As a disclaimer, I’ve never seen the actual Halo TV show, so this post isn’t meant as criticism. I have, however, read the criticism, and one of the questions that keeps coming up is whether or not fidelity to the original story is even possible. You know, the original story as expressed in a 2001 first-person shooter video game – with, to be fair, all its surprising depth and cleverness. That’s what I want to look at. To do so, I’m gonna draft a rough (very rough) outline for a TV pilot, and you can judge if I’ve answered the question.
Unlike the creators of the real TV show, I am not a screenwriter, so the goal here isn’t to come up with the best possible Halo TV adaptation, but the most faithful. And that’s actually kind of freeing, in an ironic way. If I ever get stuck, I just think: What Would Halo Do? However, the guide for this process will be the preeminent example: HBO’s The Last of Us, which successfully adapted one video game to a season of television, and gave us a strong opening hour.
The Approach
Of course, we have to look a little bit past the first episode, as several recent examples in blockbuster Hollywood suggest the importance of a roadmap for an entire series. I see Halo as a four-season television show, with the first season covering the events of Halo: Combat Evolved, the second and third seasons covering Halo 2 – a game jam-packed by an overzealous development cycle, famously chronicled – and a fourth covering Halo 3. That leaves the option open to adapt the Reclaimer Saga later, but as that particular era remains unresolved, I’m more comfortable looking at the original three titles.
And to be honest, the Reclaimer Saga (Halo 4, Halo 5: Guardians, and Halo Infinite) is where we begin to pull away from what I most appreciated about the story. Granted, of those games, I only played Halo 4, but that one really centered the relationship between Master Chief and Cortana, to nebulous thematic ends. It tends to require the Chief be less human than he had been. In Combat Evolved and Halo 2, he was a fun action hero who did awesome things like ride a bomb through space and crash a Banshee into the Pillar of Autumn, like, just to bug Cortana. Even in Halo 3, he’s able to quip inside the heart of a Flood hive, as I’m twisting the Xbox 360 controller out of sheer frustration. God, that level was hard.
I think Master Chief is pretty underrated. He isn’t a silent protagonist, but he was designed with a certain blankness for ease-of-identification by the young male gamer in the target demo. This would seem to inspire workarounds by the various writers of Halo adaptations over the years, whether Alex Garland in 2005 or today’s writers room. From what I remember, Garland took the MGS2 route and made the Chief a secondary character, viewed as a legend by the actual protagonist. Kind of like his approach to a Judge Dredd movie, where Anderson more than Dredd has the arc.
Well, at least Dredd never removed his helmet, am I right? I know that the Chief does in the Halo show, which is especially perplexing post-Mandalorian (and even post-V for Vendetta), but I’ll admit that the anchor for a prestige television drama may require more than what game Chief necessarily offers. This, however, raises another question: what is prestige? Halo is an action movie, better compared to something like John Wick than John Adams – both of which are great.
And like a lot of great action movies, Halo exists in the present tense. This is extremely important. I think, when it comes to adapting a video game to screen, it’s the instinct of filmmakers – and even fans – to fish around in the game’s lore. Take Mass Effect, for example, where I often see people talk about the First Contact War. And I just don’t know, man; that isn’t the experience of playing Mass Effect, which is the excitement of making consequential choices and using Warp. Similarly, Halo is the excitement of shooting aliens, two guns at a time. That’s what we’re adapting – those feelings – and that’s why video game movies are so tough to crack: we have to translate the emotions of play to a medium without the same interactivity.
Which brings us to our final question: Reach, the 102 of Halo lore. The starting point for our show is a bit tricky, and we can liken the situation to the three anime adaptations of the manga Berserk. Each of them starts in a different place than the manga, in which our hero Guts is having sex with a demon. I don’t know why that was never good enough. For Halo, we have the beginning of the first game, Combat Evolved, but we also have “the Fall of Reach,” the equivalent of Star Wars’ Clone Wars. Chronologically, the Fall of Reach comes first (and the book, Halo: The Fall of Reach, predates Halo: Combat Evolved). Is that where we should begin?
We’d have to look at our four-season arc and see if it makes sense. By the end of our series, Admiral Hood shakes hands with the Arbiter and says, “I remember how this war started. What your kind did to mine. I can’t forgive you. But you have my thanks, for standing by him to the end.” In this way, the Fall of Reach, where the Covenant devastate a human world, is indeed our thematic starting point. But I don’t want to overstate it, as I think it’s been overstated in the franchise (with countless adaptations across multiple media). Instead, I’d use it to open season four, like how the Return of the King movie opens with Gollum’s origin story.
That way, we can preserve a lot of the mysteries of Halo within the actual Halo itself. The developers of Combat Evolved were sure to introduce each element of the world in a logical, compelling way, and I wouldn’t want to disrupt that with a big war story – where we’re already supposed to know what the Covenant is, anyway.
So, what do we have so far? Master Chief is the main character, he wears a helmet all the time, it’s more action than drama, and we open with the Pillar of Autumn approaching the Halo ring. Our “faithful Halo adaptation” means adapting Combat Evolved. So far, so good!
Season One
To identify the contents of our first episode, we need to block out the first season. Thankfully, that’s already been accomplished. The major chapters in Combat Evolved even have titles:
- Pillar of Autumn
- Halo
- Truth and Reconciliation
- The Silent Cartographer
- Assault on the Control Room
- 343 Guilty Spark
- The Library
- Two Betrayals
- Keyes
- The Maw
(For this post, I consulted Halopedia for titles, plot points, and dialogue. I haven’t been able to play original Xbox games since a firmware update wiped backwards compatibility off my 360. Fuck you, Microsoft!)
I’m not confident that each chapter will equate to one episode. Right away, I know I don’t want to land on Halo to start episode two. I’m not even sure I want it to be the ending of episode one. For reference, the first episode of FX’s Shogun does not end when John Blackthorne finally reaches Japan, unlike the prologue chapter of the book. So, to get a better sense of how we’ll sort and combine these chapters, let’s add brief summaries (the writing quality of these summaries, and the later outline, is accurate to my prewriting elsewhere – it’s pretty rough):
The Pillar of Autumn
The Covenant have caught up to the Pillar of Autumn and they’re boarding. The crew inside scrambles, awakening Master Chief, who’s quickly hooked up with Cortana by Captain Jacob Keyes. The Chief fights through the Covenant to an escape pod with a small group of Marines.
Halo
The escape pod crashes on the ring world, with Master Chief the only survivor. Fighting through more Covenant, he searches for and rescues Marines. Keyes, however, has been captured, and is being held on a cruiser, the Truth and Reconciliation.
Truth and Reconciliation
The Chief leads the surviving Marines on a mission to infiltrate the cruiser. Once inside, they clear out the Covenant and rescue Keyes, who tells them about Halo, a superweapon. The Covenant is searching for Halo’s control room. The Chief and Keyes lead the Marines off the cruiser. “Time for a little payback.”
The Silent Cartographer
Chief and the Marines descend on an island guarded by Covenant. They fight their way inside a structure to a security override station. Chief and Cortana discover the location of the underground control center.
Assault on the Control Room
The Chief and Cortana drop into a structure filled with Covenant. The Chief fights through them as the interiors give way to a sprawling winter forest. He hops in a tank for a big battle. They reach Halo’s control room. Cortana learns that there’s something dangerous buried on the ring, and Keyes is about to uncover it. The Chief runs off to stop him.
343 Guilty Spark
The Chief is dropped off at Keyes’s last-known location, a swamp. He enters a structure ominously littered with the bodies of both Marines and Covenant. He watches a recording of what happened here: Keyes and his men were attacked by a parasitic alien creature. He’s then attacked by the Flood, and continues further underground, where he meets up with surviving Marines. After some fighting, he’s teleported to safety by 343 Guilty Spark.
The Library
Guilty Spark tells the Chief that they have to collect the Index in order to activate the Halo ring. The Chief fights through as Guilty Spark exposits on the Flood. They secure the Index and teleport away.
Two Betrayals
Guilty Spark and the Chief arrive at the control room, and nearly activate the Ring but for Cortana’s intervention. She explains, Britishly, that the Halo ring indeed kills the flood, but only by starving it – by eradicating its food source. Sentinels appear and the Chief fights his way out. They have to stop Spark and destroy the Halo, and they’ll do this by detonating the Pillar of Autumn. First, the Chief overloads the pulse generators, fighting through Covenant and Flood both.
Keyes
The Chief and Cortana return to the Truth and Reconciliation to retrieve Keyes. They find him assimilated by the Flood, and the Chief mercy-kills him, retrieves his neural implants.
The Maw
Our heroes return to the Pillar of Autumn to blow it up. 343 Guilty Spark tries to stop them. Against his protestations, the Chief blows up the reactors, sending the engine into critical status. They escape on a Warthog, then a Longsword fighter. The Pillar of Autumn explodes, taking Halo with it.
For the determination of our episode count, what I’m looking for is that each episode has a substantive beginning, middle, and end. This is what I’ve come up with:
Episode One: “Ringworld”
The Pillar of Autumn
Halo
Episode Two: “Truth and Reconciliation”
Truth and Reconciliation
Episode Three: “The Silent Cartographer”
The Silent Cartographer
Episode Four: “Assault on the Control Room”
Assault on the Control Room
Episode Five: “The Flood”
343 Guilty Spark
The Library
Two Betrayals
Episode Six: “Combat Evolved”
Two Betrayals
Keyes
The Maw
So, this breakdown gives us six episodes, which wouldn’t be uncommon for modern television. Breaking Bad opened with seven, The Walking Dead with six. Halo needs a big budget, so it’s best to start “small.” If it’s a ratings success, we can ask for a bigger budget for season two, where we’ll definitely need it.
Episode One: “Ringworld”
I also want to mark out plot points, as the game takes a few narrative shortcuts that we wouldn’t expect from a TV show (Cortana does a lot of heavy lifting). I think this will help us with set-piece redundancy (you may have noticed a lot of “the Chief fights through”). In HBO’s The Last of Us, there was “the Clicker scene,” and “the Bloater scene,” rather than several encounters like in the game. For a Halo show, we only need to see each kind of set piece once, and we’ll make sure they feel unique.
And I find it’s helpful generally to demarcate plot points based on their emotional response, as that will dictate how we build up to them:
- Attacked by the Covenant on the Pillar of Autumn
- Chief’s awakening
- Keyes’s sacrifice
- The revelation of Halo
- Cortana: “The ring’s ecosystem is incredibly sophisticated.”
- Cortana: “The Master Chief and I are going to see if we can save some soldiers.”
- Fighting back on Halo
- Cortana: “ I’ve found Captain Keyes! He’s being held on a Covenant cruiser, the Truth and Reconciliation, a ship I disabled before we abandoned the Autumn.”
Right away, we have a nice arc here where, in the first half, humanity is on the backfoot, and then the Chief helps them score victories on Halo. We’ll close on the revelation that Keyes has been taken. We also have the second arc of the experience of being on Halo, something ancient and mysterious. Even aesthetically, Halo: Combat Evolved moves us from the familiar (UNSC) to the alien (the Covenant and surface Halo) to the – surprise! – deeply alien (underground Halo and the Flood).
At this point, I have a separate window open for the outline of episode one, and I’ll reproduce that below. What immediately follows is a brief instance of prewriting, the thought process informing what goes into the outline, written half for myself and half for the reader.
Outline Scratch
Halo: Combat Evolved opens on the Halo itself, in space next to a massive planet. The first thing we hear is a haunting piece of orchestral music, which does a far more economical job of setting the mood than a brief snippet of the Fall of Reach would. Before we assume control of Master Chief, we have cutscenes, themselves economical. Knowing that this story begins and ends on the Pillar of Autumn, I think it’s imperative that we take some time here to establish it as a space and as a home for interesting, sympathetic characters.
A big part of the mission “Halo” is running around the ring and rescuing Marines. Cortana says, “The Master Chief and I are going to see if we can save some soldiers,” and the reason I’m pointing that out is because lines like that wouldn’t make the transition to a teleplay. We should already know that that’s the objective, and more importantly, we should feel it. We’ll know that Marines have crashed on the surface, we’ll know who they are, and we’ll want to see them again.
Of course, in the game, the Chief goes around rescuing multiple groups of Marines, and that may be redundant. Perhaps the survivors have banded together, and are even in contact with Cortana. We could see things from their perspective – first, before Master Chief. Let’s see the Halo from eyes more like ours, rather than the Chief’s, who never seems too plussed by it, or anything, really. We’ll also get a better sense of danger and a desire to see Master Chief rescue these guys. And speaking of non-Chief perspectives, this is where Captain Keyes is captured, so we might consider seeing that.
Just like in The Last of Us, we could pare down on the tutorial section. I don’t know that it’s necessary for the Chief to move through the Pillar of Autumn to reach the bridge and then move through it again for the lifeboats. We’ll compress some of that, and make the situation on the bridge more urgent.
The real difficulty comes with the Halo segment, which will be different than the Pillar of Autumn. Here, we’ll introduce multiple POVs: the Chief’s, Keyes, and the Marines who Chief will rescue, including Johnson. This will help us work backwards, in terms of who among the Marines we’ll have to set up beforehand.
The Covenant take cover in the Forerunner structures. This is where the Marines should go, and encounter the Covenant. Maybe they fight for it.
The Marines hear from the other pods, which are taking fire. So they head out to rendezvous with them. They reach the crashed pod, which has a lot more wounded. They fight off the Covenant, but another dropship comes in. They execute a tactical retreat, eventually holing up in a Forerunner structure. We cut to the Chief’s perspective as he begins to explore this new environment, and he sees that it has a sophisticated ecosystem.
The climax is when the Warthog comes in, and they ride off to rescue the Marines holed up in the Forerunner structure. Beneath this structure is where we have the unnatural cave. And in the end, we hear from Keyes.
The Outline
Each of these five acts will be an average of 8.8 minutes long, totaling the standard 44. Generally speaking (for commercial American entertainment), every scene in a screenplay is two to three minutes long, with four as an absolute ceiling. That means each act will have, give or take, three to four scenes. In total, that’s 15 on the low end, 20 on the high end.
Let’s see how we do!
ACT I
The first thing we see is the Pillar of Autumn, stationary, against the Halo ring in the background. Technicians are patching up the great ship, which looks like it’s been through hell. Inside, Captain Jacob Keyes crosses a length of the Pillar of Autumn (maybe not the whole length), whose corridors are occupied by overflow from the med bay. He enters a conference room with a view to the Halo, where he fields an argument about whether to regroup with the fleet or touch down and explore this bizarre structure. Keyes is solidly in the former camp, and gets emotional when he talks about Reach. He’s afraid that humanity is losing the war.
In the cryo chamber room, Chief Thom Shepard is running diagnostics and notices his only surviving tech, Sam Marcus, is dissociating, staring blankly at the lone cryo pod. Shepard tries to get his attention, but Marcus only talks about the world he just saw burn under the Covenant fleet. He’s especially despairing because Reach was their last hope. It was the birthplace of the Spartan program, and for all they know, this one is the last one alive. Shepard says that’s all the more reason to do their jobs. They have to keep him alive, and get him to where he needs to be – wherever that is. Whatever’s left of humanity out there. Marcus muses, “What can one guy really do?”
We return to the conference room. Before a decision is made, an alert goes off. The voice of Cortana comes in over the comm to report that the Covenant are here. In about 90 seconds, they’ll be all over them. Keyes heads for the bridge.
Keyes brings the ship back up to Combat Alert Alpha. He wants everyone at their stations. Cortana appears, revealed to be the ship’s AI with a holographic representation. “Everyone?” she asks. Keyes affirms it.
In the hangar, Johnson gives a legendary speech and rallies the surviving Marines, bringing them from wounded and scared to ready for action. “All you greenhorns who wanted to see Covenant up close, this is gonna be your lucky day!”
ACT II
From the cryo chamber room, Marcus and Shepard can see flashes of the carnage just beyond. Plasma fire, explosions. They have a single pistol between them (which, in this continuity, will function as a pistol), and stand before the door, ready for a final stand. Poom! Poom! The enemy is at the door. The computer pings. Marcus runs over and reads the order to “unseal the hushed casket.” He looks back at Shepard, as if to say, “We’re saved.” Shepard tells him to open it. Now! The door is busted down, and Shepard opens fire into the smoke. Marcus works as fast as he can, but it’s too late for Shepard, who explodes in a cloud of pink and crimson mist. The initializing sequence gives Marcus enough time to look over and see an Elite walk through the smoke. The eight-foot-tall alien laughs, holsters the plasma rifle, and stalks slowly toward Marcus. With a hiss, the cryo pod opens, and the Master Chief emerges, gets his bearings. The Elite charges, and the Master Chief engages and kills him. He picks up Shepard’s gun and tells Marcus to stay close.
Master Chief leads Marcus through the halls of the Pillar of Autumn, impressing him further with his Spartan skills. They meet up with the Marines, who are escorting the other officials seen earlier talking with Keyes, and Johnson tells the Chief that they’ll split a unit off and help him to the bridge. They fight Grunts and Elites through the ship, and Johnson loses contact with Keyes. They need to hurry.
ACT III
They reach the bridge, which has been sealed. The Covenant are trying to get in, so they fight them off and Chief forces the door open. Keyes is practically alone in there. As the ship seems to collapse around them, he tells Chief that he’s initiating Cole Protocol, Article 2, and they’re abandoning the Autumn, though he’s gonna try to land it on Halo. Cortana does not like that idea, as this war already has enough dead heroes. Keyes tells Master Chief to get Cortana safely off the ship. If she’s captured by the enemy, the Covenant will have everything, including the location of Earth.
Chief, Johnson, and Marcus head to the lifeboats, which are being rocked by explosions. The Covenant ships are targeting them. Amidst the chaos, the Chief is separated from Johnson and Marcus.
A Marine heads for the last lifeboat and is thrown to the ground by an explosion. The Chief picks him up and hurls him into the pod. The shuttle blasts off. On the descent toward Halo, the Autumn is pounded by heavy laser fire. We follow Keyes as the Pillar of Autumn goes down, swarmed by Banshees. He tries his best to keep the ship together, and straps himself into a chair to brace for impact. The ship begins to burn up in the atmosphere, shooting fire across the viewport. Keyes screams.
ACT IV
The doors of a lifeboat hiss open to reveal banged-up Marines. It’s dark just outside the fallen craft. They’re inside some kind of cave – the pod must have dug through the ground and found a pocket. They check on the wounded and set up a perimeter. Johnson picks up the comm. It’s Marcus, who tells him that two other pods of Marines have met up in a “strange structure.” He tells them to hang tight, and hears someone shout that there’s light ahead. Johnson leads the rest of them toward it – the mouth of the cave. It opens on a grand, sweeping vista. Green hills with strange towers firing lasers into the sky, and above the horizon, the side of a ring ascending to the heavens. A pair of Banshees zips overhead. “Get down!” They retreat back into the cave. “They’ll be here soon.”
Cortana awakens Chief, who’d been knocked out. He finds that he’s the sole survivor of the crash. He asks Cortana if anybody else made it, and she taps into the comm line to hear Johnson, who’s taking fire. He tells Chief to grab the other Marines first, but Johnson is closer, so Cortana sets a waypoint on the cave. Master Chief exits the lifeboat, in a slightly different biome than where Johnson crashed. He sets off toward the cave, and we see that this Halo ring has a sophisticated ecosystem.
Banshees touch down around the fiery wreck of the Pillar of Autumn. Commander Thel ‘Vadam leads his Elites inside the ship.
The Marines in the cave defend against an onslaught of Covenant, including Jackals. A Marine says they need reinforcements, but Johnson tells him they need to clear the LZ first. The Covenant push them back further and further into the cave. Finally, the Chief arrives and clears the enemies. Johnson gives the word to the Marine, who calls Foehammer for a ride.
ACT V
A loud clanging awakens Keyes, still in the chair. He hears the telltale “wort, wort, wort” in the near distance. He tries to stand and immediately collapses. Thudding footsteps approach. He reaches for a pistol and an Elite hoof comes down on his wrist.
The Chief jumps the warthog over a hill and the Marines hoot and holler. They tear around the Halo ring, taking out any Covenant in their way. Finally, they reach the Forerunner structure where Marines have holed up and a battle ensues. The Chief kills the last Elite and explores the interior of the structure. Cortana recognizes what might be a control panel, and an elevator is revealed, taking them deep underground. There, they see that the interior of the Halo ring is vast and hollow, with interconnected bridges and tunnels. Cortana tells Chief that she’s hearing chatter on the Covenant battlenet: Captain Keyes has been taken.
Conclusion
So, that one technician, “Marcus,” turned out to be pretty important. Considering he dies almost immediately in the game, that definitely presents a WWHD-related problem for the season going forward. Do we replace him with Chipps Dubbo? Maybe he turns up dead in the Forerunner structure at the end. That was a big thing in TV over the last decade — the surprise protagonist death — probably because of Game of Thrones. Or The Shield.
As you can see, I couldn’t figure out a better way to deliver the Keyes exposition at the end. I was thinking, like, Chief somehow accesses the Forerunner structure and it tells him… about Keyes? That’s a tough one. I’m also now thinking we have to have Chief see the Halo first. It can reflect in the orange of his visor. I definitely fell into the trap of “make Chief not the main character” with Marcus. And introducing the Arbiter so soon? I love the idea, but that’s gonna require a longer conversation, if he could play the role of a villain in the first season before he has his arc in season two.
Well, with each paragraph being a scene, we’ve ended with 16 — on the cusp of the low end! But I think we got there. Now I leave it up to you, dear reader, to judge if this Halo show is possible. But I have a judgment of my own I simply can’t resist:
No!
Look, Godzilla Minus One took home the Oscar for visual effects on its $15 million budget, so obviously, there’s something inefficient in the Hollywood approach (especially given that the people actually making the effects remain underpaid). Still, the level of spectacle that even our opening hour requires is gonna be too much. It’s too much Covenant, who are not like human-shaped Star Trek aliens. Each of them requires CGI, on top of the plasma fire, the blue explosions, the vehicles, the vistas, holy shit. Six episodes?! Can we do this season in one episode? Maybe one half??
The Battle Beyond Planet X 