It wasn’t terrible, but it could have been so much better. (Fan Creations)

by Coaxkez, Sunday, May 22, 2022, 20:25 (915 days ago) @ Cody Miller
edited by Coaxkez, Sunday, May 22, 2022, 20:30

I’m not as down on the series as many of you appear to be, but I think it’s fair to say that this first season was a bit of a mess. It felt like there were several competing ideas of what the showrunners wanted to do with it and none of them were given the proper level of attention or development on-screen. I’m actually 100% fine with the many changes to canon as long as they make sense for the story the showrunners want to tell, but in a few cases it seemed like those changes were made for completely arbitrary reasons. More egregiously, characters sometimes made huge decisions for completely arbitrary (or just plain stupid) reasons, most prominently when Chief trusted a UNSC prisoner so implicitly that he slept with her inside of a monitored holding cell and then stayed the night for good measure.

I’m not really sure where this show wants to go in Season 2. I think there are some things we can deduce about the plot, but character-wise, I don’t know where any of this is leading. It doesn’t seem like they’re trying to “match up” to any established major events in existing canon, so I think this is going to go in its own direction, but what that means is a total mystery at the moment. Again, I’m fine with that, but it needs to be a direction that makes sense and exists in service of the story they are trying to tell. The trouble is that I’m not certain they know exactly what that story is in the first place.

Makee’s death seemed very premature and I’m sad that she will not return for Season 2 because it did not feel like we got to know her very well at all. Similarly, Kwan’s story didn’t resolve so much as reach a pre-defined end point without any apparent relevance to the greater plot of the season or the show overall. It feels like they don’t really have a plan for any of these characters, and that’s not a very encouraging realization.

However, the show continues to excel in its action scenes (when it bothers to stage them) as well as its overall pacing and, while I find myself in the minority regarding this next point (at least over on Reddit), I’m mostly very pleased with the way the show has chosen to depict the Master Chief and his fellow Spartans. Other characters like Halsey and Miranda show a lot of promise, but I’m going to be looking for tighter and more introspective writing in Season 2 to develop that promise into something substantial. The jury is still out, but if Season 2 fails to build upon the foundation that this first season established, then I will likely stop watching upon its conclusion.

Overall, it was a decent finale that ended very abruptly and left a lot of plot and character threads unresolved. I’ll be back for more when the show resumes.