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Halo

Transcendence

Directed by Jonathan Liebesman

TV-14

S1 • E9 May 18, 2022 49m

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?

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Cast of Transcendence

Pablo SchreiberMaster Chief, Spartan-117 / John-117
Natascha McElhoneDr. Catherine Halsey
Shabana AzmiMargaret Parangosky
Natasha CulzacRiz-028
Olive GrayDr. Miranda Keyes
Yerin HaKwan Ha
Bentley KaluVannak-134
Kate KennedyKai-125
Charlie MurphyMakee
Danny SapaniJacob Keyes
Jen TaylorCortana (voice)
Bokeem WoodbineSoren-066
Julian BleachHierarch Mercy (voice)
Ryan McParlandDr. Adun Saly
Gustavo ChiangMP Takacs
Oladapo Oluwatosin OkunolaMP Choksey
Samuel Tamunotoku GboboMarine Doyle
Caroline BoultonFlight Technician Javal
Hilton McRaeHierarch Regret (voice)
Claudius PetersMP Malya
Karl JohnsonHierarch Truth (voice)
Csémy BalázsEvans
Danielle FiamanyaUNSC Nurse
Jonathan LiebesmanDirector
Steven KaneWriter
Michael ArmbrusterProducer
Sheila HockinProducer
Charlotte KeatingProducer

Transcendence Ratings & Reviews

WraithTDKJune 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.

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Halo: Transcendence
Halo: TranscendenceTrailer
Halo: Silver Team Divided
Halo: Silver Team DividedScene

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