‘Halo Episode 6: Solace’ Review
Image Source: The Scientific Gamer
Halo. After six episodes, the television show on Paramount+ finally delivers our first glimpse of the eponymous ringworlds. Finally, what fans have waited decades to see play out on the small screen in live-action has come to fruition. In an episode full of dramatic tension, it spectacularly ends with revealing the famed ring worlds of the Forerunners and sets up what hopes to be an exciting final three episodes of the first season.
If you were to choose a word to describe this episode, “answers” would be a good one to go with. It starts with some of the rawest human emotions Master Chief displays yet as he locks Halsey in a radioactive chamber, threatening to inundate her with massive amounts of radiation. It’s a test, not for Halsey, but for Cortana. Chief has essentially written off Halsey. The years of lies and the revelation about his abduction from his childhood home sealed the deal. With Cortana, he wants to see whether she’s working for Halsey or John and how much control she has over him. At the last second, Chief pulls Halsey out, confirming his suspicions. Later he confronts her again in an interrogation, one that is supervised clandestinely by Admiral Parangosky and Captain Keyes, where, in keeping with the theme, they start sweating that Halsey is going to implicate their involvement in the whole Spartan abduction conspiracy as well. She doesn’t, but the risk of discovery got too close for comfort, so they had Halsey placed under house arrest and Miranda in charge of the program under the guise of the Spartans failing to be as obedient as designed.
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Chief and Makee meet for the first time, and the secrets hinted at in his visit to the Rubble start to reveal themselves. Something in Chief and Makee’s DNA sets them apart from the rest, something that lets them activate the Artifacts. While they haven’t come out and said it, and it’ll likely be explored later or in the second season, but it must be something like Forerunner DNA. Her arrival and discussions with Chief prove to be the tipping point for him, pushing him to interact with the Artifact until it nearly kills him and then transports his consciousness somewhere else. Chief finds himself on a ringworld in a dramatic reveal with the classic video game overture. The ending with Cortana asking him where he went was a solid ending to the episode, having given just enough to satisfy the curiosity of when we’d get to the Halo installations but also leaving more to be discovered.
However, it suffers from some of the plot hole issues that have plagued the series from the beginning. Take the fear of Parangosky and Captain Keyes. They really sell that the abduction of the children for the Spartan program was illegal, but I found myself shrugging and not really feeling the panic they did. For a program as widely known and feared as the Spartans, it’s pretty unbelievable that a government demanding control like the UNSC would be oblivious to how these soldiers ended up in their ranks and the human cost of it all. It, unfortunately, undermines the political tension the show is going for with the machination of Parangosky, Halsey, and Keyes intertwining.
Image Source: IMDb
Then, of course, there is Kwan Ha. For the first time, there’s no hint of her in the episode, and I thought there would finally be an episode without the odd side story, and that’s how it generally went. Except for a small flashback on one of the ships where Chief checks his vitals, he sees her asking if he will be alright. It was so quick, and given how irrelevant she’s been to his story over the last five episodes, it felt pointless. It felt like the writers were trying to keep the two of them connected but realized more than halfway through the season that they hadn’t.
Character development was strong here and well done. We get this hint that Halsey’s schemes — which she claims them to be in the interest of advancing humanity’s evolution to survive — are coming home to roost, and she turns on the waterworks and tears up as her daughter takes over her work. When Miranda leaves, Halsey wipes the tears and removes the ocular device that belied the real reason she wanted to see her daughter. Natascha McElhone delivers it perfectly, playing into Halsey’s genius and ever-calculating mind being one step ahead of everyone else. There’s still this sense that Halsey can smell them getting closer to stopping her, and her escape routes are diminishing.
With three episodes left to the finale, this episode’s dramatic events and set-ups positioned them well for a strong finish. Hopefully, there aren’t any derailments that disrupt the potential for this first season to end on a high note.
Halo is available to stream on Paramount+.
Rating: 8/10
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Source(s): Paramount+
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