Halo: Episode 3 Review
I have had colonoscopies worse than Episode 3 of Halo.
Halo Episode 3 ("Emergence") begins on a 'waste reclamation planet.' Amidst a sea of metal and plastic, two young child slaves are harangued by human guards for their inadequate performances. They slack off and read a book; for this crime, the punishment is death.
But wait. Just then, a phantom dropship swoops down from the sky! Two Elites lower down a gravlift. The guards run! Everyone flees! The Elites saunter casually toward the one surviving child slave, a girl. She is their only target.
Meanwhile, nothing happens. No gunfire or screams are heard. No fighting takes place. The Elites do nothing at all except walk, like invulnerable Saurons, straight toward their objective, led their by a magic stick.
The little girl stares back at them. This is a flashback, we realize. This girl is human-alien princess.
CUT TO: TITLE SCREEN
Was Anyone Even Trying?
This opening sequence exemplifies this show's three worst qualities.
#1: I've never seen a lazier sequence in my life
The aliens show up. Some people are afraid for a few seconds, then no one cares. Aren't these guards defending their facility? Aren't there planetary defenses? Doesn't someone, somewhere have a gun? Aren't the Elites interested in blowing some people up to clear a path? There isn't even a soundscape for this environment; it's completely stale. This is like a video game where all the enemies around the player freeze during a cutscene.
#2: Bad Science Fiction is an understatement
An entire planet dedicated to recycling...plastic. One might imagine that any spacefaring civilization with sophisticated enough technology to instantly and effortlessly traverse the stars whenever they want at no apparent cost, as they do freely in Halo, would also have the technology to automate recycling. They produce so much energy that one wonders why they bother with recycling at all: space isn't like Earth, we don't need to worry about pollution. Just dump that shit like they do in Star Wars.
This whole concept involved no thought whatsoever. It makes no sense in any science fiction context.
#3: Terrible shitty acting
We've finally found an actor more wooden than Kwan: kid version of human-alien princess. Dear lord.
Enter Cortana
We finally meet Cortana in this episode. Halsey kills her clone, scanning her brain into a computer, causing human-sized Cortana--a sort-of hologram, played sort-of by Jen Taylor--to materialize. The entire sequence is a molestation of The Fall of Reach, but it is recognizable in part. I won't go through and itemize a list of the ways in which this is different from the books and games: the bottom line is that Cortana, in both purpose and presentation, bears no relationship whatsoever to the character from Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo 2, and the departures are all for the worse.
But to be honest, that doesn't bother me that much. (So we're clear: it does still bother me, just not as much as hornets in my underwear or tarantulas in my mouth.) For the first time in the show I feel like the writers are at least going for something. I feel like Cortana and Chief are working toward some sort of objective in the narrative.
This is why I'm unhappily reporting that I liked "Emergence" more than either of the previous two episodes, even though I still think it's terrible. In fact I think every constituent component of Halo is bad; I can't name any element that I like intellectually, in the abstract, on paper. But I can't bring myself to hate it like I did the first episode.
There are a few things about Cortana in particular that bothered me a lot, though. I can't help but escape the impression that the writers set out to do research on the character, only instead of playing the games, they installed Windows 10 and used that as their baseline.
Notice first the awful redesign. She looked more blue to me in the episode tonight and I didn't notice her heterochromatic eyes, but it hardly matters; the choice to depart from Cortana's classic look is mystifying and infuriating. Cortana's sleek data silhouette is iconic. It's one of those things that can't be changed.
Not only does she look completely different, she's human sized. She walks around at Master Chief height--Halo 4 style.
These departures are relatively minor relative to the character's personality, but they stick out more due to Jen Taylor's appearance in the role. Taylor is the only reprising actor from the games. So when I hear Jen Taylor's voice issue out of the mouth of whoever this character is, it's seriously jarring.
The words she says are even more jarring. As I said, this Cortana is nothing like the character from the games--and quite a lot like the Windows 10 virtual assistant. It sounds identical to Siri or Alexa too: stilted, dignified, technical, fairly typical AI. Nothing sarcastic or witty. No Cortanacisms. No jokes. She doesn't sound like Cortana.
I would like to remind you that the first thing Cortana says to Chief in Combat Evolved is a joke. Because she's funny. She makes lots of jokes.
Maybe she's just learning or whatever. Maybe she'll flesh out over time. I don't know. It was bizarre to me that she was so completely developed right after being scanned from Halsey's clone's brain; no period needed to learn English, no time required to master mathematics--not even a few seconds to demonstrate her IQ. She just knew everything right away! But it's not the same brain as the clone's, because her accent and personality are completely different...
With all said and done, I'm still curious where they go with this, and not just morbidly. There might be something decent in here. I really like Jen Taylor, so that helps. That doesn't mean it's good. But I do want to keep watching. Sort of.
RoboChief
As I mentioned in my review of the first episode, the writers are clearly--for some reason--going for a RoboCop arc with the Master Chief. In this episode he uses a knife to cut out a 'pellet' in his back which turns him into a Real Boy. He then wanders the streets of Reach, taking in his humanity for the first time.
This isn't far-off from the arc I'd imagined for the protagonist of a sci-fi novel I outlined last year. It's simple, it's RoboCop, but it could work. You could do this with the Master Chief, if you really wanted to. But it doesn't work here at all. For one, the notion that the Master Chief's humanity was somehow subdued because of this magical pellet in his back was never established. Bokeem Woodbine told us about it, yeah, but we never saw it. Chief seemed perfectly human to me. He saved Kwan, even though she's fucking annoying as shit. He's hyper-compassionate. We never saw him savagely murder innocents; we never saw him ignore art and music in favor of repairing a gun; we never saw him work hard when play was an option, or stay focused even when no one was watching.
So when he meanders around Reach, which definitely looks just like a planet involved in an existential war for humanity's existence as people hang out and play music and run around in parks and eat at French restaurants, there's no growth. We see Chief--but what's different? What's changed? He says this is like the 'first time' but--why?
They could have done a lot with that sequence. Instead, they did the laziest thing possible, and then it's over. Could there be a more perfect summary of the show?
Halo Stuff
I recognize almost nothing from the games in Halo. I don't see the characters. This isn't the conflict I know. The problems we're facing in the plot aren't Halo's problems. But this third episode had a lot more of Halo's 'stuff' than the previous two, perhaps even combined. This at least makes the series feel more like a big piece of shit, less like a scam. That's a step in the right direction.
Here are the few I noticed:
+ Covenant Corvettes
+ Stalwart frigates
+ Droppods from Combat Evolved
+ Hunter worms
+ Cortana, sort of
+ Multiple spaceships!!
Finally we're seeing spaceships, after three hours in this setting. I don't care if the encounter between the frigate and the Corvette makes no sense whatsoever and leads to nothing: at least we're finally seeing ships in space. It almost felt like Halo, even if it was marred in a stupid plot about some dumb human-alien princess girl.
This is a big improvement over the pilot especially.
Kwan is the Worst Character Ever
Why is this character in the show? Whose idea was it to put a teenage girl in Halo? Does anyone like her? What's wrong with the writers? Were they dropped on their heads as children?
If it wasn't for Kwan, who is nothing but a time-filler and a waste of space, I wouldn't even mind Halo that much. It would annoy me for all the reasons cited above and it would still be mediocre sci-fi, but it would be watchably entertaining. But Kwan ruins the show. She's so fucking boring. Her sections annihilate the pacing. There's nothing to her. She doesn't fit into the plot. She has nothing to do with the story.
Please Jesus, someone kill her already.
So There You Have It
I spent this week's episode yelling at my TV, but I have to say that I want to watch the next one now. I'm not entirely sure why. I don't like this show or think it's good, but I'm sufficiently invested that I want to see where it's going--hopefully, to the Flood, where there might be some cool special effects and/or action sequences. If it wasn't for Kwan, I would happily-unhappily watch the rest of the season, cringing whenever Master Chief said anything, rolling my eyes at how lazy everything is, but not especially bored.
With Kwan--we'll see how it goes.