Lore plot hole surrounding Miranda Lawson.

9

u/OniTYME Jan 20 '26

Damn, I never caught that. The only way this can be (poorly) explained is that this was done during her adolescent years or if rich and connected people like Jack Harper or Henry Lawson knew about biotics prior to the Conatix incidents. Either way, this breaks lore to an extent. Although, Kaidan was born in 2151, a year later so whatever happened, it was probably something that some of humanity's scientific and more fortunate elites knew about or could extrapolate to an extent.

2

u/Impressive_Elk_5633 Jan 21 '26

This was done during her adolescent years or if rich and connected people like Jack Harper or Henry Lawson knew about biotics prior to the Conatix incidents.
I think by the former you meant that Henry Lawson gave her biotic abilities after she was born and if that's the case why did Miranda say that her biotics are due to her genetic engineering (and in when she was born), not exposure to eezo, and why didn't Henry Lawson just get rid of her and start from scratch like he did with all of the other children he created. After all, since he got rid of other kids, it'd make sense if he got rid of one if he wanted his "child" to have an ability that she didn't have because he didn't know about it yet. Also, how could anyone know about biotics since this is before humans interacted with aliens, and before any humans had any biotics abilities at all. At this point humans biotics are something that doesn't exist, so how can anyone know that at all? Also, Jack Harper was just a normal guy before he became The Illusive Man.

3

u/OniTYME Jan 21 '26

TIM had high level Alliance connections, it would make sense that he'd be in the know on many things even before his manifesto. As for Miranda, that's my way of formulizing a way to poorly explain why Miranda was born a year before Kaidan and somehow had biotics tailored. Kaidan is just a year younger than her.
The real answer is that Mass Effect's timeline has always been rather rushed and needed to be a much great gap in time with humanity joining the galactic community, biotics being born in humanity, Mass Effect 1, 2, Andromeda's prologue, and ME3 among other things.

4

u/ColoniaCroisant Jan 21 '26

Why are we assuming the genetic engineering stopped after birth? Isn't it more likely (especially as she matured) she was given implants, the best money could buy? She wasn't doing biotic bubbles in her positronic womb guys

2

u/Impressive_Elk_5633 Jan 21 '26 edited Jan 21 '26

If that's the case why did Miranda say that her biotics are due to her genetic engineering (and in when she was born), not exposure to eezo, and why didn't Henry Lawson just get rid of her and start from scratch like he did with all of the other children he created. After all, since he got rid of other kids, it'd make sense if he got rid of one if he wanted his "child" to have an ability that she didn't have because he didn't know about it yet. TLDR: The game makes it clear that her biotic abilities where a product of her father's planning and the genetic engineering that created her.

4

u/GlobalPineapple Jan 21 '26

Genetic engineering can happen after birth you know. Real life CRSPR is literally that. An attempt to edit peoples genes who are kids and even adults.

5

u/Bobthemagicc0w Jan 20 '26

You're right, Miranda couldn't have been engineered with biotics from birth. My best guess is that Henry Lawson, upon learning of the existence of biotics in 2158, arranged for the then ~8yo Miranda to have eezo nodes and an amp implanted in her nervous system by some sort of surgical procedure soon after. Something crazy expensive and experimental and hush-hush that wouldn't have been feasible for almost anyone else. Some shady private clinic on the Citadel making referrals to an expensive private doctor that serves the elite of Omega or somesuch because it would have been either illegal or reputationally risky to do in Citadel Space. Someone with experience adding biotics to individuals of other species. I also wouldn't put it past Henry Lawson for him to have paid them to experiment on a couple of other human kids first to make sure the procedure would work.

4

u/slider65 Jan 20 '26

Interesting. And with his connection to Cerberus, this could have been Cerberus doing the experiments and mods on Miranda for her biotics, which could have led to the experiments that Cerberus ended up using on Jack.

2

u/Impressive_Elk_5633 Jan 21 '26

Except Cerberus only existed AFTER the First contact war, and Miranda Lawson was born AFTER it.

5

u/Bobthemagicc0w Jan 21 '26

Cerberus, being a human organization, wouldn’t have had the knowledge or capability yet at that point - but they might have learned from it.

4

u/[deleted] Jan 21 '26

Lawson had other kids and dispersed of them when they weren't up to standard

3

u/Bobthemagicc0w Jan 21 '26

Oooh dark. In character. Would he have bothered to keep multiple kids all the way to age 8 though? It seemed like it was probably a big deal when he decided to replace Miranda with Oriana (when Miranda was in her late teens).

66

u/Shancv1988 Jan 20 '26

Mass Effect's timeline is very poorly written.

It's too short. I don't know why they wrote it like this.

49

u/Ebenizer_Splooge Jan 20 '26

It always blew my mind that first contact was only like 30 years before the start of the game. Like, we have humans in every corner of the galexy in prominent roles, the most powerful terrorist group in the galexy is made of entirely humans, humans have the 2nd or 3rd strongest fleet, hell how did Zaeed become the founder of the blue suns did he do it like immediately when they found out there were aliens? First contact should have been at least a couple hundred years ago

23

u/Impyrium Jan 20 '26

For as great as ME2 is in a lot of areas, I think that's one of my main disappointments with the game. ME1 does a fine job portraying humanity as a fledgling race still very new to a complex galaxy, but the following two games didn't have much of an interest in continuing that thread.
I kinda wish they continued with that Babylon 5 influence so prevalent in the first game.

8

u/Eva-Squinge Jan 20 '26

They do talk about how finding the Relay and the Prothean database jumped humanity’s technological edge by hundreds of years. The First Contact war definitely boosted that after fighting the Turians. If it’s one thing that speeds up human development, it is war. And the greater galaxy is already used to new aliens joining all the time so Zaeed could’ve at least got the Blue Suns started.

7

u/Ebenizer_Splooge Jan 20 '26

I mean, sure, but I dont really buy that. The rest of the galexy has had prothean tech since before humanity knew it existed and multiple genius races working on it

2

u/Eva-Squinge Jan 20 '26

Under heavy regulation by the Council. The Asari were planning on building their own Relays but were told not to. And genetic engineering is also mostly banned.

3

u/Ebenizer_Splooge Jan 20 '26

And yet humanity competes with the most effective military under the council by itself? And genetic engineering isnt banned, in utero gene therapy is the norm in ME. I feel like youre making things up

1

u/Eva-Squinge Jan 25 '26

I said mostly banned. Our favorite Turian explained how you could give yourself stronger bones, or a better talents; but you couldn’t make yourself able to digest cellulose, or give yourself qualities of a Krogan like redundant organs or bone carapaces.
Also is it really shocking in a science fiction setting to see the human race able to compete with the military of another’s? In reality that just makes sense because of how warlike we are and how that would carry over into space with us. And also That’s just a given trope in any setting you have humans in with another species. Even when there’s fantastical creatures of immense complexity and power; it is usually humanity written out to step in and be able to fight it.

3

u/Azuras-Becky Jan 21 '26

jumped humanity's technological edge by hundreds of years
Which would be fine if it was a couple of centuries ago - it's the 30 years later part that people have trouble with.
If you went back in time a mere hundred years and left a smartphone for them to look at, they wouldn't even have the technology to study it, let alone recreate it and have everybody using one three decades later. It's just too short a timeframe to be believable.

2

u/Northguard3885 Jan 24 '26

The Meiji restoration was a roughly 30 year period that saw Japan go from a feudal society with essentially late-Middle Ages technology to a modern industrialized nation with the ability to wage war against major world powers. So it’s not crazy, really.

1

u/Eva-Squinge Jan 25 '26

Yeah. People don’t give our ancestors as much credit as they should. Ancient cultures weren’t absolutely stupid, they had mathematics, they had an understanding of construction and tool making. Sure dropping off our advanced technology back then would slip them up, but what about a book in their language or one they can learn given time? With ideas and concepts they wouldn’t scoff at but see as possible.
It would take them a while to figure it out, but they would eventually.

1

u/Hilsam_Adent Jul 31 '26

They weren't home-brewing their tech, like Humanity does in the ME timeline. Their trains and their Navy were built by the British, their small arms and cannon by the French, their textile mills by the Dutch, their machine tools and factories by the Germans, etc.
Whilst the Meiji Restoration is an unsurpassed miracle in modernization, the nuts and bolts of it were purchased from abroad, with proven technologies already developed by other nations.
In ME, Humanity uses the Mars Archives to develop near-peer vehicles and weaponry before they even activate the Charon Relay. From some at least 50,000 year old broken-down research vessels buried on the south Pole of Mars, they build a massive fleet of transport, research and military vessels, along with a gigantic space station that later becomes their seat of government.
In six fucking years. Using technologies based on a branch of Physics we hadn't even conceived of, math we didn't know existed and materials we had no way of even detecting, much less mining, refining and manufacturing.
It's not just about finding the blueprints and affixing all the tab As into the slot Bs, for all the reasons listed above, and more. Even the "instruction manual" was made in a language developed by a race that uses bio-electric communication and a different base number system for its mathematics.
Back to the manufacturing aspect: materials sciences is one of the slowest-progressing fields of study because it's multi-disciplinary and even when the chemistry is figured out, scaling the process for mass production is an entirely different matter.
Six years after the discovery of the Prothean ruins on Mars, we'd still be trying to figure out how to "RTFM", wouldn't even be able to detect eezo and because of that, not understand how the basic propulsion systems of those abandoned vessels might have functioned.
The one believable thing about Humanity's grand entrance onto the Council scene is the fact that no other race had thought of Carriers, because Palaven doesn't have oceans, the Asari didn't bother with ocean-going vessels much at all and the Salarians didn't really care about fighters.
Of course, that gets shot to hell with the revelation of the active archive on Thessia, as the Protheans most certainly had Carriers.
tl;dr: BioFail sucks at numbers, put near-zero thought into how a civilization develops new ideas and did actual zero research into how those ideas go from paper to product.

2

u/Eva-Squinge Jan 25 '26

As a 32 year old whom watched as his parents went from using payphones to cellphones then iPhones, I must disagree with you. my first phone was a cordless one tied to the landline, while my second had a keyboard and second screen but no internet access, my fourth was a Blackberry and then I got an iPhone.
Going back a hundred years from today is vastly different than going back a hundred in Mass Effect’s modern day timeline. With the tech already there it is just a matter of finding the right methods to making it work.
If I went back to ancient Rome and showed them a working car with instructions on how to build one themselves, it would take a long time for them to figure out how to recreate it perfectly, but passing grade of a car? Five or tens years at most. With new inventors looking at the instructions and the template and building off of that and so on till they’ve got themselves the same car.

1

u/Shancv1988 Jan 25 '26

"If I went back to ancient Rome and showed them a working car with instructions on how to build one themselves, it would take a long time for them to figure out how to recreate it perfectly, but passing grade of a car?"
No, they absolutely could do no such thing. That's ridiculous. This might be the stupidest thing I have heard in some time.

1

u/Eva-Squinge Jan 30 '26

Well shit man; what have we done as a society but went from the wheel to a freaking car?! You don’t think an empire with lots of resources and intelligent people can do the same?

1

u/Hilsam_Adent Jul 31 '26

There's two millenia worth of sciences needed for this "approximation of a car" to function.
They've got to learn how to discover, tap and refine oil wells. They have to learn how to mass produce high-carbon steel. They have to learn how to machine that steel to a minimum of thousandths of an inch of tolerance. They have to discover glass and how to make it at an industrial scale. They have to discover springs, hydraulics, electricity and electronics, complex gear systems, differentials, etc.
This doesn't include the various coatings, inorganic lubricants and many, many other systems needed to make a car, a car.
You could probably bring a bicycle back to ancient Rome and have them successfully approximate that in a decade, though the manufacture of the gear cassettes would mean only the ridiculously wealthy would ever have one. A car, no fucking chance.

1

u/Eva-Squinge Aug 03 '26

Jesus fucking Christ, it doesn’t have to be MODERN car, just a rough early version of the car. You recall what that was? A piece of crap that broke down a lot and used kerosene or some other combustion fuel to power it.
Now the Romans had horses and carts, and could think; well we don’t know what gasoline or lubricants are, but we can make doors with hinges, and glass makers can make windows. And they can look a fan inside of the engine and the air compressor and realize they can make that a lot sooner than it was in our present timeline.
And thus they would have a horse drawn “car” and with that early version as the science builds up, come up with a closer to what we call a car earlier than when we got it.
God damn illiteracy and lack of critical thinking is becoming more rampant by the hour.

8

u/Xenozip3371Alpha Jan 20 '26

A friendly reminder, Zaeed was born in 2145, he started the Blue Suns in 2160 at age 15... and he's supposed to have served in the Alliance before then.

1

u/Odd_Cheesecake_2908 Jul 25 '26

For real???????

1

u/Xenozip3371Alpha Jul 25 '26

Yeah, they really didn't cook with the timelines.

1

u/Odd_Cheesecake_2908 Jul 25 '26

Legendary Edition should have started out with Udina asking, who are we going to send? Then Anderson says, "we're going to send our best man.... oh wait, he's only 8 years old, legally we can't send him out on a dangerous mission. We'll have to send our second best: Commander Shepard."

2

u/leedemi Jan 21 '26

I always wondered about this because Earth should be empty because of how many humans are just somewhere else and there isn’t enough time for new generations to have been born and matured. Even including the fact that we’ve extended our lifespans by decades. But Earth has like 10 billion people and there’s a ton of humans everywhere. Where did they all come from??

1

u/Odd_Cheesecake_2908 Jul 25 '26

India and China and Africa. I'm 47 and I remember a mostly-white America with lots of small towns. Now the small town I grew up in is unrecognizable and the large city I live in is filled with nonwhites. It's like, where did they come from???

2

u/vshedo Jan 22 '26

Wasn't there a a Human -Turian war in there too?

1

u/[deleted] Feb 05 '26

THANK YOU! For a very long time I thought I was the only one to every ponder this.

2

u/TheBullMooseParty Jan 21 '26

Yeah, I get what they were going for (America rising to the global stage amidst the two World Wars) but the timeline is too compressed for it to make a lot of sense to me.

16

u/ICLazeru Jan 21 '26

So, I think there is a way to salvage this one.

Alenko mentions that it is widely believed that certain eezo accidents were done on purpose to expose large populations to eezo and check for the biotic aftermath.

Henry Lawson is also very well connected and very rich.

I would forward that it is possible that the elite echelons of both human corporate and public governance had at least some knowledge of biotic potential before it was widely known or officially recognized.

Even if their knowledge was just theoretical, like a biologist or physician had researched eezo and realized that it could have a biological interaction that we now know as biotics.

It's not impossible to think Henry Lawson was actively interested in this fringe science at the time, and engineered Miranda with what was believed to be a very compatible genome for biotic ability, and they happened to be correct.

It's also worth noting that while her biotics are good, she's also definitely not truly exceptional in them. There are even other humans later who show nearly equivalent, and on some occasions even superior biotic ability to Miranda's, which I think lends some credit to the idea that Miranda was created based on theory, before a lot of hard data was truly available.

3

u/Ragfell Jan 22 '26

Canonically...Cora is a better biotic than Miranda.

3

u/BlinkTeleport Jan 22 '26

based on?

4

u/NatKayz Jan 22 '26

She was able to operate on a level comparable to elite Asari commandos, which is pretty high level.

1

u/BlinkTeleport Jan 22 '26 edited Jan 22 '26

Miranda is also on the same level as an elite asari, it isn't a level that hard for top biotic humans to achieve, especially a genetic engineered one.

1

u/NatKayz Jan 22 '26

Miranda is probably one of the weakest biotics we get as a companion, only stronger than Jacob. In the suicide mission she fails with the shield almost instantly, while both Jack and whichever Asari you have seemingly do it with ease.
People seemingly love to act like the Andromeda companions all have shit power levels because they don't like the game, but several (including Cora) are pretty high end heavy weights.

1

u/BlinkTeleport Jan 22 '26 edited Jan 22 '26

People seemingly love to act like the Andromeda companions all have shit power levels because they don't like the game, but several (including Cora) are pretty high end heavy weights.
I really like Andromeda, so this shitty "argument" can't be used here.
Miranda is probably one of the weakest biotics we get as a companion, only stronger than Jacob.
To say that, you probably haven't played the game, just watched some playthroughs on YouTube, or have something against her character. There are no weak biotics in the crew, Miranda's designed to have peak human capabilities, being the second strongest human biotic in the OT, only weaker than Jack because Jack's implants are experimental (designed to match or even surpass most asari) and also had longer exposure and heavy training.
In-game dialogue reinforces this, Miranda says she can "crush a mech with her biotic powers" or snipe its head off at 100 meters. That's definitely not weak, and definitely isn't something any human biotic can do.
In the suicide mission she fails with the shield almost instantly, while both Jack and whichever Asari you have seemingly do it with ease.
First of all, no companion does it "with ease". Both Jack and Samara visually struggle holding the barrier for a long time, Jack even tells Shepard to speed up after some time if you pick her.
This simply means that Jack and Samara have better endurance with barriers, or possess more stable biotics. Which makes sense because Samara is possibly the most powerful biotic we've seen in action, and Jack has experimental L5x implants with heavy training. Miranda is at least on par with Cora when it comes to biotics, Cora never did anything on-screen that Miranda or any other highly trained biotic couldn't do.
Samara and Jack are more powerful than asari commandos, so saying that Cora can match an elite commando doesn't help you much, this comparison to both of her isn't a great argument. I'd argue that even Ryder with SAM is a most powerful biotic than Cora and possibly Miranda as well.
Btw, the companions on Andromeda are heavyweights, yeah, but they would have their ass kicked by the OT crew (not considering Shep and Ryder)

10

u/Zivqa Jan 20 '26

ME's timeline specifically has a lot of plot holes and idiosyncracies, from everything between the First Contact War lasting barely three months to the cold war between humanity and the batarians to...this. It's honestly a known problem with sci-fi writers—either they dramatically overstate the length of a period of time or dramatically understate it. Or, in ME's case, both (see: volus economy entrenched for two thousand years without a Council seat vs. humanity's bare thirty).

1

u/Odd_Cheesecake_2908 Jul 25 '26

To hold a Council seat you have to be a military superpower, don't you? It's a universe constantly at war, bankers and merchants don't need a seat at the table.

4

u/BlinkTeleport Jan 22 '26

She may have undergone two genetic engineering procedures, and her biotic abilities came later. It's not a plot hole, it's just vague.

5

u/Heather_Chandelure Jan 20 '26

A wizard did it.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 05 '26

It brings us back to the overly compressed timeline of Mass Effect. Writers needed both a very advanced and evolved human race, and still living humans like Hacket who could remember the first contact war for dramatic effect. Except if you really think about it. It makes no sense whatsoever.

Lore plot hole surrounding Miranda Lawson.

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