Halo - S1 • E9 - Transcendence
Halo
TV-14S1 • E9May 18, 202249m
8.2
Beaten, battered, and betrayed, John 117 leads the Spartans on a suicide mission to find the Halo and save humanity. But at what price?
WraithTDK reviewedJune 24, 2025
And so, here I sit, having watched the season finale, feeling much the same as when I finished the premiere. My assessment stands: I think if I was to judge this as a stand-alone TV show, entirely on its own merits, divorced from the source material…I’d consider it a pretty good show. The visuals are good, the action is good, the action is good, and I suppose the story is fine.
The trouble is that the reason I began watching it is because I’m a huge fan of the source material. I love the Halo universe. And as a *fan*, this show was extremely frustrating. They completely stripped the series of its nuance. You wouldn’t think that they’d need to dumb down a first-person shooter about a super-soldier killing aliens…but here we are. In the games and novels, Hallsey and the UNSC were three-dimensional human beings. They did some messed-up things, but they weren’t the soulless cartoon villains they are portrayed as here.
Specifically, in the source material, Hallsey DID indeed kidnap the Spartans. They DID replace them with clones. They DID train them since childhood to be perfect soldiers. But they never wiped their memories or lied to them about their identities. The Spartans all knew and accepted their origins. Hallsey was almost a mother figure to most of them. And she wasn’t as cold-hearted and crazy as they portray her as, either.
Additionally, the Spartans were never unfeeling robots. There was never an “emotion-suppressing pellet” in them. That’s nonsense. They had nerves of steel because they had non-stop military training since childhood.
Kwan’s storyline seemed completely unnecessary. After the first episode, it became a spin-off story that didn’t really add anything to the main story.
Finally, the relationship between Master Chief and Cortana was perhaps what was most spoiled in this. Cortana has never had the ability (let alone the DESIGN to) “take over Chief’s body.” She was never in John’s head (that would be insane; a human brain could never contain what she is). She lived in John’s Mjolnir armor. The armor interacts directly with his brain through his neural implants. She’s his partner, feeding him data and communicating with him through his brain at a much faster rate than they could by simply talking. It was a purely symbiotic relationship.
If you don’t know any of this, and just go into it as a show…fine. Probably good. If you go in as a lore-junkie, you’re going to have a bad time watching how much they butchered it.