Halo the series is owned by Paramount Plus
Directed by Dennie Gordon
It’s all come down to this. We’ve been on a wild ride with a lot of ups and downs to be sure, but this is the moment that fans wanted to see since the show was announced all those years ago. The Halo show finally gets to Halo, and lo, did the fanboys rejoice! Well, maybe they did, and maybe they didn’t; it’s going to be interesting to see how the fandom reacts now that we’ve gotten to where a lot of them felt we should have started, but we’re here to look at the episode itself and not the endless Reddit threads this is sure to produce! Is this a great finale for both fans of the show and fans of the game, or does trying to bring these two worlds together leave nobody happy? Let’s find out!!
With everyone converging on the Halo ring like a violent space version of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, World, Chief (Pablo Schreiber) has the lead on everyone and can practically taste the perfectly preserved dirt on the planet’s surface when he realizes that he can’t just leave everyone else to die and so turns back around to join the battle; leaving Makee and The Arbiter (Charlie Murphy and Viktor Åkerblom) to call dibs on the ring shaped space station. What he doesn’t know, however, is that the artifact Miranda and Halsey (Olive Gray and Natascha McElhone) brought back from the secret alien laboratory is carrying something far more sinister than a mere fleet of Covenant starships. A long extinct spore known as The Flood has woken up and is hungry for meat which it finds readily on this human outpost, and so Kwan Ha and Soren (Yerin Ha and Bokeem Woodbine) need to find Kessler and Laera (Tylan Bailey and Fiona O’Shaughnessy) before they get caught in this grotesque outbreak that Kwan seems to have some sort of connection with even if she doesn’t quite understand it herself. With Chief trying to help the Spartan IIIs being led by Kai (Kate Kennedy), Makee fighting with Cortana (Jen Taylor and Christina Bennington) as they barrel ahead towards the ultimate weapon, and the rest of our heroes fighting off Space Zombies, will this be humanity’s last stand as they valiantly fight against impossible odds? What’s waiting for everyone if they do make it to the Halo ring, and will they have enough strength left to stop Makee? It’s taken us two seasons to get to the darn thing, so was the wait ultimately worth it!?
I’ve had mixed feelings about this show all season, and the last few episodes have done little to settle my thoughts on it. This finale at least feels like the end of a story before moving forward with whatever comes next, and while I appreciate the moments that capture a sense of epic grandeur that exemplifies the best of Halo, I can’t say that all my reservations have been assuaged. On its own, it’s a darn fine slice of Space Sci-fi with big battles, bigger sacrifices, and the rise of a new threat to raise the stakes of the series going forward. The Flood finally makes a proper appearance and I like the direction they’re going with as the show is emphasizing the diseased aspect of the creatures instead of just using them as a big wave of cannon fodder. Perhaps it’s an easy layup for a show to depict disease as particularly frightening in this post-COVID world (except not really, as the virus is still going strong), but it works in this new context and provides us with some solid horror-action set pieces which has always been the purpose of the Flood since the original game. We also get space combat which the show has been very cagey about, presumably another budgetary concern, and the Last Stand of the Spartan IIIs with a guest appearance by Master Chief is fun and tragic in all the ways you’d want a battle like this to be. For me, however, I’d say the show peaks right as we get to the Halo ring, as it feels just enough like the games while still keeping the focus on our characters and their arcs. Chief and Makee continue to have a strong dynamic, with Makee in particular having some unexpectedly strong emotional moments when it comes to the Arbiter. I had assumed she was merely manipulating him to further her goals and to keep herself alive, but their bond is really sold in these moments and makes the fantastic fight scene between the Arbiter and Chief all the more impactful for it. Some of the plot threads don’t work as well with a lot of them feeling like setups to be paid off in season three, particularly where Miranda and Halsey end up as well as the vague role that Kwan Ha has to play in this building conflict with The Flood, but they work well enough that they detract from the rest of the action, and I’m still interested to see where all of it is going.
Still, that raises the big question that hangs over this show like a piano on a frayed length of twine; where are we headed after everything that happened here? The TV series is a different beast from the video games; we’ve known that since the very first episode, where Chief takes off his helmet. Adaptation is a complicated process and things will inevitably change along the way, at least if you’re doing it right and not just regurgitating the source material. Still, my issue with the season is that it never feels fully secure in its vision and keeps hedging its bets in ways that come off as awkward. We began this season with an absurdly huge shift in the status quo that, for me, is the root of the season’s woes, as we spent most of our time trying to get back to where the first season left off. The final moments of this episode left me with a lot of those same feelings as, if you know anything about the games, we’ve effectively burned through three fourths of the storyline and there’s no indication of what the direction is for the next season except pad out the remaining quarter of the game’s plot. Now that we’ve finally gotten the carrot they’ve been dangling for two seasons, what is there left to do? What is the Halo ring, at least the one in the original game, if there’s no longer a mystery to solve? Then again, I’m still trying to fill in the gaps with my knowledge of the game and the showrunners could be planning to add all sorts of interesting ideas from the franchise or even their own unique contributions instead of simply relying on the first game for guidance. We at least have Kwan Ha and Soren to carry on the plot without the weight of the franchise’s lore hanging over their heads, but if that was the case, I’d say they needed to signal that at the end of the episode, and instead we get a tease of something specifically from the first game.
Last season was mostly good that ended on a low point, and this season was mostly middling that ended on a high point. Season two was not as good as season one as far as I’m concerned, but the high points are about as good as anything we got in that first season, and I think fans will be happy with most of what they get in this episode. The question still remains, however, as to what will happen next. The cat is out of the bag, and we got a good episode in the process, but they’re either gonna need to move on very quickly to the next act of the story, or they’ll need to go in a widely different direction to keep next season from feeling like a slog. Can they pull it off? I’m optimistic given how much I turned around on this season after having such ambivalence towards the first two episodes, but they cannot make the same mistake again. If this is the vision, stick with it. We have some momentum now that we’ve finally landed on the ring, and while there are a lot of challenges ahead, they can make it work if they move forward with confidence rather than doubling back to address fandom complaints. Despite its lackluster teaser at the end, this is a strong showing for the series and a solid jumping off point if they’re willing to make the leap. I certainly hope they are, but we’ll see if the fans end up cheering from the sidelines or try to weigh them down.
The Reviewers Unite 