Halo Episode 3 ("Emergence") begins on a “waste reclamation planet.” Amidst a sea of metal and plastic, two 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.
Just then, a Phantom dropship swoops down from the sky. Two Elites descend on 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 stride directly to their objective, led there by a magic stick.
The little girl stares back at them. This is a flashback, we realize. This girl is the Covenant Princess.
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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 somebody 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 silent. This is like a video game where 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 it wants at no apparent cost, as they do 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.
This whole concept involved no thought whatsoever. It makes no sense in any context.
#3: Terrible acting
We've finally found an actor more wooden than Kwan: these two child actors.
Enter Cortana
We finally meet Cortana in this episode. Halsey kills her clone, scanning her brain into a computer, thus creating a human-sized Cortana--a sort-of hologram, played sort-of by Jen Taylor. This sequence is recognizably stolen from The Fall of Reach, yet the character of Cortana bears no resemblance to the AI we know from the original Halo games.
This doesn’t bother me that much. I mean, it bothers me, just not like hornets in my underwear or tarantulas in my mouth. For the first time in the show I feel like the writers are going for something. I feel like Cortana and Chief are working toward some sort of objective.
But I can’t 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 the awful redesign. Cortana's sleek data silhouette is iconic. It's one of those things that can't be changed. But they changed it. Now she looks like a normal human.
She’s also human-sized, like in Halo 4.
These departures are relatively minor compared to changing the character’s personality, but they stand out badly when Jen Taylor is the one in the role. She is the only returning actor from the games. When I hear her voice issue from the mouth of whoever this character is, it's seriously jarring.
The words she says are even more jarring. This Cortana is nothing like the character from the games but quite a lot like the Windows 10 virtual assistant. She sounds like Siri: stilted, dignified, technical, and typical AI. There is no sass or wit to her.
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.
I am still curious where the writers take this. There might be something interesting down the line. I love Jen Taylor, so that helps.
It probably won’t be good. But for the first time, I do want to keep watching.
RoboChief
As I mentioned in my review of the first episode, the writers want the Master Chief to have Robocop’s arc. In this episode he uses a knife to cut out a 'pellet' in his back that turns him into a Real Boy. He then wanders the streets of Reach, taking in his humanity for the first time.
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 in the pilot. He saved Kwan in the pilot. 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, there's no growth. We see Chief, but what's different? What's changed? He says this is like “the first time.” How?
They could have done a lot with that sequence. Instead, they did nothing. This is Halo in essence.
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
+ Drop pods 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.
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 weren’t for Kwan, I would 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.
But Kwan is incredibly boring. Her sections ravage the pacing, and she might yet ruin the show. We will have to see.