Regret is not just the name of a Prophet

Why do you always have to jump?

Final Episode. Here we go.

You know, taken as a stand-alone episode absent of any of the baggage of the prior eight episodes, this episode isn’t that bad. It’s got some decent Spartan-on-Covenant action, Cortana and Kai carrying the whole damn thing on their backs, and John finally acts like the Master Chief… in a way.

We get a pretty decent battle on a planet clearly designed to look like Halo 3’s desert levels on the Ark, and there’s also a pretty good 4-Spartan firefight battle with a somewhat shakily CG’d action sequence that’s still mostly entertaining. And then we get Cortana Chief… Master Cortana? Johntana? Corn? Anyway, Cortana takes over Master Chief’s body like Halsey always intended, and she’s a force to be reckoned with. Neat, if somewhat canon-abusing.

It’s a weird stopping point, too - the whole B plot with Kwan and Soren basically completely ignored at this point (and you can leave it there too, IMO) - we don’t find Halo, and Makee is… ‘dead’ (yeah no, she’s 100% uploaded to the Domain, the Forerunner’s galactic network). Halsey’s in hiding after escaping the consequences of her attempted coup, using a clone of herself to fake the UNSC out and then just walking around somewhere where there’s totally security cameras? As in the last episode, the UNSC’s security makes no sense - they’re supposed to be everywhere, watching everything and yet they miss stuff on cameras all the time. Has there ever been the real Halsey on the show? Was it the flash clone the entire time? Was her going rogue just the clone breaking down? Who knows?

Much like the whole thing with them searching the star system for the Covenant planet; “oh yeah we know that this solar system we can’t see in due to lensing artefacts from gravitational fields” and yet “yep we’ve searched it and found nothing”. Which one is it? Can you not see into the area, or have you searched it?

Sigh.

I can’t ignore the trainwreck that was this series as a whole, and I can’t strictly recommend anyone watch it. If I were to give any advice to Season 2’s scriptwriters, more of this episode please, and less of the rest. Heck, retcon a bunch of stuff, I don’t care - I can pretend that Halo Season 1 didn’t happen; I already pretend that Halo 5 doesn’t exist.