Halo the series is owned by Paramount Plus
Directed by Dennie Gordon
We’re over the hill and barreling down at lightning speed towards a conclusion that everyone is scrambling to get ready for. The last episode was certainly a lurch with how much they tried to cram in and how they tried to stitch it all together, but with that work out of the way, does this episode ramp up more organically as it takes us into the big finale? Let’s find out!!
With Chief and Cortana back in contact, there’s not much that can stand in his way as he gets revenge against Ackerson and finds his stolen armor. Of course, that ends up being small potatoes when it turns out that the Covenant fleet is within spitting distance of the Halo and the UNSC are still in bad shape after the attack on Reach. With little more than the barely trained Spartan IIIs to throw at the problem, Parangosky makes a fateful choice that puts Ackerson in a rather awkward position, and that’s before he runs into the mighty fists and burning wrath of Chief as well as Kai who is similarly ticked off about being lied to. Humanity’s hope may lie in what Halsey, Miranda, and Kwan have found in the caves of Onyx, if only they knew how to activate it, and time is running short as Makee and The Arbiter are on their way to the ring with little on their mind but salvation through utter annihilation. Can Chief put aside his anger long enough to save humanity now that the Covenant have their eyes on the celestial doomsday weapon? What secrets will we learn once Halsey, Miranda, and Kwan open the door to the long dormant secrets left beneath the surface of Onyx? I’m still unsure why ONI thought Chief was better suited as a dead poster than as a butt kicking warrior, but you do you, I suppose.
I don’t think this is a terrible episode by any stretch, but the cynical feelings I had at the start of this season started to return as I sat through this hasty setup to what might not be the big finale we were all waiting for. Too many questions are just left up in the air by the end of it, and it’s not easy to get invested in the conclusion to a storyline when you’re still unsure of where all the pieces are and even what the message is they want to convey. If anyone can tell me how the Covenant fleet knew where to show up despite Makee keeping it a secret and how much of this is Cortana’s fault, I’d greatly appreciate it as the show glosses over the finer points of the threat that’s supposed to keep us on the edge of seat for the finale. Kai’s turn against Ackerson feels a little hasty, even though it seems that Chief has the uncanny ability to convince soldiers to abandon their duties with a simple speech; a power he reuses in this episode, as he gets an entire squad to just go home instead of taking him in. This is all starting to sound a little too nitpicky for my taste, but the overall point is that there’s a lack of consistency in the storytelling which is best exemplified by the Spartan III death mission. It could be bias on my part, but it feels less like a genuine gray area the show wants to explore and more like they want to have their cake and eat it too. The franchise, particularly the novels, has a somewhat unhealthy view of the military and its values which is not uncommon in military sci-fi, but it was something that the first season did a decent job of addressing. Here, it feels like they want to incorporate some of that back in, but they don’t do it elegantly; trying to both condemn the decision as an act of betrayal while lionizing the need for such a sacrifice. It’s clear that sacrifice is the theme of the episode as everyone has to contend with it in their own way, but at least with the Spartan III scenes it rings a bit hollow given the conspiratorial nature of the Parangosky and Ackerson storylines. It rings a bit truer in the Soren storyline where he is clearly conflicted about it, and I like how Makee uses it as yet another tool of manipulation, but it lacks punch where it’s most prominently brought up, which is not what you want from your penultimate episode.
The most consistently interesting parts of the episode are the scenes with Halsey, Miranda, and Kwan finding the Forerunner lab, as well as Makee formalizing her alliance with The Arbiter. Expanding on the relationship between Halsey and Miranda is the kind of character driven narrative I want to see out of this show, and it was fun to see Kwan put the pieces together while those two bickered about who’s the better scientist. The lab itself gives us an idea of how the inner workings of the Halo ring will look, and I’d say the show nailed the aesthetic quite well, but it’s over a little too quickly with the answers to too many questions being pushed to the next episode. Makee, at least, gets some closure as her revolt with the Arbiter comes to a satisfying end with an interesting dynamic forming between them, though Cortana is something of a sore thumb as I’m still unsure how much or how little influence she has over everything that’s going on which makes the overall threat we’re supposed to be anticipating for the next episode feel unclear.
The problem with this show is that it can’t simply play out the way that a series like this should, as there’s a secondary narrative that is almost overwhelming it; one of fan frustration and unmet expectations. For the most part, I find the fan complaints to be unwarranted and rather unserious, as critiques often begin and end with deviations from the source material. The showrunners could not have known how they were gonna react to the second season as they were filming it, but they knew what people thought of season one, which is why so much of this season, especially the first half, has a radically different tone than what came before. In this episode, it feels as if the chickens are coming home to roost and the scrambling they’ve tried to hide behind solid actions, fan service, and deeper connections to the lore, is now plain for us all to see. Perhaps I was a little too kind on the last episode, as I was still riding high on the show seemingly turning back to what I had liked about it back in season one. Still, I’m much more ambivalent now heading into the finale than I was at the end of the previous episode; not that I doubt we’ll get some solid action to send us off on a high note, but that they’re going to once again burn everything to the ground to try and win back a certain segment of the fan base for the next season. We can hope that cooler heads prevailed when this was all being put in motion, but I think it’s gonna take more than a single episode to right this ship.
The Reviewers Unite 