Halo Review: Unbound (Season 1 Episode 2)
Halo Season 1 Episode 2, “Unbound,” despite its faults, is a step in the right direction.
A big criticism that has been levied against the series by the fans — for justifiable reasons — is that the writers only seem to have a passing familiarity with the property and as a result have created a series that only feels tangentially like Halo. That is something that the team behind the series has admitted; they’ve avoided any of the games or books.
What “Unbound” does, for the most part, is have an episode that alleviates some of those fears. For some fans, it’s never going to be Halo enough, no matter what you do as a writer. There will always be people when something has been adapted that claim that it is not recognizable of the thing they love to a level that they’re happy with.
Those are complaints that are rampant within the Star Trek and Star Wars fandoms and those are not people you can please. With that being said, this does feel more like Halo than the previous episode. The thing that a lot of people are struggling with right now is the trajectory that this series is going to take.
Specifically, there’s a desire to know how this first season is going to shake out. The problem is that two of the things that are most iconic about Halo as a franchise is The Ring and Cortana. This first season is just taking a while to get to both of those things.
Both of those are being doled out slowly throughout these early episodes and while that’s frustrating, it’s also methodical. This is going to be a slow burn to get to a lot of the meat of this franchise.
“Unbound” is doing a decent enough job of letting the audience know that The Ring and Cortana are both things that it has on their minds but also patience is urged.
It’s natural to want to get to the more action-oriented parts of this and delve into galactic superweapons but Halo is doing something that is really essential here. It’s trying to set up conflict that isn’t just the Covenant or Master Chief. It wants to do more worldbuilding than that.
There are obvious pros and cons to that. It’s going to take a lot longer to get to the more recognizable parts of this franchise but it’s also getting a picture of things that are more extraneous than that. The series is getting more into the machinations of the UNSC and its more monstrous motivations methods during this war.
The rebellions are something that would be really easy to gloss over but Halo is taking time to really put a fine point on that. Frankly, there are many ways to address just how abhorrent the UNSC is. Halsey created the Spartans not to fight aliens but quell rebellions.
They aren’t a moral organization but they are working towards a greater good. There’s a lot of grey area to contend with there. The series could take that into some really compelling areas later.
How much sin do you have on your hands if you do bad things for good reasons? Does one counter-balance the other?
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.