Why Kaidan is the Best Love Interest in Mass Effect

Subject Zero (Jack) - Biotic Psychopath

Ah, Jack. What can I possibly say about you? I mean, no one in their right mind would ever attempt a relationship with someone like you in real life, much less entertain the idea of it. But you're a character for sure, so let's see how you rate in the romance and chatacter development department.

Mass Effect 2 is well under way when you finally get a chance to track down the mystery crew member the Illusive Man has provided a dossier for. It takes you to a deep space, maximum security prison with a morally questionable warden who's just this side of being too slick for comfort. (Oh man Bioware... obvious foreshadowing much?)

Of course he has no intention of just letting you leave, Bioware can't possibly pass up the opportunity for more conbat scenes. Plus, what better way to demonstrate Jack's powers than to have her literally rip through the station like the walls are made of butter?

The crew you bring with you to the station are equally impressed and/or disgusted by Jack's powers and mental state. And rightly so. As an aside here, given how many crew members you now have, I have to say that I enjoy both Grunt and Kasumi's lines when you finally catch up to Jack.

Grunt is really just in total awe of the psychotic biotic and Kasumi is amused when Jack attempts to threaten Shepard when they first meet on the prison. So a deal is struck and Jack joins the crew, a load screen happens and you're immediately thrown onto a cut scene aboard the Normandy.

A cut scene that has both near naked female crewmembers having a fight in the conference room or whatever room it's called. There's name calling and furniture flying when you enter to break up the fight between Jack and Miranda.

So that happens. Later, you go talk to Jack who has hidden herself in the bowels of the ship for... reasons. Her dialogue is clipped, forced and well-acted. Unfortunately though, you leave the interaction feeling like you just wasted a lot of time coming all the way down here, past the engineering room for a few scant lines of dilogue that go nowhere and are completely unsatisfying.

So missions happen. Eventually, if you don't completely forget that Jack exists down there in the bowels of the ship, (which I totally do, every time I play unfortunately), you learn just how much of a badass Jack is, how she really has no regard for life or property and would sooner stab you in the face than talk to you. Oh, and she really, really hates Cerberus.

So assuming you didn't forget Jack is down there, you get to her loyalty mission where she wants to blow up an abandoned Cerberus base in some convoluted and ineffectual attempt to reclaim her childhood. Yeah it sounds a bit redundant but what else can Jack's loyalty mission be in a game? It's fine really. What's not fine is the way Jack's personality does something odd after you've left the planet and she sits in the shuttle flicking the cover trigger for the bombs you left behind.

I'm not even sure what it is that bothers me about that scene. But it does bother me. Maybe it just seems like an out of character thing the way her face is broken with too much emotion? Or the nervous flick, flick, flick thing she's doing with the trigger? I dunno. All I do know is that it bothered me every time I saw it and have no words for why.

Moving on. We return to the ship and are immediately thrown into another cut scene with Miranda and Jack. Now, if you don't have nearly maxed out paragon and/or renegade bars, you will have to choose who's side you're on between the two of them. If you have max of either Paragon or Renegade you don't have to choose a side.  (I love the renegade dialogue here and always try to max it out just to tell them both to shut up and chill and kill each other after the mission is over.) (As an aside, using paragon for this scene always annoys me. It sounds less like badass Shepard and more like Captain America is scolding grown children with a level of morality and righteousness you just want to shove right back up his or her ass.)

So you've made your choice for better or worse, but I'm pretty sure that if you choose Miranda, Jack has absolutely zilch to say to you. Talk about icy drama queen. I'm also pretty sure her only line she has after choosing Miranda's side is to tell you to "fuck off." She might grudgingly thank you for helping blow up the base, but right after that she tells you where to shove it. And then she is completely unavailable for further dialogue until after you do more side missions. Unfortunately, I always leave Jack for last so until I romanced her, I missed out on her cut scenes.

Eventually I did get to experience those missed dialogue scenes and to be honest, they really were not worth the wait. I'm sure there are those who would argue she's not that bad but she really is. Bioware hung Jack out to dry when it came to her development. That, or they had absolutely no clue what to do with someone as traumatized as Jack had been portrayed and how to handle her inability to connect with people.

Like Jacob, Jack's romance is largely forgettable. It's unfortunate because Jack is a very unique and often underappreciated character. Aside from the blatant sexual way her so-called outfit is drawn, she has insights into what's going on around her and a unique perspective on what she sees happening. She's definitely biased, but it doesn't detract from her overall personality.

That being said, I found her romance largely unsatisfying. After "raging against the machine" that is Cerberus and how her life has gone up till now, the cut scene in Shepard's cabin was disturbingly OOC and highly stereotyped.

Obviously she has bucket loads of issues when it comes to relationships of any kind, but having her break down in front of Shepard that quickly was not a turn on. It detracted from what made her desirable in the first place and reduced her to little more than a scared little girl who needs protection.

What happened to the badass psychotic biotic? Where'd she go and why would she choose that moment to show weakness when she's on the verge of releasing her resistance to Shepard's advances? If anything, I think she'd do everything she could to project her own confidence rather than expose a weakness that she already knows Shepard is well aware exists.

So yeah, this too was a missed opportunity for Bioware to do something different with a character with very sharp edges and they took the easy way out. They didn't allow Jack to show how confident she could be with the support of someone who cares. Instead, they showed that giving a crap about someone is a weakness and one she is not particularly happy about.

I can't say much more about this romance past Mass Effect 2, other than that she does not join your crew. She has no side missions for you to catch up with her and the only time after Grissom Academy that you see her in person is in the Citadel DLC. I didn't take her romance that far in my playthroughs, so I don't know what that looks like. But I can say that since Bioware spent very little time including prior romances in Mass Effect 3, that a romance with Jack is just as unsatisfying as any other character who doesn't join the Normandy crew in 3. Considering how much work is involved in the second game to successfully romance Jack in the first place, the end of her romance is highly unsatisfying and only serves to remind fans that their choices really don't matter.