Back when Halo’s second season was about to begin, the people involved took get pains to announce that the show was going to undergo something of a tonal reboot, jettisoning some of the dead weight of the previous plot in order to finally get some forward momentum. Thus certain plot threads, such as Master Chief’s relationship with human turncoat Makee, the machiavellian plans of Catherine Halsey, all that stuff involving the Keystones and anything concerning Soren and Kwan Ha were noticably put on the backburner in order to make things feel much more Halo-ish.
However, as we get to the sixth episode of season two, I can’t help but notice that a lot of those threads have sneakily crept back into the show with all the stealth of a cloaked Jackal. However, now that Halo has gotten a narrative boost thanks to the fall of Reach, will these past storylines find that they have a renewed sense of purpose?
While everyone else suffered and died on Reach, Kai was conspicuous by her absence as she left the doomed colony with the scheming Ackerson before the Covenant plasma fell. We rejoin her as she trains new Spartan recruits on Onyx, the location of the ONI secret headquarters and as she puts her pupils through frenetic simulations, she finds that one of her recruits, the vengeful Perez, is railing against her superior.
While Kai eventually starts questioning Ackerson’s training methods, the mismatched group who survived the attack on Reach arrive on Onyx with revenge on their mind. Soren and his wife, Laera, have come to find their son who has been abducted to serve in a new generation of Spartans while Halsey and Kwan Ha enter the bace via secret passages in order to infiltrate the inner echelons. Master Chief, ever the forthright one, decides to take a more straight forward approach which results in him allowing himself to be captured in order to get closer to Kai, Ackerson and the equally guilty Parangosky and demand to know why the fall of Reach had to happen.
However, Master Chief isn’t the only one who is taking the fight to their superiors as the power couple of Makee and the Arbiter have decided to go directly against the ruling body of the Covenant and make a play for locating the Halo once and for all. The problem is that Makee has lost her ability to use the Keystone to find it and so the captive AI known as Cortana ends up offering a helping hand. But unbeknownst to Makee and the Arbiter, Cortana isn’t quite the hostage they once thought, as she’s been in contact with ONI the entire time and has been using them to triangulate the position of the Halo all along. All they need now is Master Chief to touch the Keystone they have and the location of the universe’s most devastating weapon will be assured.
If I’m being honest, if Halo had decided to jettison all of its unnecessary, dangling threads, I for one would have been quite happy as I’ve been complaining about the show’s misplaced focus since day one. However, I have to give the showrunners credit for using the fall of Reach to light a fire under the butt of this rambling space opera. While the various stories that stubbonly have nothing to do with the actual location of the Halo once causes me to openly curse at the screen the second the show once again took its eye off the ball, now they have renewed life thanks to the fact that they now all seem to be moving toward a common goal.
With literally every plot line seemingly meeting on the planet Onyx, a quick shift in focus to whatever Kwan Ha is getting up to no longer slows the story down to a crawl as she’s currently on the same planet as everybody else.
Of course, some plots are still noticably more gripping than others and in this respect, the episode’s MVP proves to be Kai, who has taken the last few episodes off. While her allegiance to Master Chief has been steadily wobbling since the beginning of the season, it’s still quite shocking seeing her now techincally the only Spartan left on the block since she still believes Ackerson’s plethora of lies and half troops. However, seeing her take up the mantle and ruthlessly train a new generation of Spartans is quite a good look for her, despite essentially being a clueless puppet, but we still get some cool action beats as they run VR simulations as they jet through space in order to overthrow a Covenant starship. However, it seems that Kai’s ambitions haven’t blended her completely to ONI’s bullshit and her reunion with Master Chief proves to be somewhat timely.
However, while Onyx still manages to continue the momentum that was created by the episode, Reach, you can’t help but feel that the episode is travelling over already trodden ground. For example, all that old stuff from season one that concerns Master Chief, Makee and the Keystones is literally brought back up as if we hadn’t put all of it behind us an entire season ago and the climax of the episode is virtually a rerun of a previous episode where Master Chief has the living shit kicked out of him by a fellow Spartan who is unaware that they’re being manipulated. However, instead of Vanak and Riz delivering the beating, it’s now the former voice of reason, Kai – but even though the show is seemingly recycling old scenes, it still manages to carry through as the discovery of the Halo now seems imminent.
Also suddenly lurching into life is the story line that sees Makee and the Arbiter cut loose from the Covenant and go out on their own. Scenes directly involving the villainous alien fanatics seem to be rare, so to get one that actively moves the story forward is hugely appreciated, especially as Soren, Kwan Ha and Halsey have precious little to do while Master Chief is kicking ass.
Probably the most obvious proof that Halo is returning to its older sensibilities is that we finally see a return of Halsey’s daughter, Miranda Keyes who has been noticably AWOL since the season begain.
While the return of Halo’s less beloved attributes may seem like the show is in danger of relapsing back into mediocrity, there’s probably enough goodwill and action to carry us to the end of the season.
But if the Halo isn’t waiting for us at the end of this season, the people in charge need to be blasted out of the nearest airlock – post haste.
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