Halo Review: Contact (Season 1 Episode 1)
Halo Season 1 Episode 1, “Contact,” is a confounding opener, even for someone who is rather steeped in this lore and world.
The biggest thing out of the gate about this series is that it’s not readily clear what the priority of this is. There are elements here that are easily recognizable as Halo, just before the events of the first game.
The UNSC, Earth’s military, is embroiled in a years-long war with the Covenant, a theocratic alien race that has been attacking their colonies. The key to this war are a group of super soldiers called Spartans, lead by Master Chief (played by Pablo Schreiber).
That’s the barebones element of Halo and the problem is that the show can’t decide what more it needs than that. It’s attempting to play to two different masters: the uninitiated and the veteran.
It wants to satisfy people totally unfamiliar to Halo and also the ones that have played every game. It’s not not terribly successful in either regard.
This leaves Halo with a bit of an identity crisis because it doesn’t know what kind of audience it’s appealing to. On the one hand, it’s hard to imagine what people new to the franchise might get out of this.
“Contact” treats the war with the Covenant like an established fact and not something that the show might have to explain and contextualize to its viewers.
It immediately drops the characters into an exceptionally bloody battle. The episode wants us to be in the colonists’ point of view but, as a result, sacrifices necessary world building.
Even when we’re on the UNSC side of the plot, nothing is drawn terribly well about what is actually happening. It’s all pretty overwhelming and confounding.
The other part of this is a big reason why Halo might not work for people who are more into the lore and mythology. The show plays really fast and loose with both of those things.
Despite being fairly nihilistic and mean, the episode ends up having more in common with The Mandalorian than Combat Evolved. A lot of that has to do with how the series is trying to take Master Chief from a stoic super soldier in cool space armor to an actual character.
In the games, you were so in that first person point of view that there was a kind of universality to his character. Anyone could be Master Chief so he kind of embodied that.
Now, the series has the unenviable task of characterizing him, something that some of the later games have attempted as well.
It is largely accomplished here by both putting him at odds with the UNSC and by removing his helmet, something that’s never been done before within the franchise.
While the show is very similar to The Mandalorian in many other respects, like going a guy in armor going on an adventure with a younger person, this is the way that it is the antithesis to that other series.
The Mandalorian operated under the belief that Mando could never remove his helmet, which was the subject of a lot of criticism, and Halo seems to understand that, though risky, that it is an inevitability.
It’s a bold move in an episode full of bold moves. To its credit, Halo isn’t making easy or safe choices. Even something as simple as the episode punctuating Halsey being Miranda’s mother, which is a deep cut that some longtime fans aren’t even aware of.
They are big swings and we can only hope that it works out.
What did you think of this episode of Halo? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
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Halo airs Thursdays on Paramount+.
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Drew Koenig
Drew has an ongoing, borderline unhealthy obsession with pop culture, but with television in particular. When he's not aggressively trying to get out of a perpetual state of catching up, he can be found passionately defending the ending of Lost. More of his online work can be found at The Lost Cause and he also co-hosts The Lost Cause Pod.