Halo the series is owned by Paramount Plus
Directed by Craig Zisk
The season premiere left me underwhelmed, to say the least. For someone who genuinely enjoyed the first season and all its interesting creative choices, it was jarring to see so much of it thrown away in the pursuit of poe-faced solemnity. In any case, I said my piece last week and got it all out of my system so I’m ready to approach this episode much more on its own terms instead of comparing it to what came before. Well, okay. Maybe a little bit more griping, but hopefully it will be productive rather than simply nagging. Will this be the episode that turns me around on the season, or will my disappointment grow with each passing week? Let’s find out!!
With the Master Chief (Pablo Schreiber) certain that something is going on that Ackerson (Joseph Morgan) and the UNSC aren’t telling him, he takes his crew on an unauthorized mission to search for the missing Cobalt Team and find evidence of whatever it is that The Covenant are up to. Of course, you can’t rock the boat without getting wet, and this little excursion puts a significant wedge between him and the rest of Silver Team (Kate Kennedy, Bentley Kalu, and Natasha Culzac) who are increasingly concerned about Chief’s erratic behavior; a feeling that Ackerson is happy to exploit as he continues to move all these pieces around in whatever game it is he’s playing. Reach isn’t the only place that’s having problems, however, as Laera, her son, and Kwan Ha (Fiona O’Shaughnessy, Tylan Bailey, and Yerin Ha) are now targets after Soren (Bokeem Woodbine) was taken prisoner by the UNSC. Without him around to play Pirate King, there are a lot of people looking to not just take the throne but whatever buried treasure Laera might know about. Can these three escape The Rubble without Soren’s past catching up to them? What can Chief do to stop The Covenant and save Cobalt Team now that the UNSC consider him unreliable and a threat to their secrets? I’m not convinced that the Master Chief is built for this kind of subterfuge. Did they even cover spy craft during his Spartan training, or did they look at this four hundred pound slab of meat and decide it was a lost cause?
The show is still not where it was in season one, but we’re already seeing some significant improvements. Where the first two episodes felt aimless as it was laboriously setting up the new status quo and the incoming Covenant threat, here we start to see things ramping up as interpersonal relationships are strained and the gravity of the situation starts to weigh heavier on everyone in the story. Unfortunately, it’s still not all that interesting to watch as the conspiracy is overcomplicated and the characters actions feel contrived; especially when it comes to Ackerson and Keyes who the show tries to humanize but only puts a spotlight on how ridiculous this whole scheme is in the first place. The needs of the plot are outweighing the credibility of the characters that are flawed but not in a way that the show cares to explore as much as it wants to use those flaws to get us from point A to B. Chief causing tension between himself and his team is a good idea, but I don’t get the sense that there’s an underlying theme here that this action is driving us to; rather it’s a plot tool to give Chief a reason to be separated from everyone else. Perhaps I’ll be proven wrong soon enough, but with such an overwhelming threat on the horizon it seems unlikely that we’ll be following up on this in any meaningful way. The only two places where the show feels genuinely character driven are with Riz contemplating a life outside of being a Spartan and everything with Laera and Kwan Ha trying to escape from The Rubble. I didn’t touch on Soren or The Rubble in my last review which, just like everything else, was made grim and gritty in a way that I found boring and cliché, but it really finds its footing here as the best example of this new tone working. It helps that it’s entirely separated from the conspiracy storyline which means everyone’s actions don’t feel nearly as forced, and Fiona O’Shaughnessy puts in a great performance for a character who was practically a bit player in the first season. I’m unsure if the fans who hated Kwan Ha and the stuff on The Rubble will be turned around by this, but it is a genuine improvement and the first sign that this season can live up to its predecessor in ways other than the action.
So, yeah, it’s still not easy for me to separate the first season from this one; even as everything about it is telling me that this is as much a soft reboot as it is a continuation of the story. Everything that I can point to from the last season that they attempt here falls short in my view, whether it’s a less interesting villain, a less vibrant aesthetic, or even just the way that characters act now that they’ve been hit with the Dour Stick. Putting as much of that aside as I can, I think they’re making progress and I’d call this a solid prelude to what’s coming. We get a decent some decent self-contained arcs from Laera, Kwan Ha, and even Riz while ratcheting up the tension as everyone is desperate to hide the monster that’s bursting through the closet door. The next episode will hopefully be a barn-burner as Chief and the other Spartans jump into action, and perhaps once they pull the trigger on Reach we can finally move past all the doom and gloom to something a little more fun.
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