There is a game called Halo.
I wanted to reflect on the series as a whole, now that all nine episodes of the first season have come and gone. Even if it wasn't greenlit ahead of time, season 2 would have been the biggest series in the streaming service because of its popularity.
It isn't very good.
It is not a very good sci-fi show, with many better options out there. It's not a very good show, with baffling character decisions and lore changes made almost every single episode. There are more to come.
There are a few things that I liked about the first season. The most likable character in the show is Kate Kennedy's Kai-125, a member of Silver Team who is allowed to come into her own once she removes her emotional suppression chip. I wanted it to be her leading the series.
Even if some of the decisions made using Cortana were weird and bad by the end, the decision to use the game was the right one, and I even appreciated the CG blend they used. She was one of the few pieces of the series that reminded me that I was watching a show.
There is a game called Halo.
A bunch of Jackals and Grunts took on Master Chief, his fellow Spartans and the USNC in a very good battle sequence. It was done well and a lot of fun, but the other two major battles of the series weren't nearly as good, and felt diminished by bad special effects and choreography.
That's about it. The source material changes at almost every turn, and that's what makes everything else so bad. If you are going to make changes, it should be for the better, not making things worse.
The biggest problem with the show is what they did with Master Chief. I can tell you that the John-117 is pretty much never felt like Master Chief, even though it's pretty much the same thing as the Master Chief. The decision to have his helmet off, often stripped of armor and with a million lines, is contrary to what we know about the Chief. He becomes a completely different character from the gaming icon. It's amplified by the fact that Pedro Pascal's Mandalorian is right there, showing you can act and show emotion even when you can't.
Over the course of the show, I would have been fine with a few face reveals, but it just ran so far in the opposite direction that it became a meme. The fact that Master Chief has sex was odd, but the context was ridiculous, that he was sleeping with an enemy prisoner of war in her holding cell, and that she was watching events that will lead to the Fall of Reach. A stupid writing decision.
It's easy to see how the entire storyline could have been trimmed down by eliminating it. At the beginning of the series, I was fully in favor of having Chief and Kwan Ha team up as unlikely allies. Another baffling decision was to immediately ship her off for a completely different storyline that has nothing to do with anything else going on in the universe. She was never seen or heard from again after the last episode of the season. They made her unimportant. The script made her useless and there was nothing inherently wrong with her character.
It's called Kwan Ha.
I don't believe in a second season of this show. Things seem to be moving slowly. We didn't get to see the Fall of Reach or an actual Halo. I don't know what multi-year plan they may be planning here, but it seems like they haven't taken much feedback to heart, and it's kind of weird.
This is a failed experiment and I don't think the brand needs any help at the moment. I was fascinated to watch the crazy story decisions unfold every week and I look forward to doing so for another year, but is the show really good? No, it is not.
You can follow me on social media. My weekly newsletter, God Rolls, is free to subscribe to.
The Herokiller series and The Earthborn trilogy are my sci-fi novels.
All Rights Reserved © 2024
