The Halo TV series unceremoniously killed one of the games’ best characters

polygon.com:

The Halo TV show has always held the video game series’ lore at arm’s length. From its early announcement of the “Silver Timeline” (an entirely separate but loosely similar canon that the TV show would be sticking to) to the first season, which gives Master Chief a slightly different origin story, the Paramount Plus series has never been concerned with the things longtime Halo fans hold near and dear. But as the show’s second season gets into more recognizable territory, like the Fall of Reach, it’s still surprising to see how wildly it diverged from the game’s in its fourth episode.

[Ed. note: This story contains spoilers for the first four episodes of Halo season 2, as well as the entire Halo video game series.]

The Fall of Reach is one of the most important events in Halo’s video game canon. A war-defining victory for the Covenant, Reach’s destruction is also the catalyst for sending Master Chief on the Pillar of Autumn, the UNSC ship that would eventually crash-land on the very first Halo ring that humanity would discover. It’s also the basis for the game Halo: Reach, a particular fan favorite.

The Halo TV show’s version of the Covenant’s attack on Reach happens — almost entirely out of nowhere — in the second season’s fourth episode. The UNSC (who seem to be more the show’s villains than the actual Covenant) had seemingly known that an attack was possible for weeks, but did nothing about it. This leaves Master Chief and his fellow Marines and Spartans completely blindsided, fighting through the streets without their armor. In all, it’s a deeply silly setup for a better-than-average episode of Halo — in fact, maybe the most fun episode the series has had so far.

But after all the dust settles and the battle for Reach is clearly doomed, the strangest part of the episode remains how it handles Captain Jacob Keyes: by killing him off in a fairly silly “forgot to unplug the ship” incident.

If you’re a longtime fan of the Halo games, there’s a good chance you