Halo the series is owned by Paramount Plus
Directed by Craig Zisk
The Fall of Reach is perhaps the most significant event in the timeline; not necessarily for its impact on the Human Covenant War, but for its place in the fandom. If you just wanted to play the Halo games for their top notch gameplay and just let the story pass you by, that was perfectly fine and those kinds of players were the ones who drove the franchise to such dizzying heights of success and prestige. If you wanted to know more about the games, however, the first thing you learn is what happened to Reach. It’s the first book in the series, it takes place right before the first game, and it’s been poking around the more mainstream side of the franchise with the game in 2010 and the animated adaptation in 2015, so getting it right is going to be the biggest challenge for this season of the show. With so much at stake, can the new showrunners satisfy both fans of the games as well as fans of the show with their telling of this iconic chapter in the lore, or will Paramount be looking for yet another showrunner to try and correct the ship for season 3? Let’s find out!!
After trying to tell the UNSC that the Covenant were on Reach, John (Pablo Schrieber) is proven right as he and Corporal Perez (Cristina Rodlo) are caught in the opening Salvo of the invasion. With little time to spare, the two meet up with Riz (Natasha Culzac) and head to Fleetcom HQ to try and get a handle on things and hopefully find their power armor still intact. Sadly they won’t find it as Ackerson and the rest of the UNSC higher ups have taken all the good equipment and ran away while everyone else was still unaware that an invasion was imminent; leaving Admiral Keyes (Danny Sapani) and a small contingent of marines to try and hold the aliens at bay while they get as many civilians offsite as possible. If that wasn’t bad enough, Ackerson shows his sadistic side as he leaves the recently captured Soren (Bokeem Woodbine) and the long held captive Doctor Halsey (Natascha McElhone) to die in the basement prison of the Fleetcom building, and they have to find a way to escape as well. With so much death and destruction happening all around them, can this rag-tag crew of Spartans, Pirates, Mad Scientists, and Marines make a valiant last stand against such an overwhelming foe? What else did Ackerson and the UNSC leave behind that could prove even more fatal to humanity’s chances in this war than the destruction of Reach itself? How did the Covenant sneak this much firepower on the planet in the first place? They’re not exactly known for their subtlety.
As an all singing, all dancing, all explosion affair, the episode does the job well enough and it feels like we’re inching closer and closer to what I want the show to be. There’s a lot more color in its cheeks as it allows some emotions to slip back in that aren’t just stoic duty and righteous anger. There are some genuinely heartbreaking turns in the story and the show allows characters to feel the weight of it instead of just getting mad and frustrated. They even indulge in that most forbidden of pleasures known as humor as we finally crack a few jokes to ease some of the tension here and there. Narratively it’s a little on the light side which makes sense given the heavy focus on action throughout, but there are some scenes of characters bouncing off of each other that gripped me more than any of the conspiratorial nonsense that’s been driving this season. I’ve yet to talk about Halsey in any of these episodes, mostly because her scenes consisted of her sitting around in an elaborate jail cell, but now that she’s interacting with someone, I’m reminded of why she stood out so much in the first season. Her and Soren are easily the non-action highlights of the show and I hope they manage to stick around for a while just to bring the level of charisma up a few notches. We’re here for the battles, however, and the show pulls out all the stops with long takes, elaborate choreography, and some really impressive CG work on the Covenant who look imposing whenever we get a good glimpse of them. It’s a shame that the show seems so averse to putting the Spartans in their armor as it’s such an iconic part of the games and would have been a great fit for this episode in particular, but our cast is clearly working their hearts out to sell everything and Pablo Schreiber has truly made the part his own which is perhaps why they felt confident about leaving him without the armor for such an important episode.
In truth, I only have two genuine criticisms of the episode, but both don’t bode well for the rest of the season which presumably won’t have the same level of action to smooth over the rough patches. I’m not a fan of the dark aesthetic this show has opted for as I’ve never associated the Halo games with such a bleak pallet. Then again, there’s always been this tension between the tone of the games and the tone of the expanded universe material as the games are fairly bright and colorful with pew-pew weapons and whatnot, but the books and comics turn up the ultraviolence with lots of blood, decapitations, and graphic descriptions of plasma wounds. The first season threaded this needled deftly with some shocking violent action scenes against a bright and saturated aesthetic, but this season is leaning march harder towards the grim end of things and all it’s done is mute the impact of the action rather than enhance the drama. The other issue is that of direction as the episode makes some rather bold choices with its narrative that leaves the rest of the season up in the air as far as what fans are to expect. We’ve been told since the beginning that this show is not going to strictly follow the continuity of the games and this episode makes that explicitly clear as we are right up to the start of the first game without many of the significant pieces we would need to retell that story. On paper, this is exactly what I would want from an adaptation; something that isn’t slavishly devoted to the narrative and isn’t afraid to set up a new status quo. The problem for me, however, is that I’m not confident that this new team knows what to do now. As I said at the start of this season, it feels like a lot of DON’Ts and not a lot of DOs which leaves things feeling a bit directionless if we don’t even have the overall arc of the games’ narrative to grab onto. Still, I will remain cautiously optimistic. The season has done a solid job trying to win me back after such an irritating start, and there’s enough momentum going into the second half that I am more than happy to ride it out until the end. Will it be enough to put it on par with the first season? I doubt it, even if we do eventually get to the Halo ring, but I’m genuinely interested to see them try.
The Reviewers Unite 