Halo 4 (2012) represents a change in topic for the Halo series. It turns away from the war between humans and the Covenant, which had been the focus for the six games previous, and sees Master Chief encounter a new (or very old) enemy in the form of the Didact. The Didact is a Forerunner, one of a race of vanished old-timey aliens who set up a bunch of architecture around the galaxy, much like the Precursors in Jak & Daxter or the Protheans in Mass Effect. This is maybe a lot of background to take in if you’re not familiar with the Halo series, but in essence everyone’s been fighting an alien parasite called the Flood, which can infect and control just about any creature, and which left to its own devices would probably take over the galaxy, consuming or controlling every living thing. Most of the Halo story, in the big picture, is about different races trying to manage this catastrophic galaxy-ending threat. The Forerunners tried to control it by building the Halo rings, giant space installations that, if activated, kill everything within a few thousand light years – maybe not stopping the Flood, but definitely killing all their food, and sort of starving them out. By the time of the original Halo games, the Forerunners are all dead – they used the Halo rings and wiped themselves out. The Flood are also mostly gone, successfully starved, except for a few under quarantine conditions, who are then accidentally released in the original Halo, sparking the crisis for that game. In Halo 4, the player discovers the Didact, a living Forerunner who survived the ring activation by being locked up in a fancy bomb shelter. Master Chief lets him out, and he starts enacting his own personal plan for fighting the Flood. He turns people into robots. It’s another version of starving the Flood – the Flood can only control organic life, so if you turn all the organic life into robots, the Flood won’t have any food. Simple. The Didact tries forcibly to transform everyone into a robot, and Master Chief has to stop him. That’s the plot of Halo 4.

The Forerunner Saga (2011-2013) is then a trilogy of tie-in novels for Halo 4, showing how the Didact got locked up, some of the ancient arguments between the Forerunners, and the extinction of the Forerunners once the Halo rings were activated. Written by five-time Nebula Award winner Greg Bear, the series covers a whole bunch of stuff which I’m really barely going to try and explain. We learn that the Didact had a political rivalry with the Master Builder, another Forerunner, who was responsible for building the Halo rings. The Didact wanted to hold off the Flood with a series of shield worlds, which I guess are sort of Death Star space fortresses, while the Master Builder wanted to build the Halo rings and kill everything. There was a compromise for a bit, and the Forerunners pursued both options, but eventually the Master Builder won the political fight and the Didact got exiled. He was put into hibernation, and eventually found and released by a young Forerunner who was essentially just poking around. We also learn about the origin of the Flood – they are (apparently) the corrupted shapeshifting particles of the Precursors, another even older race who created the Forerunners and then died at their hands. We’re a long way off the original Halo game at this point, let alone Halo 4. So the Forerunners are fighting the Flood, who have spawned out of the bodies of their dead progenitors. The Didact and the Master Builder conflict over their different methods, the Flood kidnap and torture the Didact, and then once the Didact escapes he turns to robot transformation as the next best solution. He forcibly transforms a bunch of humans into robots, saddening his ex-wife, the Librarian, who likes humans as they are. She locks him up in prison, which is where you find him at the start of Halo 4. The Master Builder then activates the Halo rings, the Librarian hides out on one of the Didact’s shield worlds, which aren’t affected by the Halo extinction blast (don’t ask, doesn’t matter), and everything else dies. The Librarian eventually emerges from the shield world with a pack of ancient humans and starts repopulating Earth. A hundred thousand years later, we get Halo 4.

Okay. A few things at this juncture. First, you might have noticed I’ve started writing longer essays. We’ll see how that goes. You also might notice that the Covenant aren’t really important in all of this – they’re a primary enemy in the early games, but in the grander scheme they don’t really matter. They aren’t major players. They’re annoying, and they might accidentally activate the Halo rings and end all life in the galaxy, but they aren’t really movers and shakers. Really they illustrate a transition I talked about some time ago, with an essay on Halo 3 back in 2021. The Halo series over time has grown from a single video game into this sprawling multimedia mega-franchise, similar to Star Wars or Marvel. The first game is this mythical, deeply symbolic piece. It works through archetype, through the classical model of the hero’s journey. It’s about bodies and souls, about the apocalypse, about human nature. These are deep, considered themes. At the other end of the spectrum, you have – well, the lore dump we’ve just outlined above. This person meets that person, they do this, and actually she knows his uncle is a robot – it’s heavy on details, heavy on a long list of events that can be reeled off into absurdity. The entry on Halopedia for the first Greg Bear book, Halo: Cryptum, is 1600 words long, and it’s honestly mostly unreadable, preferring completion over significance. Consider this one sentence:

“They jump into slipspace and make their way to the formerly Precursor-occupied world Charum Hakkor in a distant system, where they find that every Precursor structure has been destroyed and that a mysterious entity that had once been imprisoned on the planet is nowhere to be found — something that greatly troubles the Didact.”

It’s not important that the travellers jump into slipspace, it’s just a chance to link to Halo’s version of faster than light travel. You don’t need to say that Charum Hakkor was formerly Precursor-occupied (that’s implied by the destroyed Precursor structures), or that it’s in a distant system. This sentence is fifty words of mostly nothing, and it completely overlooks basic questions. Why are they going to Charum Hakkor? Why is the Didact troubled by the escaped prisoner? In the rush to itemise external details and actions, the wiki writers have skipped character motivation, which is the basic connective tissue of plot. It’s not the book’s fault that this wiki entry is so obtuse – Cryptum is fairly well-written, all told – but this manner of thinking is encouraged by the nature of the franchise as sprawling encyclopedia. It’s the detail end, the extended universe end, swiftly devolving into an impossible web of dates and names.

If you’re then going to adapt Halo, right, you’ve got this spectrum in front of you – from tightly symbolic hero’s journey to sprawling encyclopedia. Where do you put the adaptation? Which end? Halo (2022-2024) is a two-season TV series created for streaming on Paramount+. The first season’s production was marred by Covid and released to general uproar from the fanbase, as it set up an alternate universe and changed certain traits of the main characters. There was a whole fuss about the fact that Master Chief takes off his helmet – you never really see his face in the games. Lead actor Pablo Schreiber, who plays Master Chief, protested that you couldn’t make a show where the helmet never came off, which doesn’t seem true in a post-Mandalorian world, but it’s almost beside the point – broadly that whole argument seems like a distraction. If the show was good, I don’t think it would matter. The real issue, I think, is in that question about adaptation, especially into the context of an already-sprawling narrative. On the spectrum of myth to encyclopedia, the showrunners placed Halo closer to the encyclopedia, but in a weird way. They didn’t just take an encyclopedic approach. They took one piece of the encyclopedia, and reworked everything to make it the narrative’s central fact.

So – we’re going back into the lore for a second. Master Chief, the main character of the Halo games, is a bioengineered super soldier, recruited as a child and subjected to a bunch of experiments and body modifications. It comes up in a bunch of different titles, and it’s never really dealt with as anything other than the acceptable cost of war. One of the books, however, decided to delve into the ethics. Karen Traviss’s 2011 novel Halo: Glasslands emphasises the moral ambiguity of experimenting on children. She focuses on how the lead scientist, Dr Halsey, kidnapped children from their families. Halsey would find talented children, kidnap them, and then cover up the kidnapping by faking each child’s death – she replaced the children with sick clones, who would deteriorate and die. The parents never knew their children were kidnapped because they thought their children were dead. It’s a darker moment in the franchise, which hadn’t otherwise really grappled with the morality of turning kids into soldiers. In particular, Traviss makes the transformation overtly non-consensual as a way of activating the broader ethics of child soldiers. It’s sort of meant to be a wrinkle in the narrative, a questionable grey area in a story that’s often otherwise very black and white, very jingoistic.

The Halo TV series then takes that bit of backstory as its emotional core, realigning the moral lens of the franchise accordingly. Dr Halsey becomes a knowing monster, a cruel, heartless figure who kidnaps and experiments on children. Previously heroic characters (like Jacob Keyes, the captain of the Pillar of Autumn in the first Halo game) are recast as actively complicit villains. The humans become the bad guys. The Covenant are also the bad guys, but the UNSC, Earth’s military hierarchy, are shown to be cruel, evil monsters. It’s a dramatic break from the games, which, as we’ve discussed before, are at least in part thinly veiled 9/11 allegories. They’re games about American soldiers fighting religious aliens. They are jingoistic, war-drunk games, often free and loose with violence turned into comedy, as when you stick a plasma grenade to a Grunt (they run around and squeal before they explode). Violence is fun, violence is justified: you’re fighting to protect humanity. In the TV show, the Covenant and the UNSC are equal and opposite villains. The UNSC is oppressive and violent towards its citizens. There are scenes where children living in junkyards get tasered to death by violent UNSC enforcers. The first season’s B-plot even has Burn Gorman dressed like a Nazi, marching around shooting minorities in a desert town (and having an absolute ball doing it). The humans are the bad guys. That’s the emotional heart of the season. The surface plot is about Master Chief trying to find a map to Halo, but on an emotional level it’s more about Master Chief coming to terms with who he is and what the government’s done to him. He is structurally paired with the character Makee, a new character invented for the show – one of the junkyard children mentioned earlier. She is captured by the Covenant (who inadvertently save her from UNSC violence), and radicalised against humanity. She sits as equal and opposite to Master Chief. Both characters are taken as children, exposed to brutality, and shaped into soldiers by an inhuman political class. They are twins, and their journeys back towards humanity mirror each other, culminating in a sexual relationship in the penultimate episode.

In itself, that’s a fairly strong structure. However, there are some confusions in presenting and articulating those moving parts. For instance, the first scene of the first episode revolves around a camp of human rebels who have broken away from the UNSC. The rebels are attacked by Covenant forces, who butcher the camp, easily outclassing the rebels in terms of weapons and technology. Fortunately, Master Chief and his team show up, fight off the Covenant, and defend the few human survivors. Structurally, this sequence is messy. The rebels critique the UNSC, who then saves them from the Covenant, obviously the more existential threat. The rebel critique looks misguided and the UNSC almost seem magnanimous, defending people who are trying to break away from their control. It’s a fumble. Are the rebels overstating the case? Isn’t Master Chief meant to be a hero? It takes a while for the show to reset its parameters. In a later scene, HQ orders Master Chief to murder a rebel survivor – and suddenly the show’s moral vision snaps into focus. The rebels are correct, and Master Chief goes rogue, setting out on a mission to drain the swamp. He’ll beat the Covenant and clean up the UNSC all at the same time. But it’s a bit tricky getting there, and the balance in terms of threat – the proportionate balance between the evils of the UNSC and the perils of the Covenant invasion – is never quite held steady.

This is where I think a lot of the resistance to the Halo TV series actually stems from. It’s not about Master Chief and his helmet – it’s about the moral arc of the universe. The show has a strong pitch. Two kids are sucked up into a war that they didn’t ask for and couldn’t possibly consent to. They are violated and traumatised by both sides, and once they figure that out they try and find their way back to some sort of human nature. That’s a compelling story. The only problem is that they’ve called it Halo. The Halo games are generally fun, goofy titles that sprawl out into this unhinged space opera. There are some ethical wrinkles, sure, but they’re not central to the plot. The TV show takes one of those wrinkles and makes it the cornerstone of their alternate universe. There are a few wobbles in delivery, but more importantly this sort of line-by-line rewriting that draws deeply on ideas and images from the existing universe. They use sound effects from the games, like the sound of the shields recharging. All the various weapons and enemy types make an appearance – one of the Spartans kicks off a Grunt’s respirator, and it starts to choke, because Grunts breathe methane and can’t handle an oxygen-rich atmosphere. The details are just too intimate, too heavily drawn from the encyclopedia. If they’d made a show that was symbolic, or deeply mythological, like the first game, they might have been able to get away with all these plot changes. The hero’s journey can survive a bit of adaptation – look at Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings, for instance. There are exhaustive listings of the changes from book to screenplay, but because they preserved the archetypes, nobody minds the little differences. Halo went the other way. It leaned away from mythology and towards the encyclopedia, but in this weird way where they took one specific bit of lore and rebuilt the show around it. They grabbed the encyclopedia and mucked with what it said, changing the vibe of the show for reasons that do technically grow out of the lore, but which you have to be Brian David Gilbert to appreciate. I don’t know who they made this for.