Renegade Reinterpretations


Dossier: Liara


"The more I search, the more clear everything becomes. The Protheans were not the only dying civilization to attempt one last defiance, one last weapon against the Reapers. I can prove it. I've found it. And Shepard, I've found a Reaper."


I'm going to tell you a story. Imagine, if you will, that Liara wasn't Bioware's singular golden child of Mass Effect. Imagine if she didn't get all the love and special content and exclusive comics to herself. Imagine if they were shared. I think you might enjoy this Reinterpretation a bit more, even if Liara seems a bit less centric to her own Reinterpretation.

The cornerstone of the change of Liara, but also a few of the other old faces from the Normandy, comes in the comic 'Redemption.' Canonically, Lira gets a bunch of comic-book sex appeal as she indulges in a crazy conspiracy to kidnap Commander Shepard's corpse. Why does she care so much for a dead body? Optimists say its love that can't move on: paranoids say its because she's a stalker who can't accept. Regardless of your personal take, this time, it's a bit less obsessive and she's not alone.

See, Liara is trying adapt to life in 0 PS (Post Shepard) when, as she's moving back to Thessia, she gets a strange mail from some guy who calls himself Archangel. Claiming not only that Shepard is alive, but to know where the Commander is, Archangel asks Liara to come to Omega to help out... where Liara also meets Tali, and an entire squad behind the masked man who claims revealing his identity could endanger them all. What Archangel reveals is this: unable to reach an escape pod, Shepard managed to make it into a stasis pod that survived the destruction of the Normandy. The pod has kept Shepard alive, but dormant, in space... until the Broker found it and brought it to Omega in order to hand over to the Collectors. That's how Archangel, who's been fighting the Collectors, found out about this.

Now, 'Archangel' never takes off his mask, so we can't 'know' that he's Garrus until ME2.. But to spoil it for you, it's Garrus, trying to protect his identity so he can continue his crusade on Omega. Whether sent by the Heirarchy to investigate Omega (Xenonationalist-influenced Garrus) or doing so on his own initiative after being fed up with C-SEC (Assimilation-influenced), while fighting the good fight and picking fights with the Collectors, Garrus stumbled across the Shadow Broker's operation of trying to smuggle Shepard's corpse to the Collectors. Tali and Liara are called in as backup for his gang, and as people he can trust to take Shepard somewhere safe in Council space.

A good many fewer poor plot twists later, the group encounters Cerberus and a wary team-up occurs. And in the course of the fighting, the Shadow Broker's agents attempt to sabotage the good commander's pod: if they can't have Shepard alive, no one can. They fail to kill Shepard, but manage grievous harm and sabotage the pod. If the stasis field drops, Shepard will die... though Cerberus promises that they can prevent that. And thus Tali and Liara are faced with the choice of handing Shepard to Cerberus, or to most likely see the Commander die. They give Shepard's body to Cerberus for lack of anything better to do, and need to split in order to evade the Shadow Broker. 'Archangel' and his crew will stay on Omega, fighting the good fight. Tali is at last ready to go home and return from her pilgrimage, where she'll be more or less safe from the Broker. And Liara gains new resolve to use her Prothean knowledge and her mother's network of influence in order to help the Council prepare for the Reapers. Namely by xeno-archeology.

And, sadly for some but happily for others including myself, no revenge complex to justify a shift from mousy, shy archeologist to badass crime boss who makes death threats. Doesn't happen.

Instead, in ME2 Liara is working with the Council (and indirectly with Cerberus) from Illium, organizing and researching xeno-archeology. Her biggest role? She finds the Derelict Reaper and forwards it to Shepard. Her side-quests? Someone's been stealing her data and trying to corrupt her research files, and Shepard needs to track whoever it is down. Of course, it's an agent of the Shadow Broker.

LotSB also takes a reboot, of course. Liara, researching something else entirely, puts the dots together and stumbles across what she thinks is a Collector outpost of some size. It's actually the Broker's hideout, of course, but that's a realization that takes some time to unfold. Ultimately the Broker (less omniscient than portrayed in canon) is an indoctrinated pawn of the Reapers who sought to save himself by striking deals with the Collectors: the Broker network is actually an example of Collector technology used for espionage, and is/was the cornerstone of the Reaper intelligence network in the galaxy.

Part of the assault on the Broker's base is that, because we DO think that this is a Collector outpost, when Shepard attacks he has backup from the Alliance as well (and Hackett in particular). What happens next really depends on how LotSB is handled in ME3: if it's unimportant or easy to hand wave aside by other means, the Broker's base is destroyed because the Broker would rather see it gone than captured. If not, the Alliance takes control of it, replacing Liara as the new Broker and turning the Broker network into the long arm of Alliance Intel, at last putting the Alliance at par with the STG in terms of a galactic information net.

At the end of it LotSB, Liara is going to stick around to help the Alliance analyze the Broker's files, looking for any clues or hints that could help save the galaxy. As an archeologist, rather than a crime lord.

Liara's Broker dossier has a few interesting points that may intrigue. Liara was not retaliated against by the Broker because the Broker wanted to seize her next big finding (the Derelict Reaper). Liara maintains correspondence with the Virmire Survivor, and learns from the VS that Shepard was on Horizon before Shepard arrives on Illium. And finally, it appears Liara spends a number of evenings at Matriarch Aethyla's bar, seeking advice.


Author's (Other) Notes:

Liara's ME2 Reinterpretation is heavily tied into Garrus and Tali's, and all three are tied into the Redemption comic analog. Thus, Liara wasn't quite the focus of most of her own entry. On the other hand, it gave her more length than she otherwise would have had.

I'll be frank: I don't particularly care for the way Bioware changed Liara between ME1 and ME2. Some did: I recognize that. There will be those who dislike this aspect of Reinterpretation. But I don't view Liara as a necessary agent to be the Shadow Broker (if taking the network is needed at all), and I view the change from socially awkward bookish nerd girl to edgy, espionage action-girl more than a little jarring. Especially when Tali was the action-girl alien in ME1, and Garrus an equally suitable action lead for a comic. A Garrus-Tali-Liara team up on Omega makes sense to me.

So Liara stays true to her character in ME1. Is she still a capable fighter? Of course. Is she now the most powerful woman espionage crime boss in the galaxy with a slight (or not so slight) obsession for Shepard? No. And that, my readers, is an improvement in my book. Liara can retain significance and helpfulness to fighting the Reapers with her initially established strengths of xeno-archeology: Liara's the one who looks for those pre-prothean superweapons that other civilizations tried to use to fight against the Reapers.