'Halo' Season 2 Episode 4 Review

TV & Film

Feb 23

Welcome to the Fall of Reach.

The moment this season has been building toward has finally arrived: the Covenant are on Reach. The moment that started the Halo video game franchise, was depicted in a book, and was one of the best single-player campaigns in the video game franchise has come to the show, and the question on everyone’s mind is: did it deliver?

The answer is more or less yes.

Silver Team finds itself, at least three of them, on leave when the attack begins. Chief and Corporal Perez race to get back to Fleet Command, meeting up with Riz along the way, and Vannak’s visit to some pigeon friends of his on a tower is cut short by the attack. Soren and Halsey escape their simulated captivity, running into Makee and her Elite guard as they steal Cortana. What follows is an action heavy episode pockmarked with moments of grief as the Covenant begin the destruction of Humanity’s foothold out in the galaxy.

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Farewell to Admiral Keyes
Image Source: Screen Rant

The action in this episode is among the best the show has put out, and all with the Spartans lacking their valuable armor. Chief takes on elites in hand-to-hand combat and then later with one of their own energy swords. Riz joins him, barking orders and dropping grenades. Doing what Spartans do, and all without their armor. It’s a clear nod to the show’s exploration of the Spartans’ humanity. They’re just as vulnerable to harm as their marine compatriots. It also hints at a motivation for Ackerson that I’ve struggled to identify until potentially now.

Ackerson’s cowardice now comes across as either spite or treason, and his arc highlights one of the problems of this show. The stories outside of the Spartans struggle to find their place in a show that focuses on Chief and the Spartans, or at least what people watch it for. Ackerson is a one dimensional asshole but they try to make him more complex with these short puff pieces like his dad or the sister that was a Spartan that didn’t make it. We learn in this episode that in his cowardly flight from Reach as the Covenant arrive, he also took the Spartans’ armor. Why? It should be clear now what his motivation is, but it’s not. Does he hate Halsey for making Spartans? Why is he punishing Chief, then, by making him look crazy and leaving them without their armor? Is he like Makee and just wants to burn it all down? Where is this going? We should be at least sensing an answer now, but I can’t sniff it out.

This episode really focuses on loss. Corporal Perez loses her family as she and Chief make their way to Fleet Command, and every time they get a chance to stop, she breaks down or lashes out at him for his lack of compassion. It’s a little jarring, given the whole scope of Chief’s journey over these two seasons to have him suddenly unflinching in the face of such emotional trauma. Instead, we see that in Riz. Riz’s new friends Louis, the Spartan with blindness, and his husband, Danilo, accompany them on the way to Fleet Command, but they die along the way. Riz struggles to do what her Spartan training has prepared her for and the carnage around her and losing her new friends. Vannak’s death at the end, staring out a hole in the roof at a pigeon flying around, seems to be what breaks Chief, after he sees that Makee is in fact alive.

In a similar fashion to Ackerson’s father’s death, they’re sad, but they aren’t as heart wrenching as the show tries to portray. Either we’ve just met these people and, like Ackerson’s dad, they’ve come in and out of our lives within the scope of an episode, or the foundational drive and motivation behind the character isn’t well enough established to really sell the character’s reaction. Halsey finally shows some humanity when Keyes dies, crying as she looks out over the growing destruction of the city, but why should we believe her? She faked that sentimentality last season with her daughter, who’s been surprisingly absent this season for no stated reason. With the knowledge of the games and lore behind me, I can surmise why, but would a casual watcher know that she has dedicated her life to the survival of the human race? Season one portrays her as this mad scientist out to usher humanity’s evolution forward, no matter the cost. The Halsey from the books and games seems to be coming out through the Halsey in the show, in this scene, but with what’s been established in the show, it just don’t make sense.

One of the more promising stories of the season, cut short by damn needle
Image Source: Comicbook

Vannak’s death is probably the most impactful, because of all of Silver Team, he was the one who seemed the most reluctant to remove his pellet and try out his renewed humanity. The little bits of lines from episode one, about nature documentaries, to the short but silly scene of him climbing a tower to visit some pigeons he’d named, made me more invested in his growth (alongside Riz). To see that cut short was the most striking of the losses in the episode.

Ultimately, what isn’t working for the show is getting in the way of what is, and it suffers as a result and diminishes what could be a stellar adaptation of a beloved franchise. Episode four mostly delivers on the culmination of a tense first half of the season in the beginning of the destruction of Reach with tight action sequences, but falls short on it’s delivery of emotional and character centered moments.

Rating: 7/10

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