The Halo TV Series is Still Bad (S2 E1 Review)

I gave the Halo show a chance. I really did.

When I first learned that it was going to be set in an alternate continuity rather than being canon, I was disappointed, but it wasn’t a deal-breaker.

As it became clear that they’d be changing a lot about the universe, I made a choice to accept the show on its own terms rather than get hung up on those changes.

When the trailer revealed there would be a human working for the Covenant, I was irritated, but I decided to still give the show a chance. After all, a focus on human villains might have been an unavoidable or executively mandated concession to budgetary constraints. CGI aliens are expensive, and the handful of shots in the first season featuring them may have been all the show could afford.

Then the first season of the show was released, and, despite my heaping benefit of the doubt on it at every turn, I just couldn’t deny that it was bad. The characters’ behavior was seldom organic. They mostly did things because the plot wanted them to. There were a lot of repetitive conversations. Characters were pointlessly hostile to each other just to manufacture drama that went nowhere. 

Even after being thoroughly disappointed by the first season, I was willing to give season two a shot. After all, there was some changeover in the higher-ups this time around. Plus, in the days leading up to Season 2’s release, we got an interview from Pablo Schreiber acknowledging that the first season had been flawed and claiming that they had worked to address its issues. As promotional material trickled out, it became clear that the Fall of Reach was going to happen this season, which would be a great onramp for the show to start following the story of the games’ universe. I wasn’t naïve enough to think the odds were in the show’s favor, but the early signs were about as heartening as they could’ve been.

Well, now I’ve seen the new episodes, and I’m here to tell you the show has squandered its second chance. It’s bad for exactly the same reason the first season was bad. Unnatural character behavior and manufactured drama. The best way to show you what I mean is to go scene by scene through the first episode and explain how this critique applies to the various conversations our characters have.

Like the first season, this premier begins on a deceptively promising note, as Silver Team assists with the evacuation of a planet that is about to be glassed. We get some passable conversation between the Spartans about their newfound humanity after pulling out their control chips. From there, we cut to some marines trying and failing to get some civilians to evacuate, and here we see the first example of what I’m talking about.

The civilians are reluctant to evacuate.

I repeat, they are reluctant to get out from under the giant deadly lasers that are about to melt them into glass.

This glassing laser is way too small, by the way.

Why? Two reasons are given. First, they have evacuated at least one planet previously, which I guess has made them tired of it. Second, they have religious beliefs about their land that make them hesitant to abandon it.

Unfortunately for the show, those two reasons contradict each other. The fact that they came here from their previous home means they’ve been on their current land for, at the most, a few decades. How did they develop such a close spiritual connection to it that they would rather die than abandon it?

The answer is simple. Because there wouldn’t be conflict in the scene otherwise. In order to facilitate said conflict, the colonists have to be irrational, and the marines have to be overly confrontational and inept in their attempts to persuade them to leave.

After a decent action scene, we get scene of Keyes debriefing Silver Team. For some reason, Chief is confused about why he fought covenant on the ground just before the planet was glassed. He doesn’t articulate his point very well. The real anomaly is the fact that the elites he saw left the area seconds before the glassing laser fired. However, if he stated that clearly, there wouldn’t be any conflict in the scene, so instead he speaks as if the covenant shouldn’t have left their ships at any point during the invasion process.

Instead of explaining the several reasons the Covenant could have for doing that (disabling anti-air defenses being principle among them), Keyes straight up gaslights Chief about whether he saw troops on the ground at all, because if he responded in a reasonable way, the scene wouldn’t have any conflict.

This conversation is interrupted by the introduction of a new character, Ackerson, who is here to replace Halsey as director of the spartan program after the events of the first season. Ackerson immediately begins condescending to our heroes in order to get us to dislike him, before admitting aloud that he has no reason to be at this debriefing and leaving of his own accord less than two minutes after his arrival.

From there we cut to a slave auction, where refugees from glassed planets are indenturing themselves to the inhabitants of The Rubble. This scene exists so a new character, who we’ll later learn is named Felix, can announce to the crowd, including Soren, that he knows where Halsey is. While his claim probably does warrant some skepticism, the degree to which the audience dismisses what he says is excessive. They do this because if they took his words more seriously, the scene wouldn’t have any conflict.

Our next scene is more heel work from Ackerson. Chief goes to his office and tries to convince him that the presence of a Covenant ground force must have some deeper meaning. Like Keyes, Ackerson refuses to believe that this ground force could’ve existed, going so far as to imply that what he saw was a hallucination induced by his having had Cortona implanted in him months earlier. To be fair, we later that the soldier chief saved denied seeing covenant for her own (stupid) reasons, but even in light of that fact, it’s baffling why Ackerson would think Cortana’s presence inside Chief months earlier could cause such a hallucination. Of course, if Ackerson believed Chief, or disbelieved him in a reasonable way, the scene wouldn’t have any conflict.

The next scene is a conversation between Soren and his partner. There’s a minute or two of decent dialogue as she expresses empathy for the people who have been displaced by the war, but that brief stint of quality writing evaporates as the conversation shifts to Halsey. Her insistence that Soren is obsessed with Halsey, and that the look on his face in the slave auction scene proved it, is a wonderful example of the writing maxim show don’t tell. They could’ve had Soren’s behavior in that scene convey this obsession, but apparently it was easier to have another character explain it later on.

We cut to Silver Team watching a newscast where the UNSC falsely claims that the planet from the opening scene was successfully evacuated, before being approached by another team of Spartans, who are massive dicks to them because there wouldn’t be any conflict in the scene otherwise.

Despite this dickishness, the fact that they’re headed into a similar combat situation has Chief worried for their safety, and he returns to Ackerson’s office to argue that the other team needs to be prepared to encounter the Covenant. Chief is overly confrontational in this scene, far beyond what a real soldier could ever get away with, though, to be fair to him, Ackerson’s pointless skepticism would frustrate me as well.

The next scene is decent. It shows us a bit of interaction between Soren and his son. It still technically has pointless manufactured conflict. Soren’s insistence that monsters don’t exist is bizarre given the number of inhumanly malevolent elements active in this universe, many of which Soren has personally dealt with, but Bokeem Woodbine’s performance as Soren manages to save this scene, and it comes off as sweet.

Admittedly, his denial of the existence of child-stealing monsters might be a deliberate use of dramatic irony, seeing as, in the next scene, Soren approaches Felix about his alleged knowledge of Halsey’s location.

We then see Chief, wearing civilian clothes in an urban environment, meeting covertly with Margaret Parangosky, who also lost her job after the events of season one. This scene is refreshingly free of useless bickering, because the conflict in it comes from the fact that both Chief and Parangosky will be in big trouble if anyone learns about this meeting.

Useless bickering resumes as we cut to Soren’s shipmates bullying Felix as they approach Halsey’s alleged location, a wrecked ship floating in space. As Soren and Felix enter, Felix makes a bunch of strangely insulting comments about Soren’s arm, because there wouldn’t be any conflict in the scene if he were polite and respectful. This angers Soren, but he’s motivated enough to find Halsey that he looks past it. Entering the room where Halsey allegedly is, we get one of the episode’s better moments, as Felix reveals that all of this was a trap. He’s a government agent, and he’s lured Soren into an ambush so he could be arrested. This twist is one of the few things about the episode that straight-up works. I genuinely didn’t see it coming, but it totally makes sense in retrospect, just like a good twist should.

The next scene is a strange one. Chief is still in the city from earlier, visiting an AI who seems to be some combination between a therapist and a prostitute. He initially speaks to her as if she is Cortana, then immediately scolds her for going along with his roleplay, saying she can’t replace Cortana. This scene suffers from the same writing problem as the others. Chief’s fluctuating emotional state exists to add conflict to a scene that otherwise wouldn’t have any. That said, Pablo Schreiber does a good job selling the idea that Chief’s feelings are complicated rather than inconsistent, and, as a result, this scene is one of the better ones.

The final scene gives us some narration from Kwan Ha, who we see is hiding in a cave for some reason. The scene is bland, but nothing about it is particularly frustrating to me. I say “to me” because I imagine the significant contingent of fans who hate Kwan Ha will be very disappointed to learn that she’s still around. I, personally, don’t think she’s any worse than the other bland characters, so I don’t really mind.

And that’s the episode. I hope the past several paragraphs have made it clear why the writing in this show isn’t good. Over and over again, it prioritizes short-term drama over character consistency and logic. This is done in an attempt to make the show dramatic, but the drama is hollow because it’s driven by the transparent hand of the writer rather than the characters and their established motives and traits. This results in a bunch of unpleasant people dully bickering with one another over things we don’t care about.

This show is not bad because it is an unfaithful adaptation. To be sure, that fact makes it more disappointing to those of us who dearly love the Halo franchise. However, if this same show had been an original IP, it would still be mediocre and disappointing. Its characters are fundamentally not compelling because their behavior is inorganic and irrational. In the absence of compelling characters, the show is doomed to be dull and lifeless, ensuring that even when the show manages to give us a decent action scene, as it occasionally does, none of the characters who’re in danger are worth caring about.