Halo: Season Two

[Palanan]

Just watched the first two episodes of Season Two. I remember not being that impressed with what I saw of Season One, so I had very low expectations—and yet, by the end of the second episode of the new season, I was actually interested, engaged, and looking forward to more.

None of that has anything to do with Master Chief, or John somebody, who is utterly bland and devoid of any compelling presence. Halo joins a long line of shows in which the male lead is less interesting than literally every other character in the series, probably because the actor has less acting ability than the unionized drivers sitting around outside the studio.

Fortunately that’s balanced in Season Two by an unexpected addition to the cast:

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At least, I wasn’t expecting Bokeem Woodbine, and he added some class and actual acting talent, to the point that his character’s family dynamics were the most interesting and believable aspect of the first episode. There’s a whole sad story encapsulated in his scenes—the old warrior who sets out to prove he’s still got it, but is so far off his game that he never sees what’s coming.

There was also some solid acting by Luisa Costa as Perez, struggling with survivor’s guilt and PTSD. Her family dinner with her goofball cousins was perfection as a scene, and her performance carried the following scene with Master Chief, who thankfully doesn’t work as a professional counselor.

Since I’m not a devotee of the games, half of everything went straight past me, and overall it feels as if it’s made by fans for fans. In terms of science fiction in its own right...it doesn’t hold up that well. I recently powered through Seasons 1-5 of The Expanse, and Halo looks a bit flimsy by comparison. There just isn’t the same depth of world-building, to say nothing of depth of characterization or complexity of political situations and operators.

Still, the first two episodes of Season Two managed to keep me interested, even though I was interested in just about everyone except Master Chief and his team. Not sure when or if I’ll see the rest, but so far it looks much better than the first season, and that’s not a bad place to be.

[Errorname]

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At least, I wasn’t expecting Bokeem Woodbine, and he added some class and actual acting talent, to the point that his character’s family dynamics were the most interesting and believable aspect of the first episode. There’s a whole sad story encapsulated in his scenes—the old warrior who sets out to prove he’s still got it, but is so far off his game that he never sees what’s coming.

I'm pretty sure he's in the first season?

[Rynjin]

Yeah, this show was definitely not made "by fans for fans". As I recall this series is one where the creators were proudly proclaiming that they had never played any of the games or even read any of the supplementary tie-in novels, as if that was a selling point somehow.

I'm almost grudgingly impressed they had the chutzpah to make a second season of this after it pretty well flopped among non-fans (being, as you say, a completely uninspiring standalone sci-fi show) and was outright reviled by actual fans of Halo (who find little to recognize or enjoy in the characterization of most characters or plot beats), and it didn't even contain enough action in the first season to make it a good mindless popcorn watch.

The Halo tv series is as by-the-books "by corporate goons, for nobody" as it's possible to get for an adaptation.

[Zombimode]

Isn't the Halo TV show one that nobody asked for, was made by people with a passing knowledge of the source material at best and no regard for artistic integrity, and that in the end nobody was watching anyway?

If so, how on earth there is a second season?

Edit: ah, yeah, what Rynjin said

[warty goblin]

It's complete disregard for canon and fandom is one of the things I quite like and respect about the Halo show. In part this is my general antipathy towards fandom and its love affair with endlessly xeroxing its obsessions, and in part because the actual story of Halo is some lore duck taped to Cortana telling the MC - who has the personality of a block of plastic imitation wood - the princess objective is in another castle. Which works really well for a videogame, I like Halo and sequels. But it's a very weak narrative on its own merits. Some setting ideas and art direction are pretty much the only bits worth taking.

The other thing I like about the Halo show is that it's actually pretty good. There's some rocky episodes, 3 and 4 or thereabouts are rather meh, but overall I find the script is interesting, pretty tight, and contains things like themes and arcs and contrasting and complementary characters. I think it's trying to jam a bit too much in - the UNSC political squabbles feel rather forced and unnecessary, a fair amount of Kwan's story feels perilously close to "we need to do something with this character filler" - and I think it pulls its punches just a bit on the UNSC. Like sure they're murdering imperialist space fascists, but without them who would shoot the scary communists, er, aliens.

But it does at least throw those punches. And I generally very much like the tripartite contrast between John, Makee, and Kwan, particularly the first two. It's some of the better character work I've seen in recent TV. The action scenes also are really good, and I like the way they're leaning into Halo itself as a mystical thing. I haven't gotten to start S2 yet, but I'm definitely looking forward to it.

[Rynjin]

If you're going to use an existing product's brand recognition instead of coming up with your own ideas, you need to be prepared for the criticism that comes with that.

And it's not particular harsh to say "turning a recognizable sci-fi setting into a Wal-Mart version of whatever other sci-fi property was popular the year before it was made" is hacky storytelling.

The Halo show never needed to adapt the stories of the games. But it did need to adapt a story that would actually be told in that setting. There's a lot of expanded material to draw from and help fill out a political intrigue story if they wanted to do that. There's a lot of stories to be told about the war crimes ONI were committing even BEFORE the Covenant showed up, and the unethical experiments Halsey performed on children, and how even though those things turned out all right in the end - when an unpredictable alien threat made the super soldiers they created to put down riots and rebellions the last hope for humanity - they are awful, awful people.

But they were too lazy to do any research that would help them actually write a story like that (one which wouldn't involve the Master Chief at all, which could have been an even greater boon for flexibility in writing), and too incompetent to actually make an engaging one on their own.

Fandom doesn't have "an obsession with xeroxing", faceless corporations have an obsession with making money off the backs of others without actually needing to put in any effort themselves. Taking an existing property and slapping it as a loose coat of paint on generic sci-fi slop completely fits the bill.

If you can't tell a better story than the property you're adapting, stick to the ****ing source material. And chances are, if you're adapting a story that you're not a fan of to begin with, you're a ham-and-egger. Stop trying to stroke your own ego by saying "I could do better than this insanely popular story everyone likes" (looking at you too, Wheel of Time showrunners).

[GloatingSwine]

Yeah, this show was definitely not made "by fans for fans". As I recall this series is one where the creators were proudly proclaiming that they had never played any of the games or even read any of the supplementary tie-in novels, as if that was a selling point somehow.

This is, at least, true to the games as Halo has been made by people who don't like Halo and want it to be Call of Duty instead since Halo 4.

I mean these people were legit actually surprised that people liked Master Chief when they made Halo 5 and the main character was Some Other Dude.

[Rynjin]

This is, at least, true to the games as Halo has been made by people who don't like Halo and want it to be Call of Duty instead since Halo 4.

Snrk. Fair enough.

I mean these people were legit actually surprised that people liked Master Chief when they made Halo 5 and the main character was Some Other Dude.

Yeah, that's weird. Like I would be completely fine picking up a new protag myself, but not understanding that some people would be put out is just tonedeaf.

[GloatingSwine]

I think they took the wrong lessons from the success of ODST and Reach which had other main characters but were spin-offs.

And, as noted, didn't like Halo anyway because it didn't have ADS and sprint and all the other things they thought FPS games were supposed to have all the time ever.

[Sapphire Guard]

Halo TV show is in a difficult spot, because its premise demands giant alien battles, but that's nearly impossible to budget for, so they're stuck doing a bunch of scenes of people arguing in offices, while ignoring the covenant as much as possible.

It could be decent with a good script, but, well...

Standout moment, someone asks John about his kill/death ratio? 'How many times have you died?' That makes no sense at all, but it got into the script somehow.

[Rynjin]

Yep. Which is another reason why, if they wanted to do political intrigue, the best thing to do would be to set the series a bit before the Covenant invasion, and deal with the the Insurrection. Then as time goes on, maybe by the mid-season, you have a first contact event and really get to show off how terrifying the Covenant are to the humans and how they decided to start learning more about this new faction they had zero way of knowing existed. Keep the conflict(s) fairly small, scouting parties at most, and it'll keep the budget down.

All of the early season stuff can easily take place in the time(s) that John is off-planet or in cryo-sleep, and he can come in just in time for a Big Damn Hero moment in the season finale.

Because that is, ultimately, who/what the Master Chief is. He's a plot device. A living Deus Ex Machina. That's why he works as a video game protagonist, but not as well as a tv series protagonist (he's pretty good as a novel protag though, getting to be inside his head changes the game). He doesn't politick, and he doesn't particularly get caught up IN politics. He arrives and kicks alien ass and inspires the people around him to fight harder. As a wise man once put it "Halo is a cool guy. Eh fights aliens and doesn't afraid of anything". That's all he needs to be in the context of the show.

He is misplaced and misused in the role the actual tv show has put him in.

[warty goblin]

If you're going to use an existing product's brand recognition instead of coming up with your own ideas, you need to be prepared for the criticism that comes with that.

And it's not particular harsh to say "turning a recognizable sci-fi setting into a Wal-Mart version of whatever other sci-fi property was popular the year before it was made" is hacky storytelling.

The Halo show never needed to adapt the stories of the games. But it did need to adapt a story that would actually be told in that setting. There's a lot of expanded material to draw from and help fill out a political intrigue story if they wanted to do that. There's a lot of stories to be told about the war crimes ONI were committing even BEFORE the Covenant showed up, and the unethical experiments Halsey performed on children, and how even though those things turned out all right in the end - when an unpredictable alien threat made the super soldiers they created to put down riots and rebellions the last hope for humanity - they are awful, awful people.

But they were too lazy to do any research that would help them actually write a story like that (one which wouldn't involve the Master Chief at all, which could have been an even greater boon for flexibility in writing), and too incompetent to actually make an engaging one on their own.

Fandom doesn't have "an obsession with xeroxing", faceless corporations have an obsession with making money off the backs of others without actually needing to put in any effort themselves. Taking an existing property and slapping it as a loose coat of paint on generic sci-fi slop completely fits the bill.

If you can't tell a better story than the property you're adapting, stick to the ****ing source material. And chances are, if you're adapting a story that you're not a fan of to begin with, you're a ham-and-egger. Stop trying to stroke your own ego by saying "I could do better than this insanely popular story everyone likes" (looking at you too, Wheel of Time showrunners).

My view is 'they changed it' is almost always a lazy, surface level criticism of any adaptation that to me at least feels like its coming from a sort of fan possessiveness and obsessiveness I really don't like. If it ruins it for anybody else, hey, that's your taste, but what a strange, pointless reason to not like something.

And as I said, I like the actual end result. Not the best thing ever, but fun, and I enjoy its compare/contrast character structure, and the gradual soft rebellion and re-humanization of the spartans. I think it's generally well acted, the writing and dialog are good, the production values are through the roof, and the parts that don't land for me are pretty ancillary to the core of the story. That puts it very far above, say, the Mandalorian, which hasn't landed at all for me in two entire seasons, and only ever attained the giddy heights of "fine." Not the best SF show of the last couple years (that's Star Trek: Brave New Worlds hands down) but I've had a lot of fun watching the Halo show. I've found parts of it surprisingly emotionally effecting even, which is a rare thing in modern TV.

[Errorname]

Halo hasn't had a good story since Bungie left, so I have a hard time being mad, it's not like anyone else is doing better. Does feel like an unforced error to put it on TV instead of making a movie, but whatever. I think the hate's probably overblown, it's not unwatchable or anything it's just kind of meh.

I mean these people were legit actually surprised that people liked Master Chief when they made Halo 5 and the main character was Some Other Dude.

Especially after Halo 2 had the exact same reaction! And that was with the Arbiter being the best character in the franchise, something Halo 5's dude definitely was not even close to.

[Rynjin]

My view is 'they changed it' is almost always a lazy, surface level criticism of any adaptation that to me at least feels like its coming from a sort of fan possessiveness and obsessiveness I really don't like. If it ruins it for anybody else, hey, that's your taste, but what a strange, pointless reason to not like something.

And as I said, I like the actual end result. Not the best thing ever, but fun, and I enjoy its compare/contrast character structure, and the gradual soft rebellion and re-humanization of the spartans. I think it's generally well acted, the writing and dialog are good, the production values are through the roof, and the parts that don't land for me are pretty ancillary to the core of the story. That puts it very far above, say, the Mandalorian, which hasn't landed at all for me in two entire seasons, and only ever attained the giddy heights of "fine." Not the best SF show of the last couple years (that's Star Trek: Brave New Worlds hands down) but I've had a lot of fun watching the Halo show. I've found parts of it surprisingly emotionally effecting even, which is a rare thing in modern TV.

I think the big disconnect here is that this is an outlier opinion even among general audiences. The Halo show is, on its own merits, pretty trash. It's not fun to watch, and doesn't have enough interesting ideas to catch interest. The acting is...fine, at best, and bad at worst.

It is a thoroughly unremarkable show and would have been utterly overlooked if they hadn't banked on the name of a property they have such obvious contempt for. "They changed it" is a symptom of the overall issue of nobody involved in the show being interested or talented enough to make it good.

[BananaPhone]

Yeah, this show was definitely not made "by fans for fans". As I recall this series is one where the creators were proudly proclaiming that they had never played any of the games or even read any of the supplementary tie-in novels, as if that was a selling point somehow.

What's that old saying from Tolkeins works? About how evil cannot create, it can only corrupt?

[t209]

Was it me or the series is going "Ultimate Universe"?
Like an adaptation reboot but compiling previous lore into single narrative like Ultimate Marvel.
Edit: Also any idea if they should adapt Marathon, OR...that's way too complex and too meta (entire story being first person shooter character and AI across time and space, more so in Infinity).

[warty goblin]

I think the big disconnect here is that this is an outlier opinion even among general audiences. The Halo show is, on its own merits, pretty trash. It's not fun to watch, and doesn't have enough interesting ideas to catch interest. The acting is...fine, at best, and bad at worst.

I'm not at all bothered by my view being pretty edge case, at this point I'm well aware that I look for different things in media than a lot of people do. My favorite scene in Matrix Reloaded is the one with the Architect, which seemingly everyone else hates, so this is not really new to me.

The they changed it criticism slightly irritates me because it's a criticism that always irritates me. It just strikes me as almost wilfully thoughtless and at best pointless, at worst counter productive. It's right up there with "Y is good, it's just a bad sequel to X, so it's actually bad" in terms of takes that fundamentally don't compute for me.

It is a thoroughly unremarkable show and would have been utterly overlooked if they hadn't banked on the name of a property they have such obvious contempt for. "They changed it" is a symptom of the overall issue of nobody involved in the show being interested or talented enough to make it good.

I'm not saying it's brilliant by any means, it's generally 7/10 kinda stuff, with a couple episodes hitting 8, and a few others cratering to a 6 or 5 for me. Which given the state of current sci-fi TV puts it in a high slot for me, but that's just because the competition is stuff as creatively zombified as Mandalorian.

And banking on name recognition is hardly a unique sin in the modern media landscape. Everything is an adaptation, spinoff, sequel, or just plain keeping the franchise chugging along because that's what we do now. Though given the very bad year a lot of legacy franchises have had, maybe this will start to shift again.

[Errorname]

The other thing with the Halo show is that generally speaking, it's failures are not without precedent in the 343 or expanded universe stuff.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by Rynjin
Yeah, this show was definitely not made "by fans for fans".

I stand by my assessment that this is how it feels to me, as a non-game-player with no knowledge of the franchise backstory.

Originally Posted by warty goblin
Not the best SF show of the last couple years (that's Star Trek: Brave New Worlds hands down)….

I think you mean Strange New Worlds, but otherwise agreed.

[Darth Credence]

I know Halo, the game, a little. I played the first game, and parts of other games, and frankly have zero recollection of anything approaching a plot. I'm sure there was one, but it made absolutely no impact on me - the game was simply another round of shooting designated bad guys. Probably as good or better than other FPS, but it's not a genre I care much about, so the game just didn't make an impression, and I certainly wouldn't play it today now that I'm older and don't play online with friends in the same way.
Meanwhile, my wife basically doesn't play video games. Lots of board games, and a few casual video games. She knew absolutely nothing about Halo before the TV show. I knew the show was coming and didn't much care. She saw an ad for it and asked me about it. We decided we'd give it a shot. Both of us are space fantasy fans (because Star Wars, Star Trek, and Stargate are space fantasy, not sci-fi) and tend to watch most things sci-fi or space fantasy.
She loved it. I thought it was fine as a diversion, something to watch while cooking dinner or whatever, but she thought it was great. Asked me how close it was to the games, to which I shrugged and said I had no idea. Asked if there was a season 2 planned, I looked it up and found there was. Super excited it was coming back, and has us waiting for the entire season to be done so we can binge it all. Asked the kid how he felt about it, as he did play and love the games. He was not a fan, and only made it through a handful of episodes.
So the idea of it being for non-fans seems pretty on target to me.

[Rynjin]

The they changed it criticism slightly irritates me because it's a criticism that always irritates me. It just strikes me as almost wilfully thoughtless and at best pointless, at worst counter productive. It's right up there with "Y is good, it's just a bad sequel to X, so it's actually bad" in terms of takes that fundamentally don't compute for me.

Typically when these hacks change stuff it's to the overall detriment to the story and feel of the world. They only change to remove identity, so they can shove it into a boring boss and tell the same story they've had sitting in storage for 10 years but with different names attached to it.

The Halo show is an extreme example of this. You change all the proper nouns and it is not only unrecognizable as a Halo story, it's unrecognizable as anything unique or interesting in its own right.

And banking on name recognition is hardly a unique sin in the modern media landscape. Everything is an adaptation, spinoff, sequel, or just plain keeping the franchise chugging along because that's what we do now. Though given the very bad year a lot of legacy franchises have had, maybe this will start to shift again.

It doesn't have to be unique for me to hate it, and I especially hate banking on name recognition for something you have zero intent or ability to make recognizable.

Say what you will about Marvel or Star Wars film #326 coming out this year, at least they're recognizable as what they are.

I stand by my assessment that this is how it feels to me, as a non-game-player with no knowledge of the franchise backstory.

That's kinda like saying that to you, as a being with no ability to feel temperature, it feels pretty hot outside.

I know Halo, the game, a little. I played the first game, and parts of other games, and frankly have zero recollection of anything approaching a plot. I'm sure there was one, but it made absolutely no impact on me - the game was simply another round of shooting designated bad guys. Probably as good or better than other FPS, but it's not a genre I care much about, so the game just didn't make an impression, and I certainly wouldn't play it today now that I'm older and don't play online with friends in the same way.

It doesn't help that the plot doesn't really kick in much until the 2nd game, which is almost a soft reboot of the franchise. The first game is very simple US Space Navy fights aliens -> aliens want to activate ancient superweapon -> zombies show up (???) -> US Space Navy stops superweapon from killing all life in the galaxy.

It's not until Halo 2 that you really get the political infighting between the Covenant factions, learn more about their caste based theocracy, get acquainted with The Arbiter (a playable Covenant character), get introduced to the Gravemind who gives a lot more context to the "zombies(???)" part above, get further context on WHY the Halo installations are designed to kill all life in the galaxy, etc.

The plots are no masterpieces but they are a coherent, interesting, and recognizable setting that COULD be used to tell better plots.

Which is why it's so disappointing that the tv series decided that being generic gray slop was a better choice.

[Errorname]

Genuinely quite curious to see how long it takes for them to introduce the Arbiter.

[Thomas Cardew]

That's kinda like saying that to you, as a being with no ability to feel temperature, it feels pretty hot outside.

I don't think that's fair. The show feels ' fan- servicery' to him, which is a fair impression. Things like the HUD fight scene and the shield recharge noise were exceptional fan service. It's quite possible the rest of show gives off similar vibes to someone especially if they don't know the source material better.

It'd be like walking into to some new cult meeting that is deliberately copying catholic traditions, and being like 'this feels churchy' even if the content is completely different.

[Saph]

The mess they made of Halo Season 1 especially annoyed me because the plot of the first Halo game is actually really good, certainly better than the vast majority of modern Hollywood science fiction. It's a bunch of classic late-20th-century SF ideas, combined in a consistent way and executed well. If they'd just copy-pasted it over, it would have made for a very good season of TV. Unfortunately, Hollywood writers seem to be incapable of doing that, probably because they aren't actually interested in doing an adaption, they just want to use a story/script they've got already and which they're convinced audiences will absolutely love if they can just be tricked into watching it.

[DragonEyeSeeker]

If you scratch off the serial numbers, this is not a bad sci-fi show. Perfectly middling, good for a watch every now and then. With the Halo branding... ehhhhh.

I have not watched the third episode yet but I am enjoying the second season thus far.

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I am pretty interested to see what happens to Silver Team, the UNSC politics/intrigue/brinksmanship, Cortana and Halsey. I think those storylines and characters are the really interesting bits of the show. I am very disinterested with Soren, his family and Kwan but things seem to be picking up, so I am sure it will lead to a fun stuff down the road.

I kind of wonder if, assuming this gets another season, we will slowly see the evolution of Master Chief from this humanized, broken man into the hero he is in the games.

The mess they made of Halo Season 1 especially annoyed me because the plot of the first Halo game is actually really good, certainly better than the vast majority of modern Hollywood science fiction. It's a bunch of classic late-20th-century SF ideas, combined in a consistent way and executed well. If they'd just copy-pasted it over, it would have made for a very good season of TV. Unfortunately, Hollywood writers seem to be incapable of doing that, probably because they aren't actually interested in doing an adaption, they just want to use a story/script they've got already and which they're convinced audiences will absolutely love if they can just be tricked into watching it.

I often feel like some writers struggle to convince studio executives to pick up those writers' pet projects, so those writers are often forced to join big budget licensed projects that they have no real interest in or love for. Everyone has to earn a living after all. Instead of making an adaptation be the best version of that the licensed property can be, the writers instead loosely adapt it and warp it around ideas, themes and story ideas they want to pen, which almost always becomes trash that satisfies neither new audiences nor established/hardcore fans. We can see this most evidently with the Witcher, where the writers seemed to brazenly distain the property they were forced to work with.

I do not think Halo is quite at that level. I guarantee you some studio executive ordered that Master Chief walk around outside his suit for x percentage of each episode and be humanized so general audiences would like him*.


*Which is what studio executives did with another hero who famously does not remove his helmet - Judge Dredd.

[gbaji]

I often feel like some writers struggle to convince studio executives to pick up those writers' pet projects, so those writers are often forced to join big budget licensed projects that they have no real interest in or love for. Everyone has to earn a living after all. Instead of making an adaptation be the best version of that the licensed property can be, the writers instead loosely adapt it and warp it around ideas, themes and story ideas they want to pen, which almost always becomes trash that satisfies neither new audiences nor established/hardcore fans. We can see this most evidently with the Witcher, where the writers seemed to brazenly distain the property they were forced to work with.

This is, IME, a very valid observation. It's extremely common for writers to have pet stories, ideas, plots, etc rumbling around that they want to do, but can't get someone to fund "their project/story/whatever", so they squeeze them into projects that they are being paid to write for instead. And.... yeah. It rarely works out that well. I mean, episode ideas within a larger established story and setting? Sure. That works. That's why you have a writing team. But in terms of "let's make the plot like this, and the characters do that, and...." for a whole season, or story arc? Those are the times it feels like the story was spackled on to the franchise.

Haven't watched any of this show, and never played any of the games, so got no real opinion on it beyond general "yeah, this is a thing that happens".

*Which is what studio executives did with another hero who famously does not remove his helmet - Judge Dredd.

To be fair though, actors faces are their bread and butter. If the audience doesn't see them and recognize them, then they aren't getting "face time". So, for up and coming actors, the last thing they want is for their faces to not be seen by the audience. Same thing works in reverse from the studio perspective: If they paid money for a specific actor to play a part, they're going to want the audience to see their face and recognize them. They literally paid for that.

So yeah, the whole "no one wants to wear a helmet" thing is pretty much universal. It's the reason why the main characters in cop shows are never wearing helmets with their tactical gear, while all the extras around them are. And if they do wear a helmet, it's always one that's designed to maximize the ability to see their faces. I don't have a problem with shows doing this sort of thing.

[Sapphire Guard]

The other reason is that it's hard to tell who is who if everyone is wearing helmets, so even something like Band of Brothers which put a lot of emphasis on accuracy had to remove helmets in combat zones some of the time.

I never played a Halo game, but I have read the novelisation of the first game... and it was a rare novelisation that got someone good to write it. They expanded on things fairly well, there were flashbacks to first contact with the Covenant, John has flashbacks to his training about ringing a bell, flashbacks to Halsey, there are plots about the Covenant reacting to John's rampage, and a particular grunt that decides they don't want to be cannon fodder.

Lots of these things could be done cheaply.

[warty goblin]

Never having MC take his helmet off in game is a fun gimmick that reinforces the idea that the player is the MC. Because you know you're never more than, like, five minutes from shooting some dudes, having your dude in full combat gear all the time doesn't feel very jarring. It has basically zero narrative cost, so why not do it?

It just isn't gonna work that way in a TV show that mostly isn't combat sequences, and spends a lot of time very far away from combat zones, places where people don't go around in combat gear all the time. At best it looks really stupid, everybody's getting briefed in normal clothes, except for the four schmucks at the back wearing giant trash cans, channeling "dude who wears reflective 'tactical' sunglasses inside" energy at a high enough voltage to be detectable from space. At worst you get that next level genius scene in Mandalorian S3, where the super elite weapon worshipping warrior cult has to split up and have everybody go off in the dark alone to eat supper because helmet fetish, a move of such intelligence that if they did anywhere but the tactically moronic SW galaxy they'd all have gotten shanked years ago. There's also no reason to try to enforce the "you are the MC" thing in a TV show, because a TV show has to be about an actual character with motivations and an arc and everything, not a blank slate custom-tailored for machine gunning grunts with minimal cognitive friction for the player. And since the major character arc for John is him rediscovering he is a human, having him keep the armor on all the time directly undercuts that.

Adaptations across mediums have to change things. Go figure. The changes get really big when you're going a game about an ambulatory refrigerator carton who goes from objective to objective shooting aliens to a show about characters doing character things.

Anyway, was home alone and sick as a dog this weekend, so I got caught up on S2. S2 is really good. The transition from S1 is a bit rocky, they clearly threw the helm a couple points over after S1, and there's a couple places where they shipped a bit of water in the turn.

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This is most evident in the whole Cortana takes over John's body bit, and whether he can actually be brought back. The answer is yes he can, and it basically happens offscreen between S1 and S2, except for a blink and you'll miss it pre-credits bit in the first episode of S2. Probably the right call, I never liked that plot point anyways, but it is a little jarring to have to the big cliffhanger from the climax of the last episode resolved over there, just, over there, stage left a bit, aw damn you missed it.

Also Madrigal, the planet around which Kwan's entire destiny apparently revolves got glassed offscreen, and now she's an indentured worker in space and just go with it OK? This actually works fine as a development, it's just really super abrupt.

But these are really minor things. The plot is turning over pretty fast now, things are happening, and they are not good things. I liked the writing in S1, but S2 definitely is a general improvement. The thematics have shifted from rehumanization to more overtly religious/mystical stuff, which I like because I like silly sci-fi mysticism, with a healthy sideline of the human costs of war. And those costs are about to get very, very costly.

It's still very much a sci-fi show, with the general clunkiness that comes with being a sci-fi show. Because that's my jam, I don't mind at all, but this isn't gonna do for sci-fi videogames what the first couple seasons of A Game of Thrones did for bricklike fantasy novels a decade or so ago. A lot of this just the nature of the source material, AGoT was, huge budgetary requirements aside, pretty much an adaptational gold mine, since it already was very character focused with a reasonably sized ensemble cast and just buckets of character conflict with absolutely colossal stakes. Halo is stuck in the unenviable scenario of having a stupid huge pile of lore of very mixed quality, but it's most popular and well known works are so character-free you have to invent a personality for the protagonist. And a lot of this is that I think the aim of Halo the TV show is make a sci-fi TV show with some Halo stuff in it. And I think they mostly succeeded in the first season, and are very much succeeding in the second season.

[Rynjin]

You keep harping on this as if any of the changes they made were...good. The show is an utter failure both in terms of adaptation and creativity, and seems to only appeal to you because you share the utter, bafflingly intense contempt the show's creators had for the original property.

Your big criticism doesn't even make any sense. John has about as much personality as your average action hero, and more than some. If Jack ****ing Reacher can carry a popular show, they could have managed it with Halo.

As it turns out, there's more than one type of story structure, multiple of which are able to carry along a bland antagonist. Not every story needs to be character-based.

Trying to inject more personality into a character isn't necessarily BAD, but the execution of just picking a DIFFERENT and much whinier bland character template from the box of their other rejected show ideas ain't it, chief.

[warty goblin]

You keep harping on this as if any of the changes they made were...good. The show is an utter failure both in terms of adaptation and creativity, and seems to only appeal to you because you share the utter, bafflingly intense contempt the show's creators had for the original property.

I don't hold the source material in disdain. I very much like Halo, played the campaign multiple times, messed around with multiplayer for the three weeks in college where I tried having friends. I can probably quote like half the dialog from Silent Cartographer from memory, and would count the opening level where you see Halo from the ground for the first time as one of my all time favorite gaming moments. I remember watching a really old trailer for it at a friend's house in glorious late nineties postage stamp resolution, back when it was a Mac title, and thinking it looked awesome. Since they released the MC collection on PC I've pottered through a couple of them as well.

I like Halo quite a lot, thank you very much. I don't view it as sacrosanct, because I don't approach adaptations from that perspective, even for source material I hold in the highest regard. If you cut me I probably bleed Tolkien, I don't think the Hobbit movies or Rings of Power are bad because they changed things, they fail entirely on their own merits.

That's really all I can say on the matter. I like Halo the game series quite a lot, I like Halo the TV series as well. I get that you don't, and that's fine, I'm not engaged in anything as utterly futile as trying to change somebody's taste. I'm simply trying to clarify my taste, and does (and does not) work for me. It isn't the best thing ever, and it certainly has flaws, but by and large I find the story engaging and the characters compelling, and I'm looking forward to the rest of this season.