Right Between the Eyes: Garrus Vakarian, The Nature of Justice, and 'Eye for an Eye'

First posted February 2023.

A little while ago, someone clocked my mass relay tattoo and asked me how I got into Mass Effect. When I admitted that I fell in love with Garrus first and the rest of the game followed, he kind of chuckled and said, “Oh, you’re one of those.”

Yes, there’s something of a stereotype in the girls falling for Garrus as an entry point into Mass Effect — and I’ve written previously about the reasons for his romantic appeal — but in a world full of interesting characters and fulfilling character arcs, Garrus stands out as particularly well-executed as an interesting character on his own, a vital connection and support for the protagonist, and a reflection of the overarching theme of the trilogy.

Mass Effect’s heart is in its characters and their arcs. We watch Tali grow from vagabond to respected admiral, Liara from rogue historian hungry for answers to the holder of the most information in the galaxy, and Wrex from cynical bounty hunter to aggressive defender of hope.

Mass Effect 2’s loyalty missions are pivotal moments for each character, and perhaps none more so than Garrus. As one of the few characters from the Mass Effect 1 crew that joins you on the ship in 2, he gets more of his story fleshed out than most. His loyalty mission, Eye for an Eye, is very possibly my favourite mission in all of Mass Effect, and for this essay, I wanted to talk about why. It’s the darkest place in his character arc, it positions him directly at the point between who he is and who he wants to be, and it showcases the relationship he has (even if it isn’t a romantic one, but I’m not gonna lie, I like it better when it is) with the protagonist, Commander Shepard, and the influence she has on his life.

Before we begin, a disclaimer: broadly speaking, I’m talking about how the story works in a playthrough with a paragon female Shepard and a romanced Garrus. Different decisions the player makes will create different stories. Having played through several versions of the story myself, I think this is the strongest both from a narrative standpoint and for Garrus’s character development. All versions of the story are valid, but I think this is the most interesting one to talk about.

To talk about why Eye for an Eye is so great, we first have to go back to Mass Effect 1. When we meet Garrus, he’s a rogue C-Sec agent, investigating the Spectre Saren, who is also Shepard’s target. Garrus runs up against a wall when he’s ordered to stop investigating, and Shepard’s investigation is at a similar standstill after the Council officially cleared Saren after he responded to the charges against him with the utterly convincing reply, “No I didn’t.” Shepard invites Garrus to join her team to take down Saren, and he gladly accepts.

Garrus is frustrated, and reveals in conversations with Shepard that he has been frustrated, with the red tape that he’s required to work within as a C-Sec agent. Bureaucracy, he argues, prevents him from doing his job, which he perceives as bringing the wicked to justice. He gives as an example a case from his early years as a C-Sec agent: the case of Doctor Saleon.

Saleon escaped Garrus when C-Sec wouldn’t allow him to order the doctor’s ship shot down due to the hostages on board. Garrus is established here as someone who wants the right thing, but isn’t worried about the consequences of how he achieves it. He doesn’t think about the collateral damage; Saleon is evil, and Saleon must be stopped, and that’s the extent of Garrus’s thought process. However he punishes Saleon is justified, because justice will have been served. He extrapolates this same thinking to Saren; Saren is evil, and Saren must be punished. While, yes, Saren is inadvertently working to end the world, Shepard reminds Garrus that she isn’t out to stop him ‘at any cost.’ She isn’t going to let innocent people suffer if she doesn’t have to. Garrus stops, cuts himself off, and says he’ll think about that.

When Garrus finds a lead on Saleon, he asks for Shepard’s help in taking him down. They find him, and Shepard refuses to let Garrus kill him. Initially outraged, Garrus bites back his anger and tells Saleon he’s lucky the Commander plans to take him into custody, to get intel on his work to prevent it from happening again. Saleon forces Shepard’s hand, drawing a gun on her, and subsequently getting shot by Shepard herself. Garrus asks what the point of her telling him not to kill Saleon was if she was going to shoot him anyway, and she tells him, “You can’t predict how people will act, Garrus. But you can control how you’ll respond. In the end, that’s what really matters.” She didn’t go in intending to shoot Saleon. Punishment was not her goal; making the galaxy a better place was, and those two goals are illustrated here as incompatible.

By the end of Mass Effect 1, Garrus has given it consideration and says he plans to return to C-Sec once Saren is dealt with. Inspired by Shepard, he’s now seen the way to do the right thing in the right way, and he thinks he’s learned how to work within the bounds of the law to ensure justice is served. It seems like a promising and happy ending to the first part of his story, but Garrus’s problem is that he still defines justice as punishment. He hasn’t absorbed as much of Shepard’s lesson as he thinks he has. And that’s going to come back to bite him, right…

…now, in Mass Effect 2. Some time after the non-Alliance crew have gone back to their respective jobs and planets, the Normandy is attacked and Shepard dies. Mostly. She spends two years in a coma while Miranda Lawson and Project Lazarus rebuild her. During this time, Garrus is on the Citadel, once again growing frustrated with C-Sec. They still aren't letting him enact justice as he believes it to be. He still has rules to follow, and he isn’t getting anywhere. The news of Shepard’s death is the final straw. He disappears off the Citadel, and several months later, reappears on the lawless space station, Omega. The station is a known hive of scum and villainy, and that lawlessness, he figures, works both ways.

Let’s leave our vigilante Garrus for a moment and skip ahead, to when Shepard returns from the dead for him. The Garrus Shepard meets on Omega about two years later is defeated, broken down, and exhausted. You can hear it in his voice. He’s a far cry from the fire-eyed hopeful we last saw on the Normandy, about to go make a real difference in C-Sec. Something has happened here.

Once they get back to the Normandy, Garrus reveals that he went to Omega after getting fed up with C-Sec again, and formed a team to fight the good fight against the criminal population of the station. He refers to his team as much like Shepard’s team for going after Saren: different people from different walks of life, brought together by a common goal. He emphasises that they avoided civilian casualties, that he was doing as Shepard taught him: the right thing, the right way, without endangering innocents.

That was only ever part of the problem, though. An important part, to be sure, but his definition of what is just and his understanding of acting rightly are what remain his primary stumbling blocks. What is right, to him, is maximising the suffering of those who do wrong. This is illustrated in his kill list, accessible in the Shadow Broker’s files in the DLC. His methods of punishment are thoughtful, thorough, and cruel. Killing Har Urek, the saboteur, by sabotaging their environmental suit, and Thralog Mirki’it, a red sand dealer, by forcibly overdosing them on their own supply: these are poetic murders, and a little humorous when you find them in the files, but thinking about it in the wider scope of Garrus’s character arc reveals that he hasn’t really internalised, at this point, what the actual crux of the problem he’s struggling with is.

He vaguely alludes to how it all went wrong — betrayal from within, and the murder of everyone else on his team — but saves the details for later. When the mission ‘Eye for an Eye’ is unlocked, Garrus gives Shepard the rest of the story.

Sidonis, one of the men on Garrus’s team, gave the location of their hideout to a mercenary group on Omega, and lured Garrus away on a false mission while the mercs killed the rest of his team. Now, Garrus has received intel of Sidonis’s location, and asks Shepard for her help in enacting his brand of justice. Shepard is immediately concerned and asks Garrus if this is really what he wants. Garrus insists that he doesn’t need Shepard’s approval, just her help.

The last time he asked for Shepard’s help was with Saleon. Now, Garrus is asking her to help him kill Sidonis. Both of them have to be thinking about the Saleon mission. Maybe Garrus is thinking of how, in the end, she did kill Saleon. Maybe Garrus is thinking of how she stopped him from making a mistake. Or maybe he’s thinking about both, and he isn’t sure which ending he wants.

During the mission, Garrus is noticeably more aggressive, more bloodthirsty, more threatening. He doesn’t hesitate to put a gun in someone’s face or put his foot on someone’s neck. “Run all you want,” he yells after a mark. “We’ll find you.”

And Shepard responds to this, in a way she doesn’t with anyone else. As the player character, most of Shepard’s thought process and decision-making is determined (or imagined, to fill in the gaps) by the player, but on every other loyalty mission, you’re there to assist. The goal post doesn’t change, and Shepard isn’t invited to question it. That Eye for an Eye even gives you the option to tell Garrus that this is upsetting is singular. Camera angles linger on Shepard’s reactions to Garrus. Her voice is wracked with shock and sorrow. This mission gets a reaction from her that you don’t see anywhere or with anyone else.

This anomaly signposts that the Garrus you’re being presented with — the Garrus better known as Archangel on Omega, the Garrus who ordered the deaths of a ship full of hostages just to get to Saleon — isn’t the one you know. All the hopefulness, all the dedication to growing and learning, all the willingness to be shown another way is gone. This is Garrus reduced to his most basic self: pursuing what he believes to be justice, no matter the cost. You are meant to notice that he’s different. You are meant to notice that something’s wrong.

It’s hard to believe that Garrus, with all he knows of Shepard, would genuinely believe she would do what he’s verbally asking her to do. He is up-front about his gruesome intentions, telling her exactly what he plans to do to both the forger Harkin and Sidonis. It simply doesn’t make sense for Garrus to be giving her these details, thinking she’ll be okay with it. He’s pushing her buttons on purpose. He’s asking her, without words, to stop him. But he’s doing it in the most frighteningly open and honest way — showing her the absolute worst of him, showing her the depths he’s been in and would continue to be in without her, and begging her to make him better.

“Terminus really changed you, huh, Garrus?” Harkin says. Garrus replies, “No, but Sidonis…opened my eyes.” It’s Sidonis that finally taught Garrus the lesson Shepard tried to teach him with the Saleon mission: that you can’t control other people’s actions, only your own. He recognised his immediate reaction to Sidonis’s betrayal, and in doing so recognised that justice — killing Sidonis — wouldn’t solve anything. It wouldn’t make the galaxy safer. It wouldn’t do any tangible good for anyone else. It would just make Sidonis dead. But he doesn’t know how to handle this realisation. He doesn’t know how to not want Sidonis dead. So he calls in Shepard, knowing that, just like with Saleon, she’ll know what to do.

Shepard and Garrus have a conversation in the skycar before the final section of the mission. He laments that she stopped him from killing Harkin, emphasising twice that Harkin “deserved to be punished.”

Shepard says this isn’t him. Garrus looks away. Because it is him. It’s C-Sec Garrus, and Archangel Garrus. But the Garrus Shepard knew — the Garrus she knows he can be — is a different person. That’s the person Shepard is insisting she sees. Garrus has struggled with the definition of justice and what constitutes the right thing to do, but ultimately, his sense of justice has been such a defining characteristic for him, for his own concept of himself, that he doesn’t know who he is without it. Shepard confirming his identity — of the man she grew to know on the Normandy SR-1 — gives him an answer to the question of who he is, and will also, ultimately, answer the question of what the right thing to do is.

Garrus argues with her, and his voice is rough, bitter, and quick. It really is unlike him, the way we’re used to hearing him — his lazy, drawn-out vowels, the swing and swagger of his pretended confidence. He almost growls as he says Sidonis “deserves to die.” Shepard asks him if he really wants to be the one to kill Sidonis. Garrus replies, “I’m not you.” And Shepard repeats, “This isn’t you, either.” Garrus immediately spits back, “Really. I’ve always hated injustice. The thought that Sidonis could get away with this…why should he go on living while ten good men lie in unmarked graves?”

It isn’t inflected as a question, but it is one. He’s beginning to see that justice and punishment and the right thing to do are all different things. He’s made hating injustice his whole persona for so long that abandoning the concept leaves him with nothing. If punishing Sidonis isn’t the answer, he doesn’t know what is. He’s asking Shepard here what the right thing to do is, because he genuinely does not know. He cannot conceive of a world in which he doesn’t kill Sidonis for revenge, but something in him wants to.

Garrus sets himself up with his sniper rifle, and Shepard goes to talk to Sidonis. Shepard sets herself between Garrus and Sidonis, and talks to Sidonis while blocking Garrus’s shot. She gives Sidonis a chance to explain, and he reveals that the mercs captured him and threatened him with death if he didn’t betray the team. It’s an explanation, not an excuse. But Sidonis is punishing himself for it: he doesn’t eat, he doesn’t sleep. When he finds out Garrus has him in his sights, Sidonis is almost relieved at the release death will bring.

And this is where Garrus gets it. Justice is something done to others; the right thing to do is something you do for yourself. Sidonis cannot forgive himself for the wrong he’s done, and he’s punishing himself for it. What good does that do? Those men are still dead, and Sidonis doesn’t even get to enjoy the life he traded for their lives. Garrus sees the empty shell of Sidonis and sees what he could become: a cold-blooded murderer with nothing and no one, not even himself, on his own side.

The mission title, ‘eye for an eye,’ is a common phrase first recorded in the Code of Hammurabi and repeated throughout history. It’s a principle of reciprocity, promising that what wrong is done to one will be done to the perpetrator in return. Garrus invokes it at the beginning of the mission, but he probably hadn’t heard Martin Luther King, Jr.’s reply to this axiom: "The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everyone blind. It destroys communities and makes humanity impossible. It creates bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers."*

We’ve seen the potential of that brutality in Garrus throughout this mission. Shepard has expressed concern multiple times but gone with him up to now. In the end, she reminds him that, unlike his target, he isn’t alone. He isn’t making this call in a vacuum. By her presence, by her position in standing between him and his target, she makes him confront the fact that he has people who care about him, and who he cares about, and he has a responsibility to them and to himself to do not what is just, but what is right.

He understands now that the right thing to do is forgive himself for his failure on Omega, and for his failure with C-Sec. It was never really Sidonis he was angry with for betraying him — it was himself, for believing Sidonis’s lie, and for enabling his team’s deaths. He convinced himself that justice demanded Sidonis’s death, and with justice served, he would be able to release the guilt. Shepard showed him that isn’t what would happen. Killing Sidonis would just push him further down the spiral. She offers him a hand as he’s falling. In not taking the shot, he takes Shepard’s hand.

He meets up with Shepard again, and says he doesn’t want to talk about it yet; it doesn’t feel good yet. Revenge would have felt good, if only for a moment. Doing the right thing doesn’t always feel good — it’s what Mass Effect plays on with the renegade interrupts, because you know how good it would feel to yell at the general who just fired on a ship you were still on, you know how good it would feel to set that mercenary yelling at you on fire. But for that moment of feeling good, you’re putting more harm into the world. Resisting the impulse may not feel good at first, but in the end, you’ll feel better for having maintained composure and not hurting someone out of reflex.

“I’m so used to seeing the world in black and white. Grey? I don’t know what to do with grey,” Garrus says. It was so much simpler when the locus of the problem was whether his target was good or evil. Acknowledging that people aren’t that simple, and that doing the right thing puts the decision back on him, makes his own well-being the priority. He doesn’t know how to deal with that. Luckily, he has Shepard. But that’s another story.

That lesson from the Saleon mission — that you can’t control people’s actions, only your own response — has finally hit home with Garrus. As we move into Mass Effect 3, we see a Garrus who gives his actions thought, rather than allowing them to be immediate reactions to what he perceives as black-and-white good or evil. Where before he was almost robotic, like pressing the ‘evil’ button would activate him to eliminate the wrong-doer without thought or consideration of consequences, he now has a concept of himself as a fully-rounded person, and of those around him as fully-rounded people themselves. From the monolithic statements he made in the Mass Effect 1 elevators about quarians and krogan, he’s come to recognise individuals and their choices, and to admit that perhaps the histories he’s been taught all his life weren’t as cut-and-dry as they once seemed.

This is exemplified by his work in his new position in the Turian hierarchy. He refuses to give an actual rank, but Shepard notices generals saluting him. At one point during the game, Shepard walks into the main battery to find Garrus staring at a holographic map. He says the turian Primarch asked his opinion on battle strategy. The old Garrus would have looked at this situation and said the Reapers are evil, and the Reapers must be punished, and whatever losses the turian military sustains are acceptable collateral damage in pursuit of justice. But that’s not the order Garrus gives. This time, Garrus advises the Primarch to pull their forces back, so they’ll be able to support the rest of the galaxy in the final push when the time comes.

His idea of victory is now focused on community — not just his own people, but every species in the galaxy. He’s not just worried about the Reapers dying; he’s worried about who survives this war.

Though he’s at least thinking of consequences now, his instincts still tend toward catastrophic. Earlier in the game, he spoke of “the ruthless calculus of war. 10 billion over here die so 20 billion over there can live,” to which Shepard reminds him, “If we reduce this war to arithmetic, we’re no better than Reapers.” It makes sense he’d fall back on the familiar framework of black and white when put in a position like this. Shepard’s simply reminding him of the grey — the human (or turian, or whoever) aspect of decision-making that is always going to require thought and consideration and balance. When we see him make the decision to pull the troops back, we know he’s finally, truly understood the lesson, and he’s grown into someone who can act with both thought and kindness. (As an aside, I’m reminded of a description of Anthony Bourdain I read once, calling him “kind but not nice” — I think that fits Garrus at this point in his arc, too. He’s never nice, but he learns to be kind. That’s more important.)

It is this relinquishing of isolation that colours the entire story of Mass Effect. The galaxy we enter in the first game is one of division, secrecy, hatred, prejudice, and mistrust. Everyone is pulling away from each other behind their own borders. Shepard’s task is to bring everyone together, to bridge old gaps, to right old wrongs, to knit together the frayed fabric of the galaxy. On a macro level, this is curing the genophage, reuniting the quarians and the geth, building trust between the turians and humans. On a micro level, it’s the individual changes which echo that goal and really drive the theme home. It’s enabling Tali and Legion to become friends. It’s letting Ashley and Liara bond over losing their parents. It’s supporting Wrex in his fight for the krogan future. It’s helping Garrus get out of his head and into the world around him.

We never hear from Sidonis again. Most other characters who briefly appeared in previous games will at least send an email to Shepard to update her, but Sidonis remains silent. Whether he changed, learned to forgive himself, or tried to make amends with Garrus, we’ll never know. But his story, and the Eye for an Eye mission as a whole, have served their purpose in putting Garrus into the deepest pit of his life, and throwing him the ladder to climb his way out. Garrus’s arc is such a satisfying story to watch unfold in the game, every single time I run through it. It’s always fulfilling to read a story like this, about togetherness and community saving the world, but it’s especially rewarding in the medium of a video game, where you get to feel the sense of having accomplished it yourself. It gives you the feeling that just maybe, this is possible in the real world, too.

*Quoted by Coretta Scott King in The Words of Martin Luther King, Jr.