Kal'Reegar: the Migrant Fleet marine who held the bridge on Haestrom

Kal'Reegar was a quarian soldier of the Migrant Fleet Marines, and the last man standing from the squad sent to guard Tali'Zorah on the old quarian colony of Haestrom. Commander Shepard found him pinned at one end of a bridge with a punctured suit, firing an ML-77 Missile Launcher at a geth platoon that was working its way toward the observatory where Tali was still at her instruments. He mattered afterwards for a different reason. When Tali was put on trial for treason before the Admiralty Board, Reegar was one of the few people in the fleet willing to say out loud that the charge was rubbish.

Who is Kal'Reegar?#

Kal'Reegar was a marine of the quarian Migrant Fleet, part of the squad assigned to protect Tali'Zorah vas Neema on Haestrom, and one of only two members of that expedition the geth did not kill.

The assignment was a science escort. Tali had come to Haestrom to study the system's sun, and Reegar's squad was there to keep her safe while she worked. The geth arrived and turned the escort job into a last stand. By the time Shepard reached the site, Reegar's people were dead, his bio-suit had been holed, and he was trading missile fire with a platoon that had a Geth Colossus in it.

For a quarian, a torn suit is not a scratch. Reegar treated it as one, and took mock offence at Shepard for pointing it out. He was willing to keep fighting in that condition, which left Shepard with a choice: talk him into standing down and covering the team's back, or let him join the assault on the Colossus. The platoon goes down either way and Tali comes out of the observatory alive.

Reegar's own survival is not guaranteed. If Shepard does not insist that he sit the fight out, and then takes too long killing the Colossus, Reegar is killed. If he lives, he limps into the observatory to report that he has already called for a pick-up, and Tali tells him she is not going back to the flotilla with him. She is joining the Normandy instead, and she hands him the sun data to deliver to the Admiralty Board in her place. Ask Tali about him later aboard ship and she reports that he pulled through with nothing worse than a minor infection.

The trial aboard the flotilla#

Everything that follows is contingent on Haestrom. If Reegar died there, he is simply absent from the rest of the story.

If he lived, he reappears when Shepard takes Tali back to the fleet to answer a charge of treason. Most of the flotilla had already made up its mind. Reegar had not, and he was blunt about holding Tali in high regard and disbelieving the allegations against her, which made him useful as a character witness for the defence.

Asked what the quarians should do about reclaiming a homeworld, he gave an answer with no bravado in it. A war against the geth to take the homeworlds back would be futile, he said, and it would end up hurting the Migrant Fleet. That was not a refusal to fight. He would go where his duty sent him. He simply did not think the war would work.

Should Shepard choose to rally the crowd rather than argue the evidence, Reegar steps forward on his own. He backs Veetor'Nara's position that Tali does not deserve exile, tells the Admirals in unpolished terms that Tali has done more for the fleet than they ever will, and finishes by saying that if she is exiled then he should be exiled with her. Tali could not quite believe he had done it. Reegar's response was that she would have done the same for him, and that after Shepard had spoken he could hardly stay quiet.

The point-and-shoot man who was not#

Reegar called himself a simple soldier at every opportunity. The record does not support him. His field experience had given him a working grasp of both small skirmishes and large wars, and on Haestrom he could tell Shepard useful things about the Colossus and about the shape of the ground they were fighting over.

The trial showed the same thing in a different setting. He picked up quickly on the politics behind the charge against Tali, and he was respected enough that both Admiral Shala'Raan and Admiral Han'Gerrel asked what he thought. His recommendation was that Tali be allowed to retake the Alarei herself, because winning the ship back would win the crowd, and the Admirals agreed with him. If Shepard withheld Tali's evidence at the trial, Reegar worked out anyway that she had found something she was unwilling to show.

He left the trial with new orders: escorting quarian technicians on a search for further signs of the dark energy build-up nobody could yet explain.

Palaven#

Kal'Reegar's last appearance is an email rather than a scene, and it only arrives if several things line up. Shepard has to have kept him alive on Haestrom, the quarians have to have come through their war with the geth, and the story has to have reached the point after the fall of Thessia.

Under those conditions the message reports that Reegar and his squad were killed on Palaven, repairing and then defending a communications tower that was relaying mission-critical traffic back to the Turian Hierarchy. It is a fitting end for a marine whose recorded career consisted almost entirely of standing in front of something so that other people could finish their work.

Odds and ends#

The Reegar Carbine takes its name from his family, which produced marines across generations rather than from Kal alone. His visor is purple on Haestrom and black aboard the flotilla in the original release, a discrepancy the Legendary Edition settled by making it black in both places. Unused debriefing notes written for Tali's recruitment mission give his full name as Kal'Reegar vas Lomas, which never made it into the finished game. And his line at the trial, "Just stating facts, ma'am", is an echo of Joe Friday from Dragnet.