This is the episode where we get Cortana, and man oh man, it was awesome. There’s a lot of exciting storytelling going on, and I feel like they’re keeping a really strong sense of story with this entire thing.
It’s Halo Episode 3, “Emergence.” John meets his new partner and discovers secrets inside his own memory. Kwan wants to return to Madrigal to continue her people’s fight for independence, but Soren has other plans for her. And Makee initiates her plan to retrieve the Madrigal object, with deadly consequences.
I don’t have any of the biases other people may have because of their intimate knowledge of the games. I started Episode 1 raw. The most I’d ever seen was those combined cinematic movies people put on YouTube, plus the short film, Forward Unto Dawn, I believe. Since then I’ve been doing a lot more research, watching some things, listening to people who are familiar with the games. And I’ll tell you what, I’m really excited for the storytelling they’re doing.
Cortana, Built From a Clone
I know very little about how this went in the games. It may turn out it was the exact same scenario, and there may be lore in the Halo games I’m unaware of, so forgive me on that. But as far as I remember, Cortana was strictly an AI, meaning an actual programmed thing. A very advanced one, but programmed for sure.
In the show they have the flash clone of Halsey, and somehow the brain substrate, the synaptic engrams, whatever it takes, is required to make the Cortana AI able to be embedded into a Spartan’s mind. Literally. It’s a fascinating outlook on things, and I really like how they’re portraying the character.
We originally got some stills of Cortana way before the season began, and people thought she looked unfinished and awkward. The truth is she was unfinished, because that was the actress in essentially Cortana cosplay. Since then they’ve done kind of an Alita: Battle Angel type setup, where they’ve purposely made the actress look CGI. Some people might see it and say that’s just bad CGI. This isn’t a CGI character. It’s a human actress, and they’ve pushed the boundaries on her. They widen her eyes a little bit, make her look a little more animated, and she ends up looking very much like a digital character.
I don’t know for a fact that it’s on purpose, but I felt like the look was on purpose, and I’m okay with that. To me it felt like CGI that was made to look artificial. Set aside the hologram bits and the circuitry-looking stuff that comes off of her. In general she reminded me of one of the characters from the original Final Fantasy movie, the old one with Donald Sutherland and some other people in it. It was one of the first fully CGI movies, and everyone had that sort of dead, uncanny valley lack of expression. She looks like one of those characters in terms of style and quality.
Sorry, I’m just really caught up in this, because Cortana was arguably one of the most impressive parts of the episode.
The Girl on the Garbage Planet
The episode starts with a flashback. We’re on the planet Oban, which is sort of a waste salvage colony. Let’s just call it what it is, a garbage planet. You see this little girl talking to a little boy who’s reading a book, and the book’s familiar if you’re paying attention. You also get to see that the authorities in this place are pretty rough. It’s almost like a slave colony, in terms of hey, you just keep moving, and they’re not afraid to kill anybody.
The little boy is reading the story to the little girl and they have an intimate moment. He tells her that whenever someone reads this one word, you’re supposed to give them a kiss. It’s adorable. Then all of a sudden, boom, the Covenant shows up, and they’re searching for something. They have this staff thing they’re running around with, and eventually they get to the little girl. They’re saying it’s behind her, it’s behind this creature. Oh no. What they’re looking for is that little girl.
This is where we find out she’s the blessed one. We cut to her grown, holding the same book we saw in the past, in her outfit, and she’s full on ready.
The Admiral Makes Her Play
Master Chief is still in jail. We cut to Dr. Keyes looking at holos of the artifact, and the admiral tells her she wants a team put together to inspect the artifact as diligently as humanly possible.
It looks like the admiral is finally making her play. She’s not happy with how Halsey’s been manipulating her, and bringing that whole situation under control starts with having Dr. Keyes on her side. How do you get Dr. Keyes on your side? Come on. You give her what she wants. And I’m sorry, no daughter of Halsey is going to pass on being the first one to see this. She’s so much like her mom, and I think the writers are doing a great job keeping that aspect of it.
The Flash Clone Knows Why She’s Alive
Then you get Halsey with her woken-up flash clone. The reason the clone is younger is because this is DNA that was taken from Halsey at that age, and she literally has her memories from that point in time.
They’re using de-aging technology, and it doesn’t look that great. The younger Halsey looks way too clean-faced. It reminds me of Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen in X-Men, maybe the second one, maybe the third, I don’t remember. It was the early days of de-aging, where they only smoothed over your wrinkles and didn’t actually de-age you. It looks like the same actress’s body with no lines anywhere, and the problem is it looks so unnatural. You could always chalk that up to her being a clone. Clones haven’t had the pull of gravity, they haven’t had the worry, the laughing, all the things that create the lines. Yeah, I guess you could say that. I tend to lean more toward that’s just bad de-aging technology.
The clone asks how the Spartan program went, and Halsey tells her so many survived. And she says that means that many died, which is way more than we thought was going to happen. It’s this weird conversation, and the clone knows why she’s alive, because it’s the only reason she would exist. They’re going to use her mind to create Cortana. It’s a process that’s going to kill the flash clone, and it allows this super powerful AI to come to life and be plugged into a Spartan at the cerebral level.
John’s already in his armor, and there are two little Easter eggs if you’re paying attention. The suits on either side of him are early versions of the Mjolnir armor from the games as the games progressed. I’m not super familiar with the material other than what I’ve researched, and that’s how I caught it. I thought, hey, wait a minute, did a quick Google search, and there it is. The one on camera right, his left, is the first game look. The second one is from when they first brought the shoulder guards up much higher and it got a little more beefy looking, from Halo 2 or 3. I thought that was very cool.
John’s not down. He hates the idea and doesn’t want a babysitter, and Halsey tells him it’s going to enhance him and make him better. Then they start the process. The Halsey clone asks, is this going to hurt? And the doctor says yeah, it’s going to be excruciating.
They put this needle in, and essentially they’re going to lobotomize clone Halsey to get what they need from her frontal lobe, the mental substrate, whatever it is. I had my glasses off for this because I didn’t want to see it clearly. I have an aversion to two things. The first is spiders and the second is eye trauma. Anytime eye trauma comes up, I’m out. It takes basically no effort. You could literally just go boop, push too hard, and pop your eye. Oh gosh.
Then they begin the process with John. You get this cool graphic of her brain being, I don’t know if it’s digitized, but pulled into this nanotechnology thing. They pop the little incision into John’s brain and push the cerebral stuff in. And the cloned Halsey’s body is unceremoniously picked up, moved, and dropped into an acid wash. They disintegrate her. Short-lived, but a cool thing.
A Co-Pilot She Wasn’t Built to Be
Next thing you know, digital Cortana shows up, and I like it very much. Does she look like Cortana from the games? She’s a blue chick who’s semi-transparent and hologrammy. In the games you see little pieces of digital glitchy stuff all over her, I think it’s supposed to be code, and you get some of that. But essentially she looks like a woman wearing a UNSC jumpsuit.
She’s apparently designed to take over. She’s designed to be the brains while the Spartans are the perfect body. Halsey tells her we’re not doing that, we’re doing this. You’re going to be a co-pilot. You’re going to help him. Cortana has to come to terms with that too. She’s a very intelligent AI and she knows what she’s programmed for, but at her core she’s also programmed to follow orders. So she begins the process of getting insinuated into John’s life.
Back at the UNSC, Master Chief is looking at what looks like code, maybe his DNA all strung out on the screen. Halsey asks if he wants to meet her and he says no. Then there she is, and he refuses to talk to her. She’s telling him she’s here to help, and she wants to be all nice and chipper about it.
Kwan, Soren and the Chickens
Kwan is still at the asteroid field, walking through the area, and you get to see Vinsher. Burn Gorman plays him. He’s the new leader on Madrigal and the other colony areas, and he’s doing his propaganda thing. She’s sure she has to go home and make all this right in order to survive.
Then you see Soren picking up a shipment of chickens, and out of nowhere Kwan shows up telling him she has to go home, we have to do this and that. He tells her he’s got to do nothing. He told John he’d keep her alive and happy, so he’s keeping her alive and happy. Now go home. We’re having chicken tonight. Even in the far-flung future it’s true. We still love chickens. But who doesn’t? Come on, get out of here.
We do stop back with Kwan later and find out she’s going to try to run away. It’s not a very important interaction, and truthfully it just serves to break up John’s scene A and John’s scene B. The A plot is definitely the dominant plot in this episode and the one I care the most about. The Soren and Kwan storyline literally ends with them on their way back to Madrigal. She promises him untold money and deuterium or something, and he’s going to take advantage of that. Whatever. Master Chief is the storyline for this episode.
Straight Out of an Alien Horror Movie
We cut to a spaceship we haven’t seen yet, the Gladius, and it responds to a slipstream event as a Covenant ship comes out. They’re getting ready, and then you hear one lone voice. It’s our blessed one. Makee, played by Charlie Murphy. She’s the little girl we saw at the very beginning, the one the aliens took. She’s telling them everyone’s dead, please help me, and she puts on a whole show of it. And briefly, as the camera goes around with her, there’s this weird undulating tentacle thing at the edges.
When we come back to the ship, the little pod the UNSC guys sent out has gone to get Makee. She comes back over, and there’s a whole platoon ready and standing at the airlock. The girl comes through, the captain welcomes her, has her sit down, they search her, and she’s fine. He stands up and puts his hand out, and that’s when the girl looks, and you see the tentacle things attack.
It’s straight up out of an alien horror movie. They’re really channeling some good things. She casually walks through the chaos as the tentacle things erupt out of the floor, out of the ceiling, out of the walls, attacking all the UNSC soldiers. She’s just walking through the bodies. She gets to the captain, and the captain tells her she’s not going to be able to stop this. She puts her hand on his head, and she has a little blade emitter that comes out of her finger. It’s the same as the big giant energy blades, like the one the guy used in Episode 1 to kill the guys and open up the vault, but she’s got a little teeny one on her finger. That’s awesome. How’s that for those pointy nails, ladies?
Later we come back to Makee on the Gladius, and she’s taking control of where they’re going. She’s setting the course.
Only When He’s Conscious
Halsey runs her experiments with the Master Chief in front of the artifact. He touches it and immediately begins to get memories. He sees the dog. He sees this little kid he knows to be him. Outside in the control area, Halsey tells Cortana to start the experiment, and Cortana says let me put him into stasis.
So Cortana is an autopilot who can just shut a brother off. That’s like if you and I are sitting here talking, and I’m saying oh yeah, everything’s great, and then that’s it. I just froze.
But the second she does that, it all stops. The artifact is no longer responsive. It’s only responsive to him conscious, which is something Halsey couldn’t have possibly foreseen and something Cortana’s not happy about. She has Cortana bring him back out of stasis, at which point the artifact comes back to life. They manage to stop it and pull him away, and they’re talking about more experimentation. John’s starting to realize something more is happening.
“Turn Me Off?”
John walks around and sees a bunch of UNSC soldiers playing a game, some future version of air hockey or something, but with a ball thing you throw. He’s looking at everything and everything just feels off. He goes back to where the Spartans are kept, their little bunker hangar thing, and everybody lines back up. Then out of nowhere Cortana pops up, and he’s telling her go away, hologram off, turn off. And she’s like, turn me off?
You’ve got to remember she’s a fully sentient thing. She has her own will, she has her own capabilities, and she’s got to pretend to follow his orders. So we have the beginning of a relationship here. I know in the games there’s a will-they-won’t-they aspect in terms of how emotionally involved they are. In the games Master Chief hibernates for like decades at a time between uses of a Spartan, so she’s very much intimately involved with him. I feel like we’re at the very early outset of that type of relationship, and I’m really interested to see where they’re going, especially because in the beginning they’re very much against one another.
A little later John goes looking for information. He’s searching for a planet, and Cortana suddenly shows up as a voice in his head, crystal clear, because we’re in his head too. She tells him she can help with the search parameters if he’ll just let her. He finally stops fighting her, and she helps him track down more or less 23 different possible planets based around what he’s describing.
Let Him Do It
He comes to believe there’s more he can glean from this artifact, but he’s worried the pellet, the little thing in his back that’s making him unemotional, or sorry, combat ready, is blocking him from fully realizing whatever he needs to realize.
So we cut to him in the bathroom, and he’s naked, and Cortana’s asking what are you doing, what’s going on, Master Chief? She reports back to Halsey that he’s trying to cut out his emotion suppression pellet. And Halsey says let him do it.
See, Halsey’s not dumb. As scientists go she’s actually kind of brilliant. She realizes that whatever’s happening, she may not fully understand it and John doesn’t either, but he’s trying to figure it out, and he’s been built to be the perfect soldier, the perfect leader, the perfect Master Chief. So she tells Cortana to help him. I want him to see you as an accomplice, not as a spy. Cortana shows up and says here, let me help you, walks him through the incision, and the thing finally comes out clean.
A little further down he’s in normal civvies. So now we’ve lost the helmet, we’ve lost the outfit, and we’ve got homeboy in just regular civilian clothes. I don’t even know what’s happening here. The Mandalorian would never let this much out of his outfit happen. We want Master Chief in the helmet with the gold and the thing. Anyway, whatever.
The story, though, is actually really good. He decides to go for a walk without his pellet in, and he’s suddenly seeing the world differently. He’s in awe. Visions of spaceships with planets, stuff that’s super picturesque, the kind of thing that would make us catch our breath in our throats, is having that effect on him for the first time ever. He follows people, he hears things, and eventually he finds himself on a train. Cortana tells him she can help him find what he’s looking for if he lets her, and he’s ignoring her, because he just wants to experience everything.
He sees a couple kissing and it makes him uncomfortable. Then he follows music, and it takes him to these two players, I think it’s twin cellos, futuristic looking cellos, playing in a park. There’s a kid with a ball, somebody with a dog, and it’s input everywhere. Cortana’s asking, is this why you pulled out your pellet, so you could hear the music differently? What’s going on?
She’s trying to figure it out too, because she’s an AI who’s been dumped into the middle of a scenario she wasn’t programmed for. She’s essentially going to go through the same emotional journey John is. It’s actually really brilliant, because now they’re going to be simpatico. Yes, she’s got orders, but at the end of the day she’s peeping what’s going on, and she’s definitely down. While he’s learning how to emote, she’s going to learn what it means for humans to emote and how to respond and react to that. They’re going to become a better partnership because of everything going on right now.
The Ringed Planet
He finally tries to get where he’s going, which is the artifact room. Cortana’s asking what he’s doing, he tells her to open the door, and Halsey, watching, tells her to open the door for him. He goes in. Cortana’s really worried, because his physiology shows that when he’s attached to the artifact his blood pressure goes up, his heart rate goes up, everything. It’s very dangerous.
John begins to see everything more clearly. He remembers things much more clearly. He comes out of it and he’s drawing, and he says there’s another one like this, and ours would fit inside the one I saw. Cortana helps him figure out which planet it is based on the fact that the planet he was on had rings and early settlers. There are three out of all the planets that match, and they track down the one where he’s from.
You see him in his armor now, looking around a big screen room, and you find out there was some sort of an outbreak and these three planets are quarantined. The one he wants is quarantined. He’s going anyway. He goes to Halsey, who pretends she doesn’t know anything that’s going on, and when he tells her he has to go find this thing, she says well then, I’m coming with you.
So we finally get to see him in his armor again, though still no helmet, you dork. I think it’s interesting, because in the games Halsey’s not around as much as she is in the series, and that’s okay.
Back at the UNSC you get both of the Keyes, father and daughter, and her father basically tells her that Halsey’s going on a trip, so while she’s gone, make the most of your time. As in, with the artifact. Then the ship takes off, and you see Master Chief, and right beside him is Cortana. And Cortana’s not happy. Something’s going down.
Should I Keep Going?
I really hope you enjoyed this episode. I did. I’m interested to see what happens.
I’d rather put all my effort into things that are going to grow the channel and be entertaining to you, my audience. Right now there’s 160 of you, and I want you to know I appreciate each and every one of you. I want to make this the most engaging show I can. I enjoy doing stuff like this, and I also enjoy doing video essays. We have a Discord now, too, and as more people come into it, it’ll become more interactive. I try to post as much as I can in there.
Do you want me to keep reviewing Halo? Let me know one way or another. The conversation lives in the comments on the video above.
