Do you like the Halo TV Show?
The early episodes were a little too: 'mind numbingly dull and gut-wrenchingly off-the-mark' for my tastes. But then episode 8 came out for the penultimate episode in season one since their original tenth episode was delayed into season 2, and I think the show really came into it's own, both creatively and artistically. The whole show has this stink of cheap corner cutting with crappy low-effort scripts that demand the least amount of CGI and set dressing possible despite this show apparently being a Sci-fi, awful insert characters that contribute nothing to the overall richness of the world or narrative and exist purely to annoy the viewer, and an apparent allergy to showing off Master Chief donning his iconic armour and helmet for more than sixty consecutive seconds an episode! The show's been compared to the sensation of downing a tincture of Fluoroantimonic acid and waiting as it burns the very hydrogen out of your organs and rips apart your stomach lining like a sheet of A4 paper in a rainstorm; But I think the Halo TV Show has a much more caustic and destructive effect on the human body when consumed!
Hey, why are you giving us such a hard time for not following the story of the games despite the fact we've insisted that this is a separate silver canon totally distinct from those games? What are you, some sort of Halo fanboy?
No Paramount.
Wait- what's that you've got in your hands. Is that 'Halo: The Master Chief Collection'?
Yes it is! I think the show's magnum opus has to be the stomach churning, vomit-inducing, 'romantic' sex scene between Master Chi- I mean John, and 'covenant spy woman' Makee; a scene so abrupt and outside the the scope of what a Halo show should be, that most people didn't even bother to pay attention to specifics of what that scene represents. But they should. Because it's not just a transparent attempt to throw in an ill-fitting love scene in order to justify the copious errant shots of various character's colons throughout this brain-rotting series; it's also a perfect demonstration of how intellectually bankrupt these writers are, to have to sink to the lowest common denominator in order to push the plot forward!
Hey Paramount?
WHY DIDN'T YOU PLAY THE GAMES YOU LAZY, IGNORANT, HACKS?
Ahem. So maybe that little performance play there will tell you exactly how the Halo show is shaping up in it's current form, with one season down and another inevitable follow-up already green-lit and on the way. And it brings me absolutely no pleasure to tell you that for some incomprehensible reason there are, presumably real, people out there in the world today who like this show. Or at least people who say things like; "I think the character interactions are good." As though they've literally never seen a scripted show before in their lives. They'll happily accept mediocre on their plates and call themselves lucky for being fed, totally ignoring the wealth of gourmet show-content available at everyone's fingertips twenty four-seven. If you like character interaction, go watch The Wire. Halo shouldn't be a show where the only thing worth a damn is that when two characters sit and down and talk to each other it doesn't always descend into a messy free-for-all of verbal projectile diarrhoea. Stick that quote on the accolades trailer!
I just keep coming back to how obvious this disaster was before the show even launched and keep wondering why no one reached out to stop them. Should I have stopped them? How? Maybe I should have conspired to acquire the position of the Head of Streaming Content' at Paramount in the month before the show aired so I had to the chance to pull it and save the gaming community. (Darn, I really missed the boat on that one. Actually, looking at their management board I can see that I clearly wasn't white and generic enough to be a division head there anyway, some disasters can't be stopped.) There should have been an alarm bell ringing across everyone's head the second the team revealed- no, they didn't just 'reveal', they lauded the fact that they didn't play the games and represented it as some sort of inspired creative decision on the part of the 'visionaries' writing the show. Apparently, they needed to be totally free-range to pen their pure magic. Well I've seen the product of their free-range rearing; and it's just bare basic farm-variety manure. Brown and clumpy.
What comes back around to whack me in the head time and time again is just the gall of it all, wrapped on the backhand of their greeting palm. This whole play that "We're really inspired by the love and passion that the Halo franchise has evoked and we just want to capture that for the TV" which clashes neatly with this prevailing miasma of "Well these games are puerile kids stuff obviously, and by chucking out the bits we don't understand we're just making the show more mature and thus better for more evolved TV audiences." They really do think we're scum, make no mistake. Why else would they not only claim ownership of Master Chief's face from the fanbase, but go our of their way to strip our icon of the armour that defines him as much as humanely possible, to punish us for flocking to these symbols by tearing them down on a multibillion dollar budget?
But the catch is; they end up missing the point of Halo altogether. This series has focused on the most ancillary of the ancillary lore under the vain belief that they're breathing life fluid into a tragically underdeveloped part of the Halo world, the human rebellions; not realising the morbid jokey intention of those snippets of the lore being a footnote. The rebellions occurred before the events of any Halo media and act as the impetus for the secret creation of the Spartans in the first place. Tools of a fascistic ruling body that were bred to crush human dissent, it was pure cosmic coincidence that humanity would stumble upon the Covenant during this time and become the targets of a holy war. The Spartan program that was designed to be weapons for oppression suddenly became symbols of defiance against an otherworldly threat and the dark origins are just swept under the rug. That is the dark joke of this corner of the law, these noble Spartan super soldiers were meant to be a sledge-hammer to a teacup and ended up becoming humanity's last hope. That's not even something you have to play the games to pick up on, making it seem that these creatives didn't really look too much at the ancillary source materials like they claimed; you know, given how the Covenant are total footnotes and that fascism is the real threat in this series.
What playing the games would have conferred onto these ignoramuses, however, is the quiet sanctity of the Master Chief character. Drunk on the hubris of imagination-devoid show runners, the Paramount executive decreed that Master Chief would take off his mask and leave it off for 80% of the runtime, mope about his tortured past which he can't really remember and fall in love with another victim of a brainwashing program that intends to use them as a weapon. I'm not a bore, I can see the obvious strings of their basic plot; it's just not anywhere near as clever as they think it is. Whatsmore, it ignores the huge potential for actually atypical storytelling which would have been available if they'd stuck more to the model of the games. In the games Master Chief is stoic, but not because he's a no-personality avatar for the player and not because he has a emotion dampening chip shoved up his rectum. He is stoic because he was fashioned to be a symbol of hope that others first rely on and later draw influence from. He carries the weight of hope, and hope doesn't need a face. As the games went on Master Chief even learned to love, in a way, his stowaway AI who also knew how it felt to carry the responsibilities of an entire species on her back and the underplayed mutuality of their relationship is exemplified in the way that the human looks and acts robotic whilst the AI mimics a lively personality together reaching deeper interpersonal insight than a traditional couple could and thus achieving a higher synthesis. (My god I'm seeing the strings of rudimentary probably totally misassigned Hegelian Dialectics again! I knew I shouldn't have tried to crash-course myself on a topic hardly anyone actually understands; I've ruined me!) In a post Mandalorian world, you'd have thought executives would have learnt the promising value of a faceless protagonist and the range of emotion which can be conveyed by the right actor in the right suit, but I guess a crappy video game adaptation project wasn't worth that small modicum of actual effort, huh.
It is astounding that Paramount thought their embarrassingly generic 'tough military amnesiac tries to uncover memory' core plot was going to be more compelling. And even more gobsmacking that the whole fascist military overarching plot is taking precedent over the namesake of the entire series! There wasn't a single Halo ring shown off in the first eight episodes; and whatsomore, in the vague exploration of the Halo rings, the writers inexplicably ruined the twist of the rings by outright telling the audience that they are weapons. Why? The mystery of the Rings is an ideal hook to draw in new comers to the franchise! It's like this show is being cobbled together by the efforts of a room of monkeys with typewriters, but even then they'd have to be on a particularly bad streak to make this many consistent dumb decisions. (Maybe they're lobotomised monkeys...) So all-in-all the show's going great, can't wait for Season 2.
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