User Reviews

The first 20 minutes of the episode is very good. CGI looks unbelievable and the action scene is as good as it gets.

The whole plot around Soren and Kwan has improved in a lot of ways, especially when the whole subplot didnt have any connection to the main one in season one. At least you can kind of see where they are going with this one.

Acherson is not entirely convincing to me so far. I like that there are more Spartans showing.

Dialogue feels somewhat lazy sadly.

I think a lot of the intrigue is unnecessary and might be in order to avoid high budget action scenes.

Overall I think it's good, let's see where this goes.

Okay I'm a big Halo fan I've read the books played every game on legendary so I absolutely love anything related to halo. I hated the first season it was clearly a bunch of people who wanted to make something and used the Halo IP without knowing anything about it. This season they seem to have gotten it better. The VFX are better most the time and the fight scenes are far better- Elites act like elites. I will say they are focusing a bit much on elite and need to show more covenant. Where the show looses 2 points is A taking chiefs helmet off and B the reason they take it off is because they want to make this show into a drama which could work with ODST's in the way there doing it but not Spartans and definitely not Master Chief. So as much as I want to hate this I have decided to go in with an open mind and accept that this is a new version of halo and stoped expecting it to be like the halo we love.

Why are we focusing so hard on Master Chiefs mental and emotional wellness? I understand this formula can be effective at times in the past. The lost identity/lost memory/sanity/grip on reality has been seen since Jason Bourne, the Matrix and many others.

But with who Master Chief is and the vast lore of Halo, this approach just doesn't fit and so much screen time is wasted on this. Master Chief is the rock. He is the legend. And he has been so disrespectfully reduced here.

Instead of exploring the Covenant, the Flood, or the HALO's, the Spartans; we dabble in all the things fans are NOT here to see and introduce a new bad guy Ackerson that's completely unnecessary! There are plenty of enemies in the Halo universe without needed to create a new one.

We got a few good actions scenes that give the series some hope but they quickly need to change the focus of where this is headed or there will not be enough viewers left for a season 3.

After a marketing campaign focused on admitting the mistakes of Season 1 and promising that Season 2 will be different, we get more of the same. Continuing the thread of making John a nutcase who speaks out and is aggressive to his commanders because they took out his "inhibitor chip" (don't get me started on how dumb that is). Bringing back Makee just when we got rid of her (nothing against the actress, but the character is awful and makes zero sense, and also her romance with John is ridiculous and unnecessary). Heavy handed dialogue and shoddy writing all over. The continued demonization of Halsey, who the show has made a traitor to humanity because... reasons (I guess the writers are not fans of morally gray characters, or interesting characters in general). Long, painfully slow plot development that fails to create an interesting world or engage the viewers. A sad attempt to copy Blade Runner 2049 with John going to an AI psychologist/pornstar (????), and no hint of Cortana who was perhaps the only well-adapted thing in Season 1.

The visuals are good, a step up over Season 1 which already looked good most of the time. I really like Pablo, I think he was perfectly cast and it's a shame to see him given such piss-poor material. The source material was so rich, they had an extended universe with dozens of books to pull from, and particularly The Fall of Reach, the novel which started it all and is literally the narrative bedrock of the Halo universe. Instead of pulling from that, expanding on it, deepening it and lingering more with the events and characters of that novel, they decided to write a 17 year old's fanfic of John falling in love with a human who joined the Covenant (???)

I was fully prepared to give this show another chance after all the apologetic interviews, but now it's clear to me that this was just a pathetic marketing strategy and Season 2 is just another colossal waste of money and talent. But don't worry about me, I'm switching to hate-watch mode. I have seen enough terrible adaptations to know how to enjoy laughing at incompetent storytelling, and for that (and the visuals) this episode gets three stars.

Just Awful.

They start with the same tired old trope of "evacuate the townsfolk before the baddies come, oh but there's stubborn elder that doesn't wanna leave and gets everyone killed"

The fight with the elites was ok but the CGI is still clunky as hell it just doesn't look right no improvement from season 1 there.

And the whole plot about Ackerson not believing, or just gaslighting chief... THE SPARTAN HELMETS HAVE FRICKIN CAMERAS THEY RECORD EVERYTHING LOL. Even modern soldiers today usually have helmet cams.

The level of writing is absolutely childish. This is a military sci fi, there is a reason most books and games of that genre usually have retired military advisors on hand to explain what sort of tactics might be used so the writers don't do anything so obviously nonsensical that it utterly breaks audience immersion.

Like the infamous Winterfell battle, or the dreaded hyperspace kamikaze from the Last jedi. Wait for the scene with the tunnel at the end of episode 2 there's a good example there..

I want so badly for this show to be good. To at least see some fun action scenes and space battles. Give us that ffs.

And for the love of god NO ONE cares about Kwan or Soren.

Barely remembered what happened last season.. by the way, i looked up the female spartans and these chicks are huge lol.. the one that does not talk much and interacts mainly with the black dude.. i remember her playing that elf that slapped geralt around in the witcher when he got captured by the elves.. she is like 6 2 or something natasha culzac.. and katie kennedy is 6 4.. and the dudes are over 6 5 the best part was the addition to klaus and the character being just like the vamp in the vampire diaries.

Anyway, no asian annoyin chick in this episode.. hopefully not in season 2 whatsoever but why are we still having this storyline about the bounty hunter nobody even cares about?

Dude, just focus on the spartans, master chief and put some action in the middle..

I am surprised to see high scores for this episode and people saying they like it because this was quite boring. It dragged and dragged and then gave us the same kind of unnecessary violence scenes people criticized year one for giving us.

Not a major twist in site, not a lot of promise to look forward to, just a really underwhelming episode.

I think the stories are always going to be weak in a show like this, they are trying to make the best out of shotty writing from a video game, but nothing about what we saw here hooked me in. Really underwhelming start to year two for Halo in my opinion.