The first 15 minutes of the premiere episode of Halo Season 2 is gripping. It’s filled with dread, action, and elements of horror that executive producers David Wiener and Kiki Wolfkill are hoping to establish with the gunfights this time around.
“That first scene establishes the tone with which we want to approach the action. That’s keeping it grounded and making it feel real and visceral and putting us right in the fight with our Spartans,” Wiener said.
The sequence contains Master Chief (Pablo Schreiber) on a foggy battlefield, taking on an unknown number of the Covenant equipped with energy swords, and the season takes place during the events of 2010’s prequel title Halo: Reach, albeit from the perspective of the show’s characters instead of the game’s Nobel Six.
L-R Kate Kennedy as Kai, Bentley Kalu as Vannak, Pablo Schreiber as Master Chief and Natasha Culzac as Riz (Photo Credit: Adrienn Szabo/Paramount+)
“One of the things I love, too, about how that moment was crafted is because of those horror elements; you feel that fear, and you get to see what it’s like as a Marine to see one of these Sangheili for the first time, and how terrifying that is, which isn’t something that we’ve really done before,” Wolfkill followed up.
See a scene from the opening moment above.
This was one of many things Wolfkill and Wiener wanted to address going into Season 2, especially Wiener, who serves as the series’ new showrunner following the mixed reception of the previous season.
Wiener also had a very specific perspective on how he wanted to tell this season’s story, “which is really that gritted, really grounded, very visceral feel. So you really feel like you’re in it. And I think that tonal shift of feeling very grounded is something that’s always been part of Halo.”
“Oh, my gosh, there was there was a number of things,” Wolfkill said in regards to things that needed addressing. “The big thing was making sure that a story really was the strongest part of the season and everything else builds around it.”
In order to craft a grounded story, they first needed to make audiences care more about the Silver Team members, the Spartan-II soldiers series unit.
“The opportunity right at the beginning that we had to kind of get to know some of the other members of Silver Team in a way that we haven’t seen them before,” Wiener explained. “And start unfolding that there’s a person inside of that armor, a special person who’s been through things that ordinary people haven’t. But they do have desires, dreams, and affections, and the more that we get to know them, the more that we get to emotionally invest in them. The higher the stakes become both for us and for Master Chief, who is responsible for bringing them all home alive.”
This serves as the crux of Master Chief’s story this season, which, after the events of the Season 1 finale, where the Chief realizes he’s been betrayed by the United Nations Space Command and was kidnapped as a child to become a soldier.
“I think in the vacuum left by Halsey,” Wolfkill said. “He’s lost a protector. So what you start to see is this objectification of the armor, like this is the thing that matters and not Master Chief. Is he a symbol? Is he a person and a warrior? That’s the thing that he’s grappling with. What does being Master Chief mean? And what does the armor mean to him?”
Halo, Season 2 Premiere (two episodes), Thursday, February 8, 2024, Paramount
This story originally appeared on TV Insider
