‘Halo’ Episode 5: No Butts, No Memes, Only Glorious Combat

The first four episodes of the Halo series have been hit or miss. It has been dull for an adaptation of an action-packed video game series, and has become a meme due to the amount of naked rear ends the series seems to enjoy showing on a weekly basis.

This week, no butt, no meme, just a realization of what this show could be if it wasn't getting dragged down in its quieter moments. There are more to come.

It is a very short episode, barely over thirty five minutes. There is a pointless plotline where the entire thing is her escaping from handcuffs. The central mystery of Chief's origins is something that anyone paying attention should be aware of, as he was stolen in the dead of night after his parents died.

This is not great, but episode 5 more than makes up for it with a glorious final battle between Spartans, UNSC and the Covenant as they fight over the new, larger artifact they have unearthed.

This battle is very good. Everything I could have hoped for with a live action battle in the style of the video games. We have it all.

• Grunts and Jackals attacking for the first time.
• A UNSC Marine getting blown up by a Needler (I audibly gasped)
• Master Chief getting two other Spartans to ride around in a Warthog.
• Master Chief (kind of) hijacking a Covenant Banshee with an aerial leap.
• Master Chief using dropped Covenant weaponry against them.
• Master Chief going nuts on the Covenent with a shotgun and pummeling an Elite into a goo.
• A Brute with a Gravity Hammer showing up (though no big fight with him yet).

It was great! The show was well done and it felt like it had earned its budget. I suppose I understand that the money isn't there to do something like this every week, but once a true battle finally did arrive, it did not disappoint, which was great to see.

I have been extremely critical of this show for a while now, and while I still think at a base level it is not all that great, I was impressed with what they did with this particular sequence, which made the preceding 25 minutes of the usual nonsense. We will see how many battles we get before the end of the season, but I hope for at least two more, including an epic finale.

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