Paramount’s Halo series has been more than a little hit or miss over the course of its first four episodes. It’s been more miss than hit as the series has been trying to set up the chess pieces and make sure that everyone watching the show knows exactly who all the characters are. In fact, the show has been surprisingly action free for a series that is based on the Halo video game where players are shooting or punching nearly every second of the game.
This week, there was a little bit more action, but in the long run, there was still a lot of buildup and not nearly enough payoff. Having said that, there’s something to be said for holding off on the real action, where Master Chief is fighting against The Covenant for as long as possible. It makes the payoff that much sweeter. Still, even when the episode did finally deliver the action, there just didn’t seem to be enough of it. It arrived out of nowhere and then seemed to be gone in a flash.
That in and of itself isn’t even that bad. One of the things that Halo has done right off the bat is really demonstrating just how completely outmanned the UNSC is when it comes to going toe-to-toe with The Covenant. When they do attack, the aliens appear to be pretty heavily outnumbered. However, the blitzkrieg style with which they attack and the fact that they are bigger, tougher and have stronger weapons allows them to mow through the regular troops like a hot knife through butter. It’s also a decent reminder of Halo Episode 1, where just a handful of aliens were able to take out an entire town’s worth of people in about 10 minutes.
One of the reasons why the action felt so “blink and miss it” is because It’s a short episode. "Reckoning" was barely over 35 minutes. The other reason why the action was so fleeting is that the series continues to focus on Kwan, whose storyline continues to be more pointless as the season plods on. She and Soren have been sniping at each other like a father and daughter team and it appears that particular dynamic isn’t going anywhere, anytime soon. The problem is that it’s just not all that interesting at this point for Kwan to say she wants to recapture the glory of her father for the third or fourth week in a row.
The other big beat in this particular episode is that Master Chief is still working to figure out just what is behind the mystery of his childhood. The show also continues to show its audience something that it’s spelled out rather explicitly through dialog. That Dr. Halsey has not been remotely honest with John about his upbringing or how he ended up coming to be a Spartan. There was a nice nod to the Halo lore in this episode, where the show depicted him being replaced by a “Flash Clone” to fool his parents and freeing him to go live and study with the UNSC military.
There was also the continued delving into what happens when Spartans remove the thing that basically keeps them from feeling emotions. Halo made sure to tell us that they are essentially emotionless killing machines when the series started. The Paramount series has since tried to get the audience to ask the question “what happens when they are still killing machines but they actually feel something?” There was a nice end-around to this question by setting it up that Kai was going to be Spartan who absolutely lost her coo on the battlefield, only to have her be the one who was screaming about finishing the missions and trying to talk sense into a compatriot who was going a bit overboard.
Speaking of Kai, it’s not definitely a mistake of the writing that Kai is the more interesting character than Master Chief. He might be the star of the show, he might be the one who leads the other Spartans down this road of finally questioning why they do the things they do, but he also is still almost annoyingly, the Master Chief. Meanwhile, Kai is walking around smiling and joking and still managing to be an alien killing warrior when the time comes to do that. She’s also expressing her individuality even more than Chief is while she’s being more subtle in doing it.
There’s also the interesting twist that the writers might even be steering the story that way because there is something fundamentally different about how the two Spartans “woke up.” Master Chief was awakened by touching the artifact. On the other hand, Kai watched the Chief remove the chip and made the conscious decision to make the same move. Here’s hoping that juxtaposition was intentional and that’s why Chief seems almost mad that he’s got more awareness of what’s going on around him.
That anger does come out in what is easily the best scene of the entire Halo series. That scene closes out Episode 5 with some action and special effects right out of the video game. The Master Chief gets to drive a warthog and take out Grunts and Weasels for the first time in the season. He also absolutely pummels at least one member of the Covenant into pulp. All of this is going on while easily recognizable weapons and armaments like the Grunt's shields are displayed and audiences can hear the familiar warning tone of the Spartans’ energy shields being depleted.
The big question for this episode of Halo is whether or not that’s enough to cover for all the wandering about and arguing over Chief’s childhood for yet another 20 minutes. It is a safe bet that should the next few episodes have a little more clashing of the two sides in this conflict, it would make for a better show all around. The time for long conversations about the meaning of life in Halo really needs to be over.