vids that other races can see (see both ME1 with the beacons and ME3 From Ashes)? So that's a bit of an iffy thing within ME1 actually.

But anyway, as for Liara, not going to Ilos, sure it's an ME2 screw-up (not the worst by far) but here is my head canon:
After the battle of the Citadel, they send the Normandy out to clear geth hold-outs ... officially. Unofficially, Shepard is just getting very brought missions parameters and they let him go do what s/he said s/he would do at the end of ME1: Find a way to stop the reapers. Since Ilos was researched by a council team already and since they would notify the Normandy id they found anything of interest, Shepard decided to really go after geth hold-outs, but not just to secure council and alliance space but also to try and salvage geth tech in order to learn more about the reapers that way. Liara decided to stick with Shepard for that task (works best of course, if Liara was your LI in ME1).
After the attack on the Normandy by the collectors, Liara's priorities shifted, first, she needed to deal with Shepard's body (as outlined in the comic), then she had the Shadow Broker to deal with, not only because of Feron but also because there was clearly something fishy going on with the collectors and possibly the reapers there.
Since the council research team never reported any great findings on Ilos, Liara simply did have better things to do than to go back there and dig for herself.

Pure head canon of course but I think it works.

I like how Bioware learn their mistakes from Ilos and remake Iokath as a focal point. Unlike the forgotten Ilos, Iokath was as a major overarching arc, a research artificial planet filled with artificial intelligence and vast technology and also a grave of billions of its creators. Scorpio spend her entire life searching for her creators but unlike Liara and Ilos, Scorpio found what she wanted and stay with it. The current storyline expand on the fight to gain the technology and they couldn't manage it earlier because the planet was covered in radiation after its discovery.

In fact Ilos could've been made a focus in ME2, its a research world filled with archives and wealth of Prothean technology untouched by the Reaper war. Why wouldn't the discovery of a superweapon against reapers be there?

Oh well.. now I could work that into my headcanon now. Alliance Systems went to Ilos to remove the remaining Geth presence but they found an unfinished Crucible and secretly studying it and rebuilding it and keeping a secret for years while Hackett send baby Shadow Broker on her goose chase before ME3.

I'm amazed they found anything on Ilos at all, and that any of the tech still worked. That planet didn't look exactly dry or anything. 50,000 years of rainwater, weather in general, and plant growth would have done serious damage to everything.

Another reason why not recruiting Liara is impossible....who else would've bothered keeping track of Shep's body?  She and TIM are the ultimate reasons Shep is reanimated.

Maybe I missed something (never read the ME books or comics; have only done the games), I always took the mass cryo as the Protheans way of hiding from the Reapers until they went back into their 50,000 year hibernation.  Remember, they said it took the Reapers several hundred years to totally wipe out the Protheans.

Yeah, the canonical explanation is that the Protheans hoped they could use cryo-stasis to hide until the Reapers went back into Dark Space.

I was just suggesting that because the Reapers are supposed to be a fringe conspiracy theory that most people don't believe, the academics in-universe probably came up with an alternate explanation for why the extinction occurred and why some Protheans tried going into cryo.

Even someone like Liara, who had been ridiculed for her own theories about the Protheans, expressed mild disbelief when Shepard first told her about the Reapers. It was only after Shepard explained about the vision they'd received from the Prothean beacon that she was convinced they were telling the truth, since this perfectly fit with her own research pointing to a galactic cycle of extinction.

Why was Harkin was kept in C-Sec for so long, despite his obvious corruption? Because it would have looked bad politically for humanity to have to remove one of the first human C-Sec officers, so they were forced to tolerate him until  there were enough humans on the force, they could boot him into "early retirement".

Same thing is true of Shepard, who earned a lot of prestige as an N7, decorated Alliance marine, first human Spectre and Hero of the Citadel. Even if the Council and Alliance think Shepard is a crackpot for believing in the Reapers, neither would want to remove them from active duty. The Council wouldn't want to admit after Saren than they let another lunatic into the ranks and the Alliance wouldn't want to admit that the first (and only) human Spectre has a bit of a screw loose.

It makes far more sense to try to play down their claims and discredit the Reapers as a myth, rather than remove Shepard from active duty. Regardless of what Shepard believes, it's obvious to everyone that Shepard has an impressive track record of getting the job done and pulling victories out of impossible circumstances. That alone would be worth Shepard's superiors having to put up with them occasionally channelling Don Quixote and claiming that windmills are giants.

As for Liara, we know that due to her youth she's frequently ignored and her theories dismissed even by those in her own field. Her fellow academics wouldn't take her claims seriously and are more likely to assume that she believes in the Reapers because Shepard was the only person who ever validated her work.

As a former acolyte of Benezia, who claims that she was "brainwashed" by a spaceship into following Saren, it's obvious to see why Shiala's testimony would be viewed as extremely questionable and unreliable by authorities investigating the matter. They'd probably view it as someone attempting to deflect blame and their role in Saren's crimes.

(For example, even after knowledge of indoctrination becomes more widespread in ME3, not everyone recognises those affected. Aethyta was slightly bitter and angry that Benezia had somehow fallen under the influence of Saren, not realising her actions weren't of her own volition, until Shepard explains what actually happened).

As we learn in ME2, Sovereign was officially classified as advanced "Geth" ship. It being a Geth ship would be hard to disprove since they haven't been seen in over 300 years and the Geth were participants in the attack itself. Also rather than an intact ship to study, Sovereign was reduced to bits of wreckage that rained all over the Citadel. That would have made it far harder for people to grasp what they were dealing with, as well as how different parts of the ship worked in conjunction with each other.

The Derelict Reaper's existence was unknown until TIM managed to back-trace the shot from the weapon that had destroyed it. While Mnemosyne was catalogued, including the strange gravitic anomaly in it's northern hemisphere (likely caused by the Reaper's mass effect field), it had not been properly investigated by any researchers by the time of ME2. The Derelict Reaper could not be study by anyone following it's discovery, as Shepard is forced to shut down it's mass effect core, causing the Reaper to be destroyed as it falls further into the atmosphere of the Brown Dwarf.

The problem with any information gathered by EDI is that if Shepard were to bring it forward, the immediate question would be what their source was and how they acquired it. I doubt that anyone would be happy to know that this information not only came from an AI (who aren't exactly trusted), but one that was built by Cerberus (pro-human extremists). That immediately would raise doubts as to it's veracity and whether or not it wasn't simply a hoax created by Cerberus, meant to undermine the Council by presenting an imaginary threat they were attempting to bury.

I'm not saying that a galactic plague is the best or even only alternate explanation anyone could come up with, but between a Super-flu and Saberhagen's Berserkers running amok, a plague seems like the far more plausible one that academics would buy into.

If it wasn't for Cerberus, Liara would have done nothing about finding Shepard's corpse. Take  away Liara and put in a Cerberus operative instead, the result would be the same. Liara was only put in for....reasons. She was never needed

Hmm...in ME, you always have to have two other companions when you go places.  In ME1, you start out with Kaidan and Ashley (one of whom, you're destined to lose).  You therefore have to have one other mandatory companion among the recruitable aliens.  Liara is it.  I got the feeling that all the other companions are optional or am I wrong?

What?

I'm talking about recovering Shepard's corpse.


Ashley, Kaidan, Tali and Liara are mandatory. Shepard can say he/she doesn't want Ashley on the ship, but Anderson reassigns her to the ship. Shepard can say no to Tali, but Udina overrules Shepard saying she can help. Liara can be recruited at the last possible moment in the game

Wrex and Garrus are optional, but one of them has to be recruited.

Yes, this is an area where the writers seemed to  have either changed their minds or were sloppy.  At the end of ME1, after the battle of the Citadel, the Council acknowledges this was a Reaper attack.  Then they go into denial in ME2.  Then the visit to the archive while chasing the Shep clone reveals that they knew it was a Reaper attack but kept that info classified.  To what end?  Joker, at one point, says he was hoping that while the Council denied the Reapers in public, they were at least working on the problem in secret.  That certainly would make sense.  Even if they had secret research going on to figure out how to stop a real Reaper invasion, given that only several years pass between ME1 and ME3, it's likely they would not have unlocked all the Reapers' secrets.  That they just sat on their hands for most of this time doesn't make sense.  (Of course, if they had shown any sanity in ME2, how could Shepard have justified working with Cerberus and TIM?)