The Halo TV Series Is an Empty Fantasy of a Good War

The Halo franchise exists as three distinct entities at once. The first, is as a background hum in the lives of people who do not play the video game but do see the advertisements. People who could not tell you that the robot man’s name was Master Chief, but do feel a vague sense of recognition when he appears on posters and TV screens. The second, is as a popular first person shooter. One where Master Chief shoots aliens for several hours, set to a bombastic score. One where you spend countless hours hanging out with your friends in custom Forge maps, or play big team battle in competent, goofy ways. The final, is as a sci-fi universe that has been crafted over the course of eight mainline videogames, eight side games, over twenty novels, several web-series, a narrative podcast, an ARG, and an animated film.

Halo, the Paramount Plus TV show, doesn’t successfully adapt any of these versions of Halo. Nor does it manage to be a cohesive narrative on its own terms. By the end of the show’s first season, barely any plot threads are legitimately resolved, character arcs are left hanging, and basic facts about the setting are left wholly unanswered—not because they are mysteries, but because the show cannot properly articulate its own world. The show’s central conflicts, for both its characters and its factional politics, are never properly presented or even justified. It is, in most ways, a failure.

The series takes place in its own timeline, dubbed the Silver Timeline—named for Spartans of Silver Team, Kai-125, Vannak-134, Riz-028, and John-117, the Master Chief. From its first episode, the show diverges sharply from the established narrative of the games both in terms of the exact setting it establishes and how it frames Chief within that setting and develops his story. The games themselves and the expanded universe around them depict a clash between the rational, practical hard scifi archetypes of the UNSC (embodied by Chief and his super AI companion Cortana) and the magical mysticism of the Covenant and their understanding of the history of the galaxy. This new TV show embraces the magic and prophecy completely, and turns Chief himself into a character who understands himself and his purpose through the lens of magic. 

Nor does it stop there, the entire world of the show could be described as placing a sci-fi veneer over a fairly rote fantasy novel replete with an evil wizard and her malevolent helper, a coven of witches guarding the secret to a magical nexus, an orphan child who discovers the destiny of her bloodline, a mysterious bandit with a heart that is as gold as the treasure he claims motivates him… really, we could do this all day. The problem is that for all the ponderous worldbuilding the series attempts to build around these stock characters, it never really resolves them into much more than archetypes, and the mystical elements end up driving the plot forward more than anything else in the story, supplying the motivation and direction that scant characterizations do not.

In its opening episode, a group of Insurrectionists on the planet Madrigal gather to gamble and tell ghost stories about their battles against the UNSC. They are dust covered, and wear impossibly layered garments of brown and orange, because they are on a desert planet and that is how you know that they are poor. Their war is never given a proper justification, the show tells us little beyond the fact they are rebels against the imperialist government of Earth, but the camera treats them with a tragic respect. It believes that as the underdogs, they are, by definition, good. It also knows that they will die in the coming scenes, and so it does what it can to humanize them.

Then a child is blown to pieces by a Covenant Phantom, and the colonists are quickly massacred. This justifies the arrival of the Spartans, who quickly kill the Covenant, leaving only a single survivor—Kwan Ha, the daughter of the Insurrectionist General. During this interventions, Master Chief encounters a mysterious Forerunner artifact and begins having visions of his own childhood, giving him a compulsion to continue communing with the device. This also seems to move Chief to take Kwan under his wing, confessing to her that he killed her mother as part of the UNSC’s campaign of assassinations against Insurrectionists before defying orders from his superiors to kill Kwan for her refusal to be a propaganda mouthpiece. The UNSC immediately turns against Chief for this defiance, but the artifact (eventually revealed as only one half of a set of “Keystones” that only “Blessed Ones” can operate, which will reveal the location of the Halo) awakens and breaks the UNSC’s control over Chief’s spaceship and lets him escape with Kwan.

This opening episode would appear to establish the UNSC as a brutal military regime, one which the insurrectionists were well justified to rebel against. It would suggest that the rest of the show would be interested in the politics which drive this empire, and how the relationship between different human factions is fundamentally altered by the emergence of the Covenant as a significant threat. It would also suggest that the relationship between Master Chief and Kwan Ha would be a central aspect of the series. Yet in the very next episode, Halo rejects this tension completely as Kwan Ha is separated from Master Chief and left in the care of a former Spartan, Soren-066.

From this point forward, the story of Kwan Ha and the story of Master Chief and the UNSC are wholly disconnected. Kwan Ha, with the begrudging help of Soren-066, returns to Madrigal to attempt to continue her father’s revolution. When she arrives, she is told by her father’s Generals that the revolution is over, and that her father’s motivations were not what they seemed. What were his real motivations? Thanks to a tribe of mystics in the desert, Kwan learns that her father declared independence from the UNSC not because he had a clear political motivation or desire for a better future, but because a Forerunner AI had given his family a prophecy that it was their duty to protect a Forerunner portal at the bottom of a well.

When given the opportunity to explore the complex relationship between an empire at war and its unwilling subjects, Halo chose to make that story about an ancient prophecy, reliant on every sci-fi writing shorthand in the book. From the desert mystics, to the costume design, and the villainous governor of Madrigal, Kwan Ha’s half of the narrative is a collection of shorthand plot devices with no emotional or intellectual foundation. It is a vapid and empty plotline, and it constitutes almost half of the show’s total runtime.

The other half of the show is given over to Master Chief and his special place within mad scientist Katherine Halsey’s Spartan-II program. The Spartan-II program was a UNSC project intended to create the strongest soldiers possible, to be deployed against insurrectionists in special operations. They entered combat at age 15, after being kidnapped, trained, and experimented upon by Dr. Katherine Halsey at age 5. These kidnapped children were replaced with flash clones, designed to die in a few months.

The Spartan-IIs are unfailingly loyal to Dr. Halsey, who raised, traumatized, and indoctrinated them. As mother, commander, and scientist, their relationship is not only complex, but deeply manipulative. The problem is that the show does not have time to actually show how this relationship developed or how it lets her control her child-soldiers. Instead, it introduces an “emotion chip” that is implanted in each of the Spartans that seals-in all this conditioning. Naturally, that cork is getting popped.

Upon removing the hormone suppressant, Master Chief begins to experience the full range of human emotion for the first time, spurring him to leave the base and explore Reach City. The following scene is corny, but effective as Master Chief listens, in awe, to music for the first time. To quickly move character arcs forward, Kai-125 witnesses Master Chief remove his hormone suppressant and decides to follow suit. Her reaction is much more intense, leading her to dye her hair with gun grease, become an impulsive fighter and showoff, and leads her to begrudgingly obey orders from Miranda Keyes, Halsey’s daughter and a scientific officer who is much more loyal to the UNSC out of a misguided application of the morality that her mother lacks.

The relationship between Kai and Keyes is, arguably, the high point of the show’s acting and writing. Keyes, the biological daughter of Halsey, and Kai, her precious, kidnapped, science experiment, have an extended conversation about their relationship to Halsey, during which Miranda learns of her mother’s cruelty, and Kai realizes for the first time just how much Halsey traumatized her as a child. It is one of the few scenes in the show where it feels like the characters left it changed. Sadly, this is a show about Master Chief, and so this handful of scenes become a fleeting glimpse into a better television show.

Chief, on the other hand, spends most of the following episodes re-awakening memories of his childhood, causing him to grow angry at Halsey for kidnapping him. The thing is, that’s about the only thing he appears haunted or angry about. The show refuses to give the audience time to see who Master Chief was prior to contact with the artifact, which flicked his feelings switch from Off to On. It is a turning point in the life of a character who we do not know, and never get the chance to know—driven not by a character’s changing, conflicted motivations, but by a magic rock.

The UNSC is an evil space empire, which has had its many war crimes posthumously justified by an alien invasion. The Spartan-II’s were child soldiers, raised to kill revolutionaries who dared to declare independence from the UNSC. Master Chief is a fucked up weirdo who is very good at using guns, and he is very cool until you start thinking about what he represents. The Halo TV series can recognize and acknowledge these facts where the games cannot. But, while it can acknowledge this fact it cannot meaningfully engage with it, because its perspective character has to be a good man.

The first five Halo games focus exclusively on the Human-Covenant war. Halo: Reach depicts the most pivotal moment in the first part of the war, when the Spartan training facility on the planet Reach falls to Covenant invasion, before being glassed. Halo: Combat Evolved depicts humanity’s first serious contact with Forerunner artifacts and the flood, finally allowing them to understand why the Covenant wants them dead. Halo 2 focuses on the latter years of the war, where Master Chief begins turning things to the UNSC’s favor while the Covenant begins experiencing an internal conflict known as the Great Schism. Halo: ODST, depicts the war on Earth through the eyes of regular soldiers, as opposed to Spartans. Halo 3 depicts the final year of the war, which ends with the death of the final Covenant leader, and the destruction of a Halo installation.

The Halo TV series is, ostensibly, also about the Human-Covenant war. Where the games devote five games worth of run-time to this conflict, the TV show devotes about an hour of its total run-time to the Covenant. By the end of the series, their motivations remain unclear, they fail to feel like serious threats, and we never get to see a cool space battle on the Halo TV show. I do not know how the war has changed by the end of its first nine-episode season.

Instead, the Covenant are presented in a handful of snapshots and through the show’s third perspective character, Makee, a human woman who was kidnapped and indoctrinated by the Covenant at a young age. Makee is, like Master Chief, a “Blessed One,” which means she is capable of operating ancient Forerunner artifacts. These artifacts, and the sacred ring which they point towards, are the center of the Covenant’s faith, which worships the Forerunners as gods. 

These are things that you could reasonably intuit from the show, but which it only explicitly states in passing. The Covenant want the Keystones, which they and the UNSC skirmish over a few times throughout the series. It is never explained why the Covenant is also going around glassing planets. Instead of a real justification, the show relies the visual and aural rhetoric of alien theocracy.

Humanity and the Covenant are at war because the Covenant is an alien theocracy and, by the rules and conventions of standard sci-fi, therefore evil. The San’shyuum speak Sangheili, a con-lang (constructed language) created for the show. Sangheili is designed to feel alien to the audience, and thus relies heavily on phonemes not present in English, but which are relatively common in Asian and African languages and dialects. This is a stark difference from the games, in which the Covenant speak English when on screen. Sometimes this is a translation for the audience’s benefit, other times they are genuinely speaking English. In either case, while the Covenant are meant to feel alien through their technology, their language is rarely used to exoticize them. 

These phonemes are used as shorthand for alien, and alien quickly becomes shorthand for evil. The aliens want to destroy humanity, and the reason does not matter. It is assumed that the audience will accept this.

Without a real justification for the war outside of the belief that the Keystones may point to some kind of weapon, the show’s climactic final battle falls flat. During the battle, both Makee and Master Chief psychically project onto a Halo installation, where Makee asks Master Chief to join her before being shot in the real world. Moments later, Master Chief is fatally wounded and hands control of his body and mind over to Cortana, who then does a fight scene. 

Over the course of nine episodes, nothing happens in a meaningless war against a threat that we are given nearly no insight into, aside from the fact that they are aliens. It is a nearly inexplicable choice that actively denies interpretation of the Halo TV series as a text, and becomes emblematic of its failure as a work of adaptation.

If Halo’s first season could be said to have a purpose, it is to portray a liberal fantasy of a complex, morally justified war. One fought by good troops who feel guilty and compromised by bad actors like Katherine Halsey, who are, in spite of everything, necessary for the cause. By the end, it has tried to illustrate the monstrousness enabled by technocratic militarism, and how deeply propagandized that system needs people and especially its servants to be in order to perpetuate itself. Standard stuff, especially in our current era of scifi television, but Halo just doesn’t do this with much style or even conviction.

It stands out as a work in which a hollow ideology precedes an artistic work without a heart. Despite all the morally ambiguous political trappings, it is unwilling to sit with the most uncomfortable parts of its subject matter, and so chooses instead to “plot device” these questions away.

The Insurrectionists, which the Halo novels occasionally sympathize with but frequently portray as misguided, are denied even the most basic political stances. Their war against the UNSC is not only fought for a magical prophecy, but for a prophecy which will almost inevitably lead to the two sides allying. Kwan Ha, after spending half the show furious at an unjust government killing her mother, and desperate to continue her father’s war, is left to protect a macguffin that the UNSC will almost inevitably need in the show’s next season. Her former oppressors will arrive on her planet and she will greet Master Chief, who will be proud of her for how much she has grown, before using the magical portal to go…somewhere.

The Halo TV series, like the liberalism at its core, believes that insurrectionists, revolutionaries, and radicals are the natural, but misguided, products of empire, who exist only to be villainized, forgiven, and then pitied before being lovingly sanitized and returned to the imperial core. The half-baked characters and plotlines of Madrigal are not just bad TV, but the direct products of this ideology.

These same critiques extend to the show’s portrayal of the UNSC, which alludes to but never engages with interfactional conflict. The UNSC is evil because Katherine Halsey is there. The people who enabled her were mistaken, but ultimately their hearts are proven to be in the right place when they turn against her in the show’s final episode. At times, Halo wants to be a political drama, but its absolute faith in the power and sanctity of institutions prevents this drama from having any meaningful stakes.

The UNSC cannot be fundamentally flawed. Not only because its worst crimes are retroactively justified by an alien threat, but because to genuinely critique the UNSC would require the show to engage with questions that do not involve magic rocks—questions that would, by their nature, force the series to actively think about the implications of its own ideology.

Halo’s politics have never been particularly complicated, nor particularly good. But they have never been so empty and loud, nor so poorly delivered. “Humanity is good because we can feel things,” the show insists time and time again, but it never shows its audience what a good life looks like or what makes its world worth living in. It is too uncomfortable with its setting and characters to do that work, and uncomfortable with the fact that it is both in love with and terrified of, empire. The insurrectionists are morally good, but misguided. So are the Spartans. The UNSC is bad, but not in ways that matter—and in the end, there are aliens to fight.