Through the first three episodes of the second season of Halo, I’ve been really enjoying what they’ve been doing. The second season has been clearly building to a massive Covenant assault on Reach, and it’s all a little uncomfortable. Well done!

This episode did a great job at building upon the storylines presented in the first two episodes to get us to the Covenant assault on Reach. This is obviously the big event that has been hinted at by everyone involved in the show, and it will take up the bulk if not all of episode four.

Pablo Schreiber is excellent as Master Chief/John. He’s been excellent so far this season displaying John’s confident insecurity… I think that’s how I would describe it? Whatever. He’s been great. He was well cast in this role for me.

Kai, Vannak, and Riz slowly displaying increasing doubt in John’s leadership when he evades answering their questions was great. Then, once they’ve been grounded and Admiral Keyes reveals John’s deception of the last mission to them, the almost-disgust look on their faces when they realize he lied to them was perfect. They really nailed that.

Then, a lot happens.

Ackerson reveals to Keyes that they have actually known that the Covenant attack on Reach was imminent and orders the evacuation of all important figures, leaving the civilians to figure things out for themselves. Ackerson knows that the Covenant is already on Reach.

On Rubble, Soren’s wife Laera gets captured by his old crew, and before they can kill her, Kwan Ha shows up and massacres everybody. But! She sent Soren and Laera’s son Kessler off on a transport to get him to safety before she returned to save Laera. So, where is Kessler off to now?

John goes back to visit Corporal Perez to try and find out why she didn’t tell Ackerson that she also saw Makee alive in episode one. She plays him the audio clip that she’s finally translated of the Covenant message declaring their intention to destroy Reach, and she believes they’re already there.

As the episode ended, a bomb goes off.

So far this season, Halo has done a good job of showing how, no matter how important you may be and you think you are, the political and military leadership are willing to sacrifice everyone and everything if they think there’s a chance of “winning”.

I know that season one heavily deviated from the Halo video games, but that didn’t other me too much. I think for a video game translation to television to work, you either need to be able to do a mostly-exact adaptation (I would say that Last of Us works well here.) or a loose adaptaion with just taking in some moments from the game that will work with the story that you want to tell (I’m thinking that Halo and the upcoming Fallout show probably work here.)

I’m not a Halo expert, so I’m excited to see what happens with the Halo assault on Reach. Is it a full destruction? It certainly sounds like it.