The best thing about the Halo finale is that it ends

After getting tricked by Makee and losing possession of the artifact, Master Chief and the UNSC scramble to apprehend her and Dr. Halsey, who everyone thinks Makee is now in cahoots with. Though the Spartan forces are wounded, they aren’t to be counted out. Get ready for the finale level in “Transcendence”.

Figures that the episode I missed last week is the one where the ship hit the fandom, huh? I know there was quite a to-do about the developments in the last episode. But even having missed that episode, the opening of the finale was a total mess.

I don’t know what it is with the editors in this show. Maybe they were looking to trim the fat in order to fit in everything the show wanted to do. Whatever the reason, this opening sequence is very sloppy. There are a lot of fast cuts and split second reaction shots of characters; it just doesn’t make for a pleasant watch.

There’s one shot of Makee walking down the corridor with the artifact and in the very next shot she swipes a gun from a pair of guards. Why didn’t we see the guards first? Why is our introduction to their presence Makee disabling them? How does this women carrying a heavy suitcase manage to sneak up on a pair of guards and pickpocket their weapon? Maybe that’s why the editing was so bad, because to edit it any other way would reveal the incompetence of the writing.

Master Chief gives up his autonomy

Anyway, back to summary: Makee and Halsey manage to escape in their respective ships. Makee makes off for the Covenant home planet. And Halsey, well, she doesn’t make it very far at all. Thanks to Kai’s infiltrating her getaway ship (another sequence with questionable choices, but we only have so much time to rant), Dr. Halsey’s escape pod lands in a field who-knows-where and is quickly taken into custody. We get an interesting, dramatic moment where Dr. Miranda is suddenly in a position of power over her mother.

Back to the main story, Master Chief and the rest of the Spartans must venture into the Aspero system, where for whatever sci-fi reason light is fragmented, making travel difficult. I liked the visuals here and wish the show had leaned in on them more. Instead, we get some low-impact action as their ship breaks down; cue more second-long reaction shots, snappy cuts, and my personal favorite add-on: characters saying nothing lines like “Oh shit” or “I didn’t sign up for this.” And of course, once they arrive the ship’s problems cease completely. Fine, whatever.

We get a big old action scene on the Covenant home planet. Covenant soldiers come out of nowhere in waves to stop our four heroes, who put up quite the fight. The fight itself is…okay. Personally, I just can’t get passed the fact that what I’m looking at clearly isn’t real. The CG environment and enemy modeling is solid, but sorry, I can still tell it’s fake, and I don’t like this show enough to ignore it and enjoy the sequence like I can with, say, Doom Patrol or Star Trek: Discovery.

Anyway, Master Chief takes a real beating and decides that the only way to recover the artifacts and save the rest of his team from a slaughter is to give up total control of his mind and body to Cortana. This is pretty interesting when you consider that John’s arc this season has been about fighting for his independence. I think the show could have emphasized the weight of this decision more, but hey, at least it’s there.

And so Master Chief, now a lifeless android, saves the day, rescuing both the Spartans and artifacts. Another plot twist: the Dr. Halsey we’ve been following this whole time turns out to be a clone! The real one sits pontificating, giving us a pretty standard speech about the future of humanity and our potential and yadda yadda to close the season.

One season of Halo is enough

Is Master Chief’s life recoverable? That’s a question for next season. A season which, in my opinion, should really not happen. I don’t know about anyone else, but this show didn’t do much for me. As a non-Halo fan, it failed to stand out from other sci-fi stories, and it suffered from lack-luster writing, editing, and direction. And from what I can tell, Halo fans are none too pleased with this show either, since it made strange changes with the story and focused on characters who don’t have big roles in the games, if they’re there at all. I imagine execs at Paramount+ are sweating at the prospect of a second season, which apparently was already greenlit very early into the first season’s run. Will they actually go through with it? For the sake of humanity’s future and potential, I hope not.

Grade: C 

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