“Brace for impact!” (Fan Creations)

by Beorn , <End of Failed Timeline>, Tuesday, March 26, 2024, 10:02 (242 days ago) @ breitzen

this isn't The Last of Us

Well, until it tried to be... Oi.

I thought the second season showed some promise early on, but then it felt like the show lost its rudder in the second half and did a tail-spin into the dirt. I finished it last night and was supremely disappointed.

The show feels as though some archaeologist who moonlights as a fanfic writer uncovered a portion of the Halo lore from ancient ruins and tried to piece together what they thought the story might be. It's just... all wrong. In so many ways. And sometimes offensively so to anyone who cares for the source material.

The TLDR for me is: I don't think anything in the show was done better than it was in the existing material, and generally, it's objectively worse across the board. I get that the show creators want to pave some new ground so that there's some "freshness" to the story, but if you're going to do that, those changes should be improvements, not change for the sake of change, and they completely failed to do that. This feels like just another step in the absolutely lackluster and tone-deaf Microsoft/343 stewardship of the Halo franchise. And it makes me sad because the source material is just so. damn. good.

I'll follow breitzen's lead and do a pro/con, I guess (in no particular order):

Pros:

• I actually really liked Pablo Schreiber, the actor who played as Chief. I don't think he was given great source material to work with, but he did have his moments. And when he put on the suit, I bought it.
  
• First-half-of-the-season Perez. I thought her interaction w/ Chief was great and I understood her character's motivations. I cared for her and her family, which added some weight to the Fall of Reach.
  
• Environments and props – whoever was on this really paid attention to details. This all screamed "Halo" in the best way. Like, at a certain point, I was putting up with the rest of the show's nonsense just so I could see the environments and notice the little details. I think this is the department that had the "real" Halo fans.
  
• Ackerson – At first, I was upset about this character, but I kind of warmed up to him. And I liked the scene with his dad. Yeah, he's a jerk, but he's also saddled with more than he can bear and all his character flaws are coming out at the seams. He's too young to be in the position he's in, but maybe that's one of the reasons he's breaking?
  
• Cortana – her S2 appearance seems a lot more on-point than it was in S1. She's vastly underutilized during the season, though.
  
• Halsey – I think that Natascha McElhone just nails this character. She's just the right amount of intelligent, calculating, and manipulative. I think I would have been happier with a spinoff show about The Adventures of Catherine Halsey.
  
• Admiral Keyes – this one's divisive, but I was actually okay with him being taken off the board earlier in the story than expected. It's unexpected for those of us who know the story, but it doesn't really move the needle in any meaningful way for the rest of the story (or, wouldn't have... if they'd have stuck even remotely to the source). His outro was more than a little over-the-top cringey, though.

Cons:

• Makee – Just... why? I don't buy the "we need someone on the Covenant side to associate with" explanation for her existence... and she's kind of all over the place. And absolutely no explanation about how she's somehow still alive? I'm not sure about her motivations or why she would know what the Halo is, much less how it works. And now she's mysteriously tied to The Aribter...
  
• The Arbiter – A concept totally wasted. Who is he? Why is he shamed? Why is being "The Arbiter" a punishment? The show don't care, just gotta use more proper nouns from Halo lore without actually caring about them!
  
• Kwan Ha – Nothing against the actor, I thought she did well with what she had. But the character doesn't belong in the story. Carve her out and, really, nothing changes much. They obviously have plans for her, but I'm not a fan of whatever mysticism they've got cooking.
  
• Second-half-of-the-season Perez (when she was jammed into the Spartan III story line). The timing doesn't make any sense – she gets out during the Fall of Reach, and then she's somehow been doing S3 training for... how long? It felt like an unnecessary over-extension of the character, to the point of failure. Keep the Spartain IIIs, but have Perez somewhere else and do her character justice. Or just let her disappear for a while and have her appear unexpectedly in season 3 to everyone's delight.
  
• Soren – a holdover from S1 that feels like something they had to shoehorn into the budget. Again, carve his story out and we'd have a leaner, tighter storyline.
  
• Too much AWOL Chief – this is a symptom of the writers' obsession with self-conflict and infighting, but boy was it wearing thin.
  
• The Flood – Everything about this just felt stupid. Why would a Librarian be clutching a Flood sample container on a Shield World? How did the sample get out of the bio-containment box? (The best I could understand is that the other lab tech ... opened the box and touched it?!) It all felt a lot like someone at 343/Paramount just desperately wanted in on The Last of Us zombie action...
  
• How Cortana gets into Chief's armor... just, uh... punch the console? Really?
  
• Hand-wavy magicking. Just everywhere. Bleeds a little too much fantasy into the story.
  
• The Monitor – since the intended audience for this show is obviously not people who are familiar with the story already, the Monitor in this last episode has to be a real WTF moment.
  
• Fight scene cinematography – too much camera movement! I'll be glad when this superhero movie style has run its course...