Halo (TV Series)

So the last two episodes have basically been what I expected from a Halo tv show. UNSC politics, Covenant politics, battle strategy, soldiers interacting, exploring Forerunner ruins and hinting at the Flood. I was never expecting a direct translation of the games with back to back action, but this kind of makes me rethink some of the issues with season one, as the focus on exploring the origins of the Spartan program placed everything else on the back burner.

General thoughts:

• The reveal that the data spike will destroy Covenant cruiser rather than just shut it down makes sense, but ONE overloaded engine being able to cause a supernova-level explosion is a bit extreme. I would buy a fleet-destroying explosion, but saying Halo will be caught in it makes some logistic leaps to get the stakes high.
• Things are also happening really quick in terms of travel time, the Covenant and UNSC find the location of Halo and are sending their fleets. The first round of Spartan III's are killed almost instantly and the next batch is about to be sent. This happened after Chief interacted with the keystone but before he retrieved his armor, so what like an hour? It's a common pacing contrivance that I don't like, but isn't exactly a deal breaker.
• The reveal of the Forerunner lab, a hard light bridge, seeing a Forerunner corpse and hearing Flood noises is bound to get any fan a little excited. Halsey looking at the star map and thinking the expanding red points is a timeline of the Forerunner empire is great.
• The changes to the Spartan generations is interesting given all the timeline changes in this show, the Spartan III's are basically over-equipped conscripts and there is no indication of added augmentation. Then it seems like this version of the III's are an emergency stop-gap they can throw together in a couple of months and ONI is working on another generation based closer to the Spartan II design. It's an amusing mix of the II's, III's, IV's and ODST's.

So, having a few days to think on it, I would consider Season 2 an improvement from Season 1 overall. I think the finale had some pacing issues, but I was on the edge of my seat throughout so I can't complain too much.

I think I can safely say that I personally want a Season 3 now, because I'd like to see where they go from here now that Chief's on the Halo and the Flood are loose back at the UNSC base (infecting Halsey got me ??? but I'm willing to see where they go with that). I'm also convinced Kai is alive and will not hear otherwise, thank you.

The whole season has been fascinating for me. The first season I thought was flawed but interesting in its' flaws, while this season does a more engaging method of taking everything and making it better (rather than just drop everything that was controversial). With the season as a whole out I can still see some problems but it's more in the realm of pacing rather than story choices. The last three episodes felt like it was trying to compact the content of five episodes, which lead to a lot of rushed plot points compared to the more deliberate pacing of the first half of the season. It might have benefitted from having the battle of Reach spread between episodes 3 and 4 rather than all of 4 and the start of 5.

This episode in particular:

• Chief is back in armor and it starts leaning more into the game characterization: jumping from one action beat to another, Big Damn Heroes all around and gives him a new quotable one-liner.
• I was anticipating The Flood to get intense but was not prepared for "shoulder and neck split apart to grow a tentacle" intense. It started off more like 28 Days Later before getting into The Thing, it merged almost every zombie apocalypse trope into its' own unique thing and I applaud them for it.
• Kai got a combination of Jorge and Linda's fate, but seeing her body in the wreckage after ramming the carrier is a good hint that she will be back.
• They did a lot with what they had but can't help but feel The Arbiter needed more time to make his death land more. It's doesn't help we aren't seeing the real time results of the Enemy Civil War he got started, only seeing glimpses of it through context clues. Still, the duel between him and Master Chief was top tier.
• I could tell early on the voice talking to Chief in the framing device was a monitor, he didn't have the chipper cadence of Guilty Spark but the more calm, ethereal tone works pretty good to hide the reveal.
• Halsey is infected and then put on ice, it's possible Miranda either gets a brutal discovery that there is no cure or that reversing the process is barely possible at that early stage. Finding an outright cure would break the setting.