Halo: Season 2

The war between the Covenant and the United Nations Space Command is continuing to escalate. Frontier colonies continue to fall, whilst both sides are desperate to track down the mysterious artifact known as "Halo." The Covenant's advance soon brings Reach, the largest planet in the outer colonies, within range, sparking the biggest battle of the war so far.

Halo is a military science fiction franchise about people and aliens shooting one another, understandable as its primary instalments have all been first-person shooter video games. But as it has gone on, the series has built up a loyal following for its surprisingly deep background material (partially worked out by "proper SF author" Greg Bear) and extended cast of characters, despite them being mostly relegated to cut-scenes and secondary media.

A Halo TV series therefore isn't quite as batty an idea as it sounds, as the universe contains enough interesting ideas to be fleshed out in a dramatic format. Unfortunately, the first season of the show proved divisive, at best. Elements of the lore and setting were jumbled up and delivered in an odd order, established canon characters were either nowhere to be seen, showed up in different roles or were killed off in short order, and Master Chief spent most of the season without his helmet on (Chief, like Judge Dredd, is never seen in the games without his helmet). Some fans were livid, whilst more casual viewers found the show watchable but underwhelming.

This second season, like a lot of recent second seasons for adapted shows with iffy openings (see also Foundation and Time, Wheel of), is an improvement, but again, a qualified one. The show is more focused this year with the search for Halo being a driving force in many episodes, at least for Master Chief. Early episodes complicate this with internal UNSC politics and internal shenanigans with those space pirates nobody really cares about, but the writers are at least determined to bring all the storylines together mid-season on Reach for a massive showdown with the Covenant. This war episode is mostly impressive, but it does strain the limits of even this show's generous budget. The second half of the season unfortunately engages in some wheel spinning and makes the crucial error of thinking the audience gives even 10% as much of a toss about Soren's family than the writers do. Things do pull back together to deliver a very satisfying finale which finally, after seventeen episodes, does catch us up to where we really should have been in Episode 1 of Season 1. Better late than never, I guess?

The cast deliver good performances, with Pablo Schreiber doing a good growly Master Chief (although he somehow spends even less time in Season 2 with his helmet on than in Season 1), Kate Kennedy making Kai-125 both a sympathetic character and a badass, and Natascha McElhone's walking moral vacuum of Dr. Halsey being delightfully conniving in every scene she's in. Kwan (Yerin Ha) and Makee (Charlie Murphy) are still here, but are much better-served than the scripts they had in Season 1, and the finale finally makes us realise why Kwan is important and it nicely ties into the established Halo backstory. Bokeem Woodbine continues to have more fun than anybody else in the cast as Soren-066 (since Burn Gorman sadly left the show in Season 1), although even he seems to get bored of his "family kidnapping" plot after the interminable-feeling number of episodes it takes up. Particularly welcome are newcomers Joseph Morgan as Colonel Ackerson and Cristina Rolo as Talia Perez, who both add some surprisingly good scenes to the show, the former as an apparent new antagonist and the latter as an ordinary UNSC soldier dragged into Master Chief's orbit.

It does feel like maybe Season 2 has had a little bit of a budget trim: there's a lot of re-use of the same sets (one hallway on Reach becomes incredibly familiar) and there's very few of the all-Covenant CGI scenes we had in the first season. The action is mostly good, with the highlight being a one-on-one duel in the finale and several parts of the fall of Reach, but some of the effects are definitely iffy, like muzzle flares looking like they were made in MS Paint and copy-pasted over the guns. Obviously and correctly Hollywood is being ultra careful with weapons on sets these days, but it feels like the vfx for that could have been a lot better (especially as after-added muzzle flares is something people have been doing for decades at this point).

For those wanting an accurate retelling of the video games, Season 2 is better, but marginally. Seeing the fall of Reach, the iconic backstory moment of the franchise, later fleshed out for a prequel novel and game, is cool, but the absence of the many of the characters and events from both the Fall of Reach novel and the Halo: Reach video game may be frustrating. Some elements that don't show up until much later in the storyline turn up surprisingly early here, which feeds into the feeling that the TV writers don't seem to want the story to unfold as naturally as it did in the games, instead feeding in deep cuts from the lore when the people who really care will be annoyed by the show's deviation from the source material, whilst newcomers will likely be bewildered or not notice/care. Including an Arbiter, but not the Arbiter (the co-protagonist of Halo 2 and one of the franchise's most popular characters after Master Chief), but not making that clearer, is a good example of the writers tapping the game material but in an unnecessarily obtuse way.

Still, making a nine-hour TV show based on corridor shooting and occasionally driving a Warthog (or is it a Puma?) was clearly never going to work, so changes were necessary in the transfer of medium. It'll be up to each viewer to determine if this level of change works for them, and if they're unfamiliar with the games, whether the show works as a stand-alone experience.

For this non-hardcore Halo fan (casual appreciator might be a better descriptor), the sophomore season of Halo (***½) is better than its first, and moves up from "worth watching if there's nothing else on" to "solid sci-fi pulp action." It feels like a lot of potential from the source material is being left on the table here, but the show is at least moving in the right direction. Halo is available to watch worldwide right now on Paramount+.

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Halo: Season 1

In the year 2552, the planet Madrigal is in open rebellion against the United Nations Space Command, discounting reports that other human worlds are fighting again alien invaders. However, the aliens, the Covenant, attack the planet and butcher the inhabitants of a small town. An elite unit of Spartan super-soldiers, Silver Team, arrives but uncovers a bigger mystery related to alien obelisks and the single survivor of the colony, Kwan Ha. A battle of wits and wills begins between the Covenant and the UNSC, with the commander of Silver Team, Master Chief Petty Officer John-117, proving to be unexpectedly important to what is to come.

It's been over twenty years since the Halo franchise first appeared and, even being charitable, it's fair to say that the series is long since past its peak. Naturally, this is the moment that a Halo TV show chooses to arrive, just as WarCraft and Assassin's Creed both received adaptations long after their moments of cultural dominance had passed, and as a result were met with indifferent shrugs.

The Halo TV show takes the route of being a prequel to the events of the video games, set even before the events of Halo: Reach, but it is also explicitly set in an alternate timeline to the games. Characters, ideas and factions are present who do not exist in the games, and most of the game characters, races and stories have been tweaked for their presentation on screen. Just about the only thing that hasn't been significantly redesigned is the hardware. Weapons, armour, aliens and spacecraft all arrive with very solid approximations of their appearances in the video games.

As with the games, the story focus on John-117 (The Wire's Pablo Schreiber), better known as Master Chief, a Spartan super-soldier who is one of Earth's best hopes in the war against the Covenant, an alliance of several alien races united by religion. Unlike the games, Master Chief is just one of an ensemble cast and we spend a lot of time with other characters: Dr. Halsey (Natascha McElhone), John's effective mentor and mother figure; Cortana (Jen Taylor), a newly-created artificial intelligence with loyalty issues; Soren-066 (Bokeem Woodbine), a former Spartan turned insurrectionist leader; Commander Keyes (Olive Gray), a UNSC officer and scientist; Kwan Ha (Yerin Ha), a rebel on the planet Madrigal; and Makee (Charlie Murphy), a human captured by the Covenant as a child and indoctrinated in their religion. We also spend a fair amount of time with the other members of Master Chief's Silver Team, particularly Kai-125 (Kate Kennedy).

The first season divides its story into several strands. In one, we learn more about the creation of the Spartan programme, particularly the way it inhibits the emotional development of the soldiers, and how Master Chief (and, later, Kai) deal with that revelation. There is some redundancy here - having two characters undergoing the same emotional journey is odd - but the actors handle the story well. Master Chief also learns more about his childhood and how he joined the Spartan programme. Dr. Halsey's dubious morality and willingness to overstep certain bounds to achieve her goals is present and correct from the video games, although this version of the character is a bit more obviously a bad 'un from the start, and her arc lacks nuance.

In a second strand we follow Kwan Ha's story as the last survivor of a massacre into becoming a potential rebel leader under Soren's tutelage. This story is competently executed, and both Woodbine and Burn Gorman as the villainous Vinsher Grath are having more fun than anyone else in the cast, but it's connection to the rest of the story and the setting feels thin. It's almost worthwhile for the final showdown with Grath, where Burn Gorman chews scenery with delicious aplomb.

In a third strand we follow the journey of Makee from Covenant stooge to discovering life among other humans. This story feels fairly random: the Covenant of the early games would never recruit or use a human to work for them (it would go against their entire religious ethos) and the feeling emerges that they had to give the Covenant a human representative to save on the CGI budget (the Covenant CGI is both excellent and fleeting) more than because there was a good story purpose for her existence. This is frustrating as Charlie Murphy gives a good performance (a lot of it in an nonexistent alien language), and deserves better material.

The season's pacing is uneven, dedicating entire episodes to some stories so entire sub-casts of characters don't appear, with even Master Chief sitting an episode out. To be fair, the games have also shown the Halo universe can survive without the big MC (the two Halo Wars games, Halo: Reach and Halo: ODST do without Master Chief as well), but given the main story focus here is on Master Chief's activities prior to the war for Reach, him sitting out a fair bit of the story is a bit of an odd choice. Having him spend most of the time he does appear without a helmet, even in extended action sequences, is an even odder one.

The thing is, all these choices could be borne if the end result was great, but instead it has to settle for being...kinda okay, I guess? The actors are all very solid, many of the ideas are fine (apart from the human Covenant member) and the show does have an ace up its sleeve with its action sequences, which are extremely well-handled. The battle sequences in the first and last episode genuinely feel like movie setpieces, and smaller action scenes throughout the rest of the series are decent. A bone-crunching internal conflict between Spartans genuinely sells the idea of these guys being human+ and you don't want to get in their way. These moments give us glimpses of a considerably better show that could have been created from the same ideas.

The show could have also tightened up its pacing a bit. There isn't really enough story to fill nine episodes and six to seven would have probably been better. There's also a lot of faffing around with ideas and elements that aren't very well handled, and for every change to the backstory and premise to make things more practical and affordable, there's another two or three that feel like change for change's sake. Even for a casual appreciator of the video games like myself rather than a deeply-invested megafan, a lot of these changes feel pointless.

The first season of the Halo TV show (***) ends up being okay. It's watchable, with some good performances and some outstanding action sequences. But the show is a bit flabby, the changes to the source material are mostly unnecessary and the show has that sheen of base-level, dull competence that a lot of modern TV shows have acquired. A second season could be a lot better, assuming they focus on the war for Reach and the search for the Halo itself. Right now, the show is okay but could do a lot better. The show is available to watch on Paramount+ worldwide.

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