That's a straight-up Exile revenge storyline, all anger and heartbreak and nobody's-really-the-good-guy, and in 1993 or so it would have been the only way it would even have occurred to me to handle it, but I wasn't happy with it in 2010. For one thing, I'd already done that story at least twice, and besides, I'd like to think I've outgrown that crap. I was prepared to just 86 the whole thing, though I quite liked some of the dialogue in the opening scene, when Phil suggested I might try to rework it into something a little more heroic - something more akin to the "hey, look, you guys, the galaxy is shit right now, but maybe we can do a little good" tone Marty Rose set for the Exile part of Hammer Time. Something, well, more Shepardian. The way I play Commander Shepard, she's certainly not above a spot of revenge, but contrary to the Klingon proverb, she believes it should only be served hot. Assassination isn't her style.

I had the outline of Operation Archangel in fairly short order - you can find references to it in Star-Crossed. (Apart from the Archangel's appearance itself, there's Tali asking the Conclave, "Did the crew of the Minuteman Nine ignore us when GENOM came for us after the fall of the Wayward Son?") I just wasn't sure exactly how the job was going to come off until - well, just the other day, really. I wasn't entirely sure whether Needa was going to survive the story until I actually got to the last scene he's in (which you may note is partly informed by a remark one of you made after Part 1 hit the site). In the end, I think Shepard would approve considerably more of the job they did than the one they were going to do. They did some good, helped some people out, and ultimately Needa's probably more screwed than if they'd killed him. :)

In other, more specific notes:

- Shepard choking up at the end of On Her Majesty's Secret Service: The is a spoiler, but given that the movie came out in 1969, I'm not going to worry about it. This James Bond film, in which the underrated George Lazenby plays 007, ends with Bond's wedding to Tracy di Vicenzo (played by the sublime Diana Rigg), who is almost immediately murdered by SPECTRE supremo Ernst Stavro Blofeld. It closes with a shattered Bond cradling his dead bride's body while the credits roll and Louis Armstrong sings "We Have All the Time in the World". When OHMSS came around on Normandy movie night, this sequence never failed to reduce Commander Shepard to a blubbering wreck - much to Liara's surprise, the first time it happened.

- The PWEI logo on the Minuteman Nine graphic is an actual icon taken from a Pop Will Eat Itself album cover, though I can't remember which one now.
UPDATE: The Pop Will Eat Itself Cure for Sanity, 1990. Includes one of PWEI's best tracks, "Dance of the Mad Bastards" (though I prefer the 7" mix on the 16 Different Flavours of Hell best-of comp). Live and alive with the dead-ahead sound...

- Including the Minuteman Nine was a complete whim, but I like the way it establishes the ship as one of those perennial items. Without its appearance here, it isn't as obvious that the one in The Antianeira Incident is the same ship and not just a namesake. Its name comes from one of the tracks on PWEI's This Is the Day... album (of which more later), "Shortwave Transmission on 'Up to the Minuteman Nine'". I don't know what the title itself alludes to (if anything - PWEI were often pleased to be quite random), and the track itself doesn't have any lyrics that might illuminate it further.

- As I noted in the discussion of Part 2, I deliberately left vague exactly what Ash considers a damn shame about Yeoman Chambers - whether she was a GENOM sleeper agent, or a victim of one, or something else entirely. Just that she's not with them here (though that doesn't necessarily mean she's dead - most of the Normandy's crew did survive, but didn't go on the road with Shepard's old team), and Ash feels a bit wistful about something to do with why not. This is called "not closing a door you don't have to". :)

- Both of the quarians we've seen returning from pilgrimage have used bits of Earth poetry as their identification keyphrase (Kevirin quotes Lord Byron, Tali'Shukra Rudyard Kipling). This is mainly just because I'm not a poet.

- The Sufficiency's name is a nod to one of the vestiges of the WPI Plan that was still in effect when I was a student there - the sophomore-year "yeah, OK, we do some humanities" project requirement they had to satisfy the accreditation body that there was some culture going on at the school. That they called it "The Humanities Sufficiency" may reveal exactly how important the school's administration really thought it was. :)

- The quarian warships we see in this serial, the Balado and the Forteviot, are named after towns in the Scottish district of Perth and Kinross. Not in-story, of course; to the quarians, they're named after planets in the old Rannoch Hegemony. (Rannoch, the quarian homeworld, shares a name with Loch Rannoch in Scotland, y'see, which is also in Perth and Kinross.)

- The idea of monkey-wrenching the Avenger's computer through an interface intended to permit the Avenger to override ships it's captured is probably the single brainwave that made this story take off again. Once I thought of that, the rest of it started falling into place. It, and the borrowed Covenant boarding craft, gets Our Heroes aboard and into position for mayhem without having to run the gantlet of an airlock breakout, and I was able to leave it ambiguous as to just where they were in the sequence at the end of Part 3, which was fun.

- There wasn't a good place to mention this without a lot of crocky exposition (and there's already a need for enough of that, because stuff happening inside computers is hard to explain any other way unless you're doing Tron), but I suspect UF-universe asari aren't actually all innately psionic per se, but rather Force-sensitive. Those of you who have played the old West End Games Star Wars RPG might remember the "Alien Force Adept" character archetype. Which makes the levitating-Needa scene even more Vadery, though that's not why I thought of it; it just seems to make more sense in the context of the UF universe than "some humans are biotic, and some krogan, and oh yeah, all asari".

- The three Pop Will Eat Itself tracks cited in Part 4 are the first three of their 1989 album This Is the Day... This Is the Hour... This Is THIS!, which I was turned onto very shortly after arriving at WPI. "Wise Up! Sucker" in particular is sort of one of the classic Exile defining tracks, and as previously noted, the Minuteman Nine was named after part of one of the song titles back when I did Rite of Passage. It doesn't appear here, but still another This Is the Day track got a lot of airplay as a Goldfish Warning used by the SPECWARCOM PWEI crews back in the Golden Age, a tradition the Normandy gang may revive. That one, "Radio PWEI", includes the verse:

OK, everybody, we're the high-tech gurus
All the rage, always on the front-page news
TV and video
Here to go go on Radio PWEI
Turn it on and turn it up high
Like a ten-ton truck, don't give a fuck
And if you don't like the Poppies that's your hard luck

- It's straight out of her character arc in the first Mass Effect that Ash Williams likes "Ulysses", which made me laugh out loud when she first quoted it, since I'd been a fan for years by that point.

- Speaking of Ash, her full rank and most significant postnominals appeared in Part 4 because I wanted to establish that her time as Gin Shepard's right-hand woman had pretty well completely erased the blocks to her career that her family history had imposed before they met. Indeed, though they were all highly honored for their part in driving back the unwritten but often alluded to geth invasion of Salusia in 2280 (more or less the UF universe's equivalent to the first game), Ash, being Salusian, came in for the lion's share of hardware - at least partly, as Geoff noted, because Asrial likes to tell uppity admirals and generals to go fuck their skulls when they get all old-boy-network on someone she figures deserves better. Taking an enlisted soldier whose family has been blackballed since 1870 and making her a Knight of the Order of Victory is a not-very-subtle two fingers to the Ministry for War from the Crown. She'd have made her an officer, too, but as Ash put it, "Respectfully, your Majesty, I work for a living." :)

- I think the last time I put a Tommy blaster in a UF story was UF4. I'd almost forgotten about 'em, but there's something about Kev that just dragged it out of the archive and tossed it at me when I needed to arm him for the last fight.

- "Thick as Thieves" is kind of the unofficial Laura Kinney theme, but certain of the lyrics were just too perfect for Force Overlord's situation in this scene for me to resist reapplying it here:

We are the left-behind
Lost on the roads you followed
We are the compromise
We've opened up our eyes
Fight the hand that feeds you lies
This time we make it right
Don't need a reason tonight
So sick of waiting for something to change my life

I almost went completely perverse and tracked that fight to "Hollywood" by Michael Bublé ("put it in your head, baby, Hollywood is dead"), but I simply can't bring myself to use that song for a fight that doesn't have either Deadpool or Rosie the Ravager (or both) in it.

- The ice bag was an afterthought, but I thought it perfectly encapsulated Liara's combination of badassery and haplessness - that she could deliver such an epic headbutt without flinching or blowing her line afterward, but would require some quality time with a couch and some ice after.

- All the goodbyes were fun, but my favorite is the last one.

- Replacing Kev with another, greener quarian info tech was a last-minute whim; if we see them again, presumably breaking in the rookie will be part of the vibe. :)

- Added 2012/12/12 I left this out of the notes initially because I was hoping someone would spot it, but if anyone did nobody mentioned it, so: we've seen the 71 Centauri system in UF before, or will see it again, depending on whether you're talking about release order or the in-story timeline. The Class M planet in that system will eventually be known as Jezebel, home of the Spacer's Rest Resort and Relaxation Center, Elisabeth Shustal, proprietor.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
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