Halo season 2’s opening minutes are the best the show has ever been

polygon.com:

Halo’s first season felt like an old-school video game adaptation: desperate to be taken seriously and terrified of all of the specific oddities about its source material that people actually love. Sure, there were firefights, Spartans, Cortana, and Master Chief, but there was also a shoehorned romance plotline, a forced theme of trauma, and not nearly as many aliens as you’d hope. The good news is the first few minutes of season 2, which premieres on Feb. 8, are a perfect encapsulation of everything the Halo series could be, and light years better than anything from season 1.

Season 2 starts with Master Chief and his team of Spartans trying to save a village of humans on a planet called Sanctuary. The Covenant are closing in on the planet and on the verge of glassing it, but that won’t stop the Spartans from trying to rescue anyone they can. There’s a scene of Master Chief charging headlong into unknown odds, and eventually taking on dozens of Sangheili. Despite the occasionally iffy CGI, the fight is exciting, intense, and a great showcase for what makes Master Chief and his fellow Spartans special — plus, there’s even a brief Arbiter tease thrown in for good measure. It’s the kind of fighting you can imagine him doing in the games, if they weren’t first-person shooters that kept you glued to the stock of a rifle the whole time.

But the quiet that follows Chief’s harrowing encounter with the Covenant is even more interesting. As the alien spaceships rain fire down from the sky in preparation for destroying the planet, Chief has a conversation with a woman from the village who opts to stay and die on her home world rather than run. She explains her reasoning calmly, looking directly into Master Chief’s amber visor with only her reflection looking back at her. She questions Chief’s own relationship with death and sacrifice, then she walks into the fire, accepting her death.

Despite the fact that all of this happens with Chief’s helmet on, exactly like it would in