They’re working on it. (Spoilers)

Hard to believe it’s been two years since Halo Season 1 released. I actually had to watch a couple recap videos on season 1 because outside of seeing Master Chief’s master cheeks and Charlie Murphy’s butt cheeks and Kate Kennedy’s butt cheeks I don’t really remember much about the show. I never forget a pair of cheeks though. If you recall from the first season, showrunner Steven Kane spent much of his time screwing up the show and pissing off the fans and generally making stupid garbage. But they booted his ass to the curb, and now it’s been taken over by David Wiener.

The results are immediately noticeable, as Halo Season 2 is shaping up to be not just better than Season 1, but a damn good show if the first two episodes are anything to go by. Let’s talk more about it.

Okay I guess I was wrong. I assumed at the end of Season 1 that they had killed John Chief and that there’d be some weird thing in Season 2 about Chief being controlled by Cortana and being a meat puppet and having a Search For Spock kind of revival. Turns out John was just fine, and after some surgery the team decided to remove Cortana from his brain and discontinue her program altogether. The big question in Season 2 however is whether or not lasting damage from Cortana’s presence in Chief’s head as well as all the things that happened over the season have turned him into an unreliable soldier.

We kick off at Sanctuary where the UNSC is still flabbergasted at how their policy of “let’s kick the shit out of civilians until they accept that we have their best interests at heart” still isn’t being taken well by human colonists. Incidentally the UNSC isn’t wrong, but it doesn’t stop the locals from refusing to be rescued from the planet until after the Covenant starts glassing it. I understand the logic, given the entire universe in Halo seems to be a completely miserable shit hole. I imagine the suicide rate is massive.

We’re dealing with a world where aliens have technology to destroy entire planets from space in a brutal fashion. If you were forced off your beautiful planet by a brutal military dictatorship only to be relocated onto a garbage heap planet, and then be told that one is also being glassed and you need to move again, maybe you’d prefer to die. What’s the alternative? Go to a shittier planet? One that the impotent and very obviously corrupt military force likely isn’t going to be able to protect either? End up being sold into slavery? They’re certainly not going to let you go to the good planets.

Episode 1 has a great fight scene between Master Chief and a bunch of covenant elites all wielding swords and using their cloaking tech. We meet a new character of the show, that being Corporal Talia Perez (Cristina Rodlo) who will no doubt be a big player in the coming season. Perez is messed up in the head, given her survivor guilt and the fact that the UNSC championed her as a hero despite the fact that all she did was survive. She’s the new forefront of the UNSC brutally bullshitting its people by making it look like the humans are winning the war when they are losing and have no idea why.

But things are different now, and I’m not just referring to how Cortana is being physically portrayed in Season 2 by Christina Bennington. The fact that Halsey is not only alive (not a surprise) but is being held by UNSC this whole time was the big shock. It got me interested. How high up are they aware of Halsey’s presence? Is it only Colonel Ackerson (Joseph Morgan) who has replaced her? Or does the higher echelon know? Damnit Halo, you’re making me interested in things!

Makee is of course alive, because we need at least one more glimpse at Charlie Murphy’s cheeks before the show closes out her plot. I actually kinda liked how Makee’s presence in episode 1 was to screw with the audience, until the show’s like “actually nah that wasn’t a vision from Chief. Or maybe it was. Either way she’s still alive.” Her return in Season 2 feels like a nod to the fans who were annoyed that Makee filled a role similar to the Arbiter from Halo 2, only for her to show up and hand-deliver the Arbiter in canon to the audience. All it’s missing is Murphy staring at the camera and saying “happy now, assholes?”

Is that the Arbiter? I know he’s in Season 2 at some point.

We know that season 2 is gearing up for the fall of Reach, which is the precursor to the actual game series. It’s nice seeing more of the supporting characters, as Riz deals with the fact that while she is a super-soldier, she is still human and needs to take care of those injuries. I hope Kai gets more time than she did in the first two episodes. There’s no way Soren doesn’t remain a big player in Season 2, I don’t think they’d just arrest him and throw him in the brig for the rest of time. I’m guessing Ackerson is going to make him an offer he can’t refuse.

Oh and Kwan is back. Hi Kwan. I have no idea when Kwan became an indentured servant on The Rubble, and I’m guessing it’s because they didn’t show it on screen in Season 1 since none of the comments I’ve seen remember that happening either. Oh well. We do get a few good scenes of Kwan kicking the shit out of slavers before going back to spook Soren’s kid.

We already know Reach is going to be destroyed, and as usual the second episode ends with Chief going AWOL. I’m guessing Ackerson is going to put Soren in charge of a team sent to bring in Chief and his crew, ala Halo 5. The big question however is why is Ackerson being so secretive about Cobalt Team and all the other crap going on? Is it because he doesn’t trust John? Is he secretly a traitor? Does he know that John Chief played hide the salami with Charlie Murphy and he’s jealous?

Let’s find out together shall we? All I know is this opening put me in a lot better mood than the first season did. I predict Kai is going to have sex with that blind ex-Spartan and Riz will have sex with Kai but it will turn out to be a dream sequence. Oh and Chief will bang Makee again. Because there’s not going to be 0 sex scenes this season.

Rating So Far: B+