Awesome / Halo (2022)

Season 1

Episode 1 - Contact

• The Elites are slaughtering their way through the miners, since their outdated weapons don't have the firepower to pierce Elite shields. It's a complete horror story. Then the Spartans drop in, and suddenly it's a horror story for the Elites.
• Credit to General Jin: When caught between an invincible alien and an invincible Super-Soldier, he picks up his gun and gets ready to fight to the end. The Master Chief flips over him, breaks the Elite's shield, and gives the general a quick nod of respect.
• The Chief powering through oxygen deprivation that should have rendered him unconscious almost instantly and reversing the problem.
• Against all odds, surrounded by hundreds of marines and with only his fellow Spartans about to defend him, Chief uses the artifact to depower the entire UNSC base and repower his Condor, allowing him to escape.

Episode 5 - Reckoning

• The pitched battle for the fate of the Second Keystone. The show effortlessly captures the scale and chaos of the combat — as well as the frantic nature of multi-player, with multiple protagonists (the Master Chief; Riz and Vannak; Kai; Captain Keyes) on the field each having their own challenges. It also sees the debut of the Grunts, Jackals, Banshees, and at the end, a Brute Chieftain.
• The Chief needs to rescue Kai, so he jumps from the Warthog onto a Banshee, manually forces it to crash into the Phantom by manipulating the wing from outside, then walks out of the flaming wreckage and slaughters his way through a horde of Grunts and Jackals before quite literally stomping an Elite into the dirt.
• The Brute Chieftain. He drops down a grav-lift and almost kills the Master Chief with one swing of his gravity hammer. Had the Chief not pulled a moment of his own - grabbing a discarded Jackal shield to block the blow - he would have been killed.

Episode 6 - Solace

• The first indication of what Halo is - after John and Makee synchronise through the Keystone, they find themselves standing on green hills, and a variation of the Halo theme swells as the familiar curvature of the ringworld sweeps through the horizon and sky above them.

Episode 7 - Inheritance

• Kwan Ha comes into her own as an Action Girl at the end of the episode, helping Soren wage a two-person war while outnumbered something like 15 to 1.
• Likewise, Soren comes out like the Super-Soldier he is, effortlessly handling Multi-Mook Melee situations one after another. Despite leaving a trail of corpses and dropped guns, he never picks one up, sticking solely to what he came in with: a knife, his fists, and two revolvers.

Episode 8 - Allegiance

• Chief is overpowered in his two-on-one fight with Riz and Vannak, and is saved when two things happen:
  • Cortana takes control of a Warthog and uses it to pin Vannak for a few moments.
  • Kai leaps into the fray, quickly evening the odds and turning it from an ass-beating into a standoff.
• Note that Vannak isn't down and out just because he gets hit by a truck and rammed into a wall. He manages to shove the Warthog off and get back into the fight himself, preventing Kai and Chief from teaming up against Riz.
• Also note that Kai had been beaten unconscious and left handcuffed to a concrete bench. She came to and was able to break free within a few seconds by swinging her legs up over her head and kicking the bench to pieces.

Episode 9 - Transcendence

• Kai runs through the hangar bay, jumps onto a ship well off the ground, gets inside through the roof, defies all attempts by Adun and Halsey to contain her, and No Sells Adun beating her in the back of the head with a large wrench before killing him by smashing him into the ceiling.
  • Halsey gets away in an escape pod, leaving Kai in the doomed ship, and the last we see of her she is attempting to regain control before we see an exterior shot of the ship crashing in flames. And then Kai climbs back onto the landing pad, revealing that she escaped just in time, standing defiant with the billowing smoke of Halsey's crashed ship behind her.
• The last act is a giant pitched battle between our four Spartans and hundreds of Covenant forces on the Covenant planet. We have sniper shots, hand to hand, first person views, Kai shooting Makee, and Cortana taking over Master Chief and controlling him and the ship to save our Spartans AND the keystones.
  • The team gets a Gunship Rescue when Cortana takes control of their dropship and uses the chain gun to strafe the Covenant forces trying to overrun them. The gunship gets a Dynamic Entry by hitting a Brute Chieftain with enough weight of fire to send him flying off-screen.
• Halsey using a clone decoy to distract the UNSC. By the time the clone is dying and Miranda realizes what's happened, her mother is making her way offworld.

Season 2

Episode 1 - Sanctuary

• The Chief's battle with several Elites. It's effectively a Curb-Stomp Battle even as he tries to keep Corporal Perez alive.
  • At one point an Elite charges him from behind. The Chief Offhand Backhands it with a shotgun.
• Not to be outdone, dozens of Elites decloak and ignite their energy swords in the mist after the Chief finds Perez. It's a striking visual, but sadly, they retreat afterwards.

Episode 2 - Sword

• Kwan's got even better at fighting since her and Soren's battle with Grath and his forces. When pursued by three slavers, she kills one with Le Parkour, ejects another into space, and manages to stab the leader in the temple with her freshly removed tracking chip.

Episode 3 - Visegrád

• After being detained and assigned two escorts, the Chief boards an elevator with them, apologizes, and then knocks them both out with a single punch each.
• Kwan singlehandedly ambushes and kills Soren's entire rogue crew to save Laera. She gets two of them by tapping a railing with a knife repeatedly and annoying Soren's former first mate into sending them to find out what it was, and then backstabs the mate himself while he's torturing Laera in an airlock. After she and Laera reunite, she remains on her guard long enough to continue tapping the railing and lure out the last crewmember, then kill her as soon as she enters the room.

Episode 4 - Reach

• The Chief, Riz and Vannak prove they can kick plenty of ass even without their armour throughout the episode, despite obviously not being at their peak.
  • John tackles an Elite while it's using active camouflage and brawls with it using a kitchen knife. Thankfully Perez provides assistance with a larger stake of metal.
  • Louis is on the battlefield with a grenade launcher, deftly taking out a group of Elites firing at them from elevated cover. It must be noted the man is blind.
  • John, Riz, Louis and Perez's route back to FLEETCOM results in them battling several Elites in the hallways of a building that the Spartans deal with handily.
  • In a Dying Moment of Awesome following the death of his husband, Louis (who, it must be said again, is blind) takes out a Wraith with a ton of grenades.
  • The sight of the unarmoured Chief activating an energy sword, preparing to duel the Arbiter. It's so awesome the Arbiter is clearly as disappointed as the audience when another Elite shoots the Chief with a plasma pistol to take him out of the fight and promptly beheads the offender.
• Soren is the first to notice the cables the Jackals are using to scale FLEETCOM and opens fire on them as soon as he can.
• One Marine gets downed and dragged to safety by a fellow soldier. He's still shooting at the Covenant with a pistol the entire time.
• Keyes' Heroic Sacrifice. Surrounded by Jackals after unplugging the fuel lines from the last civilian transport, he orders Perez to take off and pulls out his trademark pipe, asking the Jackals if they've got a light for it. Seconds later the light comes in the form of Perez firing the ship's engines, igniting the fuel and killing Keyes and all the Jackals present.
• A villainous example from the Arbiter, who tanks several Needler shots from Vannak and rips the one that stuck out and stabs him in the chest with it.

Episode 5 - Aleria

• Laera and Kwan's Big Damn Heroes moment, swooping in to save the Chief, Riz, Soren and Halsey from the newly-arrived Brute Chieftain and blasting him to hell.
• Riz diving back into the fray, Guns Akimbo, to recover Vannak's body. You'd be forgiven that would be the last seen of her, but then she emerges from the smoke carrying Vannak, and she almost makes it all the way to Soren's ship before finally getting downed, thankfully close enough for the others to get her and Vannak's body on board.
• Cortana pulls few punches when being interrogated by Makee, even answering back to her in Sangheili.
  • She later discreetly helps Makee by showing her and the Arbiter the vision of Halo, which is just as breathtaking as it was in the first season, to the point it convinces the Arbiter to cooperate with Makee.

Episode 6 - Onyx

• While it's a simulation, seeing the Spartan-III candidates - and Perez among them - space-diving to the Covenant corvette is a sight to behold.
• When the Chief surrenders to the UNSC and is brought in to be restrained with tethers, he waits for the Jerkass officer from Visegrád to leave the room before wiping the floor with the Marines about to fasten him to the floor, throwing them across the room by their tethers.
• After the actions she's taken part in this season, one may hesitate to award one to Parangosky, but the revelation that she planned for Cortana's capture by the Covenant certainly counts.
• Cortana reuniting with the Chief. Once he's recovered from the beating he allowed Kai to give him, she leads him to the Keystone, remotely disabling any defenses in his way and non-lethally disabling anyone who tries to stop him.

Episode 7 - Thermopylae

• Chief is confronted by a pack of soldiers with the arrogant commander ordering them to take him down. All Chief does is look one soldier in the eye to dare him to try it. As one, all the guards lower their weapons.
  Commander: What are you doing? I said, engage!
  Soldier: Do it yourself.
  • He and his comrades just walk off and when the commander goes for her gun, Kai knocks her out from behind.

Episode 8 - Halo

• The Master Chief saving Kai, Perez and Perez' squad leader. While the fight is mostly in shadow, it's effectively an Unflinching Walk down a corridor lined with several Elites armed with energy swords, and the Chief even dispatches some of them with an Energy Sword.
• When Ackerson notices his guard has frozen due to the Flood infection, he snatches his pistol and guns down the infected Janine before she can attack Laera and Kessler.
• Soren and Kwan fighting off the Flood, starting with saving Ackerson, Laera and Kessler and later putting down several infected before being forced to retreat.
• Kai's Heroic Sacrifice, right from the screens of Halo: Reach. She takes control of the Covenant corvette they captured and crashes it into an Assault Carrier, destroying it and crippling the Covenant fleet enough to turn the battle in the favour of the UNSC fleet.
• The Master Chief's duel with the Arbiter.
  • After starting with Sword and Gun, the Arbiter simply blocks the bullets just as Thel 'Modamee did in The Package, forcing them to stick to their Energy Swords.
  • Both duelists tank severe hits from Swords and fists. The Arbiter is the first to get hit, with a slice through his left pectoral. He simply transfers his Energy Sword to his right and keeps dueling.
  • The duel also results in the Master Chief's armour acquiring its trademark scars he received before the beginning of Halo 3.
  • Even after getting his ass kicked, the Chief refuses to stay down and manages to beat the Arbiter through a Heroic Second Wind with copius use of his Grappleshot. By the time he's done beating Var's face in, he's broken several of the Elite's teeth and one of his mandibles.
  • The Arbiter faces death with dignity, confident it will be with his honour restored and imploring Makee to tell the Master Chief his wishes. When the tearful Makee finally tries to do so, the Master Chief tells her he didn't need her to before granting the Arbiter's wish with a stab through the heart.
• Despite the horror they unleash and them gutting a large part of the cast, the Flood themselves deserve props for being such a massive Knight of Cerebus with their introduction with how efficient they are at completely demolishing one of the most fortified and secure facilities within UNSC control in a matter of hours—all while being essentially a Clipped-Wing Angel for the time being due to lacking a Gravemind presently, which does a lot to show the reason why the Forerunners were so afraid of them despite being a massive interstellar empire.