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Companion Study: Jacob Taylor

I know, I know. Jacob Taylor? You’re writing an essay about Jacob Taylor? It’s fairly uncontroversial that he’s the least interesting of Mass Effect 2’s otherwise stellar cast. Even the Shadow Broker doesn’t seem to think he’s very valuable (if you haven’t brought him along on Lair of the Shadow Broker, the difference between the comments on him and everyone else are astonishing). But that’s why I wanted to write about him – almost no one has. But I think there’s a lot of value in analyzing why this particular character fell flat with the majority of the player base, and if you’ll bear with me for a few paragraphs, I think you’ll agree.

While doing research for this essay, I discovered that Jacob Taylor was a pretty major character in a couple of the Mass Effect books. I grappled for a bit about whether or not to consider his actions and characterization in those books in my analysis here, but ultimately decided against it. For one thing, I don’t own and haven’t read the books, and there’s only so much insight you can get out of summaries. More importantly, though, I had no idea these books existed when I played ME2, and neither did most players. A video game series that prides itself on storytelling can’t rely on external media to support its story, so I will analyze Jacob Taylor in the form that the majority of the player base experienced him.

 So, with the limits of this analysis established, let’s dive right in to the problem of Jacob Taylor. I want to briefly note what an honest-to-God shame it is that this character fell so flat. He’s one of the only people of color on Shepard’s squad, and one of the only significant black characters in the game. As a white person, it’s not my place to analyze Bioware’s issues with race in detail, but it felt important to touch on. He’s also a major contributor to fem!Shep’s lack of romance options. He’s a thoroughly unappealing option to most players anyway, but to also have him cheat on Shepard and break off their romance in ME3 is a real slap in the face to the few people who were interested. Having characters whose lives don’t revolve around the protagonist and whose romantic relationships don’t work out is an interesting idea, but it’s a problem that it only happens to female protagonists, who also have a romance option unavoidably die. M!Shep, on the other hand, can always steer their romances to happy endings. That’s a problem.

 So what caused this character to fail so utterly? To understand that, let’s take a look at what the developers were hoping to achieve with this character. We’re introduced to Jacob Taylor as a friendly face in a confusing environment, a casual and collected man who offers up the truth of the situation to Shepard out of moral conviction. That’s a decent introduction. Between that and the first few conversations Shepard has with him on the Normandy, I think we can piece together pretty clearly what Jacob’s character is supposed to be. First and foremost, he’s supposed to be a sympathetic voice. He defends Shepard against Miranda, commiserates with them over Cerberus’s spotty track record, and talks about his service with the Alliance. He’s presented as the voice of reason relative to Miranda and TIM. He’s like Shepard, working with Cerberus because he doesn’t see a better option. And that’s the second thing – he’s like Shepard. He shares a similar career path and went through a similar arc of disillusionment and frustration. He’s supposed to be relatable. Third, he’s a good soldier. He’s dutiful, professional, shows great respect for the chain of command, and a solid combatant. And finally, he’s presented as a voice of reason. He frequently advocates for the “logical” and “morally upstanding” choices. His biases show through rarely. The information he provides to Shepard about the galaxy is meant to be very reliable.

 However, this collection of traits fails to make him interesting, for a variety of reasons. Let’s examine why one at a time. He fails as a character sympathetic to Shepard primarily because he’s set up in opposition to Miranda’s fervent belief in Cerberus. The dichotomy between the two makes plenty of sense in the first mission – one pro-Cerberus, one anti. But this falls apart very quickly thereafter, because absolutely no one else you recruit likes Cerberus. The best you get is indifference from people like Zaeed and Kasumi, and far more often you get burning hatred. The deep vendettas of Jack and Tali against Cerberus burn brightly, and Jacob’s mild dislike for them fades out in comparison. This is especially bad for him because his character concept is grounded in the contrast between his reluctant partnership with Cerberus and Miranda’s conviction in their methods. It’s simply uninteresting when compared to the rivalry and outright hatred between Miranda and Jack.

 His failure as a sympathetic ear for Shepard is, surprisingly, almost completely unrelated to why he fails as a target for Shepard’s empathy. This failure boils down primarily to a failure in the writing of his one-on-one conversations. He’s given a backstory that somewhat mirror’s Shepard’s, but there’s no emotion or color attached to it. We know very little about his feelings about his time with the Corsairs, or the names of his fellow servicemen, or any of the conflicts they engaged in, or the hardships they overcame. Compare to Garrus, who talks at length about the team of vigilantes he put together and the tight scrapes he fought his way out of and the burning sense of purpose that sustained him through his ordeals. Jacob was instead written to be almost completely impassive, private, cutting off any conversation as soon as it ventures anywhere potentially emotional. This can be interesting, done correctly. The majority of the companions begin somewhat emotionally closed-off. But Jacob never opens up. The writer’s attempted to make Jacob seem professional and controlled, but instead they robbed him of interiority. This is especially apparent with his personal mission, which fails to advance any central conflict in his personality or resolve an issue that has clearly been affecting him personally. Even the climax of that mission barely brings any of his emotions or character traits into the limelight, and when Shepard tries to dig into his feelings after the mission, Jacob completely shuts down that line of inquiry, never to be reopened.

 Jacob isn’t helped by the fact that he’s also basically the most ordinary combatant to ever be a permanent member of Shepard’s squad. Mechanically, his powerset is very bland, with only Pull and Incendiary Ammo to start off with, and his unique power is functionally interchangeable with two other unique powers, simply extending the user’s shields. And within the game’s story, his abilities are just as ordinary. He’s not a vigilante sniper, a dying assassin, a genetic experiment, or a biotic engineered into the ultimate weapon. He’s just a security officer who happened to not die in the opening level. Simple competence as a combatant looks a lot less valuable when everyone else on the team was recruited because they were extraordinary. In ME1, Kaiden and Ashley had each other to bounce off of, keeping either from looking like the weakest link in a party consisting of fascinating alien experts, and by ME3 neither of them could be considered ordinary soldiers by any stretch of the imagination. But Jacob is just clearly the weakest link of ME2.

 His final and weakest central character trait, acting as a general voice of reason, actually works the best out of any of these. It simply fails to be impactful because the previous three failed so significantly that the player has no real interest in him, so his opinion is unimpactful.

 Having laid bare the flaws in Jacob’s character design, what have we learned? What was the primary factor that created such an uncompelling character, and how could he have been done better? In my opinion, the prime cause of the failure of Jacob Taylor comes from what role the writers wanted him to serve. They intended him to be Shepard’s number one, the friend and confidante that Shepard sees themself in. This was an ill-conceived idea for two reasons. First, there’s player behind the character of Shepard, and that means there is no one-size-fits-all most sympathetic best friend and supporter character. Everyone is going to see it differently. Second, this was a bad idea because there’s already a character returning from a previous game who had this effect on the majority of the player base with astonishing effectiveness, and that’s Garrus Vakarian. Other have written more and better than I could ever hope to on what makes Garrus such a great character, so I’ll leave that alone for now. Instead, let’s talk about what Jacob should have been, instead of trying to fight for Garrus’s role.

 First, I would make Jacob a true believer in Cerberus. As it was, Miranda was the only one who really backed Cerberus – for good reason, the organization was completely mistrusted by outsiders. Making Jacob a true believer would go a long way towards making the presence of the shadowy group feel more immediate, rather than confined to Miranda’s room and TIM’s video calls. This would also open up more avenues to compare and contrast him with Miranda in ways that aren’t better filled by other characters. Preserve Jacob’s general friendliness and moral conviction but put him in control of it. Make him the honey to Miranda’s vinegar, doing his best to gain Shepard’s confidence and exert Cerberus’s agenda over them. Don’t necessarily make him good at it – he’s not a spy – but put that barrier of distrust up that justifies his emotional distance from Shepard. Make him a professional – but this time, he’s not working for Shepard, he’s working on Shepard.

 Naturally, this substantially shifts the nature of his interactions with Shepard. Now Shepard has to not just assess him as a person, but try to shift his loyalties away from Cerberus, just as they must do with Miranda. Likewise, Jacob would have pressure to open up a little more, to try to earn Shepard’s trust through emotional intimacy. This allows us to maintain Jacob as a deeply private person while still letting the audience get to know him through those anecdotes and emotional drives that are so sorely missing from his actual conversations. I’d also consider moving him from the Corsairs to N7. This would shave off a bit of exposition on an element that never seemed to go anywhere, as we never directly interact with or are influenced by the Corsairs in the games. And of course, his personal mission needs to be much more grounded in his issues. We could even preserve most of the basic structure of the mission that appears in game if we provide some crucial background. Have Jacob early and often credit his father with his morality and dedication and, position his disappearance as something that Jacob blames the Alliance for. Don’t make this the inciting incident for Jacob’s defection, we should avoid reducing his morality to a product of his personal suffering, but certainly make it a bitter mark against the Alliance. This allows Jacob’s euphoria and subsequent disillusionment with his father’s survival to have a much more profound impact on his beliefs as it throws him into a crisis over whether his choices and moral compass have come from a worthwhile place – and with the previously established emotional intimacy between him and Shepard, the player can actually see this crisis, unlike in the actual game. I can see a few different trajectories that that could send his character on that could have a substantial impact on ME3, but that would basically be an essay in itself, so we’ll leave it alone for now.

 Next, make him more than just an average soldier. Give the player a reason to think he’d be a good person to have on the team. Maybe instead of being station security, he could be a military expert there to evaluate Shepard’s mental faculties once the Project is finished. Or maybe he could be positioned by TIM to watch Shepard and assassinate them if they go off the rails. The specifics don’t necessarily matter – just present him as being someone who could be taken seriously as a choice for your team when you could pick an ancient asari warrior or the greatest master thief in the galaxy instead.

 Finally, drop the only sane man angle entirely. ME2 is entirely about Shepard corralling dysfunctional superpowered idiots into a workable team. Let Jacob express strong opinions and clear biases for the player to consider and grapple with. Let some personality through the professionalism.

 Maybe you disagree with me. Maybe you think Jacob Taylor is fine as is and I’m going on a ridiculous rant. Maybe you’re right. But to me, and to many others, Jacob Taylor failed as a companion, which is a damn shame, because there was so much that could’ve been done with him instead.

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Companion Study: Zaeed Massani

Zaeed Massani is an oft-overlooked character in the fandom, and it’s easy to see why. He’s a DLC character, he doesn’t have a full dialogue tree in the only game in which he is a companion, he’s not romanceable, and he’s a real dick, with actions ranging from amusingly mean to full-scale atrocities. It doesn’t help that he’s introduced as part of Mass Effect 2’s ensemble cast, of which nearly every other member (Sorry, Jacob) became a fan favorite to some degree. He also gets a bit shafted in Mass Effect 3, where he appears in a short side mission that is minimally impacted by his presence and that has no connection to his character arc or motivations. Despite this, I think Zaeed is a valuable and interesting character, and worth a closer look.

Let’s start with an on-paper concept of his character. Zaeed is on old merc, betrayed by his old partner and best friend and left for dead. Now he’s teamed up with Shepard for a promise of revenge and a small fortune in credits.

Now, I’m of the opinion that money is a poor binding motivation for a suicide mission. Where most of the companions in ME2 are bound to the mission through a sense of obligation to the galaxy as a whole or Shepard personally, Zaeed has only a big paycheck and extreme apathy towards his own survival. On the surface, the latter sounds like a more interesting motivation than the former, but with Zaeed, it… isn’t. To understand why, one only needs to look at Thane, who has a similar motivation. He knows he’s going to die, so he may as well do so in the pursuit of something good. But Zaeed doesn’t have anything contextualizing this mission as specifically worth dying on relative to any other. He doesn’t express a sense of obligation or even necessarily a preference for the galaxy to keep going. He simply doesn’t care. A character that truly doesn’t care is hard to care about.

So why do I like Zaeed as a character? Because the implications of his backstory are absolutely fascinating. He cofounded the Blue Suns, arguably the biggest and most dangerous mercenary group in the galaxy. And he didn’t cofound it by bringing a whole bunch of money and resources with which to start an organization, he cofounded it by being a really damn good mercenary. He put together teams of people and personally led them on dangerous missions, and he did it well enough that people kept coming to him to lead them. He was a good leader.

Now, most of the stories that Zaeed will tell Shepard about his past adventures that involve mercs under his command end in a lot of them dying grizzly deaths. From this, one would think that he was a poor, reckless leader. However, I think it’s clear from other details that these missions had to be the exception rather than the rule. For one, mercs don’t keep signing up for missions run by a guy who has a reputation for getting his team killed. For another, the Blue Suns is a massive organization with hundreds of mercenaries working for it, and it’s been built in its entirety in Zaeed’s lifetime. You can’t staff an organization with corpses. People have to survive to be hired on full-time and prove their worth so that leadership roles can be filled. One could argue that the organization didn’t develop into what it is now until after Zaeed was removed, but I find that argument uncompelling. For one, it compresses the already narrow timeline for the growth of the organization from nothing to the biggest mercenary group in the galaxy to a ludicrously small period, and for another, it’s shown in game that Zaeed knows the leadership of the Blue Suns, and they know him. If you bring Zaeed with you to recruit Archangel, the leader of the Blue Suns on Omega recognizes him and treats him with respect. To me, that seems like sufficient evidence to discount the idea that Zaeed was a poor leader.

Zaeed may have been a good leader in the past, but by the time of the game that is clearly no longer the case. He’s abrasive, violent, paranoid, and will utterly fail as the Strike Team Leader during the suicide mission. What happened to him?

Well, he got shot in the fucking head.

It is incredibly rare to take the kind of wound that Zaeed took and survive. A point-blank headshot is a death sentence. So how did Zaeed survive? It’s a sci-fi, so some very impressive technological feats are possible. But Zaeed was shot in a premeditated betrayal. Medical help was not close to hand, and no one was going to Lazarus him back to life. Zaeed’s only comment on his survival is that, “Rage is a hell of an anesthetic.” So he was shot in the head and made his own way to medical care afterwards. How did he do it?

Let’s look at a real-life example. Let’s look at Phineas Gage. Phineas Gage was a 19th century railroad foreman in the US until a tamping iron – the device used to pack down the explosives used in construction – was launched through his head by an errant explosion. To the amazement of all present, Gage stood up after the accident, apparently unharmed except for the massive hole in his head, and had to be convinced to stop working to go see the doctor. However, Gage was a different person after the accident. His personality was dramatically altered by the destruction of a portion of his brain, and he became more antisocial and exhibited poor impulse and emotional control. That’s as much as I’ll discuss Gage here, but he’s a fascinating figure and absolutely worth looking into more if it interests you.

Zaeed’s behavior during the game is explained very well by this comparison. His extreme behavior in his pursuit of revenge exemplifies his loss of emotional control, and the fact that he blows up a factory full of innocent people on the spot to try to get to Vido definitely demonstrates impulsivity. Even his general apathy is comparable to some accounts of Gage’s behavior after the accident, although those accounts are disputed.

In my mind, this makes Zaeed something of a tragic figure, but not because of the fact of his disability. The tragedy is that Zaeed, like Gage, finds himself in circumstances where he cannot get the help he needs. By most accounts, Gage’s impulse control improved as he aged, and, had he had proper support, his quality of life could probably have been immensely improved. Likewise, Zaeed has no friends or deep connections other than those who just betrayed him and killing is all he knows. Is it any surprise that he should throw himself into revenge, and then into a suicide mission? He has no one to help him understand that he has other options.

I wish more people cared about Zaeed Massani. I wish the game did a better job showing people why they should care. Because when you do a little bit of digging, there’s so much to care about.