Paramount’s ‘Halo’ Show Is Not Going Great

After a premiere that exceeded my expectations, I can't say that the show is going well after four episodes, and things are getting worse every week.

This has nothing to do with the show straying from series canon, it is just not a very good show overall, and keeps running into a bunch of issues both related and not related to the games.

When Master Chief was the lone survivor of a Covenant attack, his character made sense for the series. She has been completely separated from Chief and has been given her own spin-off storyline that seems to have more or less nothing to do with the main storyline. After two episodes as a brand new character, did Kwan ever get her own storyline? The show felt like it was trying to establish a relationship between her and Chief and now that is just a side plot.

The decision to have Chief not wear his helmet 98% of the time in this series was a bad one, even if I don't have an issue with his performance per se. Chief put on his helmet for 15 seconds to drive through the woods and then he immediately took it off again. I understand why he might not have his helmet on out of combat, but it makes the character feel disconnected from the game icon everyone knows and loves.

I'm down with nudity in my TV shows, but it's become a meme in the Halo series. I joked that Master Chief was going to lose one more layer of clothing. He was down to his undersuit and naked by the third episode, so he probably could have kept his pants on. nude butt in three of the last four episodes is an actual meme, as the show keeps trying to be adult with nudity.

I don't find the Master Chief's storyline interesting in terms of actual story telling. Halsey runs a program that takes child soldiers, turns them off, and makes them kill machines. We know that she was shady when she stole John and killed his parents, but we are building toward a revelation that she was not nice to John when he was an orphan. This is not new.

This week was particularly disappointing when we saw Spartan Kai cut out her own emotion pellet in the nude, and her fellow Spartan didn't notice the giant wound in her back. I understand that Halsey and her assistant are on a trip, but still, there would be mechanisms in place to show that a Spartan has done something drastic.

The budget here doesn't seem like what it needs to be, whether it's Chevy SUVs with armor plating or scenes that look like Master Chief is driving a Warthog through someone's backyard. Since the pilot, there has been roughly zero real action, and we have barely seen the Covenant at all. Kai talked about firing a Needler instead of actually firing one. I knew a show wouldn't be as action-intensive as the games, but it's getting boring.

I don't think this is working well for many reasons, but there is another half a season to go. It feels less and less likely that things will turn around.

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The Herokiller series and The Earthborn trilogy are my sci-fi novels.