Episode 5 (Fan Creations)

by Cody Miller , Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Thursday, April 21, 2022, 16:04 (946 days ago) @ Cody Miller

I hope this one shuts up the people who thought the show was boring.

Now, I can kind of see what they were going for in Episode 1 with the notion of the children being kidnapped. But I still stand behind my initial feeling that it was not handled properly… The way all the characters reacted was too incongruous with what the audience should know. If anything, we should have seen Halsey internally nervous but trying to maintain a composure, perhaps using a bit of subterfuge to convince the UNSC to bring the Chief back (ordering him to kill Kwan still doesn't make too much sense). Instead, both Halsey and everyone else were pretty much at Defcon 1. That doesn't really jive with this episode, where Halsey is calculating trying to hide the risk from Parangosky. And it definitely doesn't jive with the idea of this being a reveal… their response in Episode 1 left no room for doubt to the audience that things were amiss.

Anyway, see how things really get cooking when we have a bunch of characters, we know what each of them wants, and those wants are all at odds? Yeah. Every scene was full of conflict and great. The episode was over before I even knew it. Totally engrossed. And we are loaded up with dramatic irony regarding Jacob Keyes.

It's great that the big battle was good narratively, but some of it felt a bit to video gamey to me. Especially the way the covenant look and move. The CG is kind of consistently weak here, and even the covenant ships don't look great, and we've been able to make inanimate CG objects look great for years now. But, I get the reality of time and budgets. The bottom line, is that unlike the action in episode 1, this one had tension, stakes, and meaningful choices. So it did what it needed to from a narrative perspective.

Cool shit.