The 'Halo' TV Series Better Ignore Some Of The Source Material

After the absolute hell that was the first attempt at a Halo film adaptation, Paramount seems very proud of the upcoming Halo TV series. And the newly released trailer seems to show why they damn well should be:

It stars Pornstache from Orange Is The New Black as the Master Chief, and it looks like proper love, care, and dollars were put into it. Still, there is a myriad of ways this could go incredibly wrong, as Halo, much like pre-Disney Star Wars, suffers from a slight continuity issue. 

The good part of the story can all be found in the games (or movies, for Star Wars), but there's still one hell of a lot of weird written material that's considered canon for money's sake. This could be a problem because while the main Halo storyline is great for a game, it might not be enough to fill an entire TV series. Now, let's make this very clear: we're not deriding the plot of Halo as “Good enough for a game because the bar is low." The sci-fi present in Halo is leagues ahead of any recent TV show with either “Trek” or “Wars” in its name, but it might not contain enough plot to fill a 10-hour long series. This could prove catastrophic as it might tempt the developers producers to fill in the gaps in this new “Silver Timeline” continuity with stuff from the not-so-good Halo series of novels.

While the original Halo storyline is beautifully told in just 4 games (The trilogy + the Halo: Reach prequel), there are, uh, 19 Halo novels dedicated to telling players what is taking place it that period of galactic history. Most of it is just filler (making it even more tempting), but the rest is bad -- and not just from a storytelling standpoint. It's bad because a lot of it is straight-up police-state propaganda.

If you only know Halo for the games -- as you should -- you'll find out that Master Chief is a genetically engineered super-soldier who's fighting a bad alien invasion. That's great, actually! I like the idea of a society so accomplished it gets to create super soldiers just for the sole purpose of murdering aliens (space ones).

But that's not it, chief.

If you read the novels, you'll discover that the Spartan-2 program, the one responsible for Master Chief, came about as a response not to alien invasions but to people trying to oppose the government. The Master Chief isn't a brave space knight; he's just a roided cop sent to patrol space. 

That's pretty bad already, sure, but it's a mere introduction to the bigger problem: the Spartan program itself. You see, turns out that if you want to create a soldier as powerful as the Master Chief, you're gonna have to train him from a very young age (Halo's words, not ours). They kidnap kids and give their parents clones that will die shortly after because they're filled with terminal illnesses.

This seems completely unbelievable, but it is right there in the first book – and it is done by the good guys. It is never questioned because the means justify the ends or whatever. Can you really blame people for mistaking this drill tweet for the real deal?

Top Image: Paramount