The Halo TV series has taken its best opportunity yet to actually take us to a Halo ring

The range has dropped in the Halo TV universe. If you know anything about the history of the Halo games, you know that the next thing that’s supposed to happen is Master Chief escaping from the Covenant forces above Reach, having his ship attacked and then promptly crashing onto the first Halo ring of the series. In other words, this is actually the moment the action begins. That’s not what happened in the Halo TV series. Instead, Chief (Pablo Schreiber) and his friends took a reflective excursion to a backwater planet that felt much more like a detour than character development.

After escaping Reach, Chief, and everyone else on the escape ship (which is basically all the living series regulars except Kate Kennedy’s Kai), you visit Aleria, a small Earth farming planet with a lot of land to spare and almost poisonous. soil. After an episode as big and exciting as the Fall of Reach, this feels like an HBO-style breather: the kind of episode dedicated to taking stock of the characters we’ve lost and exploring the new shape of the world after a major commotion. . But those shows earn those reflective episodes with consistent quality to themselves, and they tend to make those quiet episodes feel increasingly bigger and more important than the loud ones. That was certainly not the case indoors Halo the fifth episode of season 2.

In defense of the Halo The entire premise of the series is that there is no obligation to follow the events of the games directly. Since the show’s announcement, the creative team behind it has been careful to specify that this series will be set in the “Silver Timeline,” which is completely separate from the canon of the games. So going somewhere other than Halo after the Fall of Reach isn’t really a problem. The problem is that the show once again fails the most basic and important test of doing interesting things with those changes.

The series seems confident that the audience will love and care about the side characters. But they’re just not interesting. During this episode, the most coherent storyline we spend time with is Soren (the great Bokeem Woodbine, doing his best as always) and his wife searching for their child. We see them questioning various people in the village and even finding someone who they think is keeping their child away from them. But at the end of the episode, they discover that he has actually been kidnapped by the UN Security Council – an organization we know at this point almost exclusively as the military that loves kidnapping children. It’s a lame, ‘no shit’ reveal that feels both too obvious and completely pointless at the same time. Another storyline of the episode involves Riz, a Spartan introduced only a few episodes ago, deciding she wants to become a farmer now that she is too injured to be a Spartan.

With storylines this boring, about characters the series can never really convince us to care about, it becomes incredibly difficult not to long for the circular perfection and alien strangeness of the Halo rings that give this franchise its name. So why aren’t we there yet?

The answer seems to lie in the Halo show’s approach to the rings in general. The series clearly recognizes that one of the strengths of the first game was that Halo was extremely mysterious. But the show approaches that mystery in a very different way than the original game.

Photo: Adrienn Szabo/Paramount Plus

Before the game, the mystery of Halo was how little information you had about both the alien ring and the video game world. Aside from the premise of humanity taking a back seat in a war against aliens, almost everything else was a black box. So when you crash-land on Halo in the game’s second level (a level also called “Halo”), the path is cleared for the game to slowly reveal its secrets about Forerunners, the Covenant religion, the Flood, 343 Guilty Spark, and everything else that feels mundane in the series these days. The TV series, on the other hand, decided to make Halo a destination. Instead of giving us no lore, it has piled on piles and piles of lore throughout its first two seasons, dangling the Halo ring in front of its characters’ prophetic visions. This path to Halo isn’t necessarily bad; a well-executed build-up and reveal can make for a fantastic moment in a TV show. But like the Hatch in Lost, the key is that you have to show the audience why the thing is mysterious and important – you have to actually prove it to us, and not just have the characters bombard us with incisive dialogue that it matters. And more importantly: the characters have to actually be involved in the end.

None of this is to say that the show doesn’t have time to get to Halo, or even that it can’t be good once it gets there. But it is to say that the journey there so far has been deeply misjudged and far too slow, and it’s starting to feel like it might not happen at all. In this episode, Makee (Charlie Murphy) tries to convince the Arbiter to go to the Halo Rings because she insists the Prophets are lying about the Great Journey, while telling the rest of the Covenant fanciful stories about its importance and transcending the physical realm. but never actually intended to take them on their journey to the divine. Now I’m not saying that the Halo series is the Prophets and we are the rest of the Covenant, but I say our lack of a trip to a Halo ring is starting to get a little suspicious, and they’re running out of time to convince me that we are really going.