Mass Effect Legendary Edition: ME2 Ep 03 – Dossier: Archangel – Garrus
Friday night meant another dose of our now apparently “mandatory” Mass Effect viewing, and this time we were heading back into Omega to track down the mysterious Archangel.
The evening gave us exactly the sort of Mass Effect session I enjoy: plenty of story, a familiar face returning to the crew, a few decisions worth stopping to think about, and far too much time spent wondering where all my ammunition had gone. Chat, meanwhile, was busy with dysentery, failed Stargate rescues, Hunger Games and eventually a successful bank robbery, so business as usual there.
🌌 About the Game
Mass Effect Legendary Edition brings together the single-player content from Mass Effect, Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3, along with more than 40 DLC packs, promotional weapons and armour, all remastered and optimised for 4K Ultra HD.
We play as Commander Shepard, travelling across the galaxy, building a crew and making decisions that continue to matter as the story progresses. In Mass Effect 2, a large part of that journey involves finding the right people for what lies ahead, which is exactly where this episode fits in.
🛰️ Where We Are in the Journey
We are continuing our 100% Mass Effect playthrough, with Mass Effect 1 already completed and the early stages of Mass Effect 2 now taking shape. Mordin had already joined the Normandy, and our next dossier sent us after Archangel on Omega.
This is also where the crew is beginning to grow properly. The larger mission is still ahead of us, but every recruitment, conversation, research project and Normandy upgrade matters, so I am taking the time to explore the dialogue and side content rather than rushing through the main story.
⚠️ What Happens in This Episode
The night opened back on Omega with a little housekeeping before the shooting started. Shepard’s armour had been changed from the previous bright-pink experiment into sparkly red to match her hair, skill points and squad choices were checked, and Mordin got the wonderfully reassuring treatment of being set to auto-level because, essentially, he would be fine. The immediate objective was clear: head into Afterlife, find the mercenary recruitment operation, and use it to get close to the mysterious vigilante everyone on Omega wanted dead.
The timing was made slightly busier by kenian2023 arriving with a raid early in the stream, bringing more people into what had already been declared the regular Friday-night dose of “mandatory” Mass Effect. From there, Shepard signed up as a freelancer with the mercenary coalition hunting Archangel and began asking questions rather than simply marching toward the gunfire. The Blue Suns, Eclipse and Blood Pack had all temporarily put their differences aside because Archangel had become such a persistent problem, disrupting shipments, attacking their operations and generally costing everyone on Omega far too much money.
The plan they had assembled was not exactly kind to the freelancers. Mercenary recruits would be sent across an exposed bridge to keep Archangel occupied while an infiltration team tried to get behind his position. If the freelancers died, that was apparently their problem. Shepard took time to speak with the different faction leaders and get a better picture of why they were so determined to remove him. Eclipse boss Jareth had a particularly personal reason after Archangel attacked one of his transports and killed two of his operatives, including his brother, while the Blood Pack had already discovered that taking Archangel on directly was easier said than done.
There was also a gunship being repaired for the assault, because apparently three mercenary organisations, an infiltration team and waves of disposable freelancers still were not considered enough for one man. Before joining the attack, Shepard quietly interfered with the mercenaries’ heavy mech, sabotaging it so that when the fighting began it would hopefully become their problem rather than hers.
Amid all of that was one of those smaller Mass Effect moments that says quite a lot without needing a galaxy-ending threat. A young recruit turned up desperate to prove himself, proudly explaining that he had just spent 50 credits on a pistol and wanted to use it. Shepard took one look at the near-suicidal assault he was about to join and told him to get his money back. On Omega, simply persuading somebody not to walk willingly into a killing ground probably counts as a considerable public service.
Chat, meanwhile, was already operating on an entirely different mission. EntertainJD had unleashed the dysentery command through the increasingly infamous “harmonica of doom,” spreading it through, asmith501, Gary and eventually Samwise. Challenges were being issued, trophy cabinets were apparently required, and a completely unrelated Stargate rescue operation was launched to recover SG-1 from Lord Anubis. That mission failed, but at least Shepard’s evening was going slightly better.
Eventually it was time to stop interviewing mercenaries and actually cross the bridge. The attack began, and almost immediately Dr Ravenholm noticed one small issue: Shepard had only 18 rounds of ammunition.
“What could possibly go wrong?”
Plenty.
After scavenging what ammunition was available and pushing through the approach, Shepard finally reached Archangel’s position. The great mystery ended with a very familiar face behind the rifle: Garrus Vakarian, alive, heavily outnumbered and apparently having spent his time away from Shepard making almost every major criminal organisation on Omega hate him.
The reunion felt immediately familiar. Garrus explained that he had become tired of the bureaucracy on the Citadel and discovered that Omega offered a much simpler approach to crime fighting: find criminals, point gun, shoot. Even the name “Archangel” was something the locals had given him rather than a dramatic identity he had invented for himself. He also admitted that he had put a couple of rounds into Shepard during the approach, but only concussive ones to keep up appearances. If he had actually wanted to do damage, he pointed out, he could have done considerably more.
There was not much time to catch up. The mercenaries realised their infiltration attempt had failed and Eclipse began moving across the bridge in force. Garrus stayed in his elevated position while Shepard dealt with the waves below, and ammunition immediately became the resource around which half the battle seemed to revolve. Rocket troops needed dealing with, a better rifle was found but was not immediately available to use, and the squadmates occasionally inspired the question of whether they planned to contribute to the battle at some point.
Then the sabotaged heavy mech entered the fight and, thankfully, became much more inconvenient for the people who had brought it. That did not make the battle comfortable. Shields disappeared quickly, health dropped alarmingly low and ammunition had to be collected whenever there was a gap between waves. Chat responded to the situation in the most helpful way possible. Erris supplied “Run RoboCop’s coming,” while EntertainJD invoked the long-running Death Loop just as survival was beginning to look questionable. A brief Lord of the Rings discussion somehow also fitted into the firefight, with Samwise eventually reducing the story to “The one ring rules all” before adding the arguably more important “What about second breakfast?”
Eclipse eventually fell back, and Garrus revealed that Jareth had been one of his personal targets for some time. That victory did not buy much breathing room. The Blood Pack found another route into the building, forcing Shepard to split the team. Garrus stayed upstairs to keep the bridge covered while Shepard took Miranda into the lower levels to stop the attackers opening the basement access points.
That section became one of the most frantic parts of the mission. The Blood Pack and their vorcha pushed in while Shepard tried to manage fragile shields, regenerating enemies and ammunition that seemed determined to disappear faster than it could be collected. Miranda was sent forward to draw attention at points, powers were being fired whenever they were available, and the whole defence eventually came down to reaching the controls before the attackers could get through.
“Press the button. Press the button.”
The door finally dropped with only seconds to spare.
There was little chance to celebrate. More fighting followed, ammunition was almost gone again, and the Krogan leading the Blood Pack proved exactly why Garrus had remembered him as such a difficult opponent. His regeneration made him stubbornly hard to put down, and it was only during the fight that Dr Ravenholm remembered the grenade launcher that had been sitting in the weapon selection all along. Sometimes the correct tactical answer really is just remembering that you brought explosives.
With the Blood Pack finally dealt with, only the Blue Suns remained. Garrus suggested fighting their way out, but the mercenaries attacked first and another series of waves poured into the building. By this point the mission had settled firmly into its rhythm: shields up, shields immediately gone, fall back, find ammunition, fire everything available, repeat. Dr Ravenholm even commented on remembering this mission specifically for its seemingly endless succession of enemy waves.
The defence succeeded, but Garrus took a serious hit during the final stage and Shepard had to call Joker and get him back to the Normandy. For a moment, the reunion looked as though it might have been extremely short-lived.
Fortunately, Garrus is difficult to keep down. The Normandy’s medical team repaired the damage with surgery and cybernetics, and he was back on his feet much sooner than expected. When he asked how bad the facial damage looked, Shepard offered the kind of warm reassurance only an old friend could get away with: he had always been ugly anyway, so a bit of face paint would sort it out. Garrus countered that some women found facial scars attractive — although, apparently, those women were krogan.
Underneath the joking, the important part was that Garrus was back. He was understandably suspicious of Shepard working with Cerberus, but trusted Shepard enough to join the mission and took up his new home around the Normandy’s forward batteries.
The stream then slowed down for the traditional post-mission tour of the ship. With the 100% run always in mind, Dr Ravenholm checked in with the crew, looked through newly available research and started considering which Normandy upgrades would eventually be needed. The problem was money. Several useful enhancements were now available, including upgrades Garrus could suggest for the ship’s weapons, but buying everything immediately would have left the credit balance looking rather unhealthy. Some upgrades were unlocked, others were sensibly left for later, and it became clear that a proper look through the weapons and equipment was needed before the next major mission.
Talking properly with Garrus also revealed why Archangel had ended up alone in that building. He had assembled a twelve-person team on Omega made up of former military personnel, C-Sec officers and other specialists, and they had been doing real damage to the station’s criminal organisations. Then one of Garrus’s own people, a turian named Sidonis, betrayed him. Sidonis lured Garrus away just before the mercenaries attacked their hideout, cleared out his accounts and escaped Omega while the rest of Garrus’s team were killed. Garrus had survived, but the unfinished business with Sidonis was clearly not going away.
Mordin’s conversation brought an even heavier turn. Until this point, he had described his Special Tasks Group work as studying the krogan genophage. Now he admitted that had been a lie of omission. His team discovered that the krogan population was adapting faster than expected, so they developed and deployed a modified version of the genophage to stabilise the population again.
Shepard strongly challenged the decision, calling the genophage a terrible mistake and the recreation of it unforgivable. Mordin did not apologise. He defended the work as necessary and made it clear that, if Shepard believed that made him unsuitable for the mission, he was prepared to remain aboard and continue his Collector research instead. It was one of those very Mass Effect shifts where the stream can move from jokes about ammunition and dysentery into an argument about the ethics of population control without feeling as though it has changed games.
Somewhere around these Normandy conversations, chat took its own sharp turn into unexpectedly dark territory. A TikTok story about the supposed “darker side” of the Smurfs resurfaced, with the explanation involving frozen children, mushroom-like Smurfs and Gargamel being recast as considerably less villainous than childhood television had suggested. Samwise concluded that it put “a whole different spin” on childhood, Erris announced that his childhood had been ruined, and Happy Cat Lady described it as the next Hollywood blockbuster. The story was eventually posted into Discord, after which the obvious question was asked: were there any similarly disturbing stories about the Care Bears?
The evening still had some unfinished business on Omega. A datapad recovered during the Archangel mission contained information suggesting that someone was planning a move against Aria, so Shepard returned to Afterlife and handed it over. Aria was understandably interested in finding out how information like that had slipped through her organisation and prepared to do a little internal cleaning.
That immediately opened another job involving Patriarch, the ageing krogan Aria kept around as a living reminder of what happened to people who challenged her. Blood Pack mercenaries were planning to kill him, and Aria wanted the problem handled without making it look as though she was openly protecting him. Rather than simply convince Patriarch to hide until the threat passed, Shepard chose the more direct option and agreed to fight the assassins in his name.
The Blood Pack were dealt with, and the decision allowed Patriarch to regain a little of his old reputation instead of simply remaining one of Aria’s trophies. Aria was not entirely delighted by the subtle change in the balance of power, but the job was complete, and Shepard came away with coordinates for a cache on an uncharted world.
Even during the quieter stretch of the stream, chat continued running its own economy of bad decisions. Earlier there had been the failed Stargate rescue and a Hunger Games round that Dr Ravenholm somehow won, much to asmith501’s immediate suspicion. Later, Dr Ravenholm and EntertainJD assembled a two-person bank heist for 500 points each — and, unlike the SG-1 rescue, this one went perfectly. Everyone performed their assigned roles, the bank job succeeded, and both walked away with 775.
By the end of the night, the important objective was well and truly complete. Archangel had been found, Garrus had survived and joined the Normandy, his history with Sidonis had been uncovered, new ship and research options were available, and an extra piece of Omega business involving Patriarch had been cleared along the way. The stream returned to the Normandy for the final save, with the next step in the 100% run already taking shape.
Next Friday’s recruitment target would be Jack.
Given how this mission went, it would probably be wise to bring more than 18 rounds.
🎬 Watch the Episode
You can see the full Archangel mission, Garrus reunion and all the ammunition problems in the complete episode on YouTube.
You can continue the full playthrough through the Mass Effect Legendary Edition playlist, and there is plenty more from me over on the Dr Ravenholm YouTube channel.
If you enjoy the episode, leave a like, let me know your thoughts in the comments and subscribe so you do not miss the next part.
🔴 Join the Adventure Live
These streams are always more entertaining when chat is involved. One moment we are trying to keep Garrus alive with barely any ammunition, and the next somebody has started a dysentery outbreak or launched a completely unrelated Stargate mission.
You can join us live on Twitch or YouTube and become part of whatever happens next. Raids such as kenian2023 joining us this evening, and our own raid into jababbo at the end, are all part of what makes the live streams different every time.
🌐 Community & Links
The stream may end, but the conversation, clips and general chaos carry on elsewhere. If you want to stay connected between episodes, these are all the places to find me.
Live — Catch the next stream and join us while everything is happening:
Twitch | YouTube
Community — Come and continue the conversation with the rest of us:
Discord
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TikTok | Bluesky | Instagram | Facebook | Threads | X
Music — You can also find my music away from the gaming side of things:
Spotify | Apple Music
Support — If you would like to support the channel and what I create:
Fourthwall | Teespring | Streamlabs
More — For my other projects, services and writing beyond the channel:
Business Centre | Download the Brochure | About Me | Blog
🚀 Garrus Is Back, Jack Is Next
By the end of the night, Archangel was safe, Garrus was back on the Normandy, we had cleared another piece of Omega side content and unlocked plenty more to think about aboard the ship.
Next Friday we continue the recruitment drive and go after Jack. Hopefully we will remember to bring more than 18 rounds of ammunition this time.
— Dr Ravenholm
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