TV Review: Halo Season One (2022)

Halo Season One (2022) created by Steven Kane and Kyle Killen based on the video game series

Humanity is at war with a group of alien races called the Covenant. But not all humans are invested in the fight. Worlds on the galactic frontier want to be independent. So the central human government uses marines and special soldiers called "Spartans" to fight the Covenant and the rebellious human elements. The show starts with an assault on Madrigal, a mining planet with dreams of independence. The attackers are the Covenant, though the Spartans show up soon enough to fight the aliens. During the operation, Master Chief (Pablo Schreiber) is clearing out some caves and comes across an artifact that he can activate by touching. It gives a burst of tremendous power and also unlocks flashes of his childhood memories. He has no conscious memories of his youth because the Spartan program (run by sketchy scientist Dr. Halsey (Natascha McElhone)) has turned them into super-soldiers with heavy-duty armor and biological enhancements including emotion suppressors. And memory suppression too. The soldiers bring the artifact (which was what the Covenant really wanted on Madrigal) back to the scientists for study. The scientists think the artifact can access a super-weapon that can win the war. They certainly don't want it falling into Covenant hands.

The plot branches out in several directions at the beginning. The lone civilian survivor of the Madrigal attack, teenage girl Kwan Ha (Yerin Ha), is more or less adopted by Master Chief. He tries to keep her safe and winds up passing her off to an ex-Spartan to take care of. She wants to be a freedom fighter on her home planet and a good bit of the plot follows her storyline as the ex-Spartan tries to keep her under control while she tries to get into trouble. The Covenant leadership has its own plans, using a human they had captured, Makee (Charlie Murphy), who also can activate the artifact by touch. A third plot line is the scientific shenanigans of Dr. Halsey, who wants to advance humanity through science, even if it means harming humans. She's in competition with another military scientist who happens to be her daughter. Finally, Master Chief's struggle with who he is and where he came from are explored. 

With so many threads to follow, the series turns into a bit of a hodge-podge. The freedom fighter storyline lasts for a little over half the run and then drops out completely. The Covenant is underdeveloped as villains--we know they want to win the war and have some larger, vaguer plan. They also have the same scruples as Dr. Halsey, i.e. hardly any. Makee is a willing collaborator with the Covenant against humanity, though her motivation shifts during the series in implausible ways. The central character, Master Chief, manages to stay in the center of most of the episodes and has an interesting enough story arc. But the show struggles to balance all of the narrative threads, with some being dropped, maybe for the next season to pick them up?

Unfortunately, a lot of the elements seem like they are taken from other shows or narratives. The tough soldier adopting a lone child survivor has happened plenty of times, going back at least to Aliens. And the young woman getting absorbed by an alien culture goes back at least to The Searchers (yes, the John Wayne film). Manipulative scientists and soldiers trying to discover their humanity are also common tropes. This series does not do enough original stuff or crafty blending of these elements to make a suspenseful or compelling show. While the special effects and visuals are amazing, I found the story just average. The actors are good with what they have but none of the performance are outstanding.

Only recommended if you are a fan of the video game series. I have only played minimal amounts of a few of the games, so I don't really know the mythology but what few of the special features I watched indicated that the creators were aware of and worked hard to build upon what came before while acknowledging the needs of a new medium (e.g. first-person shooters are short on character development where tv shows benefit greatly from it).