In Episode 8 of Halo, Doctor Halsey says of the series' protagonist:

There is no John, there’s been no John for years. There is only Master Chief, a product of the species who made him necessary.

Out of context, this reads as the sort of thesis-stating that you see a lot in science fiction writing. You can imagine how this theme might work really well in a Halo show, with “Master Chief” represented by the classic armor from the games and “John” being represented by helmet-less Pablo Schreiber.

But, in context, that’s not actually what she’s saying. It’s a lie from Halsey to Makee, an original character introduced in the show who is sent by the covenant to infiltrate humanity but finds herself falling for John. Not only is it a lie, it’s a really obvious lie, both to viewers and to the characters in the moment in the show. Halsey even contracts herself in the scene, calling John by his first name multiple times before and after the quoted line. It’s frustrating; it feels like a line that would have worked in a different show but that should have been removed during editing of this one.

I wouldn’t say that’s representative of every problem in the show, but I think it’s a good way to start talking about what went wrong. There are some things that work quite well, and some decisions that make a lot of sense, but lots of stuff that simply isn’t done well or doesn’t make sense.

Take a look at this scene:

It looks OK, right? Not much color, but a neat design. Now, take a look at a closer shot a second later:

The background is just . . . white. It almost looks like a work-in-progress still with the CGI not fully applied. I’m not if the stills totally convey it, but it really doesn’t work in the scene. But interestingly, it’s not like this is true of the all of the Covenant interior scenes:

Here they used the classic purple from the games, combined with some lighting elements that are also stylistically similar to the ones the games use. I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s masterful interior design, but it works better than the all-white background in the previous scene, which has two problems that are pretty characteristic of the show:

• It’s not really clear what the intent behind it is, and
• It doesn’t really work

This particularly applies to the story arc of Kwan Ha, another original character. She’s introduced as part of a insurrectionist group on the planet of Madrigal, where she watches all of her friends killed by Covenant and is the sole survivor saved by the Master Chief.

I quite liked her introduction in the first episode; she’s well written and acted, and if nothing else she does a good job of putting a “human-sized” character alongside the aliens and super soldiers of the series. But then in the second episode, the Master Chief leaves her at a pirate space station and returns to the UNSC, and she begins a journey to reclaim her home planet from the UNSC that comes across as basically totally orthogonal to the main plot of the series. The culmination of her story is a Paul Atriedes-esque scene of her tripping out in the desert with an all women Fremen-ripoff desert tribe. I exaggerate, but only a bit; it’s cliche and not particularly well done.

How does Kwan Ha’s story intersect with the “main” plot? It doesn’t – she’s entirely absent from the last two episodes of the series. She’s almost certainly going to return in the second season and play some kind of role there, but as-is I think it’s a huge mistake that in the first season of a new show adapted from a game you’d have an original character with a substantial amount of screentime whose story doesn’t stand on its own.

I don’t love joining the chorus of hate on Kwan Ha; she gets a lot from fans, some of which I suspect is not due to a rational dislike of her story. Since Halo fans are both racist and stupid there’s been a lot of criticism out there for aspects of the story that basically work – Kwan Ha just unfortunately isn’t one of those, even if I’m not sure the reasons fans dislike her are spot on.

A decision that got a lot of hate before the show released was the casting of Olive Gray and Danny Sapani, both Black, as Miranda and Jacob Keyes, two characters who were originally White in the games. Both actors did well in their respective roles, and were some of my favorite characters from the show. There’s no tradeoff in the quality of the acting, and casting Gray and Sapani helped avoid having an entirely white cast of original game characters.

In general, I think the casting for the show was done well. It has what I suspect are some problems with direction and writing: there are enough inconsistent performances that I’m inclined to think it’s a systemic problem rather than the actors just being bad. But basically every main actor has a few good moments where you can see why they were picked for the role.

Pablo Schreiber in particular is a good pick for the Master Chief. He’s gotten a mixed reception from fans, I think because he didn’t just reprise Steve Downs' performance. But he does a good job of filling the role that the show calls for. He’s stoic where he needs to be, and expressive when the script calls for it. In a better show I suspect his character would be remembered really fondly.

Beyond just the master chief, there’s an interesting dynamic where the best characters are the ones adjacent to, but not core to, the main story of the series and the games. The show struggles a bit with the Chief and Halsey in part because of how much weight those characters carry in the original story, and it has trouble justifying the existence of characters like Kwan Ha who don’t have an obvious tie-in (yet). But, in contrast, I think Washington Post writer Gene Park is totally spot on that Spartan Kai-125 is easily one of the stronger characters in the series, partly because she fits easily into the series' main story without being constrained by existing expectations around the character.

The battle scenes in the show are also well done, if not flawless. They’re fun to watch, with the show taking an unusually bold stab at translating the feel of combat in the Halo games into TV. In particular, you get to see the same kind of running-and-gunning, close-combat fighting, and weapon scavenging that happens routinely in the games, in a format that doesn’t look too bad. In my opinion, it’s a nice contrast to previous live-action Halo work, which usually goes for a much more standard sci-fi shootout look.

I’d like to defend one more creative decision made by the team behind this show: the Master Chief sex scene. Like I said before, a lot of the bad decisions in this show don’t have a clear purpose and don’t really work in context. I don’t think either is true for master cheeks.

In particular, it makes a lot of sense for the two characters involved:

• John is experiencing human emotion for the first time in his adult life, and has just met someone he has a unique connection with via the Forerunner artifact they can both interface with
• Makee spent her entire live living among the covenant, which makes that connection she has with John particularly powerful. The show also draws deliberate parallels to a romance she had as a kid that was cut short by her abduction by the covenant.

While some have argued the scene is a violation of the Geneva convention, it’s clearly intended to be consensual and I’m just not sure that’s the most useful lens to view it through. Even if some of the aspects surrounding the scene aren’t executed flawlessly, it’s a genuinely character driven moment in a show that’s mostly lacking those.

The decision to have the Master Chief fuck, and it’s ultimate effect in the show, is an interesting one to look at. It’s a bold choice that pays off in a lot of ways, and the reasons it doesn’t aren’t inherent to the decision; it’s that the “basics” on this show – writing, direction, etc – aren’t well done enough to make it feel justified to viewers.

This is true of a lot of the stuff that doesn’t work in the show. Master Chief taking off his helmet isn’t a bad decision at all, but the show ignores some fairly fertile ground for storytelling in favor of having him go mostly helmet-less throughout the show. Having a side character with a significant story arc outside the main story is fine, but viewers need a reason to stay invested.

It’s easy to look at this show and think that the writers and showrunners should have just stuck to the story already established in the books and games. But there are some problems there. For one, you’d need to make some edits anyways to reconcile the differences between “book canon” around the fall of Reach and the “game canon”. But the bigger issue, and I suspect the one the show’s creators ran into, is that all of those are leading into the plot of Halo: Combat Evolved.

CE is a video game with a great campaign mode, but you couldn’t adapt it to a TV show without making significant edits already. So, taking a step back, an adaption actually probably requires major changes to the original story. The problem isn’t those changes, it’s that the basics are poorly done.

I hope that future showrunners don’t learn the wrong lesson here. Fans may tell you that they’re mad because of X and Y changes to the original canon, but, as we’ve established, fans are stupid (and racist). They will find something to get mad about no matter how closely you hew to the original canon. So what you need is to focus on making the show good.

I’m not really optimistic that future game adaptations are going to learn the right lessons from Halo. I’m not even sure the second season is going to learn the right lessons from the first. So ultimately I do think I’d recommend stealing someone’s Paramount+ login or pirating the show to get a chance to experience it despite the flaws and idiosyncrasies.