This is Going to Hurt…

You might be wondering why, exactly, I subjected myself to another eight episodes of this “adaptation” when I so disliked the previous season. Reader, I must confess to feeling the same way myself on more than one occasion…but I soldiered on, because you deserve it, and also because I wanted to put out a review sometime this month.

Oh, yeah: SPOILER ALERT in effect for the rest of the review.

This season, at the very least, managed to hit some plot points from the games (and related media): humanity’s loss of the militarized planet Reach, the training of a new generation of Spartan super-soldiers, and Master Chief’s arrival on the Halo ring. Unfortunately, a number of these moments are undercut by contrived plotting and a bunch of filler I didn’t care about.  

Instead of doing a beat-by-beat recap of each episode (I’m sure you can find those elsewhere if you really want to), let’s try something that has absolutely, definitely, never been done before by other lazy reviewers:

The Good:

– This season introduced Perez, a character I quite liked. Sure, her journey from nervous Marine to nervous Spartan-III happened in about a week and a half, but I enjoyed the way she played off both Chief and Kai. The dinner scene with her family was fun – too bad the Covenant blew them all up from orbit. That’s one way to end a barbecue.

– I feel obliged to give a shoutout to Pablo Schreiber’s acting this season – with the helmet on, he sounds cool and clinical, like a cucumber that shoots guns. Out of the suit, his facial acting alone effectively conveys Chief’s inner turmoil, and his dialogue delivery is still on-point. No complaints there.

– We have, it seems, seen the end of Master Cheeks. Chief does spend the vast majority of the season out of his armor, to an extent that it feels like the showrunners are deliberately tweaking the audience’s collective nose, but there’s nary an ass to be seen. Tragic.

– I really liked the scenes where Ackerson, the Naval Intelligence officer who’d been presented as unidemensionally shitty, is revealed to actually have character depth (and more than two shades of it, too!). His conversations with his ailing father in the face of the Covenant’s impending assault on Reach were unexpectedly heartstring-tugging.

– The visual effects for the Flood were pretty sweet. They reminded me of the necromorphs in Dead Space (and also, you know, the Flood from Halo).

– Kwan Ha, nobody’s favorite character from season 1, was much more palatable this time out – her plotline (which still feels tangential in the extreme) has far less screentime, and what screentime she does have is mostly spent kicking ass. Her haircut’s better, too! Remember that atrocious thing she had on her head in season 1? It was like someone glued roadkill on top of a monk’s tonsure.

– Soren survived the finale, which was cool. I thought the show was signposting his death pretty hard for most of the episode, but his wife died instead! Well, she got bitten by the Flood and presumably morphed into a horrible monster offscreen, but close enough. I must admit to not caring at all that the wife died; I’m sure the actress is a lovely person, but I couldn’t have given less of a fuck about that character if you held a Needler to my head.

The Bad:

– All the skullduggery and backstabbing going on with the Office of Naval Intelligence was…not good. For one, there was just too damn much of it – the Covenant only got scraps of screentime in comparison to the ONI stooges and their plotting. On top of that, none of the aforementioned plotting felt organic; rather, it came across as the show needing to shuffle pieces around to create conflict for conflict’s sake, like a pair of blind people wearing mittens and playing chess.

– The way the Flood were introduced was just moronic. I’m no biologist, but I would think that wearing fucking gloves would be a prerequisite for handling mysterious alien artifacts. Michael Crichton[1] is rolling in his grave.

– Cortana’s “updated” appearance bothers me. Not that it’s bad, by any means, I just don’t see why they needed to change it.

– I don’t think they ever explained how Makee survived getting shot last season…or maybe they did, and I just wasn’t paying attention? Either way, I’m blaming the show. As with nearly everything in life, it’s not my fault, it’s television’s.

– The immersion-shattering convenience of Kwan Ha’s rescue of the rest of the cast from Reach had me grumbling internally like I’d just ordered Indian food on Grubhub and asked the chef to “really fuck me up with the spices.”  

– The deaths/retirements of the other members of Silver Team felt pretty weak. Sure, the way the Arbiter killed Vannak was creative, but it also made Vannak look like a chump. After being repeatedly injured, Riz decided to retire from being a Spartan, which is all well and good, but the show leaves us with no idea of what she’s going to do with her life now. It would’ve been nice to at least get a hint, you know? Finally, Kai’s kamikaze sacrifice in the finale was undercut by both a super dumb set of last words (“this is going to hurt” – seriously?) and the sight of her body floating in space afterward, armor undamaged. Right now, she’s basically Schrodinger’s Spartan-II: we won’t know if she’s alive or dead until we look in the helmet.

The Mediocre:

– I generally approved of the Covenant’s appearances this season (despite occasionally-subpar CGI and a real lack of variety in their weaponry). I wish the story had spent more time with the Arbiter and Makee – not because I’m uber-invested in their characters, but because the costumes and sets are interesting and the internecine fighting between Covenant factions is much more engaging than, say, watching more dumb-ass domestic drama between Soren and his wife.

– The Fall of Reach was decent from a visual perspective, but felt extremely rushed and oddly small-scale, like a last-minute model volcano you cranked out the morning of the Science Fair. This is supposed to be a huge battle over the UNSC’s biggest military outpost! Instead, we got a few (admittedly cool) shootouts on city streets, followed by some close-quarters fighting and a battle on a bridge that was less destructive than a certain cargo ship’s recent trip to Baltimore.  There were missed opportunities here to include a wider variety of Covenant species: we have yet to see a pair of lumbering Hunters, for example, and this battle would have been an effective time to introduce them[2].

– Captain (Admiral) Keyes got a pretty bad-ass sendoff, but I couldn’t help but be distracted from the moment by thoughts of “wait, that’s a huge change they just made from the games.” I know this show is all about making changes from the games, but you have to admit that moving Keyes’ death up so far in the timeline sticks out like a swollen testicle dangling beneath a pair of cutoff jean shorts.

On Balance…

If they make a third season, will I watch it? Sigh. Yeah, probably. Does that mean you should? Eh. I mean, you can. I’m not your dad (hopefully).

If I was going to give this season a rating, it’d be:

6/10 (+1/-1.5)

I don’t think I gave the first season an overall rating – but if I had to, I’d hit it with a 3.75/10 (+1.25/-.75). Improvement has been demonstrated!

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[1] Author of The Andromeda Strain, in which the characters wear fucking gloves.

[2] I know we saw the worms that comprise the Hunters in Season 1, but that’s different enough that I feel justified in complaining.