Halo is over, and it never gave a shit about aliens

polygon.com:

[Ed. note: This post contains spoilers for the final episode of Halo season 1.]

“We lose the artifact, we lose the war,” a bloodied John, neé Master Chief, tells his comrades. “No matter what [the UNSC] has done to us, we’re all we have now.” This is supposed to be a big moment for him — not a “just had sex” kind of big moment, but rather rallying his fellow surviving kidnapped-children-turned-supersoldiers to fight their true enemy.

But after nine frustratingly bad episodes, we understand so little about the Covenant that there’s not a lot left to hope for in this Paramount Plus show. In its season finale, Halo endeavored to explore the repercussions of John finally attempting to be human. But what they should’ve done by now is show us the depth of being an alien.

There’s the obvious reasons: Aliens are, famously, sick as hell. A collective like the Covenant, the straightforward, hyper-religious adversaries from the Halo games, held promise even in a show as bewildering as Halo was in its the early episodes. With Halo restructuring of the lore of the game, the opportunity seemed ripe to reevaluate the antagonist and play around with every aspect of their alienness.

But no! The show opted instead to (mostly) focus on Master Chief’s trauma. But since everyone who propped up the corrupted UNSC regime that made his life depressingly possible justified their actions by pointing to the Covenant threat, the show repeatedly fell into the vacuum of its own creation.

Perhaps no one embodies this better than Makee (Charlie Murphy), the woman raised by Covenant aliens who saw her potential as a “Blessed One” in their doctrine. Her arc had the promise to be deeply, truly bold: A human raised by aliens to hate humans could