Paramount's Halo is Embarrassingly Bad

well it's been three more weeks and you know what that means it means three more episodes of paramount's terrible halo show for me to watch and review and hopefully for you to enjoy at least until i can't take it anymore and decide to shove shards of glass into my eyes to stop the pain from having to watch another minute of this schlock so since i've already done two other videos on this subject i probably don't need to explain anything further so part of the reason i waited three weeks is because not much happened in episode four i could probably summarize this in less than five minutes and actually i'm gonna time myself on this so episode four begins with a flashback showing the spartan twos as just small children and john wants to go back home and of course halsey lies to him and tells him that she asked him to come here and he said yes which of course his memories were wiped so he doesn't remember now from here the plot of this episode splits into three different branches which in my opinion was only done to pad out this episode but i'll just break down each individually because of course in classic tv show style it cuts between them before anything of significance happens sometimes it makes sense because it's supposed to be a minor cliffhanger for the commercial break because of course paramount plus has [ __ ] commercials but again most of the time it just feels like padding so on chief's side he and dr halsey and her assistant arrive on the planet eridanus too and john finds his old home and starts having some memories from the past cortana is able to use some kind of augmented reality technology to recreate what his house would have looked like when he was a child and he starts to remember that dr halsey was there before his parents died then he conveniently remembers where the larger artifact is and the trio ride off to its location they find it and we hear a monologue from miranda keys about how her mother is a sociopath essentially now we get to the soren and quan ha subplot this is really what makes this episode feel like a waste of time so anyway sorin and kwan ha land on madrigal they go to this city that's in the middle of the desert with no natural resources nearby i don't think i need to explain the problem with that any further again i probably wouldn't have a problem with this if they just explained oh this super valuable spice [ __ ] or those drugs we saw in the first episode are mined here and they're super valuable you know like dune that this is likely ripping off of but anyway so quan ha tries to find the resistance of course we know she's wanted by the evil resistance guy who was put in his position by the unsc as revealed in a previous episode eventually she finds one of her dad's generals yes apparently the insurrection was so large on this planet that they have their own army i guess with several generals but if that's the case why was the outpost in episode 1 so lightly defended are they literally writing this show as they go along or was the budget too low to have a proper army for the rebels i don't [ __ ] know in any case it's an indian woman of course there's only so many generic comments i can make about diversity before it just gets old it's about as cringy as you would expect apparently the resistance has given up at this point and quan ha being a [ __ ] again wants to lead the resistance by herself and it turns out the general chick was an informant for the evil resistance leader guy and in the next scene he's shown naked and he's talking to some female assassin who's fully clothed who's this show made for again and predictably he hires the female assassin chick to kill kwon ha then kwon and soren arrive at her aunt's house who supposedly has access to their family fortune and a method of rekindling the resistance well it turns out her family's broke and that's why the resistance broke up in the first place and sorin left to try and get access to his ship which unfortunately got scrapped while they were gone and so he finds out where the nearest transport off the planet is and then threatens a guy at gunpoint for his motorcycle which is probably the only cool moment in the episode and of course the assassin shows up already kills kwan has ant and then soren shows up right in the nick of time shoots her in the shoulder and then misses the following two shots at like five yards guys he's a [ __ ] spartan he can't shoot a target right in front of him i mean are you [ __ ] kidding me dude so of course the assassin survives then the evil guys goons show up and soren and quan escape the city into the desert on the motorcycle then finally we have kai's subplot which is the shortest of the three where she cuts out her behavioral chip and no we don't really get to see her naked of course we get to see master chief's ass but not a woman's ass and you may notice yes i actually know her name because they say it several times from this point forward if the entire season hadn't already been made and of course if i wasn't an irrelevant z-list youtuber i would almost believe that they took criticisms i had of the previous episodes but to keep it simple all that happens is she starts gaining her emotions back she puts some pink highlights in her hair miranda is now in charge of the spartan program so she gets some one-on-one time with them they talk about the saying healy language and kai is already losing control and can't hide that she's cut the chip out she doesn't even [ __ ] try if i didn't know better i'd say this was commentary from the writers about women not being able to control their emotions i'm just gonna assume it's unintentional and yeah that pretty much covers the episode i'm terrible at brevity and i ramble too long so i probably didn't make the five minutes and i definitely cut out a few scenes there but you really didn't miss anything important trust me this episode was a complete waste of time it does set up a couple events for later episodes but it could have easily been combined with episode three there's no question so let's get to episode 5 which is no doubt the best episode since episode 1. if you've already seen it you know why that being said i still have one major problem with the battle scene at the end but i'll admit they did a decent job here at least it's entertaining and the first scene is yet another flashback that shows the first time that dr halsey and captain keys apparently he was also there at the time seeing master chief for the first time and even as a child he's able to save a kid from falling off a rope bridge just based off of this one event halsey sees potential in john to be the greatest of the spartans i know i've said this before in the previous videos but i am honestly sick of this show jerking off master chief as much as it does back in the present we see the unsc has established a massive excavation site for the new artifact and brought along a [ __ ] ton of troops for what is known as a completely uninhabited planet purely a setup for the last scene again i know i'm nitpicking but it really doesn't make sense to bring along this many soldiers when you need workers and scientists maybe demolition experts i don't know anything other than a platoon of troops would make sense here the chiefs three spartan buddies are there as well which honestly was a good move for the sake of the plot so kai's subplot actually feels tied in with master chiefs and we don't have to constantly cut to a new location every five minutes and immediately after i say that the next scene is in madrigal where we see quan ha and soarin are stuck in mill the desert and quan ha says she can't possibly leave the planet and she'll fight her oppressors even if she's the last one left soarin once again mocks her for the [ __ ] that she is and handcuffs her ass to the motorcycle rightfully so and wanders off into the desert god can you imagine if that's how this subplot ended this show would go up two points for me instantly but no it's a setup for another really shitty scene but i'm getting ahead of myself back on eridness we see kai talking to vanick asking him if he ever wonders why the covenant are killing them he says no then she asks him in a sort of roundabout way why they never ask these questions and just like the first episode he gives one of the only good lines in the show i wonder if all that gun grease in your hair didn't seep down into your brain asking me dumb ass questions like that you know i said this last video but i'll say it again why isn't sergeant johnson in the show two of the major black characters have one-liners and one of them is charismatic so clearly they could write at least an okay sergeant johnson at least better than master chief i guess it doesn't really matter ultimately either way the show still sucks but it's just another of many missed opportunities immediately after this master chief figures out that kai took out her behavioral chip just by the grease in her hair which makes sense yeah and he talks to her and is pretty condescending i think they were trying to go for chief trying to protect her but he just comes across like a dick and he tells her that she's not cleared for duty cortana then points out the obvious hypocrisy of this given that master chief himself can't control his emotions and hasn't been combat tested and he tells her to shut the [ __ ] up paramount's master chief ladies and gentlemen next scene we see covenant chick talking to some elites this is just the setup for a really dumb plot device that happens soon but for now it's just padding which i suppose was needed in already shorter than usual episode and we were about due for another stupid scene so we see quan ha beating on handcuffs with a [ __ ] rock this 90 pound woman for about a minute straight beats on these clearly thick steel futuristic handcuffs and actually upon re-watching this scene she doesn't break the handcuffs she breaks a small metal piece off the motorcycle which honestly only makes slightly more sense than the alternative the rocks aren't even sharp they're crumbling in her [ __ ] hand and the metal just snaps off what is it [ __ ] plastic or something was it already cracked she wasn't even pulling on it either it makes no [ __ ] sense but obviously you're not supposed to think about it it's a woman power moment then back on a redness again we see dr halsey and keys talking to the admiral chick and she wants to cut them off because master chief is going off the rails but halsey threatens to blackmail her arguing that admiral hood will need a scapegoat for the whole spartan program then keys and halsey discuss their daughter miranda and keys wants miranda off the project to have her hands clean of the whole thing now we get to the plot device that drives the rest of this episode halsey's assistant shoots some kind of laser into the artifact it shoots out this giant signal that is so powerful that all of the humans are essentially paralyzed by the noise that it creates and all the way light years away on madrigal covenant chick feels the signal and somehow knows exactly where the artifact is now i already know some nerds are going to point this out that it is plausible that 4runner technology would be able to do this considering the way the halo array works it must be able to send signals faster than light which is fair the part i have a problem with is covenant chick having a magic radar in her brain or however the [ __ ] that's supposed to work or maybe she just has memorized all of the human settlement planets that she knows exactly where a redness is or what it looks like or whatever it's not even explained man it's [ __ ] stupid let's be real the ends don't always justify the means especially when the show is already pretty dumb you don't need to make it even dumber just to force an action scene it's ironic because this is one of the very few times in the show where they actually didn't pad something out enough we have episode 3 and 4 where almost nothing happens but you decide to rush a huge ass battle scene that's supposed to be i'm assuming the mid-season hook to keep everyone watching for the rest of it but there's no build up it's just a direct cause and effect with no in between lead up time i guess you get the point after the chaos settles and the signal stops master chief is once again trying to find out what happened to his parents and him cortana reiterates what we've already been told before that all of the records have been erased for the spartans and so master chief touches the bigger artifact this time and finally gets flashbacks of the night he was kidnapped by dr halsey and so after saying this dr halsey conveniently shows up behind him and since he can't control his emotions he immediately tries to kill her and so cortana shuts down his nervous system and he passes out the way they set this up in the show it makes sense why he tried to kill her but it didn't need to be this way in the first place it's just contrived drama all right let's just move on before i go off on another tangent so we cut back to madrigal again and soren is back from whatever excursion [ __ ] he was doing before and kwan hai is nowhere to be seen so of course again knowing the type of [ __ ] diversity higher feminist writers who wrote this show somehow in the undefined amount of time that soren was gone she not only broke that piece of the motorcycle to get free digged a hole for her to hide under got a stun baton from somewhere also where the [ __ ] did she learn these gorilla tactics as far as we knew she was a [ __ ] hippie in the first episode yeah okay she's the daughter of the resistance leader but she's never used any survivalist tactics before this point and she sneaks behind soarin a trained spartan and [ __ ] tases him in the back of the neck knocking him unconscious and the scene ends with her stealing his revolver and aiming it at the back of his head [ __ ] this scene man every time i want to give this show some small credit like oh they did this right they do [ __ ] like this it's so [ __ ] bad it just seems to me like paramount wants that woke audience so so bad but that is not halo even with this cucked as halo has gotten under 343 it's not reddit tier okay it's not well thankfully next is the scene that almost redeems this episode as master chief wakes up the covenant have shown up already in just a matter of hours i guess since the signal went off and the unsc's frigate that's floating in the sky gets blown up almost immediately i'm glad no important characters were on board and we get what is almost a really awesome action scene now i say almost because they did make a few really poor decisions here but before i name my criticisms i'll get into the good stuff first i'll start off by saying it looks really cool just seeing the banshees fly overhead and shoot energy blasts and drop bombs and [ __ ] and the covenant come down in the drop pods and there's just stuff everywhere it's a cgi wonderland i guess you could say and i've never been someone who hated big cgi fights i like them when they're done well and a lot of this is done well and looks like the games kind of it reminds me of some of the bigger battles in reach at least which is certainly a good thing one of the bigger upsides of the scene is we finally get to see some of the other alien races there's jackals there's grunts there's a brute near the end and certain parts of it feel like homages to halo gameplay like the warthog gunner shooting people there's a needler combine explosion a phantom shows up halfway through the fight and drops in some more covenant troops and i'd say the pure spectacle factor of the fight is pretty good now we get to the [ __ ] i have a problem with my first issue and something anybody who's played the games will notice is that they gave some of the jackals energy swords this has got to be another one of those moments where the writers or producers or episode directors thought they knew better than the people who made the games and thought hey they have shields they should also have swords well as you might expect there's a [ __ ] reason that they don't have swords i'll admit i don't know what bungie's internal reasoning was i'm assuming it's some kind of gameplay balance thing but lore wise it's essentially a ritualistic weapon used by higher ranked elites the only reason it's even viable for them to use is because they're important enough to get energy shields if they didn't they could just get headshot and boom all their sword guys are dead there's obviously also elites that have cloaks which again would make swords viable again it's not like it's unbelievable that a jackal could use one but the energy shields are supposed to function more like a riot shield that covers most of their body because they're squat skinny creatures the swords aren't meant to be an actual frontline combat weapon another problem i have with this scene is the payoff to kai's subplot at least up until this point basically she has a panic attack saying all the soldiers die around her since she still can't control her emotions and so her shields go down and she starts taking actual hits an explosion goes off right next to her and she gets shell shock and she's about to die now the problem i have with this ironically which might sound out of character for me is that it's unintentionally misogynistic when you think about it because who are the two characters who have taken out their personality chips master chief a man and kai a woman so they're implying that again like i mentioned earlier the woman is the one who can't control her emotions and is powerless in the middle of battle and has to be saved by a man you know the type of thing that like anita sarkeesian would complain about the only reason i even have a problem with this is because it's the hypocrisy and the lack of self-awareness from the writers we just had a scene where kwon ha did something absolutely implausible for her character at least the character we've known up until this point not only does she not look physically capable of breaking out of her cuffs but she's shown no survivalist skills at all on the other hand then we have this scene where a trained spartan just because she gets her emotions back instantly forgets everything she's told and gets her ass absolutely whooped and can't save herself in the slightest i don't even have a problem at all with master chief saving her it's just poor writing then we have the biggest problem which is directly afterward where the show just kind of jumps the shark it looks really [ __ ] stupid it actually reminds me of when princess leia goes [ __ ] superman mode in the new star wars movies but master chief jumps on board a banshee and you're thinking oh he's going to hijack the banshee just like the games because that would actually be cool in another throwback no he [ __ ] clings to the bottom of the thing and steers it using his sheer super human strength i guess to collide into the phantom at like [ __ ] mach 2 and has this huge explosion which both master chief and kai survived despite the fact that kai's shields were already down and she got shot a bunch of times and all the covenant below the phantom die dude it just looks so bad i could describe it in words but it just it's just bad all right trust me okay the final part of the scene has master chief killing the rest of the surviving troops with a plasma pistol and he has a fist fight with an elite and punches him into a bloody pulp which admittedly is cool but the thing that just happened before this does take away from it a little bit then a brute shows up smacks chief with a gravity hammer steals the larger artifact that they just excavated and then the covenant retreat and then the episode ends so i've gotta say despite the problems and i do have two very big problems with this episode that already went over this is probably the best episode in the series if they cut out the really shitty kwan ha subplot out of this episode and patted out covenant chick discovering where aridness was this would be a very solid 7 out of 10 episode and if they cut out the really [ __ ] stupid banshee suicide explosion technique and just had chief hijack the thing it would be an 8 out of 10 episode instead it's like a 6 or 6.5 which considering it's the best episode of the show is kind of sad but i'd be lying to you if i didn't say i was entertained by that action scene if every episode of the show had even just a three minute action scene i would at least be entertained i wouldn't say it's good but i wouldn't hate the show like i do now so of course i bit off more than i could chew with this video because i wanted to take a break in between reviewing the halo show and doing other stuff so we've got one more episode to cover thankfully it's just another setup episode for future events so it shouldn't take too long to summarize this episode begins thankfully not with another flashback but immediately following the conclusion of the battle from last episode which i forgot to mention covenant chick got left behind at the very end of the last one obviously sent as an agent to try and acquire the smaller artifact from reach and this sort of dramatic irony is supposed to carry her entire part of this episode but honestly it just frustrated me similar to how in episode 3 her deception with the unsc frigate in the middle of space led toward bringing the hunter worms on board and killing everyone you saw the last video i don't need to explain it in detail again and this is pretty much just that on a larger scale of course our future military is a bunch of idiots even though they clearly don't completely trust her they trust her enough to bring her to their largest military installation off earth where quite literally the future of humanity and its last chance for survival is held in various forms whether that be cortana or the spartans or the artifact all these things are crucial to the war effort so they'll just let this random human who just so happened to be jettisoned off the ship for what purpose exactly to be a spy even if they didn't believe that a human would ever work with the covenant what if there was an alien species that was a doppelganger or a homunculus of some kind or maybe she's just brainwashed why the [ __ ] would they take her back to reach it makes no [ __ ] sense it's clearly only done to drive the plot forward and once again make the military look like a bunch of idiots which i find funny because this show is sponsored by the us military yes really look it up so anyway on the way back to reach master chief tries to kill halsey again and so the reason he's doing this is to test the limits of cortana's control on his brain and he finds out that she can't actually make him do something she can only shut down his nervous system and so he saves dr halsey right before she's about to get cleansed i guess and this is the part where my suspense of disbelief is once again destroyed because if master chief has tried to kill dr halsey twice she would [ __ ] terminate his ass we already know she's a cold ruthless [ __ ] she doesn't care about jon as a human being he's a tool and obviously he's a defective tool now so he has to die or at least be forcibly retired in some way but now he just gets away with this this is not believable in any way man i know there's going to be some people who will argue with this assuming they even watch this far in the video but what i'm saying is he is not an essential asset especially at this point not to the point where he can just get away with doing anything especially killing the lead [ __ ] scientist that is developing the technology that ultimately saves humanity it's almost cartoonish how important dr halsey is in the grand scheme of things then we get a couple scenes that are basically just military politics that add some more needless drama and pet out the show and master chief has chosen to interrogate covenant girl who is given a name mckee chief is obviously suspicious of the very convenient circumstances around this whole thing but she distracts him by telling him that he's special again in the way they haven't yet explained i'll repeat my prediction from the other two videos i think he either has forerunner dna or ancient human dna whatever they decide to go with and again this is where the poor writing shows its face why would she know this we the audience know why she knows this but why wouldn't master chief wonder how the [ __ ] she could possibly know he's the one who can activate the artifacts nobody would have told her that would make no [ __ ] sense so the fact that she knows would prove she's a spy there is no way you can tell just by looking at him that he's special but whatever the writing has been the toilet for so long at this point let's just move on so meanwhile dr halsey is being interrogated by some unsc official because they need to scapegoat for the failures of the spartan program unfortunately in the middle of this questioning master chief barges into the room and just demands an audience with her i don't care how much respect or how important master chief is supposed to be at this point this is [ __ ] [ __ ] and you know it this is not how power dynamics work in any organization and especially not the military but again i'm getting to that point where i'm finding it hard to care anymore i just want to get through this let's [ __ ] wrap up the rest this episode even though we're only a third of the way in i promise you almost nothing happens long story short master chief is a crybaby rage monster now and can't believe that dr halsey would kidnap all these children to try and raise the ultimate soldiers and save the galaxy which is obviously the answer to his [ __ ] redundant questions and he's freaking the [ __ ] out he lashes out at cortana again then he goes to see kai talks to her for a bit tries to pretend to be emotionally stable for a second which just doesn't work after we've seen him spurge out for the rest of this episode then we see admiral chick has taken dr halsey off of the spartan program and wants to send her off world then miranda decides to talk to mckee and doesn't find it suspicious at all that this woman knows how to speak saying healy why the [ __ ] would a prisoner be taught an alien language whatever moving on we see dr halsey and her assistant at some other apartment and they talk about how cortana is probably going to try and break out of the unsc security system to get to them next scene has a hologram of a spartan laser and i guess they're talking about the development of it which is kind of a cool easter egg slash foreshadowing at least i'm assuming next scene has miranda keys taking over the spartan program and all the research and stuff but her mother tells her to come meet her so i guess she's just allowed to do that and dr halsey tells her not to experiment on the artifact and then they have an argument basically where miranda is disgusted with how much of a psycho her mother is blah blah blah save the world honestly i'm on halsey's team with this one i think the survival of humanity is far more important than the lives of a couple hundred kids maybe i'm a sociopath too but the ends really do justify the means in this case and it turns out the purpose of the meeting was to scan something on miranda i'm actually not sure what but she had some kind of contacts that were a camera of some kind i guess then we see john back with mckee and mckee is doing crazy talk that's obviously meant to convince chief to touch the artifact again which of course he does speaking of which as jon goes to touch the artifact mckee tries to go see him which of course she's not allowed to do and so she tries to assassinate her handler and she just gets away with this by the way nobody sees the tiny little finger sword they didn't see it when they patted her down and the lady conveniently has her back turned so there's no consequences for this and somehow using the power of the artifact both john and mckee manifest on one of the halo rings wherever it is in the universe and the episode ends there showing us halo so yeah this episode kind of sucked i don't think i had to tell you that i think you could tell if not by what i was saying how i was saying it i am genuinely getting tired of watching this [ __ ] and at the time of recording this i literally just looked up the season is apparently nine episodes long so unless seven and eight are pretty substantial there will probably only be one more video to review the rest of the show because i don't want to flood my channel with [ __ ] halo tv show reviews i'm supposed to be a video game reviewer so what is there to say really we had two shitty episodes and one halfway decent episode which is about on par for this show so far the best thing i can say is at least there was one substantial action scene before the finale i legitimately thought we were only going to get tiny little skirmishes until the season finale so i was happy to see that but everything else sucked the writing is horrible the feminism and diversity [ __ ] has gotten completely obnoxious and like i said before the show is borderline unwatchable because of really all of these things honestly if it was well written i could excuse the feminism and diversity stuff but yeah it's pretty [ __ ] bad and those things go hand in hand every time people will tell you otherwise they'll tell you last of us too is a great game and the only thing people don't like about it is that abby looks like a man trust me there's a lot of reasons to dislike the last of us too and the same goes for pretty much every woke tv show i've ever seen even if you made every character a straight white male it would still suck all it is is pattern recognition it's not necessarily go won't go broke it's go won't go [ __ ] not exactly clever but i think it gets the point across so hopefully the next video will be top 10 games that deserve a sequel i was working on it a bit in the background but i sort of more or less took a week off i just wasn't feeling it guys i was getting pretty burnt out the videos that i'd recorded before i took the break were kind of [ __ ] i'm gonna be honest and i'm glad i've taken the time to actually sit back and evaluate some of these scripts they're not really scripts you know they're audio recordings that i do with notes because scripting takes time and effort and i suck but that's about it i'll see you next time guys

Channel: Synthetic Man

Views: 200,460

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Id: ICE4hE_TNjU

Length: 34min 16sec (2056 seconds)

Published: Sat May 07 2022