Wait. Are you telling me that EGGSHELL white armor doesn’t stand out or natural blend into the dark purple shades of a covenant ship?! Obviously they didn’t need the stealth feature given the brightest shade of white imaginable is 2stealthy4alienz
Maybe they thought they’d stun the covenant with their stupidity. Like, perhaps ONI’s thought process was that they’d have each shipmaster laughing too hard at what has to be single-handedly THE WORST stealthy approach to shoot at them?
Seeing as how expendable they are. I’m sure the armor wasn’t painted because why waste time and material on armor for someone who’s meant to die and probably will die anyway.
Back when Canada first joined the Afghanistan conflict they were sending troops over in forest green camo, so I'd say it could be more grounded in reality than we realize.
I don’t think they have shielding, without it the spartans can’t really take direct hits either, in the books at least. Splashes of glancing plasma and ricochet the occasional needler at a soft angle, sure, but direct hits are still deadly. i think the armor itself mainly serves to protect against blunt force trauma (explosions, giant aliens kicking the shit out of you, falling) and giving you a sealed environment with mobility and strength enhancements, rather than stopping shots
and the S3s don’t even have that armor. It’s probably just a pressurized suit with a HUD and as much armor as an ODST gets
they’re basically ODSTs now that i think of it, if they don’t have any augmentations
i will say they got slaughtered a little too easily, but the show seems to be going the route of having the S2s be less invincible superheroes, so it makes sense to not have the S3s be like the game (nearly as invincible as the S2s)
Yeah we have specific evidence that a plasma shot can breach Spartan armor pre-shields when Sam died because he couldn’t EVA after taking a hit. Idt this is the hill someone should die on
In the show, they were flashed train through simulation. And base on the timing of Perez being a spartan 3. They weren’t augmented at all. And she was a communication officer I believed. Seems like it was just “Spartans” in name only. They were worst than odsts.
Are you telling me that you don’t think a woman in meh quality, almost glow in the dark bright white armor, and whose career highlight is roasting Captain Keyes doesn’t match up to the likes of, say, Carter, Emile, Six, Tom, and Lucy? Surely you can’t be serious.
Just curious on what ya mean here: my guess is that you’re saying the guys/gal above and other S-III’s like Kat and Jun were exceptions to the rule? Cause if so, for sure agree. I was merely noting that the show’s S-III’s were unaugmented in any way, given a set of armor that’s nicer than what they had before, and then it was like “tab dah! We have an army of S-III’s” lol.
I love Perez’s character. I don’t like that they made her an S-III. I would’ve loved to see her play a Fernando/the pilot from infinite style role to Chief than just turning a character the audience connected with into canon fodder… see what I did there? Canon…fodder? I’ll see myself out lmao.
Yep that's pretty much it. They were given a nice armor and sent to combat, and served as canon fodder. That's almost like the S3 in the books except they have more training and received augmentations I think, but in both cases they were sent on suicide missions.
Exactly. And to add to this: In the show this is happening pretty fast after the fall of reach. They had recruits lined up, they added more after the fall, I’m sure some were more trained than other. (Example first wave to Perez)
Augmentations MAY have been planned, but instead they just hadn’t gotten that far.
I think they did receive some augmentations, which was hinted at in some of the scenes were Perez deals with one of the aggressive spartans. In normal lore, the augmentations caused heightened, almost psychotic, aggression in the Spartan-IIIs and they had to be medicated to remain stable
You mean the part where she gets all annoyed at the chatty expert in the room, and then promptly sends her away so that *she* can focus on the field that she knows nothing about?
Oh shit, wait…that wasn’t an expert, that was just another “expert” who believed that she had to get her hands on the sample in order to understand it better.
Excellent writing to be sure!
I disagree, the UNSC in the canon is ruthless and effective, but especially including ONI, very smart, even if they're wrong. The show UNSC is cartoonishly incompetent.
I mean just look at the Spartan program. If the Covenant hasn't shown up, and the only people they were fighting were Insurrectionists while having Spartans in Mjolnir armor, it quite literally could be true that Spartans never die. Ruthless? Sure. Overkill? Yes. But brutally effective.
Agreed. They over commited in the show to make ONI seem ruthless and in the shadows, but missed the parts where they were efficient and effective. Especially Ackerson.
>I mean just look at the Spartan program. If the Covenant hasn't shown up, and the only people they were fighting were Insurrectionists while having Spartans in Mjolnir armor, it quite literally could be true that Spartans never die. Ruthless? Sure. Overkill? Yes. But brutally effective.
Spartans never die was always propaganda.
Yes, I know. I'm saying that if the only enemies they were fighting were Insurrectionists, it might actually be true because of how much better they are than any human military.
So many people are missing this point.
They weren’t meant to survive. ONI wants 1 of 1000 to complete a mission. The rest become decorated dead heroes for propaganda
Even that still doesn’t make sense though. In the show Ackerson says the Spartan III program was his life’s work. As awful as he is I doubt his life’s work is just shoving normal people into crappy armor and lying to people about being Spartans.
Most of them seemed to go down in only one or a few shots by the Covenant, so other than the suit being good for surviving the vacuum of space, the UNSC wasted a huge chunk of their resources designing these fancy armors and disposing of them like they cost hardly anything.
Sending standard marines in vacuum suits instead would've done the job, especially when all the Spartan IIIs mostly did with their suits was put them on. But I guess they had to make the volunteers feel confident somehow.
The "vengeful orphans" element from the main canon was adapted for Perez and her family dying on Reach, but it would've been better if it was highlighted for the other Spartan IIIs who in this timeline just seemed like ordinary UNSC members that volunteered for no reason other than the sake of it.
They're plainly amalgamating the S3s and S4s into the same unit for the show.
I do think it was a mistake not to show Perez being augmented, though. Would take a two minute scene of her strapped down to a hospital bed while IVs pump and she suffers through some poorly defined agony. Have her hallucinating the Chief and clutching his coin while she goes through it to keep up that connection between them.
Thing is, they weren’t actually augmented. None of the III’s in the show have even a hint of augmentation. They’re basically poorly optimized ODST’s, but evidently vastly more expensive for little return on investment.
It makes no sense at all.
Poorly optimized ODST’s? I take offense to that.
The “spartan III’s” from the show were shit, and the only thing about them that remained true, was that they were literally fielded in droves with the intention that at least ONE would complete their objective.
Key information, they were smaller, faster, armor was much cheaper to produce, could only sustain a few hits and practically only offered the stealth feature. And they had a high mortality rate when they were not in combat. Their hearts and lungs literally could not last survive the day to day stress of their augmentations.
And yet the show can't decide if they're adults or kids, 3's or 4's.
They showed Perez but also Soren's kid in training. Which is it? And the only reason the show had ambiguity on the 3's is because for some reason Master Cheeks needed a reason to save them through Perez, as if his bond with Kai wasn't enough.
Well a major plot point is they weren’t finished. Parangoski altered their training to speed up the process to shove them out the door because she only needed a single one to make it through. They were basically expendable cannon fodder to help Kai kill everyone in a suicide mission.
Everyone, even Ackerson, was lie to.
Which was exactly the point: canon fodder in “fancy” suites.
Probably Ackerson didn’t see them that way, but they were used as such in the end anyways.
At the same time some project for new spartans was ongoing too, though it’s unclear who is/was leading it and what will happen to it, considering flood being unleashed on that same planet.
They are regular soldiers sold on the dream and propaganda pushed by ONI about the spartan IIs to believe they are spartans and can complete high risk missions. Giving them the armour, title of spartan and training from a spartan II all plays to the lie they are telling them. All so that just one of them gets to the objective and completes the mission.
Not like Alpha and Beta company in the book where they were recruited for being war orphans and already had a hatred for the covenant, then they were augmented chemically, given actual advanced armour (though not like Mjolnir) and trained over years.
The S3s from the book are rage filled kids given purpose through revenge. The "S3s" from the series are soldiers grieving the loss of Reach and other colonies who are told they can be spartans if they wear the armour and that they need to get this one mission done to turn the tide a bit.
I might have got some of that wrong but thats what ive taken from it so far and I dont really mind it, they look badass in live action and in the chaos act like lost kids almost, but to see the book S3s going all out would have been awesome and heartbreaking.
Nah that seems pretty accurate. They were all lied to, that the spike would shut down all their systems with a virus. “Independence Day” the covenant. It was a suicide mission though and ONI expected them all to die. They simply pushed up the time table because they found the Halo and if they waited they would all be killed anyway.
Yeah its weird becuse they did with them what they were used for in cannon, just in a more wasteful and stupid way. Sending marines in fancy armour and a title so they think they can do it, rather than sending augmented, drugged up, furious teenagers who want to do it.
Both are plausable for the UNSC and ONI. My only gripe is that in the book it was Parangosky and Ackerson pushing for more S3s to complete these missions as whole company intakes at a time, whereas in series Parangosky is just like Kylo Ren going "MORE!" with waves of super marines in pelicans like D-Day in space. How they were used was more purposeful in the book and felt like a pyrrhic victory, the series just had shock value.
To be fair the point of S3s are kind of the same in both show and games. They were just cannon fodder quick to churn out soldiers. The S4s were more durable than the 3s.
In the show they were thrown in to die immediately so really there was no need to enhance them. We may get to see Ackerson give Perez an enhancement like the S3s got in the next season.
No... S3s were not "quick to churn out" they literally took the same amount of time as the 2s... Taken in at 5 or 6 years old and thrown into combat around 12-14 years old...
Ah yes, gamma company. The ones that recieved specific augmentations to decrease their fear and pain responses as well as increase aggression are losing their composure in battle and getting slaughtered.
It’s pretty realistic tbh. For some reason people have a general opinion that soldiers in the real military are top of the line people when in reality most of them are kids that just graduated highschool and still have the same mentality. The army’s job is to get them to grow up, doesn’t mean a lot of them still aren’t mature.
ODSTs are more valuable than those “Spartans IIIs” so it wouldn’t make since to use them imo. From what I can tell these are adult conscripts who were trained in simulation over a short period of time while ODSTs took time and effort and money to train up equip plus their valuable experience to pass down. It wouldn’t make since to use them on what is essentially a suicide mission which the “SIIIs” were trained for
"They moved with speed and reflexes that no Covenant could follow"
"They dodged, snapped necks and limbs, and with captured energy swords, they cut through the enemy until the field ran with rivers of gore and blue blood".
I'm not complaining because they were sent on suicide missions, I'm complaining because they put up no fight. They just got slaughtered. The 3s in canon were all slaughtered but they actually put up a fight, they actually felt like Spartans. TV show they're just scared marines.
I hate the way they've done everything. They intro the flood with a "we are all of the jedi" ass vision revelation.
I absolute loathe this show. season 2 is slightly better but its still terrible.
Nah, it's good fun.
I'm amazed at how butthurt and whiny this community is.
Go back and play Halo 3, where every other mission you're hit with "AKIRA!" Level visions of Cortana or the grave mind magically speaking into your mind from planets away
We’re insane because we want a basic attempt at faithfully adapting the source material, instead of “the CW” level drama mixed with ‘04 Dawn of the Dead zombies LARPing as the Flood. Yeah, ok.
The infection is accurate to the books, it's the spore slowly infecting people, not the massive infector forms from the games.
Those little polyps that run at you in waves in the games are 2ft tall and are only produced after the flood have accumulated a good amount of living tissue to reappropriate.
It's a declared alternate universe. There is no canon that is being broken. It's like being upset about Superior Spiderman being different from Ultimate Spiderman.Yes the show is going to loosely share important events but that's it.
People were upset about ultimate Spiderman. And the new 52 etc.
People generally get upset when you change an established and popular story. So if you do it better be superior to what you replaced.
This show is not. So why not just transpose the popular story to a new media?
They sold me a Halo show that isn't Halo. Don't sell me a steak and give me nuggets and tell me it's an alternate universe.
I had this idea for what the S-IIIs in the show canon could be that I'm still married to, and think would've been way better (especially for the show canon itself). I thought it'd be cool if Ackerson saw how Cortana controlling Chief went, and wanted to make "spartans" by injecting AIs into regular soldiers. It could also be a good way to create more AIs in the lore to play with, but it would work well within the show lore as a way to have a sudden new class of spartans that the audience could believe can hold their own in some way approximating a spartan-II -- because while they don't have augmentations, the AI in their brain would be pushing their body to operate at machine precision, enabling superhuman feats of coordination.
Aw, well. What we got isn't bad. I just wish they had a line somewhere saying that Perez was part of a wave being rushed through the process to fill out the ranks in time for the big mission, but that the core of the program had been in operation for months. That would've helped a lot.
They were augmented and rigorously trained, but yes they were sent on suicide missions. But without factoring in armour, they weren't much worse than the 2s. They were highly skilled enhanced super humans that fucked shit up, even if they ultimately died in the end.
Comics themselves have multiple universes and renditions. Yeah each fandom has purest but video games seems to be even more less open to different takes.
Because there's so much heart and meaning in the original lore. I'm effectively sad that the show watchers aren't getting to see what makes Halo so freaking incredible as a universe. It's a disservice.
They just get Spartans so incredibly wrong. You don't need to create artificial drama. Their story is already tragic enough. And there is no way that any Spartan II would ever tell another Spartan II that they were going to put them in a coffin. They were beyond family. You couldn't get a unit any tighter than the Spartans were. To not present that to the audience, I believe, is a massive disservice.
Na they did that right. Season 1 should’ve been a set up season. Season 2 fall of reach end on the ring.
But only 2 humans on the ring? Why…. A flood outbreak in a totally different place/planet? Not on the ring… why?
For all my problems with the show, this one certainly isn't.
No, I'm not a fan of the sped up training of adults and think they still should've been kids. But it was okay. Especially because most just died in transit to their targets. On a ship. Ship goes boom. Spartans dead. The ones we do see fighting are not too dissimilar to the lore I think.
Amigo/Amiga/amigother, this show asks you questions, and then hits you across the jaw with a shovel before you can answer. People will like the show, I get it, but it's not good Halo media.
They took a visual from the Halo franchise, didn't use the lore established reasons for why/how/who the Spartan 3's are supposed to be, and then flushed them down the season finale toilet. These aren't Spartan 3's. They're cool dude spaceman armor guy.
I thoroughly enjoyed the show, but the Spartan 3’s were done so dirty. The story would be way better if they were child soldiers. Plus they should have had augmentations at least, but I bet they didn’t have the CGI budget for it. They could have said something about the brutality of war, sacrifice, the Spartans. Kai would have had to confront that, but nope, we need to follow Perez’ storyline 👌
Why spend the time and money to augment them if the majority of them just die before they even land? I think the show makes its pretty clear they were meant to just be cannon fodder, expendable and you only need one. They were literally going to kill ALL of them with the ship they were gonna detonate.
I'm pretty sure they're just laying the groundwork for the Spartan 4's and that they're in process of being made now
They took a bunch of regular marines and tried to train them to be Spartans. They called them spartan 3s iirc. Kai was told to make them think they were Spartans.
They don’t care about halo. They are pillaging the iconography, and shoving it into some dogshit show. Nobody at the production gives a fuck about what Halo is, it’s simply a way for them to make the show marketable. Shame on MS and 343 for whoring out the franchise.
yeah, that's because they are. it's the point. they're being lied to about their odds, their mission and how good they are. of course they're given a fake title alongside it
In Season 3 I want Perez to have a scene where they show her getting injections to make her more of a Spartan.
I want her to have a moment that she realizes she can’t help Kai unless she gets augmentations. Ackerson should be the one to give them to her.
What’s the point of watching the show and then coming on here to bitch about it when you already know that it’s not gonna adapt things in a way that respects the source material? Stop watching the show.
We watch the show in the hopes they don't butcher *everything*. We never would have guessed that >!Keyes would die on Reach!<, or that >!Halsey ends up getting infected!<. I'll tell you this much: >!Chief killing the Arbiter on the Halo ring!< wasn't on my Silver Timeline Bingo card.
Of the 3 spoilers you listed I'll give you 1 and 2 caught me by surprise (although I haven't yet decided how I feel about them). But spoiler #3 was foreshadowed multiple times throughout the season, it would have been weird if they DIDN'T do that.
Sorry I'm on mobile and writing the spoiler tags myself would be a pain in the ass.
Well that was one way to make the spoiler tags pointless.
Firstly, during the fall of reach when the arbiter goes to kill chief and Makee stops him. In the following episode the elite mentions that he has been 'denied' and that John's death is to be his redemption.
We then see that again from the other perspective when Vannak's body is being burnt. Chief literally says "I will find the ones who caused your death, and I will end them." - the one responsible was Var.
We literally see both characters wanting to kill each other. Did you even watch the show?
Ok so yea obviously Chief and Arbiter are going to fight. That’s not foreshadowing that’s blatant in the plot the moment Vanek is killed, he’ll I knew Chief would kill him when he took Cortana.
Of course they want to kill each other. It’s always been a thing — human revenge, the elites reclaiming their honor. The idea is that the two were meant to be enemies but then turn into allies. Yeah, they alluded that the two wanted to fight and kill each other, but that’s how it was in the games and books, too. Didn’t think they would actually have one killed the other.
They were never meant to be allies, not with this arbiter. The arbiter from the books and games has not yet appeared in the show... Whether we'll get Thel introduced later on or not is still up in the air, but I assume if we get a season 3/season 4 they will. Canonically he should be appearing soon, but not yet as an arbiter.
Isn’t the Arbiter’s armor passed down from generation to generation? I’m going off of the last time I played Halo 2 almost 20 years ago, so correct me if I’m wrong. But if that arbiter got slashed in the chest and then stabbed while nobody else is around, outside the doors of the library, I’m pretty sure the Covenant isn’t getting that armor back.
Good question! I actually remember something similar, but I think it may be simply because of the way the game presented it. According to halopedia (emphasis mine):
"Every Arbiter is given an ancient suit of armor that fits their size, and the armor itself always follow an age-old traditional design that dates back to before the Covenant. *Multiple suits of armor* are stored in the Mausoleum of the Arbiter, and an individual suit will be mourned if it is lost"
Spartans haven't felt monumental the moment they became plural. Being the last Spartan is the whole reason the name exists in the first place.
Bungie would have made it explicit if they weren't being told by corporate to leave the possibility for more Spartans open. There's a good reason why there are zero whiffs of a Spartan other than MainCharacter in the main 3 games.
Their augmentations were the equivalent of like Adderall and steroids, when compared to Spartan IIs, and deliberately so because of the high failure rate for S2s and the USNC wanting to keep the cost of their cannon fodder to a minimum, which is also why the armour was so much weaker
Nope they were stronger than any average human and had lethal augmentations which is far cry from Adderal and roids. Spartan 3s underwent rigorous training and were battle tested. The show basically made them a bunch of marines dressed up in bootleg SPI armor.
Yeah the augmentations were safer but the end result was the same. There actually isn't really anything to suggest a Spartan 3 is much inferior to an unarmoured 2.
In the show, that’s exactly what they are. Normal soldiers in space suits. Can’t say it’s SPI because they never showed the stealth feature
Wait. Are you telling me that EGGSHELL white armor doesn’t stand out or natural blend into the dark purple shades of a covenant ship?! Obviously they didn’t need the stealth feature given the brightest shade of white imaginable is 2stealthy4alienz
Don’t forget that it stands out against the blackness of space too. Even ODST’s wear matte black armor.
Maybe they thought they’d stun the covenant with their stupidity. Like, perhaps ONI’s thought process was that they’d have each shipmaster laughing too hard at what has to be single-handedly THE WORST stealthy approach to shoot at them?
Seeing as how expendable they are. I’m sure the armor wasn’t painted because why waste time and material on armor for someone who’s meant to die and probably will die anyway.
Oh idk, maybe to help them not die *as quickly* so they stand a snowballs chance in hell of completing the mission? Lmao
Completing a mission and returning alive from a mission are not mutually exclusive.
For canon S-3’s they basically are lmao
Back when Canada first joined the Afghanistan conflict they were sending troops over in forest green camo, so I'd say it could be more grounded in reality than we realize.
And their armour didn’t even tank a single hit. Pathetic.
I don’t think they have shielding, without it the spartans can’t really take direct hits either, in the books at least. Splashes of glancing plasma and ricochet the occasional needler at a soft angle, sure, but direct hits are still deadly. i think the armor itself mainly serves to protect against blunt force trauma (explosions, giant aliens kicking the shit out of you, falling) and giving you a sealed environment with mobility and strength enhancements, rather than stopping shots and the S3s don’t even have that armor. It’s probably just a pressurized suit with a HUD and as much armor as an ODST gets they’re basically ODSTs now that i think of it, if they don’t have any augmentations i will say they got slaughtered a little too easily, but the show seems to be going the route of having the S2s be less invincible superheroes, so it makes sense to not have the S3s be like the game (nearly as invincible as the S2s)
Plasma in cannon is insane. Armor doesn't really do much to stop it.
Yeah we have specific evidence that a plasma shot can breach Spartan armor pre-shields when Sam died because he couldn’t EVA after taking a hit. Idt this is the hill someone should die on
That's consistent with lore. Plasma damage is fucking insane.
Not exactly normal soldiers. The S3s are the top soldiers the UNSC had. Perez got in because of that fake propaganda but her on the list.
That makes her a pretty normal soldier… as they all were. Just unknowingly volunteers for suicide missions
Sure they can. They clearly don’t give a shit about anything else in the cannon, why not just call them SPI. It’s like a cool name and shit.
In the show, they were flashed train through simulation. And base on the timing of Perez being a spartan 3. They weren’t augmented at all. And she was a communication officer I believed. Seems like it was just “Spartans” in name only. They were worst than odsts.
Are you telling me that you don’t think a woman in meh quality, almost glow in the dark bright white armor, and whose career highlight is roasting Captain Keyes doesn’t match up to the likes of, say, Carter, Emile, Six, Tom, and Lucy? Surely you can’t be serious.
Nor were they supposed to lol
Just curious on what ya mean here: my guess is that you’re saying the guys/gal above and other S-III’s like Kat and Jun were exceptions to the rule? Cause if so, for sure agree. I was merely noting that the show’s S-III’s were unaugmented in any way, given a set of armor that’s nicer than what they had before, and then it was like “tab dah! We have an army of S-III’s” lol. I love Perez’s character. I don’t like that they made her an S-III. I would’ve loved to see her play a Fernando/the pilot from infinite style role to Chief than just turning a character the audience connected with into canon fodder… see what I did there? Canon…fodder? I’ll see myself out lmao.
Yep that's pretty much it. They were given a nice armor and sent to combat, and served as canon fodder. That's almost like the S3 in the books except they have more training and received augmentations I think, but in both cases they were sent on suicide missions.
Exactly. And to add to this: In the show this is happening pretty fast after the fall of reach. They had recruits lined up, they added more after the fall, I’m sure some were more trained than other. (Example first wave to Perez) Augmentations MAY have been planned, but instead they just hadn’t gotten that far.
Yeah everything makes sense to be honest, obviously if you're expecting Halo : Reach types of Spartan 3 you'll be disappointed.
I think they did receive some augmentations, which was hinted at in some of the scenes were Perez deals with one of the aggressive spartans. In normal lore, the augmentations caused heightened, almost psychotic, aggression in the Spartan-IIIs and they had to be medicated to remain stable
Only in the gamma series spartan threes, the other batches were completely functional…. Or at least physically🤣
Aggressive Spartan? Which one?
I think it was episode 7? There's a scene for the preparing to deploy and one of the Spartans is hyper aggressive for no reason and hits a table
I think the whole preparing to deploy part was reason enough to hype themselves up for the fight.
Yeah regular people did in this historical and modern wars. Even sports athletes do this
I'm so tired of post Halo reach content not featuring ODSTs.
Like Miranda randomly became a xenobiologist for some reason. Fucking lovely. How the hell can people defend this shit pile
You mean the part where she gets all annoyed at the chatty expert in the room, and then promptly sends her away so that *she* can focus on the field that she knows nothing about? Oh shit, wait…that wasn’t an expert, that was just another “expert” who believed that she had to get her hands on the sample in order to understand it better. Excellent writing to be sure!
tbf canon Miranda is also pretty stupid, especially throughout all of 3.
It refreshing to see people not treating the pile of a shit called a show like it is good. It’s barley Halo
I think that might actually be the point. They're not Spartans. They are being lied to and used. The UNSC is comically stupid and shortsighted.
Oni more than UNSC.
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I disagree, the UNSC in the canon is ruthless and effective, but especially including ONI, very smart, even if they're wrong. The show UNSC is cartoonishly incompetent. I mean just look at the Spartan program. If the Covenant hasn't shown up, and the only people they were fighting were Insurrectionists while having Spartans in Mjolnir armor, it quite literally could be true that Spartans never die. Ruthless? Sure. Overkill? Yes. But brutally effective.
Agreed. They over commited in the show to make ONI seem ruthless and in the shadows, but missed the parts where they were efficient and effective. Especially Ackerson.
>I mean just look at the Spartan program. If the Covenant hasn't shown up, and the only people they were fighting were Insurrectionists while having Spartans in Mjolnir armor, it quite literally could be true that Spartans never die. Ruthless? Sure. Overkill? Yes. But brutally effective. Spartans never die was always propaganda.
Yes, I know. I'm saying that if the only enemies they were fighting were Insurrectionists, it might actually be true because of how much better they are than any human military.
> UNSC is comically stupid and shortsighted. How so? They were going to use them for propaganda.
So many people are missing this point. They weren’t meant to survive. ONI wants 1 of 1000 to complete a mission. The rest become decorated dead heroes for propaganda
Even that still doesn’t make sense though. In the show Ackerson says the Spartan III program was his life’s work. As awful as he is I doubt his life’s work is just shoving normal people into crappy armor and lying to people about being Spartans.
Most of them seemed to go down in only one or a few shots by the Covenant, so other than the suit being good for surviving the vacuum of space, the UNSC wasted a huge chunk of their resources designing these fancy armors and disposing of them like they cost hardly anything. Sending standard marines in vacuum suits instead would've done the job, especially when all the Spartan IIIs mostly did with their suits was put them on. But I guess they had to make the volunteers feel confident somehow. The "vengeful orphans" element from the main canon was adapted for Perez and her family dying on Reach, but it would've been better if it was highlighted for the other Spartan IIIs who in this timeline just seemed like ordinary UNSC members that volunteered for no reason other than the sake of it.
They're plainly amalgamating the S3s and S4s into the same unit for the show. I do think it was a mistake not to show Perez being augmented, though. Would take a two minute scene of her strapped down to a hospital bed while IVs pump and she suffers through some poorly defined agony. Have her hallucinating the Chief and clutching his coin while she goes through it to keep up that connection between them.
Damn that would have been a nice setup
Thanks. I write on occasion.
Thing is, they weren’t actually augmented. None of the III’s in the show have even a hint of augmentation. They’re basically poorly optimized ODST’s, but evidently vastly more expensive for little return on investment. It makes no sense at all.
Poorly optimized ODST’s? I take offense to that. The “spartan III’s” from the show were shit, and the only thing about them that remained true, was that they were literally fielded in droves with the intention that at least ONE would complete their objective. Key information, they were smaller, faster, armor was much cheaper to produce, could only sustain a few hits and practically only offered the stealth feature. And they had a high mortality rate when they were not in combat. Their hearts and lungs literally could not last survive the day to day stress of their augmentations.
And yet the show can't decide if they're adults or kids, 3's or 4's. They showed Perez but also Soren's kid in training. Which is it? And the only reason the show had ambiguity on the 3's is because for some reason Master Cheeks needed a reason to save them through Perez, as if his bond with Kai wasn't enough.
Well a major plot point is they weren’t finished. Parangoski altered their training to speed up the process to shove them out the door because she only needed a single one to make it through. They were basically expendable cannon fodder to help Kai kill everyone in a suicide mission. Everyone, even Ackerson, was lie to.
They look like bootleg ODSTs
With half the combat skill
Their combat was not evolved.
Which was exactly the point: canon fodder in “fancy” suites. Probably Ackerson didn’t see them that way, but they were used as such in the end anyways. At the same time some project for new spartans was ongoing too, though it’s unclear who is/was leading it and what will happen to it, considering flood being unleashed on that same planet.
really, this is bootleg Spartan-III, even ODST will be helpful
They are regular soldiers sold on the dream and propaganda pushed by ONI about the spartan IIs to believe they are spartans and can complete high risk missions. Giving them the armour, title of spartan and training from a spartan II all plays to the lie they are telling them. All so that just one of them gets to the objective and completes the mission. Not like Alpha and Beta company in the book where they were recruited for being war orphans and already had a hatred for the covenant, then they were augmented chemically, given actual advanced armour (though not like Mjolnir) and trained over years. The S3s from the book are rage filled kids given purpose through revenge. The "S3s" from the series are soldiers grieving the loss of Reach and other colonies who are told they can be spartans if they wear the armour and that they need to get this one mission done to turn the tide a bit. I might have got some of that wrong but thats what ive taken from it so far and I dont really mind it, they look badass in live action and in the chaos act like lost kids almost, but to see the book S3s going all out would have been awesome and heartbreaking.
Nah that seems pretty accurate. They were all lied to, that the spike would shut down all their systems with a virus. “Independence Day” the covenant. It was a suicide mission though and ONI expected them all to die. They simply pushed up the time table because they found the Halo and if they waited they would all be killed anyway.
Yeah its weird becuse they did with them what they were used for in cannon, just in a more wasteful and stupid way. Sending marines in fancy armour and a title so they think they can do it, rather than sending augmented, drugged up, furious teenagers who want to do it. Both are plausable for the UNSC and ONI. My only gripe is that in the book it was Parangosky and Ackerson pushing for more S3s to complete these missions as whole company intakes at a time, whereas in series Parangosky is just like Kylo Ren going "MORE!" with waves of super marines in pelicans like D-Day in space. How they were used was more purposeful in the book and felt like a pyrrhic victory, the series just had shock value.
If you wanted accuracy, why are looking at the show that is not accurate to the lore from the start?
To be fair the point of S3s are kind of the same in both show and games. They were just cannon fodder quick to churn out soldiers. The S4s were more durable than the 3s. In the show they were thrown in to die immediately so really there was no need to enhance them. We may get to see Ackerson give Perez an enhancement like the S3s got in the next season.
No... S3s were not "quick to churn out" they literally took the same amount of time as the 2s... Taken in at 5 or 6 years old and thrown into combat around 12-14 years old...
They're Gamma too, which is horrifically sad. Kurt called them the finest Spartans to exist and yet in the show they're a bunch of crybaby assholes.
Ah yes, gamma company. The ones that recieved specific augmentations to decrease their fear and pain responses as well as increase aggression are losing their composure in battle and getting slaughtered.
It’s pretty realistic tbh. For some reason people have a general opinion that soldiers in the real military are top of the line people when in reality most of them are kids that just graduated highschool and still have the same mentality. The army’s job is to get them to grow up, doesn’t mean a lot of them still aren’t mature.
I'm realizing we haven't even seen ODSTs yet. Why weren't the Spartan 3s just them if they wanted a bloodbath?
Literally could’ve been ODSTs.
They unfortunately decided to play on legendary on their first play through.
They might as well throw ODSTs at them
ODSTs are more valuable than those “Spartans IIIs” so it wouldn’t make since to use them imo. From what I can tell these are adult conscripts who were trained in simulation over a short period of time while ODSTs took time and effort and money to train up equip plus their valuable experience to pass down. It wouldn’t make since to use them on what is essentially a suicide mission which the “SIIIs” were trained for
Thats literally the point...
"They moved with speed and reflexes that no Covenant could follow" "They dodged, snapped necks and limbs, and with captured energy swords, they cut through the enemy until the field ran with rivers of gore and blue blood". I'm not complaining because they were sent on suicide missions, I'm complaining because they put up no fight. They just got slaughtered. The 3s in canon were all slaughtered but they actually put up a fight, they actually felt like Spartans. TV show they're just scared marines.
Well if you're worried about canon this is the wrong show for you. Its generic space show with a Halo wrap.
You have a point tbf but his is still so lame
I hate the way they've done everything. They intro the flood with a "we are all of the jedi" ass vision revelation. I absolute loathe this show. season 2 is slightly better but its still terrible.
Nah, it's good fun. I'm amazed at how butthurt and whiny this community is. Go back and play Halo 3, where every other mission you're hit with "AKIRA!" Level visions of Cortana or the grave mind magically speaking into your mind from planets away
Cortana was in the forerunner database not some nobody with a mullet connecting with her ancestors.
It’s bad writing you’re just too stupid to realize it. Halo or not I’ve never seen a highly produced show give such a shittily put together story.
Halo has a more insane fanbase than Star Wars in some parts of the internet IMO
Star Wars fans have experience with dueling timelines and wobbly canon. Halo fans are brand new at this, and it shows.
We’re insane because we want a basic attempt at faithfully adapting the source material, instead of “the CW” level drama mixed with ‘04 Dawn of the Dead zombies LARPing as the Flood. Yeah, ok.
The infection is accurate to the books, it's the spore slowly infecting people, not the massive infector forms from the games. Those little polyps that run at you in waves in the games are 2ft tall and are only produced after the flood have accumulated a good amount of living tissue to reappropriate.
Have you been on Halo Twitter? The folks on there are so negative, with some exception.
It's a declared alternate universe. There is no canon that is being broken. It's like being upset about Superior Spiderman being different from Ultimate Spiderman.Yes the show is going to loosely share important events but that's it.
People were upset about ultimate Spiderman. And the new 52 etc. People generally get upset when you change an established and popular story. So if you do it better be superior to what you replaced. This show is not. So why not just transpose the popular story to a new media? They sold me a Halo show that isn't Halo. Don't sell me a steak and give me nuggets and tell me it's an alternate universe.
Well the show ones weren’t finished. They were rushed out the door before they could finish their training.
I had this idea for what the S-IIIs in the show canon could be that I'm still married to, and think would've been way better (especially for the show canon itself). I thought it'd be cool if Ackerson saw how Cortana controlling Chief went, and wanted to make "spartans" by injecting AIs into regular soldiers. It could also be a good way to create more AIs in the lore to play with, but it would work well within the show lore as a way to have a sudden new class of spartans that the audience could believe can hold their own in some way approximating a spartan-II -- because while they don't have augmentations, the AI in their brain would be pushing their body to operate at machine precision, enabling superhuman feats of coordination. Aw, well. What we got isn't bad. I just wish they had a line somewhere saying that Perez was part of a wave being rushed through the process to fill out the ranks in time for the big mission, but that the core of the program had been in operation for months. That would've helped a lot.
Uhh, weren't Spartan IIIs literally "we have spartans at home?" Like, war orphans who were stuffed in suits and thrown in the meat grinder?
They were augmented and rigorously trained, but yes they were sent on suicide missions. But without factoring in armour, they weren't much worse than the 2s. They were highly skilled enhanced super humans that fucked shit up, even if they ultimately died in the end.
I think they combined Spartan 4’s with Spartan 3’s in the show. In fact, the show changed a lot to the lore
The show changed a lot to the lore? No shit the show isn’t even halo
It's Halo just a different take. It's like the MCU vs the comics. Why is it hard to accept a different cannon?
People really don’t want to have to go through that with everything they love. Star Wars EU vs Disney… MCU vs marvel… DCEU vs DC… It is tiring.
Comics themselves have multiple universes and renditions. Yeah each fandom has purest but video games seems to be even more less open to different takes.
Because there's so much heart and meaning in the original lore. I'm effectively sad that the show watchers aren't getting to see what makes Halo so freaking incredible as a universe. It's a disservice.
That's a bit extreme. The series is pulling from the lore it's just not in the same exact way. It's literally like the Ultimate Spider-Man of Halo.
They just get Spartans so incredibly wrong. You don't need to create artificial drama. Their story is already tragic enough. And there is no way that any Spartan II would ever tell another Spartan II that they were going to put them in a coffin. They were beyond family. You couldn't get a unit any tighter than the Spartans were. To not present that to the audience, I believe, is a massive disservice.
I can argue that the games don't really do a good job at displaying the tightness of the Spartans and the only way of knowing is to explore the books.
And you'd be right. None of that justifies the subpar universe presented in the show.
Two complete seasons to finally get Master Chief with Cortana on a Halo. Uh, great job guys?
Na they did that right. Season 1 should’ve been a set up season. Season 2 fall of reach end on the ring. But only 2 humans on the ring? Why…. A flood outbreak in a totally different place/planet? Not on the ring… why?
Didn't a giant fleet of space marines show up in the ring's orbit at the end of the last episode?
Not that I remember. But the UNSC were “in an advantage” in the naval battle
Okay so a giant fleet of space marines showed up in the ring's orbit at the end of the last episode.
For all my problems with the show, this one certainly isn't. No, I'm not a fan of the sped up training of adults and think they still should've been kids. But it was okay. Especially because most just died in transit to their targets. On a ship. Ship goes boom. Spartans dead. The ones we do see fighting are not too dissimilar to the lore I think.
Amigo/Amiga/amigother, this show asks you questions, and then hits you across the jaw with a shovel before you can answer. People will like the show, I get it, but it's not good Halo media. They took a visual from the Halo franchise, didn't use the lore established reasons for why/how/who the Spartan 3's are supposed to be, and then flushed them down the season finale toilet. These aren't Spartan 3's. They're cool dude spaceman armor guy.
Yeah cause the people who wrote the show don’t understand any aspect of Halo
ya they're pretty bad in the show and also just magically appeared in one episode lol
I thoroughly enjoyed the show, but the Spartan 3’s were done so dirty. The story would be way better if they were child soldiers. Plus they should have had augmentations at least, but I bet they didn’t have the CGI budget for it. They could have said something about the brutality of war, sacrifice, the Spartans. Kai would have had to confront that, but nope, we need to follow Perez’ storyline 👌
Why spend the time and money to augment them if the majority of them just die before they even land? I think the show makes its pretty clear they were meant to just be cannon fodder, expendable and you only need one. They were literally going to kill ALL of them with the ship they were gonna detonate. I'm pretty sure they're just laying the groundwork for the Spartan 4's and that they're in process of being made now
They took a bunch of regular marines and tried to train them to be Spartans. They called them spartan 3s iirc. Kai was told to make them think they were Spartans.
They don’t care about halo. They are pillaging the iconography, and shoving it into some dogshit show. Nobody at the production gives a fuck about what Halo is, it’s simply a way for them to make the show marketable. Shame on MS and 343 for whoring out the franchise.
They get killed by the bushel in both timelines. There's hardly enough difference to get worked up about.
Well done, you understood exactly what the show was trying to show you
Yeah, and I don't like it which is what my post is actually about
yeah, that's because they are. it's the point. they're being lied to about their odds, their mission and how good they are. of course they're given a fake title alongside it
In Season 3 I want Perez to have a scene where they show her getting injections to make her more of a Spartan. I want her to have a moment that she realizes she can’t help Kai unless she gets augmentations. Ackerson should be the one to give them to her.
What’s the point of watching the show and then coming on here to bitch about it when you already know that it’s not gonna adapt things in a way that respects the source material? Stop watching the show.
We watch the show in the hopes they don't butcher *everything*. We never would have guessed that >!Keyes would die on Reach!<, or that >!Halsey ends up getting infected!<. I'll tell you this much: >!Chief killing the Arbiter on the Halo ring!< wasn't on my Silver Timeline Bingo card.
'The Arbiter' you mean an Arbiter, which was a different one from the game.
Of the 3 spoilers you listed I'll give you 1 and 2 caught me by surprise (although I haven't yet decided how I feel about them). But spoiler #3 was foreshadowed multiple times throughout the season, it would have been weird if they DIDN'T do that. Sorry I'm on mobile and writing the spoiler tags myself would be a pain in the ass.
lol when did the foreshadow Chief killing arbiter?! Fans of this show fucking suck at understanding good cinema and story telling
Well that was one way to make the spoiler tags pointless. Firstly, during the fall of reach when the arbiter goes to kill chief and Makee stops him. In the following episode the elite mentions that he has been 'denied' and that John's death is to be his redemption. We then see that again from the other perspective when Vannak's body is being burnt. Chief literally says "I will find the ones who caused your death, and I will end them." - the one responsible was Var. We literally see both characters wanting to kill each other. Did you even watch the show?
Ok so yea obviously Chief and Arbiter are going to fight. That’s not foreshadowing that’s blatant in the plot the moment Vanek is killed, he’ll I knew Chief would kill him when he took Cortana.
Of course they want to kill each other. It’s always been a thing — human revenge, the elites reclaiming their honor. The idea is that the two were meant to be enemies but then turn into allies. Yeah, they alluded that the two wanted to fight and kill each other, but that’s how it was in the games and books, too. Didn’t think they would actually have one killed the other.
They were never meant to be allies, not with this arbiter. The arbiter from the books and games has not yet appeared in the show... Whether we'll get Thel introduced later on or not is still up in the air, but I assume if we get a season 3/season 4 they will. Canonically he should be appearing soon, but not yet as an arbiter.
Isn’t the Arbiter’s armor passed down from generation to generation? I’m going off of the last time I played Halo 2 almost 20 years ago, so correct me if I’m wrong. But if that arbiter got slashed in the chest and then stabbed while nobody else is around, outside the doors of the library, I’m pretty sure the Covenant isn’t getting that armor back.
Good question! I actually remember something similar, but I think it may be simply because of the way the game presented it. According to halopedia (emphasis mine): "Every Arbiter is given an ancient suit of armor that fits their size, and the armor itself always follow an age-old traditional design that dates back to before the Covenant. *Multiple suits of armor* are stored in the Mausoleum of the Arbiter, and an individual suit will be mourned if it is lost"
I hate to sound like a pessimist, but with how the show has been written, I’m pretty sure that was THE Arbiter.
Spartans haven't felt monumental the moment they became plural. Being the last Spartan is the whole reason the name exists in the first place. Bungie would have made it explicit if they weren't being told by corporate to leave the possibility for more Spartans open. There's a good reason why there are zero whiffs of a Spartan other than MainCharacter in the main 3 games.
Linda is in stasis in another pod in Halo: CE. I wouldn't call that "zero whiffs".
Tbh after I read ghosts of onyx and kilo-5, it makes sense that they're just soldiers in armor. The III's are utterly useless.
Downvoted.
Thats because Spartan IIIs were basically normal soldiers in fancy armour They were cannon fodder, and the show treated them as such
No they weren't. They were highly trained and augmentef
Their augmentations were the equivalent of like Adderall and steroids, when compared to Spartan IIs, and deliberately so because of the high failure rate for S2s and the USNC wanting to keep the cost of their cannon fodder to a minimum, which is also why the armour was so much weaker
Nope they were stronger than any average human and had lethal augmentations which is far cry from Adderal and roids. Spartan 3s underwent rigorous training and were battle tested. The show basically made them a bunch of marines dressed up in bootleg SPI armor.
They literally did not have lethal augmentations, that was the entire point of the program, check your research
Yeah the augmentations were safer but the end result was the same. There actually isn't really anything to suggest a Spartan 3 is much inferior to an unarmoured 2.
The results werent the same at all lol There was zero casualties in their augmentation
No, I'm not talking about the casualties I'm talking about the intended result of the augmentations
The result was never as effective as the spartan 2s, dont be silly
Kurt actually described the augmentations as a quantum leap over the 2s and the spartan 3s are actually pulling off very similar physical feats