Review: Halo introduces us to Cortana in “Emergence”

After leaving Kwan in the hands of his old friend Soren-066, Master Chief returns to the UNSC where Dr. Halsey introduces him to Cortana, a digitized supercomputer entity. The intent is to reign in his emerging independence, but Chief continues to reach for the lost fragments of his humanity. Meanwhile, the Blessed One sets out to meet Chief, as the Covenant has taken a keen interest in the other person capable of activating the artifact. All this and more in this week’s episode of Halo, “Emergence.”

Wherein I rant about the sloppy prologue

We kick off this episode with a flashback to the origin of the Blessed One. We see her on the planet Oban, squeezing in a quick romance with another boy before he is killed off by the cartoonishly evil guards. She is chased down and rescued when soldiers of the Covenant arrive and take her in.

It’s a decent enough backstory for a character, but the execution is messy. When you really pay attention to the order of the events, they make no sense. So the Blessed One is running away from the guards, right? Then the Covenant aliens show up. We clearly see that both the Blessed One and the guards chasing her have noticed the aliens in the sky. The Blessed One uses the distraction to escape, but why do the guards continue to chase her?

This goes back to my complaint from the first episode about the writing completely screwing up what a character’s priorities would realistically be. Is it really so important to beat on one of your enslaved workers when an alien invasion has just started? And I get it, the writers want to establish that the Blessed One hates humans and prefers the Covenant because of how human beings have treated her, but let’s not force characters to make the dumbest decisions in order to establish this.

The editing doesn’t help either. In one shot, the Blessed One is getting away. The next time we see her, she is being picked up off the ground by a guard as if she had fallen over or something. What happened in the middle? Who knows, who cares. Not the show apparently.

Okay, that was a lot for such a short prologue, but the show has had a lot of these sorts of moments, moments where the lack of care for details inspire paragraph-long rants. I highlight this one so I don’t mention the others I noticed. Thank me later.

Meet Cortana

Moving on, Dr. Halsey finally speaks with that clone of hers that we’ve been hearing about, as well as with Master Chief. The pair of convos are pretty interesting, with a lot of neat concepts in play. For instance, her clone knows practically everything she does, yet retains a sort of childlike naivety. The doctor’s chilly demeanor makes her a more fascinating a character for me; if she can’t even show any warmth to a replica of herself, what does that say about her? Halsey continues to be this show’s saving grace.

Unfortunately, this dynamic won’t last, as Halsey’s clone is killed in order to create Cortana, an intelligent AI that can hopefully control Master Chief. For now, it’s just monitoring him.

Cortana is…well, annoying, but I can’t be too mad because I think the show is going for that. Her tone of voice, her habit of interrupting…yeah, I’m pretty sure we aren’t suppose to like her.

But I do like her role in the story. I like how she is pretty much a spy for Halsey, ordered to help Chief with whatever he does even if it furthers his independent streak. That sorts of goes against her mission, but Dr. Halsey’s need to observe makes it make sense.

My one thing, though: I could have guessed that Halo was going to bring in the uncontrollable AI trope, but it seems to really be jumping the gun with the foreshadowing it. Cortana is veeeery insistent on questioning both Chief and Dr. Halsey. It seems really obvious to me that she is going to go all GLaDOS, but maybe the show will surprise me.

Halo is getting better…slowly

Last thing: the show tries to have a secondary story with Kwan back on Rubble, and it honestly feels like placeholders for scenes accidentally got left in. It’s all very cookie cutter.

In the first scene, Kwan tells Soren she really wants to go back to Madrigal, and Soren says no. Second scene: Kwan tells another character that she really wants to go back to Madrigal, the other character says she shouldn’t. Third scene: Kwan again tells Soren she really wants to go back to Madrigal, okay fine. What changed? She offered him money. Boy, if only she had thought of that the first time, but then the writers couldn’t have done these bland trio of scenes to break up Master Chief’s story.

If the episode is just about Master Chief, Dr. Halsey, and Contana, then just make it about them. The Blessed One’s invasion of the UNSC is more than enough of a secondary story. Save advancing Kwan’s arc for when you can actually dedicate time and effort to it. The show could have done something so much more interesting for her; maybe she sneaks her way out of Rubble, a fitting first trial on her hero’s journey. But nope, we get three tired scenes that made me feel nothing.

And that’s all for this week. Some pros, some cons. More steps in the right direction, I’d say. Let’s see if the Halo can keep the ball rolling.

Grade: C

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