I keep looking at this stuff and just can't figure out how in the nine hells someone can come up with such elaborate ways to screw up a setting and story in which even a 10 year old writing in purple crayons could strive. Since I don't own consoles Halo was never something I actually played. Never read the books either. The closest I've come to be in contact with Halo is "Forward Unto Dawn". And even to me listening and watching the reviews, all of this is jarring.
265 iterations of a script. Tens of millions in funding. Access to CGI that prior generations couldn't even dream of. 20 years of lore to draw from. And you get... this.
So, as effectively a total stranger to Halo, how about this:
Season 1 you get a team of ODST characters, and to balance that off you get a couple of indie characters. The season's mostly concerned with the war between the UNSC and the indies, you'd get the perspective of both sides. As the episodes progress you'll get more and more hints that something's off. Colonies fall silent. UNSC ships disappear. Rumors about a new threat emerge which at first are dismissed, since there are ODSTs/Indies to kill and missions to fullfill. Then, when things start to solidify, we get episode 9 and 10 as a two-parter season finale, in which the Covenant are revealed as the threat, and Spartans make their entrance, including Master Chief. Who keeps his friggin' helmet on. In an alliance of convenience the indies and UNSC defend the planet they are on, but get defeated despite their best efforts and amounts of firepower and hardware that both human sides were convinced would've given them a win, establishing the stakes for season 2.
In Season 2 you then could gradually shift the focus on Master Chief, the Covenant, etc., building up to a brief face reveal at the end of the season, for example.
Seems a little slow, and I'm not sure it would really work well.
I'd compress it down. The first two episodes sets up a conflict between the UNSC and a mixture of Insurrectionists and mercenaries, and there's hints that something is going wrong. A company commander is informed that he and the men will have to tighten their belts, because the supply ship is six days late. But it takes four days to get here from Madrigal. If the ship was delayed, the message should have got here by now. And there's funny things happening with the satellites, which the UNSC and the Innies blame on each other.
The UNSC launches a raid on the Innies, and it all goes wrong. Something is prowling out there in the bush, picking them off. What starts out as Predator-style ambushes soon escalates. The Innies and the Marines keep finding each other's soldiers, dead from horrific burns, and it looks like they were interrogated.
By episode five, the UNSC launches a counterattack on what they think is an Innie ambush, and they find aliens.
Then the Covenant get serious.
In Forward Unto Dawn, we caught a glimpse of what looked like tunnel fighting. UNSC and rebels are fighting together underground against an unseen enemy. The UNSC is reduced to this because the Covenant are launching airstrikes and artillery barrages, and nobody knows what is going on. They have to move underground or at night until relief can show up. Fortunately, the colony is on an old floodplain, and the outpost is built on a network of drainage tunnels meant to channel flash floods.
Some comms operator reports that a bunch of freighters popped into the star system and broadcast a mayday. Apparently, Harvest is under attack, and these are refugees. Those freighters hang out for a whole episode as hope builds that they might somehow be able to evacuate the Marines and the colonists, but then they flash a distress signal. This is followed by a broadcast from the Covenant. An alien warrior introduces himself and names off his victories and his allegiances, and follows it up with "Your destruction is the will of the gods, and we are their instrument."
The final episode of the series is a two-parter called "Fire In the Heavens", and it starts out with some Marines staring into the night sky. There's thunder and lightning, high above where the clouds should be. A naval officer contacts the company commander, groks their situation, and promises that help is already on the way.
Down in the tunnels, something is tearing the Covenant a new one. The Covenant are forced to fall back, giving the Insurrectionists and the Marines time to evacuate. This is the Spartans' Big Damn Hero moment.
The leader of the colonial outpost, who had sort of thrown in with the Innies before this all went down, reports to the UNSC that before the power failed, something was trying to hack into the local intranet. The colony has a library and servers full of cached data, information that his own son was learning from. The Covenant want it. After all, they're out to destroy Humanity, and you can't destroy what you don't understand. The Covenant want to know how we think, how we fight, and where we came from.
The company commander promises to set charges and destroy the library, but the leader says that he has a better idea. He needs some equipment from the UNSC, and he needs time to round up survivors.
The final scene is a band of Insurrectionists (who were already established as having lost everything to the Covenant), some of whom have donned Marine armor, holding out in the outpost's school/eating hall. The barricaded front door blasts open and plasma fire pours in. The Innies return fire, but the windows break in too. Every last one of them is pinned to the ground or slaughtered where they stand by something they can't see.
Elites decloak, and they are lead by a zealot. The Zealot interrogates one of the Innies dressed in Marine armor, and demands to know what those things in the green armor were. They fought like demons.
The Innie spits out a wad of blood, looks the zealot in the eye, and says "They are demons, and they've come to drag your alien ass into Hell."
The zealot scoffs and promises that this planet will burn, and it is just the first of many. As he speaks, we cut to dropships landing in the outpost, dropping troops carrying special equipment. One of the Grunts is already carrying a machine into the server room and plugging it into the servers.
The zealot's speech ends as the machine restores power to the server room. The lights come on, and the Grunt spies a device in the corner. It's UNSC green and warhead-shaped, and it has a big radiation symbol on the side.
The Innie smiles at the zealot and says "Yeah. This planet is going to burn. You and your troops are going to burn along with it."
The whole colony goes up in a flash of light.
Cut to the warship that evacuated the colony, where the company commander is promised a promotion and gets a chance to thank the Spartans for saving his ass.
"You realize that this isn't over?"
"Yeah. I know. This war is just beginning."
