3 eps in. better than season 1? yeah. Great? hell no.
The bad from season 1 is carried forward with marginal improvements.
Halo this is not. Generic sci fi CW show with mystical elements and bad soap filler it is.
I will say there may be enough usable material by the time the season ends to edit together a half decent movie.
The show has little practical tension in it's tone, and the actual stakes are hard to encapsulate for the audience, particularly those who have no immersion in the games themselves.
IMHO, in a production like this, you have to look at the practical mechanics and logistics involved, including your functional budget. You have an "enemy" that will require extensive CGI/SFX, so that limits how often you can use them. Hence you have to create peril and conflict in some other way. This show, in it's current form, tries to push through a type of geopolitical backdrop and investigate the clear psychological damage/emotional damage from the Spartan program.
The world building here is too expansive.
If it was me, and it's not, I'd put these Spartans on the UNSC Leviathan , start the series with a space battle, have the ship be damaged and alone, and then put it on the run. To drag the enemy threat away from other human planets, etc, etc. Still wouldn't cheap, but it would be easier to focus the budget. Also create limits to what the Master Chief has and can use. You can't appeal to the audience by having Master Chief eating soup and talking about his isolation. You need to actually put him into a situation where he's isolated and no help is coming.
One of the struggles of any writers room of shows like this is to actually get people to detach from trying to mirror themes and conflicts in actual present time current events. It's just really hard to do it and not many performers can pull of the volume. Aaron Sorkin could do it because he generated a massive amount of dialogue per script and per episode. But part of that skill was doing heavy exposition drops that could bring the audience up to speed quickly. This is part of why JK Rowling was so successful with the first half of the Harry Potter series. She pumped in a lot of information in a digestible way that wasn't forced upon the reader all at once. You can get away with writing like that if you have Alison Janney doing your dialogue. But you can't with most performers.
Halo, this show, is a version that wants to tell a story that cannot be contained by it's practical logistics and budget. They are intentionally spacing out the action sequences and patching in filler to bridge the gaps. But the attempts at world building, IMHO, is just really inefficient spending waste.
Get smaller. Not bigger. Terminator 1. Predator 1. Aliens. Alien. Die Hard. Robocop. The Thing. Even something modern like Severance. You can do a lot and make something good with a story that is mostly contained. A limping heavily damaged UNSC battle cruiser on the run from the Covenant, that would be plenty to interest the general audience. Try putting Master Chief in a situation where he doesn't have a full army behind him.
But just my take on it.
