I also really liked the war scenes, a lot of the time it was pretty inglorious and violent, which was nice to see in something with as much hero-worship potential as Halo has to fall into. The siege of the covenant ship in particular was great.
For as much as my brain turns off whenever John Halo swordfights twenty elites at once, I did like his line at the end of his Arbiter fight, that was pretty cool.
I wish this show was like, you follow a squad of spartans, you follow a squad of ODSTs, and you follow some random shitty infantry guys. Just keeping it all ground-level, sorta Starship Troopers-like, from the perspective of the grunts. When that sort of stuff pops up in the show, it tends to be what works for me.
Halo gripes
So many of these storylines are god-awful, hoping we jettison a good number of them with where the finale left us:
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Kwan’s story continues to stagger around, I don’t know why. She just soaks up 20 minute in an ep to be told a series of vague statements she does not understand. I think there’s potential with her as a refugee, and telling that story, but they’re not really interested in that.
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God, please, either conclude or do something with Soren and his family. It’s wild that they have Soren’s kid involved here, so he can’t really do any action movie stuff. He doesn’t want to either, so I just don’t really have a ton to grab onto here. I do really like the actor though? If they got his wife and kid off the show he could maybe be some kind of outsider investigator role? I dunno.
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Halsey has settled into this role where she’s not driving anything now, she’s just reacting, or trying to stop losing things. I get there’s catharsis from seeing John Halo and Soren tell her off for abusing them, but I want her to do big manipulative “needs of the species” shit and be a force to reckon with. There should be some kind of tension where she is actively using soldiers, and the soldiers can see that she considers them disposable, and I guess the moment she was removed from authority we stopped being able to get that, because why would anyone follow her if they weren’t forced to do so by the military?
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In the games, The Flood is sort of a boring villain, I don’t think giving it a voice and a character with the Gravemind was a good idea. There’s potential here if they treat the Flood like a force of nature that has no will, I think, that has no wants, and is just a hunger. Hopefully that’s what they’re doing here.
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Reeeeally not super nuts about the entire human fleet being there at the Halo, it feels like we’re now going to go right back to meetings in human ships, rather than the exploration adventure of Halo 1, with John and Cortana and nobody else.