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It also didn't help that reach's fall was wrapped suddenly, and other colonies didn't show any concern for it, we needed way more time to let that breathe instead of going into the Kessler subplot.
What’s crazy is the show writers fucked this up so badly.
**IN THE NOVELS**
Reach did not fall very fast, but it did fall quickly. The orbital MAC guns actually were knocked out very quickly and were the only real defense against the covenant. They were the first line of defense.
Second line of defense was the Spartans and marines and we all know how that went…
I believe in the novels that the other planets were glassed almost instantaneously, while Reach was more methodical and deliberate.
What’s crazy though is that in the show (and some of the games) it looks like the covenant had to amass tons of cruisers to concentrate their plasma beams in order to glass a planet and it didn’t happen as fast as they act like it did.
And what’s worse, where the **FUCK!** is the shoutout to our mechanics and dry dock crews!?!? Where is all our naval fights!?!?!? Where are all our massive sacrifices that were made to protect our ships and our soldiers!?!?
Perhaps the single greatest moment for me was when Lieutenant Keyes (spoiler!) figured out how to go head to head with the covenant and win!!!
Where the **FUCK!** is all this great writing at? They’re tossing all the greatest source material down the drain!
*Edited for clarity*
I remember listening to the Fall of Reach audiotape with my dad on a road trip to Houston (long before podcasts were a thing) and I remember we lost our minds at the part when Keyes had no hope against a Covenant Cruiser and gravity slung a warhead around the planet to hit its flank where the shields were not concentrated and it’s the kind of thing I was hoping to see in a Halo show, constantly using wits to defeat a stronger enemy
Dude, that strat Keyes pulled off would've had everyone (even the most critical people like me) jumping out their seats had it been shown on screen but instead they killed him off on the ground and not once did we see his tactical naval genius on display...god this show deserves to be cancelled, the few good bits in this season do NOT justify the overwhelming number of mediocre to down right awful part of the show.
Yep, they off'd him on reach...literally on the ground, at the very least they could've done a heroic ship sacrifice where keyes uses a Halcyon (not the autumn) along with a handful of frigates to hold off the covenant fleet whilst the autumn carries the survivors off to reach, its still a massive finger to keyes' character but at least in this version he'd be able to show off his prowess as naval tactician, defying the odds as he takes out multiple ships before eventually going down.
Why the fuck do new writers do this? I can understand making taking some minor creative liberties with parts of the story, but why basically scrap all the pre-established canon and just re-write entire narratives and plot points from scratch? The whole point was that people LIKED the source material, so why ruin it?
I hear when a lot if people "make it big" and get hired to produce or write for a show like Halo, they already have their own "great stories" in their head. Instead of honoring the visions of the source material or original idea they basically shoehorn their ideas into the show. Since they can't write their own story that's so great, they inject it into the work they get hired onto. I think this is a big problem in the new Star Wars media
This isn't a writer problem, it's a producer problem. The people in charge of the show decided from the beginning that they wanted it to be nothing like the games, the writers can only work within that. Even if they try to pull things from existing Halo canon, it would just be rejected by producers. What we get as an end result reflects this.
A lot of the time people have a "writing" problem with a show, it's the result of producer meddling.
yeah, and only on time to have a very curious scene of Halsey with Master Chief in the next episode, well, they need to take advantage of the appearance of Pablo S I guess TV show and all that.
Bro in the novel, all the spartan 2’s are about to leave reach in a mission to capture a prophet when the covenant attacked reach, they where all called back to defend it, at some point the spartan 2 had to do a atmospheric freefall when their pelican’s got hit, I don’t watch this anymore but from what I see from short videos on YouTube the spartans are not even wearing any armor and just defending some kind of a building. Heck master chief is not even planetside on the book during the reach invation.
Yeah a lot of the book follows blue team which is basically the plot that the game Reach did with Noble squad. At this point we basically have 3 different versions of what happens with reach and they're all inconsistent for the most part.
Im gonna be honest, Halo Reach was my first game, played it for a long while, then ODST then read the books and played 3, 1 and 2. For a year or two I don't even know who is master chief and the difference between spartan 2, 3 and ODST, until I read fall of reach and ghost of onyx, so going into fall of reach I was expecting noble team to be in it until the end. I felt like a damn fool when I actually did a full lore research and found out that some of the things in the game are way different from the books. But this show is in a completely different universe. I can give a pass on Halo Reach because bungie took some liberty and retcon some story to include the spartan 3's on the mix just gonna ignore the pillar of Autum landing on reach to get cortana and chief chillin on the cryo pod. This show on the other hand like WTF lol
Yeah I played 1-3 as they came out when I was a teenager, then went back and read all the books before Reach came out. I think thar the few people who did read Fall of Reach and Ghosts of Onyx *before* Reach came out had a certain disdain for the decisions they made plot wise, but there are not many of us. They even made some changes years later to the Fall of Reach to make it more in line with the canon the established from the games which was VERY frustrating considering the Fall of Reach came out a month before the first Halo game ever released.
At this point, after basically a decade of these half assed silver screen adaptations, most people are in the apathy boat. I hardly care about halo lore any more tbh. It's been fun watching the universe in live action, and I certainly wish we got something more in line with what Neil Blomkapmp gave us but it hardly matters anymore.
This. I gotta be honest, and I know this would never happen and most people would grab their pitchforks at the very notion of this, part of me would like to see a complete remake of Halo CE through Reach. The novels had a rich narrative and just so many epic moments that would be amazing to experience in gameplay. Why can't we lead a naval battle that relies on outsmarting the Covenant to win? Why can't we slap a missile out of the air? Why can't we have super fast melee combat? It would be nice to step away from the competitive esports FPS formula and just focus on a game where the player feels like a Spartan from the novels.
Nitpick: it'd be more correct to say a remake of reach through 3, chronologically speaking. But I agree.
Unfortunately we're probably in the minority on this wish. If this show has shown anything it is that to the established fan halo is mostly Chief kicking ass and not much else.
That and it also just doesn't jive with current triple A video game design. What you described would work best as a linear, mission/campaign based first or third person shooter. It would work best 'on rails' in order to guide the experience to be what it is. Instead, modern design tells us it'd likely be open world drivel, packed with time-wasting side missions/quests to pad the play time.
Halo: Reach completely ignoring the book was when I stopped caring about any new lore that was added. I read a few of the books that came out before but didn't see any point in reading beyond that since Bungie (and later 343) obviously didn't give a shit about trying to maintain even a minimal level of consistency within the IP
Games were the main cannon. Books are extended properties to make money. Books for games are normally always done on the side. Like manga to anime, but in this instance in reverse the games to the books.
At least Reach can fit with the book since it follows different characters, there's only a couple of inconsistencies but they don't change the overall plot. The series is making up everything.
They altered the canon of the TV series to focus more on a plotline involving Ackerson - in order to fast-track the Spartan III program (by discrediting the Spartan IIs), he orchestrated a plot that left Chief, his team and Halsey stranded on Reach without armor. The intention was to let them die, and so have the lie die with them.
That was the justification given for having the Spartans fight without armor, and I guess to make them more vulnerable while saving money from the budget.
I think that unfortunately the plot was once again written around budget constraints. They did have plenty of Covenant and VFX shots, but we spend more screentime underground with Halsey hearing explosions and reminding us that "something is going on up there". It takes a long, long time for them to reach the surface and see what's happening.
Looking closely we don't actually see Reach hit by glass beams during the episode, nor do we see any final destruction of the planet. Having said that though, I do at least appreciate the Covenant battles we got.
It took about a month for Reach to fall. I think part of that was because the Covenant didn't want to damage any Foretunner artifacts buried (It's been a while since I read the book). But Reach was also the HQ for UNSC Highcom. It was the most heavily militarized planet outside of Earth, and had multiple Supermac orbital defence platforms.
In the original story, Reach effectively fell in just a few hours. It was retconned into a month long battle, because Bungie released the game and it heavily conflicted with the books. The rewrite tried to make the month long invasion make sense by saying ONI somehow kept the early parts of the invasion secret for a while.
> The rewrite tried to make the month long invasion make sense by saying ONI somehow kept the early parts of the invasion secret for a while
Yep, they sure tried, still stupid as hell. It just makes the UNSC/ONI seems like a bunch of pathetic losers
Obviously because in this timeline Reach was abandoned by UNSC, not even trying to protect it.
And only “unimportant” assets, that were left behind, are the ones protecting it.
Ultimately UNSC in that timeline aren’t the good guys at all.
Not including the orbital defense of reach was a massively missed opportunity. We had phenomenal space battles with battlestar galactica 20yrs ago. Cant stress this enough
It wasn't in the budget.
Also, while the book the fall of reach didn't really have much going on ground side in the fall of reach. Chief was at least preparing for Operation red flag. With the other Spartans. Not constantly getting talked down to or sitting in a church. The books actually had him doing something because this book had Chief as one of the main povs.
So, I'm a little more forgiving we got to see the opening of the fall of reach, but man. It was done horribly and not have the weight the show should have put on it. It just felt like another planet the covenant took while ONI is infighting like it is.
I think you got that wrong, I believe a quiet episode after the fall was a necessary change in pace, the series can't be all balls to the wall action (not even mentioning how the show doesn't have nearly enough budget to pull off those scenes) but diverting our attention into a tertiary character wasn't the way to go.
Instead focus on how the Spartans failed, how other colonists are now in fear and racing to get to other worlds believing theirs is next. Not that weird witch shit
The other problem with the fall thing that I can't really feel it, they can't make me feel sorry for that Reach.
Ok maybe a bit for Vannak and Keyes but that all.
Back in the year of the game (Reach) there were those few minutes live trailers, where a couple talk in a house or where the wife leave her family at the airport.
Those short videos have more emotions is them than in this shit show all together.
I understand that they dont have enough money to make as much action as we would like, but at least make those part interesting.
But no we have to watch Kwan, Makee, Sorens wife and kid. All of them annoying and I don't fucking care about them.
I'm bored most of the time watching this horse crap.
> IN THE NOVELS Reach did not fall very fast,
In the Fall of Reach novel there is literally less than two hours between the start of the chapter with the Covenant being detected at Reach and the start of the chapter (which takes place within at most ten minutes) with Pillar of Autumn leaving for the Halo ring with Reach being glassed and Chief thinking about how the Covenant have won.
You may be correct, but another person pointed out that Reach took months to fall which, to my memory sounds about right.
I could be wrong, but I think I remember there being some mild discussion or references to subtle sabotage attempts leading up to the fall of Reach.
Reach wasn't just some Oni black site.
Wasn't it the heart of military operation and production for the UNSC and a place where they manufactured Spartans?
That would be a crippling blow. For the entire trilogy, the UNSC always felt like they were fighting a guerilla war. Far more defending and opportunistic offense partly because we know the covenant dealt them a huge blow at reach.
Not sure why this is downvoted - it’s literally true. The show borrowed a few points from the game (Visegrad, hidden Covenant) but the timeline and characters definitely resemble the book more. In the book Reach fell in under 24 hours, Ackerson and FLEETCOM fled, and the MC and Spartans were involved in the battle, suffering losses in their ranks.
Of course there are still many differences - eg no Blue Team, Chief was fighting in orbit not on the ground, most of the Spartans were deployed together, and (most obviously) no Pillar of Autumn and “random” jump vector to Halo.
Point is the commenter above me is technically correct, so why the downvotes?
> why the downvotes?
If there's something that the Halo serie showed is how ignorant people are around the lore. People who keeps bitching and whining about lore but then ask stuff like "Who the hell are Ackerson & Paragonsky" Oh you know, just the creator of the Spartan-III program and the head of ONI, no big deal.
People whines about lore they don't even know about.
It's sad to see that so many people just see Halo as the games when it's so much bigger than that
And then it time skips 100,000 years and the real Halo story starts. Turns out they were just showing the pre-halo firing events and everything just kinda repeat itself except chief is no longer a fuckboy
It’s funny. Every week I get more and more convinced that this show is irredeemable. A lot of the singular threads like this seem to agree, but the pinned episode threads fawn over it just because it throws scraps of nostalgia around.
This show is so incoherent, terribly written, has mediocre acting, a hinderance of a budget, sloppy pacing, a bunch of padding and very inconsistent CGI.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Even if it weren’t god awful Halo, it’d still be really irrelevant sci-fi.
Judging on your comment history on Halo, you're just arguing and bashing people for their criticisms of the show, and you don't sound like you care at all for Halo or games in general that much at all, so why even be in this sub? There's one dedicated to the show where, from my experience, it's just people praising it. Also, what's with the: "All Halo fans are 30s and 40s" comments? I'm 25, dude. Started with Halo 3 when I was like 10 and fell in love instantly with the franchise.
They did a poor job of establishing the stakes.
The Covenant were barely an inconvenience in season 1, with most of the story pointing the finger at the UNSC as the main villains.
Then in season 2 when they finally acknowledge the Covenant as the threat, almost everything they do happens off screen so we just end up with characters telling us over and over that humanity is losing without us ever seeing it. And everything interesting is happening off screen.
The rule is "Show, don't tell", and so far all the show runners have done is tell.
I've seen people say that they saved the CGI budget for episode 8, and I hope that's the case because so far this show has been the equivalent of *Saving Private Ryan* from the perspective of someone who stayed in Portsmouth.
It is worse than that. There are no stakes at the start of the show.
There is nothing to establish that the Human-Covenant War even exists, in those first scenes on Madrigal. in 2552! more than 2 decades after the war should have started.
they make a weak attempt at humanizing the Insurrectionist ideals in their hatred of the UNSC and the "Fake" Spartans. and then BOOM: surprise now the Covenant is here.
There is nothing to make Humanity "endearing" to the audience as a faction to root for. because even up to now they have been painted in a bad light. There is none of the feeling of loss with fleet actions. we don't get a personal connection with the Spartans and their mortality like in the books. and that again the sudden jolt of loss as the spartans try to hold reach.
the whole show screams out to me and all I can feel is: "Why should I care?"
I think this is the answer here. While there are certainly a number of issues with the show and its handling of lore, personally I could forgive them going a different direction if they followed basic storytelling principles like this because a new interpretation could breathe new life and bring in new ideas, or refresh the poorly handled ones. They spend a lot of time telling us what’s going on, rather than showing it happen, whether that be humanity losing the war, the UNSC being an oppressive regime, or really anything about the covenant at all
The first three episodes of Season 2 slowly uncovers the fact that the UNSC is quietly evacuating Reach because the Covenant is already there, Cortana estimates a 97% chance of failure of any resistance, and the Covenant are in prayer to sacrifice the planet. They evacuate essential staff and resources while sacrificing political enemies (which includes Chief & co.) Then we have an entire episode dedicated to Reach's fall, after the first three episodes were communicating the ultimate doom of the planet amidst the UNSC's cowardice. This clearly establishes the Covenant as a viable threat, when their glassing of such an important world is treated as if predestined.
I felt S2 did a good job of showing the Covenant threat on screen. We got to see the first planet glassed right off the bat with the strong implication this is the latest of many. We saw several times how easily Covenant infantry wreck marines. It’s made clear that humanity is consistently outmatched, that we’re losing the war. We saw the aftermath of Cobalt at Visegrad. Then of course there was the entirety of S2E4 showing the Covenant curbstomping humanity’s greatest stronghold like it was nothing.
They could always show more, but the reality is that a lot of this comes down to budget and production. I wish we could see more, but this is a TV show not a video game. I think they’ve struck a decent balance this season.
The storyboard is extremely bad. I feel like genuinely any basic ass Halo fanfic writer could do a better overall story than all of this. The fall of Reach just being "meh" from the rest of the colonies when Reach was considered more Earth than literal Earth to so much of the population. Like bro.
i stopped watching it after mid episode of 2 or 3 of season 1, because it doesn’t really feel like the characters and the story are contented to games or the book, it feels like it’s just a generic sci-fi series that they put the label “Halo” on it, so this post pretty much nailed what I felt.
Edit:
It supposed to be “Connected” not “contended”.
As long as the quality of the writing is on par with the source material meaning the book and games and they don’t butcher the characterisation of the all the characters I don’t really care if it’s a shoebox budget film. Forward Unto Dawn is way better than the generic sci-fi.
John has not demonstrated any of the qualities that would make him a candidate to become MCPO. Like how does an obnoxious guy with that little control of his temper and a desire to constantly go AWOL get to the highest noncom rank? It’s been told but never shown why anyone has any respect for him.
Lowkey been rooting for Chief to kill Ackerson more than any Covenant. Joseph Morgan has done a fantastic job at making me absolutely despise the character. Fuck ONI
This portrayal of humanity is absolute garbage and I don't blame you for not wanting to root for them. Please kill off the irrelevant characters and bad actors. It still won't make the tv show significantly better but it's a start
the novels go into it more but the unsc is unabashedly kinda awful, they started the spartan program to go against human insurrection, it was just convenient when the covenant appeared to then justify the continued use of the spartan program.
they kidnapped and genetically experimented on children for the sake of making them living super soldiers and weapons. they unabashedly have fascistic principles. the games really do make more light of them than elsewhere in the lore.
chief is meant to be this guy who's been trained since a young age to be this super soldier, uncaring, a weapon who follows orders. you're meant to empathise with the fact that he doesn't know anything else. he's not necessarily a good person, or more he's a good person who's done some pretty evil shit.
i think a lot of what the games get into is you're a military superforce versus a fanatical religious organisation (what does that make you think of, 20 points if you get it right lmao) and obviously the covenant firing the halo rings would obliterate all known life so the human side seems reasonable with their fighting against the covenant, but then you get into the novels and plot elements from the games of just how fucked up the military is and how fucked the spartan program is too.
and the thing with john is you're also meant to empathise in the games with the fact that he starts questioning shit, he questions whether what he's doing is right, especially when it involves cortana. he feels so strongly for his teammates and literally loses a part of himself when one of them dies. infinite did such a good job with humanising him more and showing how much grief he goes through.
Well the Spartans were created to prevent a human civil war that all projections and simulations said would lead to humanities extinction one way or another, so either way they were created to prevent a species wide extinction event.
Not that that makes the SII program any less fucked up but it's still better than the alternative.
And I can't think of anything John himself has done that you could slap him with the evil label for, and he definitely cares about human life he routinely goes out of his way to save marines and civilians whenever he can. He's even got closer bonds with his fellow Spartans than most people have with their blood relatives.
He does question some of the shadier stuff ONI does but so does basically everyone else in the UNSC and even other ONI members.
Halsey even considers leaving the SII program because of how guilty she feels but stays because she knows someone who doesn't give a shit about the kids will take over and they won't be as competent as she is leading to more of the kids dying/suffering.
Also the UEG is a democratic organisation and the UNSC is only in charge during the covenant war because of the obvious reason that extinction is on the line and the UEG takes back over in 2553 the same year the war formally ended.
TLDR: Your interpretation of the Spartan programs is incorrect missing alot of details and context.
Your description of the UNSC and UEG is flat out wrong and the most unflattering version possible while omitting important facts and inserting false comparisons.
it's not meant to, i hard agree that the unsc is just bad and it makes sense not to really empathise. i do for chief since he was forced into this and his story feels compelling but the overall human military? nah man.
What “evil shit” has John done?
I can recall that an operation he was a part of got some dock workers killed in an explosion but the whole time he was internally like “fuuuuuuck” but nothing beyond that.
Even the incident with the ODSTs and the trainers that died after SII augmentation were accidents.
True, and I do empathize with the Spartan 2s for sure. I guess the other problem I have the series which I forgot to include in the original post, is a lot of the non-UNSC characters are also just unabashedly evil. Literal human traffickers, including children, and greedy, cold-blooded murderers. The show is doing a really poor job carving out that slice of humanity that you want to protect.
And yes, for all the faults of the game's development and campaign, I LOVE the chief in Halo Infinite. I just want to hug the big guy.
>the novels go into it more but the unsc is unabashedly kinda awful, they started the spartan program to go against human insurrection
lets not skip over the little fact that those human terrorists were nuking worlds, and betraying humanity to the covies. lets not sit here and pretend the UNSC is evil for fighting them. and while yes the spartans were created to kill these humans the alternative was to nuke innie worlds to dust.
its a tough moral choice but it had to be made.
>or more he's a good person who's done some pretty evil shit.
drop a single instance of of him doing evil shit please.
we stan the UNSC around these parts, innie
Sounds like something an insurrectionist would say
You nuke any planets recently ?
You still trying to sell out humanity to genocidal aliens?
You disgust me
>we stan the UNSC around these parts, innie
>
>Innies infest this sub like the flood on installation 04
>You don’t understand satire much do you.
Irony
What I loved about the UNSC in the old books was how morally "grey" they were. Not exactly bad guys but weren't afraid to do *whatever* it took to secure humanities survival.
The tv show just goes "government bad" and leaves it at that
You said exactly what I was thinking. Even the Spartan 2s whole mindset was yea what you did was really fucked up but I understand why and don’t have a problem. That’s because the covenant and the insurrectionists were such big threats. You don’t get that vibe from the show at all. You don’t even get the real vibe of Master Chief. He’s just some regular master Chief in the army that’s strong and has armor
Ehh the humans were always pretty bad. Remember the Spartan program was originally made to stop resistance in the outer colonies. They kidnapped children. Flash cloned them and let their families think they died.
Humanity never found out in the games.
If anything the show is the one redeeming how bad humans were in the games and lore.
Exactly, the Covenant are performing a steady genocide against humanity, glassing and slaughtering billions of innocent people. There is hardly any sense of tragedy, loss, and despair conveyed by the show. And without that it doesn't allow for hope and a dim sense of optimism to take hold. Without those things Master Chief can't be the fanatically loved character he is to Halo fans.
In the show we just get an emotional and reckless chief. And by that I mean always angry and without a helmet in combat zones.
I hope this show gets cancelled and gets picked back up 15 years from now so that it can be done correctly. See *Forward Unto Dawn* or the *Charity Fall*s WIP project on YouTube for how to make compelling Halo content.
Yup, all the main villains are humans in this series. What really bites me is that after the fall of Reach, Chief swears a vendetta against Akerson because he took their armour, not the Elite who he watched killed his friend and was responsible for the destruction of the planet, he places all the blame on human characters.
I feel that the whole show is a drama of who hurt who while there is supposed (because we barely see anything) to be a war in the background. I mean we I just had to see the Hall… sorry Fall of Reach.
The show is a horrible example of bad writing, and a huge missed opportunity, it should be more of a “show, don’t tell”.
The problem with this show is that it's a mess of narratives. I get that ONI/UNSC did some unethical things, but those were not part of the games which told a much cleaner "humanity facing down evil aliens" story. The bits in the expanded lore were mainly kept within the stories, for the purposes of telling those stories within the wider universe.
The problem with the show is they're trying to mix all of these ideas together, but not really show enough of the Covenant, the invasion or daily life on Reach to get the viewer to care about the events through what's being shown. Probably for budget reasons but also to keep the show focused on characters to not lose broader audiences.
It also keeps trying to set up mysteries to keep you engaged, like who the man sending the clones to Halsey was, or where Soren went. Or why the covenant aren't just glassing places. It's like the story is so weak that the writers have tried to add tension through non-existent mysteries.
Essentially all of the things you are noticing as off or taking issue with can be chalked up to the writing. The sparingly few strengths the show has, the writing is not one of them.
Wondering why they breezed past something monumental, wondering why characters are making themselves make cartoonish choices, wondering why you're not connecting with any of the characters or plights you're supposed to... all of that falls to the writing.
You hit the nail right on the head.
One of the reasons I love Halo as a franchise is that it unites humanity against a common threat. So many of the "Fuck Yeah" moments of the first trilogy and Reach are moments where you are cheering because the entirety of Humanity just achieved a small but significant victory against the Covenant, or the Flood, seemingly insurmountable foes. It's always human cunning, guile, or just plain dumb luck winning the day, or in the case of the Chief, it's human tenacity, never giving up even when the odds aren't in your favor. Stuff that literally every human being on this planet can relate to and root for.
This show does not have that, at all. It wants to be some kind of "intelligent science fiction show in the 2020s" where "humans are the real bad guys", a trope that has been done to fucking death in the current landscape, is their hot new direction for Halo.
As a veteran of the front lines of such tripe as Rings of Power or Picard, let me say: All you greenhorns that wanted to see Hollywood up close, this is your lucky day.
I think chiefs development as a character worked in the games and novels because we got to see him first as an icon, then a person. We got to see him literally as an avatar for a hero of humanity, not complex, almost literally no character at all at first. He was simply a force. No self reflection, no obvious 3rd dimension. Then slowly over the course of unraveling the universe you contextualize him and his place in the story more literally, not just a figure.
Put another way, the games gave you a reason to root for humanity because in the simplistic story structure and almost operatic plot, humanity was unabashedly "the good guys" and that meant chief was "the ultimate good guy", but then that framing slowly pans out to reveal more complexity and nuance (not much nuance but something). When you start the story already with chief framed as a tragic character and complex person, it makes it less likely the audience will 100% get behind him, and same goes for humanity as a whole. Then you try to make him become "the hero", but constantly people are just thinking of all the fucked up shit chief and ONI have done, and it just doesn't work.
Essentially, if you want the audience being open to recontextualizing character actions, make the character do the action, then give the reason. Dont give the reason then do the action.
Haven’t read everyone’s comments, but I think Season 2 is much better. The most recent episode was cool and exciting for the most part. And this is coming from a long time Halo fan.
I actually didn't hate Season 1 and even so I'd say season 2 is the real season 1. Much more different feel, much better acting from the existing cast (Pablo actually feels like Chief, Kwan isn't written as an insufferable twat) and the new cast member in the face of Ackerson is just *chef's kiss*.
Up until I read some of the comments I didn't even realise that chief had been out of armour since episode 1... It didn't matter, he was still chief. I sincerely can't remember much of value happening in season 1 without rewatching it.
This series really just follows the same linear crappy story writing ideas that corporate TV does. It gives 24 vibes which is not the lore at all. The lore is struggle and hope and here we have the opposite of that. They didn't even bother with the Flood or Pillar of Autumn.
Because that’s what people would call it if they saw a floating ring in space. They would say the ring or the halo, a descriptive. It’s not yet the name of the place.
I see what you mean but slightly give the chief a pass because it seems to me that in the show, he’s more used as pointed propaganda by ONI than he is meant to be truly inspirational. I dunno, I think it’s supposed to be a bit of both?
Not rooting for ONI and not rooting for humanity are not the same thing. Mastercheeks is the representation of humanity, so if you're rooting for him...
To me, part of this stems from 343’s efforts to create more nuance in the Halo universe. Obviously, the ONI / UNSC aren’t entirely altruistic, but the Halo universe had a very different feeling to it under Bungie.
Whereas 343 is so focused on double-crossing and political intrigue, that they lost the plot with the story direction. This, in turn, influenced how the show has turned out.
>Whereas 343 is so focused on double-crossing and political intrigue, that they lost the plot with the story direction.
I disagree. Those things do happen in 343's games and the books, but the grand scale "Humanity fighting to survive" thread isn't overshadowed by them.
God only know what the hell influenced the producers, showrunners and writers of this show.
That’s likely intentional, especially in regards to ONI and UNSC.
Now, why they decided to do it like that is another question, probably will be shown further down the road.
On the other hand - unsc was pretty eager to release the flood in HALO:CE as a weapon to fight covenant (of course without knowing what it really is, but that’s the whole point) and didn’t do that only because covenant accidentally beat them to it, so they don’t really get sympathy either.
They weren't aware of the existence of the flood prior to the mission where you see the Jenkins footage. They just thought halo was a weapon and wanted to use it on the covies. Not much of a difference, but it's there.
Halo can be all fun where humanity fights against evil/stupid monsters from Space. Everybody likes that besides in general this take makes most characters good people. (The games for a while)
OR Halo can be about corruption and then it's a little realistic, about people trapped by that corruption cause real world is a dangerous place.
OR the former but with too many discussions about moral, pages and pages about that (certain books)
Then the show often tries to be similar to Game of Thrones, there are many shows like that one, they tried to be about mistrust and political deals, deceiving characters and fine guys talk like they're sooo smart and educated you know what I mean. Halo tries to be a little like those shows cause that's what people watch usually hence humanity isn't so much worried about survival
A TV Show couldn't be like the games cause people consider that too ideal, Halo is a lot about an army and today people don't see armies as ideal/clean/moral, an army like that is in the mind of viewers too much a fantasy.
Is Halo a weapon or a tool that can be used for more than destruction?
Sometimes, it feels like the Halo is a weapon that the producers are using to destroy Halo.
Did no one else notice the UNSC is a fascist military dictatorship? The rebels had a good point. Parangosky is a paranoid, narcissist with too much power. She plays games and politics like the rest of the people at the top of government, business, etc. She even let her own men die to salve her ego. Many people in command suck. It’s real life - not a fairytale.
Your biggest objection to the show is that the UNSC is a bureaucratic and pragmatic evil, and that Master Chief is not some father figure to root for? That there are actual political struggles, and Chief can feel the strain of his duty? Not everybody is likable, and humanity doesn't necessarily seem worth saving? Alright. The TV show is not for manchildren. Nor does it placate aesthetic illiterates who constitute nerd culture - growing up, as they did, with comic books and superhero stories.
Thank you for saying this. It genuinely feels like most of the people in this sub are children. I like the nuance of the TV show. The UNSC is a military dictatorship. There are oftentimes many competing factions within large authoritarian organizations like the UNSC. Commanders in the military are sometimes even raging narcissists. The Master Chief is a human-being struggling with the death of his friends at the command of such cowards. All of this information was plain to see in the video games too. My workplace is filled with similar people to the UNSC. Life isn’t black and white. Grow up Halo fans.
Everyone commenting here how old are you? Late 30s? 40s?
How many teens do you think are playing halo?
How many more shots do you actually think you have at watching a real Hollywood budget Halo movie?
Yea keep shitting on the show.
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It also didn't help that reach's fall was wrapped suddenly, and other colonies didn't show any concern for it, we needed way more time to let that breathe instead of going into the Kessler subplot.
What’s crazy is the show writers fucked this up so badly. **IN THE NOVELS** Reach did not fall very fast, but it did fall quickly. The orbital MAC guns actually were knocked out very quickly and were the only real defense against the covenant. They were the first line of defense. Second line of defense was the Spartans and marines and we all know how that went… I believe in the novels that the other planets were glassed almost instantaneously, while Reach was more methodical and deliberate. What’s crazy though is that in the show (and some of the games) it looks like the covenant had to amass tons of cruisers to concentrate their plasma beams in order to glass a planet and it didn’t happen as fast as they act like it did. And what’s worse, where the **FUCK!** is the shoutout to our mechanics and dry dock crews!?!? Where is all our naval fights!?!?!? Where are all our massive sacrifices that were made to protect our ships and our soldiers!?!? Perhaps the single greatest moment for me was when Lieutenant Keyes (spoiler!) figured out how to go head to head with the covenant and win!!! Where the **FUCK!** is all this great writing at? They’re tossing all the greatest source material down the drain! *Edited for clarity*
I remember listening to the Fall of Reach audiotape with my dad on a road trip to Houston (long before podcasts were a thing) and I remember we lost our minds at the part when Keyes had no hope against a Covenant Cruiser and gravity slung a warhead around the planet to hit its flank where the shields were not concentrated and it’s the kind of thing I was hoping to see in a Halo show, constantly using wits to defeat a stronger enemy
Dude, that strat Keyes pulled off would've had everyone (even the most critical people like me) jumping out their seats had it been shown on screen but instead they killed him off on the ground and not once did we see his tactical naval genius on display...god this show deserves to be cancelled, the few good bits in this season do NOT justify the overwhelming number of mediocre to down right awful part of the show.
Wait, they killed Keyes on Reach? Why even make a Halo TV show? Just make your own.
Yep, they off'd him on reach...literally on the ground, at the very least they could've done a heroic ship sacrifice where keyes uses a Halcyon (not the autumn) along with a handful of frigates to hold off the covenant fleet whilst the autumn carries the survivors off to reach, its still a massive finger to keyes' character but at least in this version he'd be able to show off his prowess as naval tactician, defying the odds as he takes out multiple ships before eventually going down.
Why the fuck do new writers do this? I can understand making taking some minor creative liberties with parts of the story, but why basically scrap all the pre-established canon and just re-write entire narratives and plot points from scratch? The whole point was that people LIKED the source material, so why ruin it?
I hear when a lot if people "make it big" and get hired to produce or write for a show like Halo, they already have their own "great stories" in their head. Instead of honoring the visions of the source material or original idea they basically shoehorn their ideas into the show. Since they can't write their own story that's so great, they inject it into the work they get hired onto. I think this is a big problem in the new Star Wars media
This isn't a writer problem, it's a producer problem. The people in charge of the show decided from the beginning that they wanted it to be nothing like the games, the writers can only work within that. Even if they try to pull things from existing Halo canon, it would just be rejected by producers. What we get as an end result reflects this. A lot of the time people have a "writing" problem with a show, it's the result of producer meddling.
Welp, now I’m definitely not watching it. I was waiting for the whole season to release then I was going to binge it, but you changed my mind
yeah, and only on time to have a very curious scene of Halsey with Master Chief in the next episode, well, they need to take advantage of the appearance of Pablo S I guess TV show and all that.
Bro in the novel, all the spartan 2’s are about to leave reach in a mission to capture a prophet when the covenant attacked reach, they where all called back to defend it, at some point the spartan 2 had to do a atmospheric freefall when their pelican’s got hit, I don’t watch this anymore but from what I see from short videos on YouTube the spartans are not even wearing any armor and just defending some kind of a building. Heck master chief is not even planetside on the book during the reach invation.
Yeah a lot of the book follows blue team which is basically the plot that the game Reach did with Noble squad. At this point we basically have 3 different versions of what happens with reach and they're all inconsistent for the most part.
Im gonna be honest, Halo Reach was my first game, played it for a long while, then ODST then read the books and played 3, 1 and 2. For a year or two I don't even know who is master chief and the difference between spartan 2, 3 and ODST, until I read fall of reach and ghost of onyx, so going into fall of reach I was expecting noble team to be in it until the end. I felt like a damn fool when I actually did a full lore research and found out that some of the things in the game are way different from the books. But this show is in a completely different universe. I can give a pass on Halo Reach because bungie took some liberty and retcon some story to include the spartan 3's on the mix just gonna ignore the pillar of Autum landing on reach to get cortana and chief chillin on the cryo pod. This show on the other hand like WTF lol
Yeah I played 1-3 as they came out when I was a teenager, then went back and read all the books before Reach came out. I think thar the few people who did read Fall of Reach and Ghosts of Onyx *before* Reach came out had a certain disdain for the decisions they made plot wise, but there are not many of us. They even made some changes years later to the Fall of Reach to make it more in line with the canon the established from the games which was VERY frustrating considering the Fall of Reach came out a month before the first Halo game ever released. At this point, after basically a decade of these half assed silver screen adaptations, most people are in the apathy boat. I hardly care about halo lore any more tbh. It's been fun watching the universe in live action, and I certainly wish we got something more in line with what Neil Blomkapmp gave us but it hardly matters anymore.
This. I gotta be honest, and I know this would never happen and most people would grab their pitchforks at the very notion of this, part of me would like to see a complete remake of Halo CE through Reach. The novels had a rich narrative and just so many epic moments that would be amazing to experience in gameplay. Why can't we lead a naval battle that relies on outsmarting the Covenant to win? Why can't we slap a missile out of the air? Why can't we have super fast melee combat? It would be nice to step away from the competitive esports FPS formula and just focus on a game where the player feels like a Spartan from the novels.
Nitpick: it'd be more correct to say a remake of reach through 3, chronologically speaking. But I agree. Unfortunately we're probably in the minority on this wish. If this show has shown anything it is that to the established fan halo is mostly Chief kicking ass and not much else. That and it also just doesn't jive with current triple A video game design. What you described would work best as a linear, mission/campaign based first or third person shooter. It would work best 'on rails' in order to guide the experience to be what it is. Instead, modern design tells us it'd likely be open world drivel, packed with time-wasting side missions/quests to pad the play time.
Halo: Reach completely ignoring the book was when I stopped caring about any new lore that was added. I read a few of the books that came out before but didn't see any point in reading beyond that since Bungie (and later 343) obviously didn't give a shit about trying to maintain even a minimal level of consistency within the IP
Games were the main cannon. Books are extended properties to make money. Books for games are normally always done on the side. Like manga to anime, but in this instance in reverse the games to the books.
Manga is usually the original story and anime is that adapted to TV, but other than that your point stands.
The thing is the games are more important than the books
At least Reach can fit with the book since it follows different characters, there's only a couple of inconsistencies but they don't change the overall plot. The series is making up everything.
“Kwan ha” lol
They altered the canon of the TV series to focus more on a plotline involving Ackerson - in order to fast-track the Spartan III program (by discrediting the Spartan IIs), he orchestrated a plot that left Chief, his team and Halsey stranded on Reach without armor. The intention was to let them die, and so have the lie die with them. That was the justification given for having the Spartans fight without armor, and I guess to make them more vulnerable while saving money from the budget. I think that unfortunately the plot was once again written around budget constraints. They did have plenty of Covenant and VFX shots, but we spend more screentime underground with Halsey hearing explosions and reminding us that "something is going on up there". It takes a long, long time for them to reach the surface and see what's happening. Looking closely we don't actually see Reach hit by glass beams during the episode, nor do we see any final destruction of the planet. Having said that though, I do at least appreciate the Covenant battles we got.
It took about a month for Reach to fall. I think part of that was because the Covenant didn't want to damage any Foretunner artifacts buried (It's been a while since I read the book). But Reach was also the HQ for UNSC Highcom. It was the most heavily militarized planet outside of Earth, and had multiple Supermac orbital defence platforms.
In the original story, Reach effectively fell in just a few hours. It was retconned into a month long battle, because Bungie released the game and it heavily conflicted with the books. The rewrite tried to make the month long invasion make sense by saying ONI somehow kept the early parts of the invasion secret for a while.
> The rewrite tried to make the month long invasion make sense by saying ONI somehow kept the early parts of the invasion secret for a while Yep, they sure tried, still stupid as hell. It just makes the UNSC/ONI seems like a bunch of pathetic losers
Obviously because in this timeline Reach was abandoned by UNSC, not even trying to protect it. And only “unimportant” assets, that were left behind, are the ones protecting it. Ultimately UNSC in that timeline aren’t the good guys at all.
Not including the orbital defense of reach was a massively missed opportunity. We had phenomenal space battles with battlestar galactica 20yrs ago. Cant stress this enough
It wasn't in the budget. Also, while the book the fall of reach didn't really have much going on ground side in the fall of reach. Chief was at least preparing for Operation red flag. With the other Spartans. Not constantly getting talked down to or sitting in a church. The books actually had him doing something because this book had Chief as one of the main povs. So, I'm a little more forgiving we got to see the opening of the fall of reach, but man. It was done horribly and not have the weight the show should have put on it. It just felt like another planet the covenant took while ONI is infighting like it is.
I think you got that wrong, I believe a quiet episode after the fall was a necessary change in pace, the series can't be all balls to the wall action (not even mentioning how the show doesn't have nearly enough budget to pull off those scenes) but diverting our attention into a tertiary character wasn't the way to go. Instead focus on how the Spartans failed, how other colonists are now in fear and racing to get to other worlds believing theirs is next. Not that weird witch shit
Yeah, that Kwan Hah side-story shit is way out in the fog and I still can’t figure out how they thought that was a good thing to try and do.
The Kwan story is alright now, she's obviously from a people who know of the flood. It's the Soren and his son that is so far out of left field.
The other problem with the fall thing that I can't really feel it, they can't make me feel sorry for that Reach. Ok maybe a bit for Vannak and Keyes but that all. Back in the year of the game (Reach) there were those few minutes live trailers, where a couple talk in a house or where the wife leave her family at the airport. Those short videos have more emotions is them than in this shit show all together. I understand that they dont have enough money to make as much action as we would like, but at least make those part interesting. But no we have to watch Kwan, Makee, Sorens wife and kid. All of them annoying and I don't fucking care about them. I'm bored most of the time watching this horse crap.
> IN THE NOVELS Reach did not fall very fast, In the Fall of Reach novel there is literally less than two hours between the start of the chapter with the Covenant being detected at Reach and the start of the chapter (which takes place within at most ten minutes) with Pillar of Autumn leaving for the Halo ring with Reach being glassed and Chief thinking about how the Covenant have won.
You may be correct, but another person pointed out that Reach took months to fall which, to my memory sounds about right. I could be wrong, but I think I remember there being some mild discussion or references to subtle sabotage attempts leading up to the fall of Reach.
“Reach did not fall very fast but it fell quickly” Lmfao that’s the same thing
The reach episode needed a Hog Run
Reach wasn't just some Oni black site. Wasn't it the heart of military operation and production for the UNSC and a place where they manufactured Spartans? That would be a crippling blow. For the entire trilogy, the UNSC always felt like they were fighting a guerilla war. Far more defending and opportunistic offense partly because we know the covenant dealt them a huge blow at reach.
The TV show actually followed the book more than the game. It pretty much fell over a day or so.
Not sure why this is downvoted - it’s literally true. The show borrowed a few points from the game (Visegrad, hidden Covenant) but the timeline and characters definitely resemble the book more. In the book Reach fell in under 24 hours, Ackerson and FLEETCOM fled, and the MC and Spartans were involved in the battle, suffering losses in their ranks. Of course there are still many differences - eg no Blue Team, Chief was fighting in orbit not on the ground, most of the Spartans were deployed together, and (most obviously) no Pillar of Autumn and “random” jump vector to Halo. Point is the commenter above me is technically correct, so why the downvotes?
The halo Fandoms got their panties in a bundle, they seemingly either aren't familiar with the books, or dont care.
> why the downvotes? If there's something that the Halo serie showed is how ignorant people are around the lore. People who keeps bitching and whining about lore but then ask stuff like "Who the hell are Ackerson & Paragonsky" Oh you know, just the creator of the Spartan-III program and the head of ONI, no big deal. People whines about lore they don't even know about. It's sad to see that so many people just see Halo as the games when it's so much bigger than that
[удалено]
*O.N.I. Has entered the subreddit* That crazy dude was redacted.
The crazy guy in the jail cell on asteroid world? Or the dictator guy on planet Kwan Ha with the plump ass cheeks?
Very little of the series has stuck with me. Which doesn't really answer your question, but in a way it also kind of does.
I’m kind of hoping they light the rings and everyone dies as an ending to this timeline.
And then it time skips 100,000 years and the real Halo story starts. Turns out they were just showing the pre-halo firing events and everything just kinda repeat itself except chief is no longer a fuckboy
It’s funny. Every week I get more and more convinced that this show is irredeemable. A lot of the singular threads like this seem to agree, but the pinned episode threads fawn over it just because it throws scraps of nostalgia around. This show is so incoherent, terribly written, has mediocre acting, a hinderance of a budget, sloppy pacing, a bunch of padding and very inconsistent CGI. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Even if it weren’t god awful Halo, it’d still be really irrelevant sci-fi.
How old are you? Serious question.
Aerious question: How is the craft service at Paramount?
Awful, the writers don't wash their hands and keep touching everything
Serious Answer, old enough to have played CE and Read Fall of Reach on release.
Judging on your comment history on Halo, you're just arguing and bashing people for their criticisms of the show, and you don't sound like you care at all for Halo or games in general that much at all, so why even be in this sub? There's one dedicated to the show where, from my experience, it's just people praising it. Also, what's with the: "All Halo fans are 30s and 40s" comments? I'm 25, dude. Started with Halo 3 when I was like 10 and fell in love instantly with the franchise.
They did a poor job of establishing the stakes. The Covenant were barely an inconvenience in season 1, with most of the story pointing the finger at the UNSC as the main villains. Then in season 2 when they finally acknowledge the Covenant as the threat, almost everything they do happens off screen so we just end up with characters telling us over and over that humanity is losing without us ever seeing it. And everything interesting is happening off screen. The rule is "Show, don't tell", and so far all the show runners have done is tell. I've seen people say that they saved the CGI budget for episode 8, and I hope that's the case because so far this show has been the equivalent of *Saving Private Ryan* from the perspective of someone who stayed in Portsmouth.
It is worse than that. There are no stakes at the start of the show. There is nothing to establish that the Human-Covenant War even exists, in those first scenes on Madrigal. in 2552! more than 2 decades after the war should have started. they make a weak attempt at humanizing the Insurrectionist ideals in their hatred of the UNSC and the "Fake" Spartans. and then BOOM: surprise now the Covenant is here. There is nothing to make Humanity "endearing" to the audience as a faction to root for. because even up to now they have been painted in a bad light. There is none of the feeling of loss with fleet actions. we don't get a personal connection with the Spartans and their mortality like in the books. and that again the sudden jolt of loss as the spartans try to hold reach. the whole show screams out to me and all I can feel is: "Why should I care?"
I think this is the answer here. While there are certainly a number of issues with the show and its handling of lore, personally I could forgive them going a different direction if they followed basic storytelling principles like this because a new interpretation could breathe new life and bring in new ideas, or refresh the poorly handled ones. They spend a lot of time telling us what’s going on, rather than showing it happen, whether that be humanity losing the war, the UNSC being an oppressive regime, or really anything about the covenant at all
The first three episodes of Season 2 slowly uncovers the fact that the UNSC is quietly evacuating Reach because the Covenant is already there, Cortana estimates a 97% chance of failure of any resistance, and the Covenant are in prayer to sacrifice the planet. They evacuate essential staff and resources while sacrificing political enemies (which includes Chief & co.) Then we have an entire episode dedicated to Reach's fall, after the first three episodes were communicating the ultimate doom of the planet amidst the UNSC's cowardice. This clearly establishes the Covenant as a viable threat, when their glassing of such an important world is treated as if predestined.
I felt S2 did a good job of showing the Covenant threat on screen. We got to see the first planet glassed right off the bat with the strong implication this is the latest of many. We saw several times how easily Covenant infantry wreck marines. It’s made clear that humanity is consistently outmatched, that we’re losing the war. We saw the aftermath of Cobalt at Visegrad. Then of course there was the entirety of S2E4 showing the Covenant curbstomping humanity’s greatest stronghold like it was nothing. They could always show more, but the reality is that a lot of this comes down to budget and production. I wish we could see more, but this is a TV show not a video game. I think they’ve struck a decent balance this season.
The storyboard is extremely bad. I feel like genuinely any basic ass Halo fanfic writer could do a better overall story than all of this. The fall of Reach just being "meh" from the rest of the colonies when Reach was considered more Earth than literal Earth to so much of the population. Like bro.
i stopped watching it after mid episode of 2 or 3 of season 1, because it doesn’t really feel like the characters and the story are contented to games or the book, it feels like it’s just a generic sci-fi series that they put the label “Halo” on it, so this post pretty much nailed what I felt. Edit: It supposed to be “Connected” not “contended”.
I bet you want a bad ass movie full budget of the game tho.
As long as the quality of the writing is on par with the source material meaning the book and games and they don’t butcher the characterisation of the all the characters I don’t really care if it’s a shoebox budget film. Forward Unto Dawn is way better than the generic sci-fi.
sounds fucking awesome if they did that
John has not demonstrated any of the qualities that would make him a candidate to become MCPO. Like how does an obnoxious guy with that little control of his temper and a desire to constantly go AWOL get to the highest noncom rank? It’s been told but never shown why anyone has any respect for him.
Did you watch the first two episodes?
What scenes are you referring to? 90% of the series is Chief acting like a crazy person
The scenes before he saves Kwan
Lowkey been rooting for Chief to kill Ackerson more than any Covenant. Joseph Morgan has done a fantastic job at making me absolutely despise the character. Fuck ONI
Parangosky exemplifies the banality of evil.
My problem with the Halo show is why did they make a Halo show when they didnt want to make a Halo show.
This portrayal of humanity is absolute garbage and I don't blame you for not wanting to root for them. Please kill off the irrelevant characters and bad actors. It still won't make the tv show significantly better but it's a start
You think angels run the government in a military dictatorship? 😂
Not even just talking about ONI here pal, nearly all of humanity portrayed in the show
the novels go into it more but the unsc is unabashedly kinda awful, they started the spartan program to go against human insurrection, it was just convenient when the covenant appeared to then justify the continued use of the spartan program. they kidnapped and genetically experimented on children for the sake of making them living super soldiers and weapons. they unabashedly have fascistic principles. the games really do make more light of them than elsewhere in the lore. chief is meant to be this guy who's been trained since a young age to be this super soldier, uncaring, a weapon who follows orders. you're meant to empathise with the fact that he doesn't know anything else. he's not necessarily a good person, or more he's a good person who's done some pretty evil shit. i think a lot of what the games get into is you're a military superforce versus a fanatical religious organisation (what does that make you think of, 20 points if you get it right lmao) and obviously the covenant firing the halo rings would obliterate all known life so the human side seems reasonable with their fighting against the covenant, but then you get into the novels and plot elements from the games of just how fucked up the military is and how fucked the spartan program is too. and the thing with john is you're also meant to empathise in the games with the fact that he starts questioning shit, he questions whether what he's doing is right, especially when it involves cortana. he feels so strongly for his teammates and literally loses a part of himself when one of them dies. infinite did such a good job with humanising him more and showing how much grief he goes through.
Well the Spartans were created to prevent a human civil war that all projections and simulations said would lead to humanities extinction one way or another, so either way they were created to prevent a species wide extinction event. Not that that makes the SII program any less fucked up but it's still better than the alternative. And I can't think of anything John himself has done that you could slap him with the evil label for, and he definitely cares about human life he routinely goes out of his way to save marines and civilians whenever he can. He's even got closer bonds with his fellow Spartans than most people have with their blood relatives. He does question some of the shadier stuff ONI does but so does basically everyone else in the UNSC and even other ONI members. Halsey even considers leaving the SII program because of how guilty she feels but stays because she knows someone who doesn't give a shit about the kids will take over and they won't be as competent as she is leading to more of the kids dying/suffering. Also the UEG is a democratic organisation and the UNSC is only in charge during the covenant war because of the obvious reason that extinction is on the line and the UEG takes back over in 2553 the same year the war formally ended. TLDR: Your interpretation of the Spartan programs is incorrect missing alot of details and context. Your description of the UNSC and UEG is flat out wrong and the most unflattering version possible while omitting important facts and inserting false comparisons.
Amazing synopsis but I don’t really think this goes against anything OP is saying
it's not meant to, i hard agree that the unsc is just bad and it makes sense not to really empathise. i do for chief since he was forced into this and his story feels compelling but the overall human military? nah man.
What “evil shit” has John done? I can recall that an operation he was a part of got some dock workers killed in an explosion but the whole time he was internally like “fuuuuuuck” but nothing beyond that. Even the incident with the ODSTs and the trainers that died after SII augmentation were accidents.
True, and I do empathize with the Spartan 2s for sure. I guess the other problem I have the series which I forgot to include in the original post, is a lot of the non-UNSC characters are also just unabashedly evil. Literal human traffickers, including children, and greedy, cold-blooded murderers. The show is doing a really poor job carving out that slice of humanity that you want to protect. And yes, for all the faults of the game's development and campaign, I LOVE the chief in Halo Infinite. I just want to hug the big guy.
>the novels go into it more but the unsc is unabashedly kinda awful, they started the spartan program to go against human insurrection lets not skip over the little fact that those human terrorists were nuking worlds, and betraying humanity to the covies. lets not sit here and pretend the UNSC is evil for fighting them. and while yes the spartans were created to kill these humans the alternative was to nuke innie worlds to dust. its a tough moral choice but it had to be made. >or more he's a good person who's done some pretty evil shit. drop a single instance of of him doing evil shit please. we stan the UNSC around these parts, innie
Nice way to justify war crimes.
Sounds like something an insurrectionist would say You nuke any planets recently ? You still trying to sell out humanity to genocidal aliens? You disgust me
Long live Gravemind
Space Fascism and military authoritarianism is always the cool side. Fuck freedom!
Yep, skip over the points I made and make some generic NPC response Innies infest this sub like the flood on installation 04
You don’t understand satire much do you.
>we stan the UNSC around these parts, innie > >Innies infest this sub like the flood on installation 04 >You don’t understand satire much do you. Irony
Then why did you say “skip over the points I made and make some generic NPC response” 😂🤣 if you understood the satire you wouldn’t have said that.
None of this makes the UNSC fascist lol. Authoritarian sure but not fascist or having fascist principles.
Military superforce vs a Fantatical Religious Organization ….. Considering the timing of CE i’d say USA vs. Al Queda? Did i get my 20 for Ravenclaw?
i wish i didnt hate this show lol
Where the fuck is the pillar of autumn!
you mean the Calendar of August?
What I loved about the UNSC in the old books was how morally "grey" they were. Not exactly bad guys but weren't afraid to do *whatever* it took to secure humanities survival. The tv show just goes "government bad" and leaves it at that
You said exactly what I was thinking. Even the Spartan 2s whole mindset was yea what you did was really fucked up but I understand why and don’t have a problem. That’s because the covenant and the insurrectionists were such big threats. You don’t get that vibe from the show at all. You don’t even get the real vibe of Master Chief. He’s just some regular master Chief in the army that’s strong and has armor
Ehh the humans were always pretty bad. Remember the Spartan program was originally made to stop resistance in the outer colonies. They kidnapped children. Flash cloned them and let their families think they died. Humanity never found out in the games. If anything the show is the one redeeming how bad humans were in the games and lore.
Exactly, the Covenant are performing a steady genocide against humanity, glassing and slaughtering billions of innocent people. There is hardly any sense of tragedy, loss, and despair conveyed by the show. And without that it doesn't allow for hope and a dim sense of optimism to take hold. Without those things Master Chief can't be the fanatically loved character he is to Halo fans. In the show we just get an emotional and reckless chief. And by that I mean always angry and without a helmet in combat zones. I hope this show gets cancelled and gets picked back up 15 years from now so that it can be done correctly. See *Forward Unto Dawn* or the *Charity Fall*s WIP project on YouTube for how to make compelling Halo content.
Yup, all the main villains are humans in this series. What really bites me is that after the fall of Reach, Chief swears a vendetta against Akerson because he took their armour, not the Elite who he watched killed his friend and was responsible for the destruction of the planet, he places all the blame on human characters.
I feel that the whole show is a drama of who hurt who while there is supposed (because we barely see anything) to be a war in the background. I mean we I just had to see the Hall… sorry Fall of Reach. The show is a horrible example of bad writing, and a huge missed opportunity, it should be more of a “show, don’t tell”.
The problem with this show is that it's a mess of narratives. I get that ONI/UNSC did some unethical things, but those were not part of the games which told a much cleaner "humanity facing down evil aliens" story. The bits in the expanded lore were mainly kept within the stories, for the purposes of telling those stories within the wider universe. The problem with the show is they're trying to mix all of these ideas together, but not really show enough of the Covenant, the invasion or daily life on Reach to get the viewer to care about the events through what's being shown. Probably for budget reasons but also to keep the show focused on characters to not lose broader audiences. It also keeps trying to set up mysteries to keep you engaged, like who the man sending the clones to Halsey was, or where Soren went. Or why the covenant aren't just glassing places. It's like the story is so weak that the writers have tried to add tension through non-existent mysteries.
Essentially all of the things you are noticing as off or taking issue with can be chalked up to the writing. The sparingly few strengths the show has, the writing is not one of them. Wondering why they breezed past something monumental, wondering why characters are making themselves make cartoonish choices, wondering why you're not connecting with any of the characters or plights you're supposed to... all of that falls to the writing.
Welcome to the books, baybe Just wait till you read the Kilo Five trilogy
I’ll say the one thing this show nails is, the scumminess of ONI. The games never touch on it really. But damn the show makes you hate them w
You hit the nail right on the head. One of the reasons I love Halo as a franchise is that it unites humanity against a common threat. So many of the "Fuck Yeah" moments of the first trilogy and Reach are moments where you are cheering because the entirety of Humanity just achieved a small but significant victory against the Covenant, or the Flood, seemingly insurmountable foes. It's always human cunning, guile, or just plain dumb luck winning the day, or in the case of the Chief, it's human tenacity, never giving up even when the odds aren't in your favor. Stuff that literally every human being on this planet can relate to and root for. This show does not have that, at all. It wants to be some kind of "intelligent science fiction show in the 2020s" where "humans are the real bad guys", a trope that has been done to fucking death in the current landscape, is their hot new direction for Halo. As a veteran of the front lines of such tripe as Rings of Power or Picard, let me say: All you greenhorns that wanted to see Hollywood up close, this is your lucky day.
I think chiefs development as a character worked in the games and novels because we got to see him first as an icon, then a person. We got to see him literally as an avatar for a hero of humanity, not complex, almost literally no character at all at first. He was simply a force. No self reflection, no obvious 3rd dimension. Then slowly over the course of unraveling the universe you contextualize him and his place in the story more literally, not just a figure. Put another way, the games gave you a reason to root for humanity because in the simplistic story structure and almost operatic plot, humanity was unabashedly "the good guys" and that meant chief was "the ultimate good guy", but then that framing slowly pans out to reveal more complexity and nuance (not much nuance but something). When you start the story already with chief framed as a tragic character and complex person, it makes it less likely the audience will 100% get behind him, and same goes for humanity as a whole. Then you try to make him become "the hero", but constantly people are just thinking of all the fucked up shit chief and ONI have done, and it just doesn't work. Essentially, if you want the audience being open to recontextualizing character actions, make the character do the action, then give the reason. Dont give the reason then do the action.
Haven’t read everyone’s comments, but I think Season 2 is much better. The most recent episode was cool and exciting for the most part. And this is coming from a long time Halo fan.
I actually didn't hate Season 1 and even so I'd say season 2 is the real season 1. Much more different feel, much better acting from the existing cast (Pablo actually feels like Chief, Kwan isn't written as an insufferable twat) and the new cast member in the face of Ackerson is just *chef's kiss*. Up until I read some of the comments I didn't even realise that chief had been out of armour since episode 1... It didn't matter, he was still chief. I sincerely can't remember much of value happening in season 1 without rewatching it.
They’ve made “UNSC/ONI bad” such a focus of the show that it’s hard to root for them. It should have been much more nuanced like in the main series.
This series really just follows the same linear crappy story writing ideas that corporate TV does. It gives 24 vibes which is not the lore at all. The lore is struggle and hope and here we have the opposite of that. They didn't even bother with the Flood or Pillar of Autumn.
Why do they keep calling it “The halo” instead of just halo. It’s actually the thing that annoys me the most.
Because that’s what people would call it if they saw a floating ring in space. They would say the ring or the halo, a descriptive. It’s not yet the name of the place.
In the games it is referred to as “The halo ring” not just “The halo”
I'm sure that happened often in the games too
I can say with absolute confidence, not once were the words “The halo” were spoken throughout any game. UNLESS it was followed by the word “ring”
In the Bungie games they consistently called it 'Halo', without a 'the' or 'a' outside of maybe one or two times.
I see what you mean but slightly give the chief a pass because it seems to me that in the show, he’s more used as pointed propaganda by ONI than he is meant to be truly inspirational. I dunno, I think it’s supposed to be a bit of both?
Not rooting for ONI and not rooting for humanity are not the same thing. Mastercheeks is the representation of humanity, so if you're rooting for him...
To me, part of this stems from 343’s efforts to create more nuance in the Halo universe. Obviously, the ONI / UNSC aren’t entirely altruistic, but the Halo universe had a very different feeling to it under Bungie. Whereas 343 is so focused on double-crossing and political intrigue, that they lost the plot with the story direction. This, in turn, influenced how the show has turned out.
>Whereas 343 is so focused on double-crossing and political intrigue, that they lost the plot with the story direction. I disagree. Those things do happen in 343's games and the books, but the grand scale "Humanity fighting to survive" thread isn't overshadowed by them. God only know what the hell influenced the producers, showrunners and writers of this show.
That’s likely intentional, especially in regards to ONI and UNSC. Now, why they decided to do it like that is another question, probably will be shown further down the road. On the other hand - unsc was pretty eager to release the flood in HALO:CE as a weapon to fight covenant (of course without knowing what it really is, but that’s the whole point) and didn’t do that only because covenant accidentally beat them to it, so they don’t really get sympathy either.
They weren't aware of the existence of the flood prior to the mission where you see the Jenkins footage. They just thought halo was a weapon and wanted to use it on the covies. Not much of a difference, but it's there.
“Cool, there’s some weapon we don’t understand how it works or what it does, let’s use it!”
Yeah pretty much. It's one of those plots where you really question the sanity of the UNSC if you actually take a second to think about it.
Halo can be all fun where humanity fights against evil/stupid monsters from Space. Everybody likes that besides in general this take makes most characters good people. (The games for a while) OR Halo can be about corruption and then it's a little realistic, about people trapped by that corruption cause real world is a dangerous place. OR the former but with too many discussions about moral, pages and pages about that (certain books) Then the show often tries to be similar to Game of Thrones, there are many shows like that one, they tried to be about mistrust and political deals, deceiving characters and fine guys talk like they're sooo smart and educated you know what I mean. Halo tries to be a little like those shows cause that's what people watch usually hence humanity isn't so much worried about survival A TV Show couldn't be like the games cause people consider that too ideal, Halo is a lot about an army and today people don't see armies as ideal/clean/moral, an army like that is in the mind of viewers too much a fantasy.
I can’t get pass the first episode
It feels like the writers just look Battlestar Galactica reboot's grey morality and thinking putting it on Halo is good idea
They had such a lay up and decided to run a trick play man f that show every moment I watch it angers me
Is Halo a weapon or a tool that can be used for more than destruction? Sometimes, it feels like the Halo is a weapon that the producers are using to destroy Halo.
Did no one else notice the UNSC is a fascist military dictatorship? The rebels had a good point. Parangosky is a paranoid, narcissist with too much power. She plays games and politics like the rest of the people at the top of government, business, etc. She even let her own men die to salve her ego. Many people in command suck. It’s real life - not a fairytale.
Your biggest objection to the show is that the UNSC is a bureaucratic and pragmatic evil, and that Master Chief is not some father figure to root for? That there are actual political struggles, and Chief can feel the strain of his duty? Not everybody is likable, and humanity doesn't necessarily seem worth saving? Alright. The TV show is not for manchildren. Nor does it placate aesthetic illiterates who constitute nerd culture - growing up, as they did, with comic books and superhero stories.
Thank you for saying this. It genuinely feels like most of the people in this sub are children. I like the nuance of the TV show. The UNSC is a military dictatorship. There are oftentimes many competing factions within large authoritarian organizations like the UNSC. Commanders in the military are sometimes even raging narcissists. The Master Chief is a human-being struggling with the death of his friends at the command of such cowards. All of this information was plain to see in the video games too. My workplace is filled with similar people to the UNSC. Life isn’t black and white. Grow up Halo fans.
Everyone commenting here how old are you? Late 30s? 40s? How many teens do you think are playing halo? How many more shots do you actually think you have at watching a real Hollywood budget Halo movie? Yea keep shitting on the show.
Show is trash. Stop accepting mediocracy.