Can you save the Batarians during Mass Effect 2’s Arrival DLC?

The Arrival DLC starts as a simple rescue mission, given to Commander Shepard by Admiral Hackett. Your task is to head to the Bahak System and locate an Alliance scientist named Amanda Kenson, who was kidnapped by Batarians after discovering evidence of an imminent Reaper invasion. When Shepard arrives at the Batarian prison, he discovers Kenson is being interrogated.

After breaking her out, he learns of the true purpose of her project: destroying a mass relay in a Batarian colonial system to prevent an imminent Reaper invasion. This system includes a Batarian colony with over 300,000 people on it. Kenson and Shepard return to the Project Base, which is located on the very asteroid that Kenson plans to smash into the Alpha Relay. She goes on to explain that the Reaper invasion is estimated to occur in only 2 days, based on the intermittent pulses being put off by the artifact.

Unfortunately, close contact with the Reaper artifact has led to Kenson and her team becoming indoctrinated, and they incapacitate and sedate Shepard.

Shepard wakes up to find himself in a sealed medical lab with only 2 hours left until the Reapers invade. The time to act is now. After fighting your way through the station, you will arrive at a computer terminal and activate the project. Here you are given two choices - call the Normandy for pickup or warn the Batarians colonies.

Both choices inevitably lead to the same outcome - Kenson shuts down long range communications; Shepard tracks her down and prevents her from destroying the asteroid; Shepard launches the asteroid at the mass relay, escaping via The Normandy before the impact destroys the entire system, killing over 300,000 Batarians in the process.

Unfortunately there is no way to complete the Arrival DLC without sacrificing the Batarian colonists. Your post-mission debrief with Hackett will be the same, regardless of whether you walked the paragon or renegade path in this mission.

Even if Shepard were able to alert the Batarian colonies, it’s unlikely that many people would have been saved. First the Batarians would have needed to immediately believe The Commander’s warning. Second they would have needed to organize an evacuation effort in under 2 hours. Maybe a few ships could have made it to the mass relay in time to avoid the system’s destruction. But still - hundreds of thousands of people were going to wind up dead, regardless.

While I really like the Arrival DLC from a story and gameplay standpoint, it’s not very satisfying in terms of choices and consequences. Arrival poses a really difficult moral question to the player - is it worth it to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of lives in order to potentially save billions or trillions? Unfortunately, we’re not able to fully explore this moral question because we’re only given one choice - destroy the mass relay to stop the Reaper invasion.

I can understand why Bioware did it this way - if you were to allow a Reaper invasion to occur midway through Mass Effect 2’s main story - it would kind of mess up the whole storyline of the game. The Collector threat and your prep work for the suicide mission would all become moot in the face of a fullscale Reaper invasion.

In the end Shepard’s actions delayed the Reaper invasion for roughly one year, which is when Mass Effect 3 begins. There is some unique dialogue in Mass Effect 3, if you completed the Arrival DLC and imported your ME2 save file.

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