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Thoughts on Halo’s Bizarre Second Season

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I was sure I had posted about the Halo TV series when the first season aired, but I can’t find the post now, so presumably it was yet another thing I’ve let fall through the cracks recently.

Master Chief John 117 in the opening credits of the Halo TV series.The short version is I was a big fan. I haven’t technically played the games, but I did watch through them on YouTube for the stories. I found the plot of the original trilogy largely enjoyable, in no small part due to the massive influence it clearly draws from StarCraft, but I don’t view it as an unimpeachable masterpiece with no room for improvement.

The first season of the TV series felt to me like it took the source material and elevated it, adding a level of depth that a first person shooter can’t deliver. It was a great deconstruction of the super-soldier trope, illustrating in exquisite detail just what a horrible idea turning humans into weapons actually is.

After an interminable wait of several years, the bite-sized eight episode second season has finally arrived (modern television is a miserable hellscape). Between seasons, they completely changed the showrunning team; I was concerned this would make the show feel different, and good lord did it ever.

This is scarcely recognizable as the same series. This is especially true in the early part of the season, where they go out of their way to avoid addressing season one’s cliffhanger or continue its plot threads for several episodes before finally circling back around to continuing the original story. What an utterly bizarre way to do things.

A Sangheili elite pilots a Covenant ship in Halo season two.Even once things do meander back to the original plot, it never quite feels the same. Many cast members have wildly different characterizations. Even visually, the show feels radically different. Once a very bright and colourful show, the pallet has become dominated by grey and gloom.

The style of writing is different, too. Season one felt shockingly smart considering the source material. I wouldn’t say season two is dumb, but it does hew a lot closer to standard media tropes and generally feels more safe and predictable.

It’s all even more confusing because if you were going to reset the direction of the show, you’d think it would be to bring it more in line with the canon of the games, as season one deviated from it a lot. But that’s largely not the case. Things do start to trend a bit more towards the events of the games, particularly near the end, but it’s still diverging pretty wildly from original canon.

I am, as I said, a big fan of season one, but a criticism I can agree with it is that it had far too little focus on the Halo itself, and on Cortana. Some dudebro gamers may disagree with me on this, but I’ll die on the hill that Cortana is the real main character of this franchise. Master Chief is her sidekick.

Kwan Ha in Halo's second season.But bafflingly these are mistakes season two continues to make. The Halo isn’t even mentioned for the first several episodes, and Cortana is barely there.

It’s not a bad season, to be clear. I’m griping a lot, but it’s still a largely enjoyable action series. It’s mostly the comparison to season one that makes it suffer. Season two isn’t bad, but season one was better, and the jarringly abrupt transition between the two styles is so hard to overcome.

Mind you, it does seem like most of the fanbase prefers this season, so once again I appear to be the lone voice in the wilderness on this. One day it would be really nice to have a normal opinion on something…

I’m invested enough in the show that I’d like to see another season (which given current trends will probably be three episodes long and take five years to make), but I do really wish we could have seen the original showrunners deliver on their vision.

Review: This Bed We Made

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Decided to do a good old-fashioned numbered review for this one. By gar, it’s been a while!

Main character Sophie in the narrative game This Bed We Made.For Christmas this year a friend got narrative mystery game This Bed We Made, which I only realized after I started playing is designed and set in Canada (bonus!). In it, you play as a nosy hotel maid in 1950s Montreal, who becomes embroiled in a tale of intrigue involving several of the hotel’s guests.

As you investigate, you must also continue to perform your maid duties, from emptying trash cans to scrubbing toilets (thankfully the mechanics for the latter are not detailed), and you can recruit one of your co-workers to become your sidekick, and potentially your love interest.

It’s a short, simple game, but largely well-executed. The mystery is less the standard thriller full of twists and more about interpersonal drama and social injustices. If you enjoy gossip, you’ll love this game, but even as someone with little interest in such things I got pretty sucked into peeping through the personal secrets of the hotel guests.

I’d also like to give a lot of praise to Victoria Diamond, who voices the lead character, Sophie. She gives Sophie such spunk and charm that you just instantly fall in love with the character.

Sophie and sidekick Beth in the narrative game This Bed We Made.As far as criticisms go, I found the romance angle of the game felt a bit tacked on. While both your potential paramours (one male and one female) are reasonably likable, neither really stood out to me as especially appealing, and the game isn’t really long enough for the budding relationship with your chosen partner to get fleshed out in any meaningful way.

I also found out the hard way that this is not one of those “choices matter” games where every choice is equally valid. It’s a very pass/fail system where you’re shooting for a good ending, and it seems to fairly difficult to get the best ending, especially as what’s required for it isn’t entirely obvious on a first playthrough.

On my first attempt, I got a very bad ending. I replayed the last forty minutes or so of the game with different choices, and I got a better ending, but still not an ideal one.

This is the sort of thing that would normally infuriate me, but in this case I found it only mildly irksome. There’s a couple reasons for this. One is how charming the game had been up to that point. Another is that the game is so short (~4 hours) it doesn’t feel too onerous to do another playthrough to try to get the best ending; I’m just going to wait until it’s a little less fresh in my mind before I attempt that.

Main character Sophie in the narrative game This Bed We Made.But most importantly, I think it makes a big difference that this is a pretty grounded, realistic story. If there was any supernatural element, I would definitely be fuming that I wasn’t able to use my superpowers to fix everything, but it makes sense that a mere hotel maid from an era where female voices were usually discounted would struggle to shift the trajectory of events.

Overall rating: 7.9/10