The opening minutes of Halo season 2 are the best the show has ever been

Halo‘s first season felt like an old-fashioned video game adaptation: desperate to be taken seriously and terrified of all the specific quirks about the source material that people actually love. Sure there were gunfights, Spartans, Cortana, and Master Chief, but there was also a romantic storyline, a forced theme of trauma, and not nearly as many aliens as you’d hope. The good news is that the first few minutes of season 2, which premieres February 8, are a perfect summary of everything that’s going on. Halo series could be, and light years better than anything from season 1.

Season 2 begins with Master Chief and his team of Spartans trying to save a village of people on a planet called Sanctuary. The Covenant is closing in on the planet and about to glass it, but that doesn’t stop the Spartans from trying to save everyone they can. There’s a scene where Master Chief charges headlong into unknown odds and ends up taking over dozens of Sangheili. Despite the sometimes questionable CGI, the fight is exciting, intense, and a great showcase for what makes Master Chief and his fellow Spartans special – and there’s even a brief Arbiter tease thrown in for good measure. It’s the kind of fighting you could imagine him doing in the games, if they weren’t first-person shooters that kept you glued to the butt of a gun the entire time.

But the silence that follows Chief’s harrowing encounter with the Covenant is even more interesting. As the alien spaceships rain fire from the sky in preparation for the planet’s destruction, Chief has a conversation with a woman from the village who chooses to stay on her homeworld and die rather than flee. She explains her reasoning calmly, looking directly into Master Chief’s amber visor with only her reflection looking back at her. She questions Chief’s own relationship with death and sacrifice, then walks into the fire and accepts her death.

Despite the fact that this all happens with Chief’s helmet on, just like in the video games, his emotions are no less clear than if we had a close-up of Pablo Schreiber’s face. Chief is shocked and conflicted about his failure to save anyone and complete his mission, but also about the idea that there is some kind of heroic sacrifice that could feel so foreign to him. Schreiber’s physicality in the bulky Spartan armor is excellent and communicative, and more effective than Chief trying to work this all out in words could ever be. At that point, it’s immediately clear that Chief is still deeply human, struggling with the vulnerabilities that the UN Security Council training programs couldn’t fully eliminate from their near-perfect soldier.

Image: Adrienn Szabo/Paramount Plus

These short few minutes make up the whole of a great one Halo on a micro scale. It’s got action, it’s got energy swords, and most importantly, it pulls in one of the gaming world’s most iconic characters and literally uses his visor as a hyper-polished mirror to reflect his own broken humanity back to him. It’s everything the games set out to do, but better, more complicated, and more human, thanks to Schreiber’s fantastic performance in the armor. The only downside is that the rest of the episode can’t match the quality.

After this fantastic opener, the show changes back to Paramount Plus’ Halo, at least for the most part. The dialogue is noticeably better, the action is smoother, the sets and VFX are better, but it’s still very much a show about bureaucratic time-wasting and people refusing to talk about the very cool aliens trying to destroy humanity. None of this is terrible, it’s just a huge letdown after the high bar set in the opening scene. If anything, it’s to the show’s credit that it’s all a lot better than season 1, and a promising start to the season as a whole.