Tag Archives: TV

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.

Final Thoughts on Disenchantment

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Disenchantment has always been a bit of a divisive show. While I generally count myself as a fan, I do sympathize with a lot of its critics. It is a very strange, inconsistent series.

Elfo, Miri, and Luci in the final season of Disenchantment.It’s definitely not what you’d expect in the context of Matt Groening’s other shows. I’m not even sure I’d call it a comedy. It’s more of a dramedy. It’s got a lot of jokes, but the humour is ultimately secondary to its intricate plot.

And that plot has not always been a strength. Its pacing has been glacial, and it rambled hither and yon throughout its five seasons with only the barest suggestion of a cohesive direction. A lot was riding on the fifth and final season to finally pay off all of the mysteries, and while it was an enjoyable season in many ways, it largely failed in that goal.

For much of the last ten episodes, I was ready to declare the fifth season the best, and by far. It manages to be both the funniest and the most serious season to date, finally nailing Disenchantment’s often inconsistent mix of drama and comedy. Up until the final episode, it’s a fantastically enjoyable season.

But I kept waiting for them to finally begin resolving the overwhelming pile of questions and mysteries the show has wracked up over its run. And waiting. And waiting. And waiting. And then the credits rolled.

Tiabeanie and Mora in the final season of Disenchantment.Many of the mysteries received resolutions that were glib and unsatisfying. Even more got no answers at all. They even introduced a few new big mysteries this season and then promptly refused to resolve them, too.

Perhaps part of the blame is on me for over-hyping myself, but they really did sell the idea there was some grand plan and that everything would be revealed in the end. I’m having flashbacks to the ending of the Ron Moore Battlestar Galactica — although however flawed it may have been, Disenchantment’s ending is still much more satisfying than BSG’s disastrous conclusion.

We had long heard that Disenchantment was planned to run for six seasons. No explanation has been given for why it ended with season five that I’m aware of, but it’s likely Netflix pulled the plug on them prematurely. I’ve seen a lot of people blame the ending’s messiness on this, and I’m sure it didn’t help, but so little is answered that I’m leaning towards the impression the writers just didn’t have a plan and didn’t know how to wrap things up.

However, Disenchantment’s saving grace has always been its characters, and that remains true here. Again echoing BSG, even as the meta-plot collapsed, the character arcs remained strong.

Elfo and Miri in the final season of Disenchantment.Bean and her companions have always been fiercely lovable, and that never stopped being true. In preparing for this post, I went back and reread my previous posts on Disenchantment, and even way back in season one I was heaping praise on Abbi Jacobson as Bean, and if anything my opinion of her performance has only increased since then. As the child of a narcissistic parent myself, her fury at Dagmar felt very cathartic.

Also, this was truly Mop Girl’s finest hour. Not the hero we deserve, but the hero we need.

The conclusion of Disenchantment’s many character arcs is as satisfying as the conclusion of its meta-plot is disappointing. There’s a lot of happy endings, and some bittersweet endings, but it feels like everyone wound up exactly where they belong one way or another. For a show that was always about finding your place in the world when you don’t quite fit in, it’s a great place to leave it.

In the end, Disenchantment died as it lived: Frustratingly uneven, but with enough heart to make the journey worthwhile.