(courtesy IMP Awards)
You can’t help but feel, as Halo sets out on its second season deep in the war-troubled depths of the 26th-century where humanity has colonised the stars and found that not all the neighbours are welcoming, that bad things are coming and they are coming up fast.
The trailer for this batch of eight episodes all but indicated with humanity’s urbanised home planet of Reach well and truly in the firing line from the Covenant, an evangelically zealous enemy which seems intent on wiping humanity off the galactic map on its way to finding their eventual spiritual destination known as “Halo” (hence the name of the show, and the game on which it’s based).
The human race is still out there fighting with all their heart, led by the Spartans, genetically and behaviourally modified super soldiers led by Master Chief Petty Office John-17 (Pablo Schrieber), who like his team of Riz-028 (Natasha Culzac), Kai-125 (Kate Kennedy) and Vannak-134 (Bentley Kalu) were all seized from their parents as children and molded into the weapons humanity needs to win what appears right now to be an unwinnable war.
Sure, humanity has a desperate desire to preserved its enviable way of life, but they are no match in the tenaciously driven stakes for the Covenant who are led by a religious zeal so toxically strong that everyone subscribes to it with every fibre of their being.
Like most, if not all religions, it’s blindly cruel and unforgiving and does not reward free thinking or heartfelt anything beyond adhering to the dogma, but none of that really matters (even if it does) because this wholehearted belief in a future euphoric state of eternal spiritual bliss means that the Covenant will fight on and on while humanity, though committed to the cause, is riven by fractures of belief and drive and priorities.
In the first two episodes alone, “Sanctuary” and “Sword”, we witness dissension with military ranks – the Spartans new boss, ONI operative James Ackerson (Joseph Morgan) cares only for prosecuting his new role as overseer of the Spartan program; he’s so coldly intense that he makes the Spartans’ old sociopathically-obsessed boss, Dr Catherine Elizabeth Halsey (Natasha McElhone) seems like a warm hug on a cold and sorry day – religious defiance by civilians against a military there to rescue them, and an unwillingness by anyone in authority to believe that the Covenant are behaving differently on the human planets they are “glassing”, invading first before destroying, a tactic they have never previously employed.
It’s a threatening change in strategy and it deeply concerns the Master Chief, but because he’s a mere grunt – a powerful one, mind you, but a grunt in management’s eyes none the less – no one, Ackerson most particularly who’s too wrapped up in his own arrogance to see beyond his small, narrow, power-filled view of the world, is willing to think that the Covenant is doing things differently and in a way that could cause great harm to the human war effort.
That’s the thrust of the first two episodes of Halo‘s second season, which continues to run with the idea that though we have followed our manifest destiny out to the stars, that we may not survive too long because we cannot be saved from ourselves.
Of course the Covenant are a diabolically obsessed enemy intent only on realising their murderously-enacted goals, but they are at least some sort of cohesive force, whereas humanity is, well, not.
And yes, we should celebrate individuality and freedom and all the good things because they make humanity as wonderful and richly imaginative as it can be, but they are, alas, accompanied by a fractious need to win power and influence which, in a darkly hilarious slice of irony won’t be worth much if we’re neatly wiped from existence by the Covenant.
Meanwhile out in the depths of space, insurrectionists, led by Soren-066 (Bokeem Woodbine), are doing their piratical best to look out for themselves and only themselves, which is all fine and good since power to the people and all that, but their constant infighting and slave trading and casual, day-to-day brutality means that while they are doing a fine job of looking after Number One, they are not much of a threat to the Covenant nor to helping humanity as a whole defend itself.
In fact, Soren’s driving goal in these episodes is getting the bounty for Dr Halsey, a quixotic act that ends up causing him more trouble than it’s worth while proving that the insurrectionists, which also unwillingly include a survivor of Covenant attacks, Kwan Ha (Yerin Ha), will keep spiralling down their own sink of self interest while the galaxy is sacrificed to the Covenant’s religious mania.
While Halo is no match for the likes of Covenant‘s slow and thoughtful storytelling, it is still willing to take its time telling its gripping, all-too-human story, one that resonates with the rich promise of the good that could be and the bad that sadly all too often results.
As deep dive into the glories of human ambition and the frailty of its tempered realisation, Halo is superb, and while it doesn’t seem sure what to do exactly with some of its characters such as Kwan Ha and Halsey in these two episodes, you get the feeling that the narrative will kick up a gear when needed.
The show also does an immersively engaging job of balancing action and thoughtful behind-the-scenes machinations, and while it’s more intimate setting up of a later narrative blocks that takes precedence in these episodes, there’s still a chillingly good amount of heart-pounding action that speaks to the fact that Halo started out as a video game and wants to keep a great deal of its look and feel in its dramatic adaptation.
As starts to a second season go, these two episodes aren’t bad, though they are aren’t as tightly executed as say Foundation‘s sophomore effort, but they augur well for action and thoughtfulness ahead and for a continuing exploration of what it is that simultaneously makes humanity its greatest champion and most mortal enemy.
Halo is currently streaming on Paramount+ with episodes releasing every Thursday until 21 March.
BONUS REVIEW: Episode 3 – “Visegrad”
You have to pity the Cassandras of the world.
And no, we’re not talking about random women named Cassandra; rather those who, like “the daughter of Priam and Hecuba, king and queen of Troy” who, after rejecting Apollo, found herself both gifted with the ability to prophesy but simultaneously cursed to have no one believe her.
They know terrible things are coming but no matter how great their conviction and persuasive-sounding their passion, they are ignored at best and boldly and wantonly persecuted at worse.
While Master Chief isn’t exactly cursed by Apollo, he might as well be with no on the human capital world of Reach believing him that their fearsome, religiously fundamentalist enemy, the Covenant, is on the planet and getting ready to rent it asunder from within.
It’s not just that the idea sounds preposterous – though as the Master Chief has observed, after seeing a pattern emerge on worlds the Covenant arrived on, that they to be uncharacteristically invading first then destroying the world, almost as if they practising a complete change in strategy they plan to use elsewhere – but that no one, including the Spartans’ boss, Ackerson or the admiral who commands them, seems to want to believe that the way their enemy wages war is changing.
It’s a terrifying idea for those fighting a war already on the knife edge, and one they don’t want to countenance, but everything, from the radio signal that Master Chief and a Corporal Perez (Christina Rodlo) heard in amongst regular chatter on the doomed planet of Sanctuary to the disappearance of Cobalt Team who appear to have been on Reach all along and not where their clearly fictionalised flight plan said they were, suggests the Covenant are, like horror movie murderers, inside the home and calling to say they are there.
This episode is a slow drumbeat of doom, a march to the gallows for the humans on Reach, and while ostensibly Ackerson etc are saying the Covenant aren’t on Reach and that the Master Chief is mad and traitorously defiant – at one point he steals a Condor ship to find Cobalt team and tells his fellow Spartans that it’s a sanctioned undertaking which, it is not – it turns out they know and are getting to secretly evacuate key assets away from a world soon to fall to the Covenant.
This is a HUGE deal since Reach is the capital and epicentre of human culture and its loss will be a singularly lethal blow, although Ackerson maintains, in his coldly detached way (though we do see him exercise some tender humanity to his father with dementia which gives him something of a semi-beating heart) that they will fight on elsewhere.
How isn’t made clear since so much of their military capacity will be wiped out, not to mention their population, but the crime here is that the Cassandra-esque warnings of Master Chief are true and that it’s not that people don’t believe him, it’s that they do and for their self-serving ends, won’t admit to it.
In this slow burn of an episode that you know is building to something narratively and literally explosive, though quite how explosive isn’t clear until the closing seconds of the episode where the world begins to come to an end, Halo masterfully explores humanity’s hubris and selfishness but also the willingness of some to take a stand even at great cost to themselves.
“Visegrad” laments the way politics and strategy seem cosily happy to sacrifice human lives on the alter of perceived future gains all while deepening the well of humanity that powers a show that is fast becoming as much a deep dive into what makes us human, good and bad, as it is the story of an unwinnable war that might just be won if those in charge will only listen to the right people.
Halo is currently streaming on Paramount+ with episodes releasing every Thursday until 21 March.