Two years ago, I reviewed the first five episodes of Halo on Paramount+ with righteous indignation. I would have kept going, except that at this point I gave up. Whatever Halo was, it wasn’t the Halo I grew up with. It had no relation whatsoever to the video game franchise of the same name. I thought it was very lazy, very poorly scripted, and very boring. And also very bad.
But when I heard that the two showrunners responsible for Season 1 had been canned, a small flicker of hope wheezed beneath my breast. I read that the new writers wanted to make it “[feel] more Halo.” And I thought, maybe, given the strength of the source material, there was a chance things could be turned around. Perhaps Season 2 would be good, action-focused, and capture some of the majesty of the original two games. Or maybe just the shitty expanded universe books. Even that much would have been acceptable.
As always, my optimism was misplaced.
The first thing to notice about Season 2 is the collapse in production value. I was critical of S1’s visual design (and what I felt to be laziness in action scenes especially), but it never looked cheap in the raw sense that Season 2 does.
The beginning of the first episode of S2 is a protracted and confusing action sequence. There is no sense that the Spartans are wearing powered armor relative to the humans around them. Their suits have no lights, nothing that glows, there’s no sound to their movement; if you didn’t know it was powered, you wouldn’t know.
The lighting is flat, and not a single shadow is anywhere to be found. John Halo can’t even stand to turn a flashlight on and breathe some life into the set. Everything is gray and, for some reason, foggy, perhaps to hide the ridiculousness of John Halo’s costume. He looks more like an idiot in a Halloween costume than a supersoldier in the pinnacle of human technology. His armor plating moves like foam.
Energy shields have been nixed. Apparently inflation is hitting ONI as hard as it is the rest of us. I do recall some shield flickering when a Spartan was shot in S1, but no longer. Elites do appear to have some kind of minor shielding, but it looks nothing like it does in the games, and is severely underwhelming. Elites also have invested in energy swords, at the expense of any and all ranged weaponry.
The only praise I can offer Season 2 is that its opening fight scene is actually a relative improvement over the confusing nonsense seen in the first episode of the last season, wherein a hyperadvanced space navy decides to land its soldiers outside the walls of an open-air fortress bailey.
But the rest of the series is unchanged. The sets are cheaper, uglier, and re-used more often, but the style of writing and structure of the story remain indistinguishable.
That is to say, there still isn’t a structure to the story, and the style of the writing is still terrible.
I gave up on the last season at the episode wherein John Halo digs for buried treasure in the woods with a spade. Yes, that actually happened, although it’s hard to believe.
This season, John Halo eats dinner with a family of six in space.
These scenes serve the same purpose:
Question: “How do we get to ten episodes in our Halo TV show?”
Answer: “Let’s have John Halo eat dinner with the family of some random soldier he rescued. That’ll use some time up.”
You will be surprised to learn that nothing like this ever appears in the video games.
The entire series is nothing but poorly done padding strung between a few action set pieces. After the initial fight scene in Season 2, Chief and Co. waste the next two episodes hanging out in the locker room on Reach. Occasionally John Halo pesters the new director of the Spartan program, but their discussions elucidate nothing. We’re supposed to believe that the Spartans are integral cogs in the UNSC’s war machinery—we are told as much several times—yet one wonders why such valuable assets spend all day exchanging sexual favors in the showers and not, you know, fighting aliens. Occasionally John Halo leads his Spartans out on training exercises; why he does this while aliens are conquering the galaxy, I really can’t say.
There is never any impression that humanity is actually in a war.
Halo is a model of incoherence. It should be studied in laboratories like rare mutant bacteria, because this degree of terribleness can surely only be attained intentionally. At no point in the two hours I watched tonight did there appear anything resembling a plot. Mostly, characters I did not know or care about engaged each other in conversations that had no purpose except to inflate runtime.
I had hoped that the new writers would do a “soft reboot” (as they claimed they would) of the previous season and disregard the countless bad decisions that ruined Season 1. Characters like Soren and Kwan would be ditched. More time would be spent with Cortana and Chief, and they would be more like Cortana and Chief. This was going to be instrumental in my enjoyment of a new season, because there was no way I was going to endure the rest of Season 1 to find out what happened. I find it hard to believe anyone finished it.
But this is not what we received. Kwan and Soren are back, and we find them in medias res. What’s going on in their stories? I have no idea; it’s never explained. There is no recap. Kwan is now an expert in Tae-Kwan-Do and fights some dudes on a space station for some reason; why is she there? No explanation is proffered at any point.
Something happened to John Halo at the end of the last season, apparently, and Cortana is now gone. I don’t know why. No one has told me. I did read online that John and Makee fucked on a Halo ring or something, but this also hasn’t been explained, except that Ritz or Keoai or whoever mentioned that she killed Makee—except then Makee shows up again.
This is a continuation of Season 1. The same characters. The same terrible story. The same bad writing.
It’s not usually unreasonable for a show to assume that its audience has caught up on the previous episodes. But given the circumstances, I think assuming otherwise was a grave error.
Halo Season 2 is the most boring thing I have ever watched. It’s mostly discussions between characters I don’t care about, strenuously avoiding any plot progression, without any semblance of story, and without any worldbuilding at all. I have no sense of what this setting is like, no clue how the war is going, and no idea of what the aliens are like or want.
Season 1 was terrible, but it wasn’t all boring. There was an infrequent sense that things were building toward a resolution, although they never did. There were also occasional glimmers of love for the games sneaked into various places: door opening effects from Halo: CE, recognizable Covenant drop pods, and the fan servicey first-person sequences.
So far, Season 2 has nothing like this. It has nothing from the games except a few pieces of art direction. There is no sense at all that we have embarked on a journey that will one day conclude with any kind of climax.
This series serves no purpose except to be jeered at and mocked. Nothing makes sense. Nothing is interesting. It’s like the creative writing homework of a bored jock looking for an easy A in his senior year of high school. While I suspect the action will prove superior overall to Season 1’s—I do think the fight scene we saw was actually written into the screenplay, whereas I’m positive that in Season 1 they were all just assembled in post—everything else is as bad or worse, and the production value restrictions make watching this show for the spectacle a much more tenuous prospect.
Halo isn’t even bad. It is nothing. It has no substance. Watching Halo Season 2 is no different from staring at your black TV screen. There are more productive ways to waste your free time.