Hello, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome back
to Lore Crimes. Now, you may have noticed this
is a brand new series, a bit of a special series
that we're premiering just for you, because we
really enjoy our talks with Fantasy Fireside,
and we will be getting back to Fantasy Fireside
and talking about not just Warhammer Fantasy,
but other stuff. But we also wanted to talk about
some sci -fi stuff. So, Colin, would you like
to announce what this series is called? Of course,
we're having ourselves a little sci -fi sit -down,
as it were. One could call it as such. Got to
have that alliteration in somewhere. Of course.
And because Colin was the one who came up with
the idea, I believe, I figured, well, what can
we talk about to start things off? And Colin,
what are we talking about today? We're going
to be talking about a setting near and dear to
our hearts, a nice little bit of Halo today.
We love it. Indeed. And today it'll be the, you
know, in the Halo games, Master Chiefs, he's
chewing bubble gum and kicking ass and he's being
a cool guy, doesn't afraid of anything. But,
you know, there was a whole war going on in the
background. So for the first bit of sci -fi sit
down, I figured let's... Let's take a look at
that war. Let's look at the Human Covenant War.
What defined the setting of Halo, as it were.
Where we get Funny Green Man and everyone else,
almost. And just to get us started, Halo is set
in our universe in the future. For reference,
do we know -ish when Halo... Halo Combat Evolved
takes place. I'm very sketchy on the time zones,
but isn't it something like 2200 or something
like that? Farther ahead, but you are right.
Halo Combat Evolved takes place in the year 2552.
Oh, okay. Wow. I imagine that's at least in part
because 2 and 5 make 7, and Bungie does love
themselves the number 7. Yeah. They do love Seven.
Seven and world domination, which... Destiny.
Oh, no. How's that world domination going out
for you, Button G? What's going on? Well, I guess
I should say they used to love Seven in that.
Now they seem to just like being evil and incompetent.
Yeah. But yeah, so we've had, kind of like Warhammer,
we've had the current history we're living in
through now, and then in a few years' time or
a few centuries' time... We're in the setting
of Halo. So where are we starting off with the
Human Covenant? We're going to start a couple
years beforehand. We're going to go to the lovely
year of 2517, right? Because there's a few things
that have or will occur shortly leading up to
around this year. And it'll help set some background.
So by 2517, humanity has, you know, in sci -fi
settings, and we got on ourselves a nice little
space board empire, right? The UN, pardon me,
the UEG, United Earth Government, sending out
WIG. WIG. Sending out, you know, colony ships
for a couple hundred years, settling on planets,
terraforming. Some of them are, you know, massive
population centers such as Reach. Some of them
are little backwater places of minimal import
were not for what would happen on them like Harvest.
You know, nothing too important. It's some sci
-fi stuff right now. Humanity's spreading out.
Around 800 worlds, I believe, is the total. Nice.
It's a nice chunk of worlds, you know. It's not
the Imperium. It's not a million worlds, but
hey. 800 worlds were only 500 years from the
future. I'd say that's decent. We've only got
one. We can't complain. Yeah, we have one. Any
amount more than one automatically leagues above
what we have nowadays, right? And by this point,
the setting's history, though. There are some
issues, even before the aliens decide to kill
everyone. You've got the insurrection. Far away
colonies going, why do I have to pay taxes to
Earth? You're like a thousand light years away.
I don't care. I've never seen Earth. I don't
care. So, you know, there's some stuff with that.
You know, some independence movements of Bruin.
You know, there's some unrest. I combined disruption
and unrest into a new word. That's going on.
the reason I chose 2517 as a nice starting point
is because that is the year that the UNSC, the
United Nations Space Command, Office of Naval
Intelligence, did that goofy little thing they
did and stole 75 children to turn into super
soldiers. ONI are comically evil, and I love
it, but also... How did they get so comically
evil? They must be quite important if they're
allowed to just do that, surely. Well, I imagine
it's been... Take the CIA or whatever, right?
And now give them 500 years of access to space
-borne technology. You can hide all sorts of
crazy government stuff in the infinite void of
space, I imagine. I imagine it didn't take them...
Even if it took them a few hundred years by Halo
to become Oni as we know and love and hate, they
had some time to practice their awfulness. It's
much more easy to interrogate someone on an asteroid
field and then just leave them there and say,
a political prisoner? What political prisoner?
Are you going to go look for them? Enjoy the
entire galaxy? Go find them. Good luck. We could
have just shoved them in a box and sent them
to the other end. You don't know. Shot him into
the sun. Why not? So and the reason they do this,
by the way, for those not familiar, Master Chief
was not made to fight aliens. They were made
to fight insurrectionists because there was a
series of reports made by a fellow named Dr.
Carver called the Carver findings, as well as
later annotated and updated by Dr. Catherine
Halsey, the wonderful woman in charge of turning
the Spartans into war machines. That said, basically,
with all this unrest going on in the fringes
of human space, we got a good few decades before
we nuke ourselves back to the Stone Age at the
worst. Which is definitely the worst case pessimist
outlook, right? But it doesn't matter if that's
how true that is, because Oni and the UNSC believed
it to be true, or they should plan for it. To
their credit, there was a colony at least once
that the UNSC pulled an Imperium on, an Exterminatus.
It was called Far Isle. There was a colony, and
then there was nuclear wasteland. Yeah. And I
think there's a little bit of teasing of this
in Halo Reach when you get onto that first mission
and you find the people, and they're kind of
scared by the Spartans, but it's not really explained
in the games much. It's more in the books. Yeah,
that is definitely more in the books. Although
that does incidentally make the Rainbow Six Siege
Master Chief skin the closest thing we've ever
gotten in a video game to what the Spartans were
intended for. Coolest thing in the last 10 years.
Master Chief falling through that house like
a sledgehammer. Just being like, right, time
to clean house. Like, oh, that was good. Oh,
it's Rainbow Six? Oh. Yeah. So that's why we've
got Spartans. That's why the UNSC military at
this point was... kicking into gear even before
the aliens showed up a bit. And a couple different
characters you will eventually know from the
games. We're starting to get some lore presence
around this point, games or books. But perhaps
most importantly, for what would be to come,
humanity, at least some people by this point,
know that we're not alone in the universe. Certain
archaeological dig sites, naturally immediately
taken over by Oni, had discovered ancient Forerunner
relics in a couple different facilities. Reach
has at least a few of them, at least one. You
blow it up in the game, or at least bury it.
And there was actually a picture taken through
it from a telescope of High Charity. The Covenant
Homeworld. Homeworld planet station. It's like
a gigantic... People might have a reference of
the Phalanx from Warhammer, but imagine that,
but even larger, I think. It's basically a planet
-sized city that can fly around, if I remember
correctly, at the scale of it. It's slipspace
capable. That thing can move. So with all that
settled, now we go to the year 2525. In this
year, there's a trading vessel. Just some human
cargo freighter. Nothing too important on its
own. Has a bit of an error with a slipspace engine.
It has to jump out of slipspace. Sucks for that
guy, but it's like a car breaks down on the highway,
basically. It's not that big of a deal, all things
considered. Not great, but Space AAA can come
and give you a hand eventually. Humanity is advanced
enough by this point in Halo that it's unfortunate,
but that guy's not going to die. You're not stranded,
yeah. No. We'll find you. Well, he is going to
die, unfortunately, but not because of slow space
issues. Because a Kigyar, also known as a Jackal
Frigate, funnily enough, the name of the ship
is the Minor Transgression. Jackals are pirates,
for those of you not too familiar with the lore
of the Covenant species. They find this thing
and they go, hey, what if we invade it? So they
do, and then they invade another one. They do
manage to get a distress signal off these ships,
not to save them. These people on these ships
are well dead. But it is enough for an undercover
ONI agent and an AI on Harvest to realize something's
going wrong. They think it's insurrectionists,
though, because like I said, humanity's a civil
war is a ruin. And even before then, there's
a whole lot of minor different rebellions cropping
up. So they think it's insurrectionists. So they
set a trap for these jackals, right? Such as,
for example, not for example, one of the members
of this trap is good old Avery Johnson. And they
get ready to fight what they think are some innies,
some dirty innies. And then they start fighting
aliens, which, oh boy, surprise, we're definitely
not alone. Previously, you know, the... Just
because of how space works, right? They could
have seen High Charity from like 10 ,000 light
years away. That means it was there 10 ,000 years
ago, you know? There's no proper way to date.
Are those guys still around? Now we have confirmation.
They are still around. And they're a little bit
mean. Also, is it worth briefly mentioning about
Johnson is kind of like a prototype Spartan in
a way. He went through a procedure that was similar
to what they were trying to do with Spartans,
but it failed for what they wanted to create.
But he is built different. He is built different.
They call them Spartan Ones, although that is
in -universe retconning, actually. They renamed
it the Spartan One program once they started
working on the Spartan Twos. They were like,
well, we're taking a whole lot of research notes
from this. Let's change the name up a bit. So
technically he's a Spartan. Not Master Chief
or Spartan Three or even Spartan Four levels,
but he is built different. So, after this little
skirmish, they do still manage to open some diplomatic
channels. Everyone's like, hey, alright, look,
rough first start, let's try again. Let's just
try and be reasonable about this, you know? Tensions
were high, we didn't expect you, you didn't expect
us, let's try and be reasonable. I find it also
very funny that in the book Contact Harvest,
where this takes place, right? The people in
charge are scrambling. We don't know anything
about them. It's a literally alien culture. How
do we make a good first impression? We want to
show that we come in peace, right? So they prepare
this massive vegetarian fruit buffet. We don't
know what they're like. What if they think even
killing animals is primitive and barbaric? We
don't want to take any chances. And then the
brutes are the ones in charge of diplomatic meeting.
Well, they don't remind me of a little bit Sorry
if this sounds annoying but like mass effect
when they first find the other alien races who
at this point are all united they're like a a
multi -species society they bump into the turians
who are like a very militarized faction stoic
disciplined bird people and that starts like
the first contact war and it's not until the
asari and some of the other races came i was
like stop fighting stop it stop it we can fix
this like okay and so that also means that like
by the time mass effect starts the the human
species has only been integrated for like 20
years or so, and there's still people who are
just like, I remember when you attacked my planet,
and therefore I think you suck, and I'm species
-ish. Kind of like that, but unfortunately, none
of the third parties in the Halo that do exist
to some extent either were in a position to or
would stop that war. As we get later into this,
that'll make a bit more sense. But something
goes wrong with the meeting. It's already off
to a rough start again. The giant monkeys that
like the taste of meat have been handed a vegetarian
buffet and are realizing that these small little
funny things are probably quite a bit weaker
than the giant Tarzan monkey. Are the brutes
cannibals as well? Am I right in remembering
they eat each other occasionally? I think they
will. Uh, yeah. Well, I'm just thinking, like,
oh, they kind of look like monkeys. We'll eat
them, too. Like, oh, okay. They're smaller than
us. We'll eat them. No, please. Brutes are not.
That name is quite accurate. But a grunt. Poor
grunts. Grunts are a very frightened people,
as a general rule of thumb. They're called ungoi
scientifically. They'll just call them grunts.
He gets a bit nervous and opens fire. A firefight
starts. Round two of diplomatic meetings have
gone wrong. And unfortunately, there will be
no round three. Because these three beings, they
did have names prior to this and occupations,
but they don't matter. We will call them the
prophets of truth, mercy, and regret. There is
a foreigner AI at the center of High Charity
that helps keep it powered. The covenant prophets
can go ask it great questions. Maybe it'll deign
to answer them. Maybe it won't. It tells them
something important about the covenant language
and religion, which is that the glyph they had
been reading as reclamation translates to reclaimer,
which... And that glyph shines quite brightly
around human presence and detects humans. So
they come to the realization that, oh no, our
entire religion is a lie. Because for those of
you unaware, they worship the foreigners as gods
and they believe that the covenant is its chosen
peoples who will follow in their footsteps to
ascend to godhood as the foreigners did. And
now one of the surviving artifacts of that religion
is telling them that, no, humanity is actually
our successors. Get bent. It's interesting, though,
that I've already mentioned Mass Effect, the
comparison of they have the equivalent of the
the forerunners with the profeons. But it's more
like we're not going to be religious zealots.
We're going to be scientific and go, oh, where
did the profeons go? they left all this technology.
The humans find a relay on Mars. That's how they
get to the wider community. But then there is
also a thing of the people who found it, the
Asari, they kind of concealed that they had knowledge
of the Protheans from the rest of the galaxy.
And I'm like, I see you copying Halo's homework
there, Mass Effect. What are you doing? I know
you slightly changed it up, but that's cheeky.
I still see what's going on here. But this is...
This is basically, this would spell the death
knell of the Covenant, or at the very least,
the Prophets. If you couldn't tell, there's some
religious intonations with their role in Covenant
society. It would certainly spell the end of
them being in charge, to say the least. There
would be some upheaval in Covenant society. As
I imagine there would be in anything, if you
got direct message from the chief religion of
your society that your religion was wrong. Yeah,
imagine if the Vatican Church got a message from
the god of Buddhism. It's like, oh, it's wrong.
What about all our treasures and buildings and
churches? Oh, we can't let... No, I'm the pope.
No, we don't have that. I got a phone call from
Zeus. That's not great. Turns out Zeus was correct.
Yep, worship the thunder god. Awesome. Yeah,
it's like, oh, that's awkward. So to hide this.
They declare that humans are inherently unclean,
and it's time for nothing less than the complete
eradication of humanity. So that is how we get
the conflict that would end with the Halo games.
2555, keep in mind. There is a... I guess, you
know, a little bit of jumping to the end here,
but this isn't, you know, quite 40 case again,
scales of war where it's been 10 ,000 years of
war, but it does. The conflict ends in 2553.
So almost 30 years. And it is long enough for
an entire generation to be born knowing nothing
but the human covenant war. It is initially kept
secret that humanity is at war with aliens and
they keep this a secret. As much as they can
for quite a few years, actually. It's only, I
want to say, a little under halfway into the
war that they can't hide the fact that we're
fighting aliens. Mostly because by this point,
we've lost a good few hundred planets. But building
up to that, the first part of the war was on
that planet of Harvest. If you've ever played
Halo Wars, you'll know that it starts with Captain
Cutter. five long years five long years which
i think also does actually make it the single
longest battle of the human covenant war because
most of them didn't last that long and to be
fair it's like arguably the most grueling even
kind of when it's like and then setback after
setback was like we're winning and then it's
like shots of all these guys being stabbed with
energy swords and you're like oh no yeah it's
like it starts with like hoorah marines let's
get them and you know there's there's a nice
a shot of uh A bunch of Marines cheering while
a Covenant ship falls from the sky. And then,
yeah, it immediately cuts to them getting, like,
stabbed, blown up by Banshees, glassed. It's...
It's not great. The first bit of the war, right?
Covenant. They send a single ship over Harvest.
Humanity sends three. Good to be prepared, right?
None of those three ships report back. So now
they're like, okay. It's time to lock in. They
send 13. And they do. They do manage to destroy
that Covenant ship. At, I believe, the cost of
10 human ships. Damn. It is... It's not an even
fight. It is not at all an even fight. Uh, they
only won thanks to, uh, the efforts of, uh, how
do you call them? Not call. Oh, pardon me. I,
I vastly underestimated. They sent 40 ships and
13 were destroyed. Wow. That's even, even worse.
My word, uh, to, to blow up one covenant. Uh,
this was, it was called a super destroyer. So
this was like, you know, a real big meaty ship,
but yeah, this wasn't just like a run of the
mill, like freighter. This was like, no, this
is one of their big guns. Okay. Yeah. But even
still, 40 to 1 is not what you want to see as
what you need to bring. Yeah, like 30 losses
between the two different skirmishes. Like, oh,
30 ships for one of yours? Oh, no. Yeah. 13 were
destroyed at first. I think the casualty is up
to 16 ships, but that's still almost half of
what you sent after them got blown up. Harvest
is then the site of bloody warfare for five more
years. It's horrible. This is, by the way, at
this point, the largest single battle in space
humanity has ever fought. And it's 40 dudes versus
one. It was only one because Captain, at this
point, I think he was only a captain. Preston
J. Cole, a very cool dude, realized that, and
this does sound kind of stupid at first, but
he realized that you need to overload the shields
first. If you just do, like, periodic sustained
fire. They're going to keep recharging. You've
got to fire basically every ship in the fleet
coordinated all at once at the thing, which sounds
like a little stupid brain -dead idea. Fire everything
at once, blow them up. But it is like if we don't
overwhelmingly concentrate all at once and coordinate
our fire, we're screwed. Yeah, I've played a
lot of Halo where you get the elite shields down
and he runs behind a tree like, ah, where are
you going? Come back. Come back. I'm going to
get you. Yeah, it's it's that. But for a whole
warship, it's not great. And this this kind of
becomes the standard of the human covenant war,
right? The covenant will invade. Humans will
do what they can. And at first, like, you know,
mankind's like, all right, we're going to get
these. We'll do like the Halo Wars. We'll get
some forward operated bases going. We'll get
ready for a fight. We're here for a war, right?
been on harvest for five years. We got to get
set for a war of conquest. And then about the
first time the Covenant glass a planet, they're
like, well, they're not here for conquest. Conquering
is not the goal. We're just here to kill you.
And they don't want our stuff. They want us to
have no stuff. Yeah, no. They don't want us around
anymore. And it is actually, again, the first
message this was informed by the prophets, by
the way, was broadcast in near -perfect English,
which means they've been studying our language
for some time before we showed up. So that's
a nice bit of fun worry. And then the prophet
of truth was heard all across the world, and
the humans in perfect English heard ligma balls
and just glassed. And, uh, it is, uh, early on,
the pattern sets itself of what the war is going
to be very quickly. Uh, I know some people in
some, like, different, you know, online, and
I know at least in some videos I've made about
Halo, were like, well, humanity won all the time
on the ground. That is not correct. Uh, the way
as it is worded, almost verbatim, and I remember
the Halo Wars timeline very specifically, I read
through that shit religiously as a kid. humanity
won isolated engagements, most of which were
on the ground, which is not humanity won most
ground victories. It's most of the times they
managed to win. It was on the ground. It's someone
put a comma in the wrong place and misread it.
Oh, okay. Yeah. To be fair, whenever you see
a cutscene or gameplay of just the elites fighting
the regular guys of the UNSC, they're smashing
through walls, they're cutting them up, they're
grabbing them by the head and pulling them off
the ground. That's a tough opponent for one -on
-one. Plus you've got all the cannon fodder of
the jackals and the grunts. You've got the brutes
involved. You've got the buggers, the buzzers.
There's an entire coalition of alien racists,
all who specialize in different ways. And then
you've got like, I'm just a guy with an assault
rifle. This is too much for me. This is bullshit.
I'm Steve. This is bullshit. Yeah. It's a bit
of an uneven fight. So. Just like I said, there
are a fair amount of different winds, right?
There's one battle fairly early on. The Covenant,
it's a planet called Hot Yai. The Covenant do
what they do. They land, they kill as many people
as they can. They start looking for stuff, which
is probably foreigner artifacts. They love to
hunt for foreigner artifacts. It's kind of their
whole religion. In response, the UNSC drops 100
ODSTs on that base, and they manage to take it
without any casualties. Ooh, ooh, ooh. ODSTs.
Yeah. ODSTs are pretty sick. Those are the exceptions.
Because, again, you play Halo, right? You pick
up a plasma weapon. You think they're great for
dealing with shields. They're not so great once
the shields are down. You've got to switch out
to the bullets. That is not how it works in the
lore. That is how it works to make the games
fun. Even if you get hit with a plasma pistol,
you are probably dead, or at least out of the
fight. Hmm. Your chest piece is melted, and it's
melted to your ribcage. Yeah, and that ribcage
is now on the outside. It's not great. Actually,
in the universe, a grunt with a plasma pistol
is a threat to a UNSC Marine. Grunts are scared,
and if you shoot them loud enough, they'll run
away even if you don't hit them. But just purely
looking at technology, it is a vastly uneven
fight. And then we get to space where the average
ratio of the UNSC Navy to get a tie, at least,
like to get a victory, is three to one. And that
is with equivalent ships, like I said. If the
Covenant break out like those super carriers,
like the one over Harvest, I hope you got a whole
fleet. Humans are like, we don't have a super
carrier. What do you mean a super carrier? We
don't have one of those. Yeah, it's not great.
There are a few things humanity does have going
for it. Not too many, but there are a few. One,
of course, is those Spartans. Originally, and
their first mission was a semi -test mission,
the first one, see how they do, was to deal with
some insurrectionists. They're very quickly retooled
to deal with aliens. Because as it turns out,
super soldiers designed to kill other humans
is still a super soldier. So the Covenant learns
what it's like to fight Spartans. And Spartans
are pretty kick -ass. They're pretty damn cool.
Even early on, they don't have energy shields
right away. At least by the time of Halo Wars,
them having energy shields is again a nice little
gameplay thing. Even early in the war without
energy shields, they're still massively augmented.
They're doing backflips over elites and shooting
them mid -air. Taking names, doing all sorts
of special missions. then any time some super
important whatever job needs to be done, you
send in a Spartan, you can rest easy knowing
it's almost certainly going to be achieved. Problem,
there's 34 Spartans. That is not a lot. So while
they are great at doing whatever their victory
is, and even if you just attach them to a normal
army for a mission and say, hey, go rain hell
behind enemy lines, just make them suffer, that's
great. and whatever area they're in will probably
be a UNSC victory. There's the whole rest of
the battleground occurring, where the Covenant's
got their wraith tanks and ghosts and hunters,
the 12 -foot -tall worm monsters. Spartans help
them last longer, not enough to quite win. There's
also quite a few brilliant commanders on the
UNSC side. Captain Keyes. was the, I believe,
the only person ever in the entire war to win
against the Covenant in a naval engagement while
he was outnumbered. It was just him on his ship
he was commanding versus, I think, three Covenant
vessels. And he was doing napkin math the whole
time, like, if I maneuver like this, I gotta
avoid these. If we do it like this... They called
it the Keys Loop. He Tokyo drifted a frigate,
basically. And managed to get the Covenant to
shoot at each other a bit, fire Mac rounds into
it. Looked good. And of course, Admiral Preston
J. Cole, who never lost a single battle against
the Covenant, he was eventually promoted to basically,
you are the man of the Navy. We will give you
everything we want. You need more ships? Yes,
sir. Have some more ships. He would go on to
win countless decisive victories against the
Covenant. at least decisive in the sense that
he won and the Covenant had to send more troops
later on. But even despite all this, humanity's
got heroes born left, right, and center. Sergeant
Johnson, Master Chief, all the Spartans. Do we
know how many Spartan IIs were made? I want to
say, top of my head, it's like a couple hundred
at best. It was 150 originally for the sake of
budget constraints. They had to pull back on
that, bring it down to 75. Okay. And then of
those 75, only 45, I believe, 30 of them died
outright from the augmentations, and 12 more
washed out. Okay. So, like, they lived, but they
were... didn't make the cut some of them were
like permanently crippled i think at least two
of them had to be put in suspended animation
just to see if they could ever make anything
out of it um so 33 spartan twos initially yeah
and um i did i do have to correct something uh
there was an episode of law crimes we did a while
back where i said that Master Chief is the highest
rank of, like, Spartan officers without being
a commissioned officer. It's only the case for
Spartan 2s. The only one who was higher ranked
than Master Chief was Kurt Ambrose, who was,
like, the guy who overtore the Spartan 3 program.
So, like, Carter from Halo Reach outranks Master
Chief, but that's just because Spartan 3s were
mass produced, whereas Spartan 2s, there were
so few of them. They were like, we can't give
Master Chief a desk job. He's too powerful. We
need to keep him in the front lines. That would
be a bit of a waste. Yeah, so the war then continues
on as this. And of course, the other final thing,
just because everyone likes big guns. Mac cannons.
Super big rail gun, because at the end of the
day, right? You can have all the fancy science
fiction, whatever you want. Big rock thrown fast
enough is still the ultimate weapon. Even that
close in atmosphere, it's fine, George. Don't
worry about it. And if I remember correctly,
the orbital ones can fire something at 4 % the
speed of light. Those ones, if they managed to
hit right, they would go through one Covenant
ship, then go through a second. And it was only
the third one that would finally stop the Mac
round. That being said, as much as all those
things are nice, humanity is outnumbered vastly.
They're outgunned. Every destroyed Covenant ship
is promptly replaced by another. And it's not
like the Covenant is lacking for leadership of
their own, even ignoring the Prophets. There's,
of course, the Elites. I do love me some giant
warrior lizards. led by their own intelligent
admirals ready to see the war through, eliminate
the scourge on their religion, such as good old
Thel Vadimi, a .k .a. the Arbiter, for when we
get there. And over the next 30 -odd years, a
little bit less, humanity goes from 800 worlds
to maybe a dozen. The war is just absolutely
brutal. Billions are dying. Eventually, they
just start evacuating. The Covenants show up.
They're like, get everyone on a freighter that
we can. Send them somewhere else. And the next
30 years is mankind doing every single possible
thing it can at a certain point just to slow
the Covenant. By the 20th year of the war, it's
starting to become clear that I don't know if
we can win this fight. There's a variety of different
things. There's the Cole Protocol. Once again,
Admiral Preston J. Cole, who says, if you're
captured or about to be boarded or about to be
destroyed, erase all your navigational data.
Destroy your ship's logs. They cannot find Earth
or any other planets, but mainly Earth. Can't
find Earth. Don't let them do that. If you can
retreat, just jump some more random in space.
Basically, just smash your hand on the keyboard
and the GPS input and go wherever you end up
and then do that a few more times until you can
finally set a course to safe waters, right? Spartans,
for the first, I think, it's almost like 30 years
of their existence, they're not even publicly
made aware of. But eventually they are, people
are like, Oni is like, hey, look, we got these
really cool super soldiers. Aren't they awesome?
And then ignore the fact that a suspicious amount
of them are listed as MIA. Spartans never die.
They're only missing in action. Which is indeed
official protocol by Oni to never list a Spartan
as dead. Because no one wants to find out that
those demigods are actually quite killable. Yep.
And again, throughout this, there are isolated
human wins. Preston J. Cole goes out, and I say
go out, not die, because there's evidence he
might have lived and just retired because he
was just done fighting. He lured about 300 Covenant
ships into a gas giant and then fired a fleet's
worth of nukes at that gas giant to turn it into
a star. which vaporized the entire Covenant fleet.
Nice. The Spartans were this whole time raining
merry hell, doing what they can to kill every
Covenant. But as the year goes on, there's less
and less Spartans. And they can only be deployed
in like... like kind of like that with like 40k
like one spartan like master chief can do a lot
but he's he's limited to a city or a small place
he can only do anything that's in like small
arms fire range there's a lot of fighting going
on and um every time you lose one of those guys
they're basically irreplaceable so yeah not great
even as powerful as they are they can only be
in one place at one time you know they do eventually
start constructing uh constructing. I guess that
is a good enough word. Spartan III is the third
generation, headed by a man named Colonel James
Ackerson, who I'll give Catherine Halsey some
amount of credit. She did at least feel bad about
it. You still kidnap the children and turn them
into machines of war. She at least had the conscience
to feel bad about doing it. Yeah. Ackerson did
not have that conscience. Nope. He admitted it,
but he didn't feel bad. This goal was to, you
know, we have Spartans. They're not enough. We
need expendable Spartans. So he made some expendable
Spartans. And I'll give the threes some credit.
I like the threes. If they were given the same
care as the twos, they could have been just as
good, if not better. They were given worse off
armor and basically the explicit purpose of the
threes. was send them on missions that an ODST
can't complete and a Spartan 2 can't complete
without dying in the process. And send like three
of them, just to be sure. And to be fair, if
you've got like 40 Spartan 2s, if you can make
like 400 Spartan 3s, that's a lot more war zones
that could benefit from Spartans. Indeed, but
that's basically how it worked. The first couple
missions of each generation of Spartan 3s, there
was like 300 of each. You know, 300 Spartans.
They'd spend like a couple months going on missions
against the Covenant, kicking ass, taking names.
These are, again, still children, and it was
even worse for them because the genetic selection
process was made looser because technology improved
after the Spartan IIs, which meant they would
go up to basically any old random war orphan
from the Covenant, some six -year -old, and go,
hey, little Timmy, do you want to hurt the people
that killed Mommy and Daddy? Yeah, and to be
fair, with the outbreak of the first contact,
I believe John was like 14 years old. So he wasn't
super old by the time he was deployed. And I
think now in the timeline, he's like pushing
50. He's got them old bones and he's not allowed
to sleep. In modern Halo, yeah, he's getting
older, but he's not even 50. He's getting there,
but they were quite young. I think it's even
worse for the threes because at least the twos
had like five years of training for the augmentations
and time to at least hit puberty. The threes
were induced puberty, which means that even before
they were augmented, like there's passages where
they would stand up and you went from the body
of a six -year -old to the body of like a 20
-year -old and to learn how to walk again. And
then they were augmented and given power armor
and said, all right, go get them, buddy. I don't
know how to spell yet. I can't read. Don't worry
about it. Can you count to 15? Because that's
what the ammo counter goes up to. Can you count
the amount of grenades on your chest? Yeah. Well,
don't lose count because if you drop one, you're
going to be in trouble. Have at them. That's
the measures humanity is resorting to at this
point because it is not looking good. Again,
sporadic victories, but by and large, over the
course of those almost 30 years, we go from,
yeah, humanity's got a pretty decent little space
empire going, to where'd all those planets go?
They're turned into glass, because the Covenant,
it's called glassing, they show up with their
massive ships and their plasma beams, fire at
the ground until the planet is glass. without
the scorching more of the let's just let's just
and to be fair that would come in handy later
on in the halo timeline at least from humanity's
perspective but right now it's not great right
now no this is this is awful i just spent all
this money on this beautiful house on this on
the coast oh no it's turned into glass oh no
and then i'm turned into glass oh no uh oof is
a good way to put it. It's, they... I remember
reading, it's in Halo Reach, you can find a data
log where it's like, initially they're like,
well, based on what we, you know, we believe
the Covenant fleet size to be, it would take
them hundreds of years to glass a single planet,
let alone all of them. And then they realize,
oh, there's a lot more Covenant ships than we
thought there was. Glassing takes days, not centuries.
They don't always totally glass a planet. Some
terraforming can always be done. Sometimes they
just glass the human settlements and then leave.
But on the real populated worlds, you got a nice
little marble now left over. Yeah. Going forward
from there, we would get to the closing years
of the war. There's, at this point... essentially
two planets of any worth humanity has left. Earth,
of course. And I will give Halo credit. They
avoided calling it Terra. I know after I've...
I got done yapping about Battletech for two hours.
They also call it Terra. Something about war
games. They really like changing Earth to Terra.
They like that Latin name for some reason. They
held back in Halo. But yeah, so it's just Earth.
And of course, the planet of Reach. The most
important planet, arguably more so than Earth,
because Earth is the homeworld of humanity. It's
where a lot of political organizations are home.
It is important. It's not just symbolic. Reach
is where you make the weapons that you need to
kill the aliens that want to kill you. It's like
Armageddon. Like, oh no, we can't lose this one.
It's too important. Yeah, it's like, I know it
sucks, but we really need to keep it. It's like
the headquarters of the military. It's the home
of the Spartans. I forget the exact number, but
it's like some hugely disproportionate amount
of the Navy and the Army come out of Reach. I
think half of its population is enlisted in the
military. Yeah, I get the impression from Reach
that the actual native population, there's not
that much of them. It's like farming communities
and stuff like that. it's not about that. It's
about, we have all these top secret facilities
and enlisted men who are doing stuff, but they
don't ask. Don't worry. Don't worry about that.
We're just, you do your farming and leave us
alone and we'll leave you alone. It's fine. Yeah.
There's, there's, I think, like I said at the
beginning, there's foreigner artifacts on reach
too. It's like for like all, like every tier
you can imagine. And there's just massive amounts
of titanium, which is what the UNSC builds their
ship out of. So everything for like the most
mundane, boring reason, we need it to mine. to
the most top -secret alien super project stuff
going on in the bowels of Reach. Reach is very
important. And let's not forget the most important
thing about Reach, those ostrich -looking things
that you see on the first level that run past
you. The moas. Yeah, they're great. You can get
a moa burger when you're in New Alexandria, or
Reach City, as a certain show calls it. Doesn't
that same certain show kill the Arbiter in a
fight with Master Chief? It kills a Arbiter.
One of them, yeah. There were other Arbiters,
but that's not why they did it in the TV show.
That wasn't a cool little reference to an existing
character. That was a show bad. Well, it's over
now. We're free. We're free. Now it's just the
new Halo games we have to worry about. Anyway.
Reach. This is... Again, I will give Halsey credit.
She's a monstrous human being. But she makes
a point. If Reach falls, we're screwed. Oni estimates,
the good ol' Office of Naval Intelligence, that
we got about three months. Like, within three
months, Coven are gonna find Reach. Like, it
is inevitable. Three days later. Which, you know,
three days is technically within three months,
but when you say three months, I'd give it at
least like a month and a half before I'd start
really worrying. Three days is a little early
in that time span. Thank you, Oni. Noble team,
a group of Spartan threes, and one two, are sent
to investigate a comms relay going down. On the
main military planet, you cannot risk insurrectionists
causing shit. So they get there, and they find
the Covenant are on Reach. And over the course
of a single month, maybe about a month and a
half, I think, actually, if I remember the game's
little time dates correctly, Reach goes from
the single most heavily defended UNSC planet
to a barren wasteland. At one point, I think
it says in the game, 40 % of the entire UNSC
military was beelining it for reach, because
we cannot lose this. This cannot happen. That
made me imagine, since I got into 40k, imagine
40 % of the Imperial Navy over Cadia. Imagine
half of all the Space Marine chapters deploying
all of their forces just to stop this one planet
from dying. Oh, important then. Abaddon warps
out of the warp. And then a wall of bullets emerges
from space. Like, oh, that's a lot of Nova cannons.
Yeah. Unfortunately, the UNSC does not have that
hardware. They have those orbital Mac planets.
They're taking Covenant names left, right, and
center. On the ground, you know, you've got the
UNSC army valiantly fighting, pushing the Covenant
back. In some places, they do secure, you know,
a good amount of victories. This is Reach. This
is about... The only planet humanity has something
resembling an advantage. And then, I mean, you
know the cutscene. Slip space rupture detected.
George destroys a supercarrier at the cost of
his own life. What if 100 more ships showed up
and fuck you? Yeah. This time led by... Not fair,
not fair. Yeah. This time led by the man who
would become the Arbiter. So he's in charge now
and he... He was a very decorated elite admiral.
If I remember correctly, you could trace back
one billion dead humans to his actions in the
war. He knew how to fight, to say the least.
So, in spite of this, reach within barely, not
even two months, goes from the headquarters of
the military to a barren wasteland. And by this
point... humanity's kind of just waiting to die.
I will say, there is one thing, and I know you
find Halo 4 very boring. I will give it credit.
I do like the original purpose of the UNSC Infinity.
Because by this point, humanity was kind of accepting
that we've lost. Like, this is it. We've lost.
So the original purpose of the Infinity, that
big ship from Halo 4 and beyond, was a giant,
like, ark ship. fiddle with as many people as
we can make it as big as we can and send it off
to space so someone will survive but isn't Halo
4 also the game that's like oh by the way all
the war crimes Halsey did we imprinted them in
her mind because the Spartans we actually made
like a blueprint for them in your genetic material
so they were inevitably going to be created and
therefore we're going to take away all of the
moral quandaries of the spartans just say oh
no we put that there because we knew what was
going to happen and oh i hate that storyline
we can ignore that one yeah not a fan not a fan
like i still think halo 5 is a decent game but
there's a there's a lot that's uh halo 5 is a
decent game halo 4 no no i was gonna say you
don't want that on the internet i like halo 4
i will defend halo 4 I will defend Halo 5's multiplayer
parts of it. There's only so much that Nathan
Fillion can save that game. He can't hold it
up on his own. When Buck and the Arbiter show
up in Halo 5, it's like a drowning man getting
a brief gasp of fresh air before you're sent
back down to drown in the shit pile. Yeah. But
Human Covenant War at this point... It's going
to be over soon one way or another. In fact,
what Master Chief was going to be doing during
this was one last final mission. Get all of the
Spartan 2s together. Refit a specialized human
cruiser, the Pillar of Autumn. And try and find
the Covenant homeworld and kidnap one of their
leaders and hopefully force a ceasefire, right?
And then Reach happened. They don't get to do
that. Master Chief is aboard the Pillar of Autumn.
It makes a... random, according to the Cole Protocol
jump, but it actually jumps to, of course, the
beginning of Halo Combat Evolved. It does not
jump to a random system, because Cortana was
with Halsey, digging around in Forerunner stuff,
with Noble Six's sacrifice, get Cortana to the
Chief, the Pillar of Autumn makes that jump,
and we end up over this strange floating ring.
Andy, what do you want to say? What is this ring?
They call it Halo. What is it, said Captain Keyes?
It's a big ring, isn't it, said Cortana. And
then, fun game. And this is where we can summarize
a bit more through this, because this is the
Halo games now. But we find this ring. This fancy
big old ring in space. And the Covenant are very
interested in it. So naturally, Cortana has some
extent of knowledge as to what it is. Not full
extent. You find that out partway through the
game, what Halo exactly is. But knowledge of
foreign artifacts is a little bit had by her.
So everyone touches down. Pillar of Autumn gets
shot out of the sky after taking down a good
amount of Covenant ships. Good for the Pillar
of Autumn. Good for Cortana. uh there was as
truth might say blinded by its majesty at first
uh they uh they begin fighting on these alien
ruins doing what they can to invent ruins artifact
is a better word doing what they can to investigate
uh they were looking for a super weapon uh because
as halsey puts it as they added in halo reach
we need something real special and we think this
might be it and am i right in thinking because
you mentioned that The man who would be Arbiter
was in charge of the Reach campaign. He diverted
to follow this Pillar of Autumn because that's
the beginning of Halo 2. He's getting stuck with
a big hot poker, but he's in charge of the Halo
1 offensive. Yeah, he is the one in charge of
the ships over the Halo, the first Halo. Well,
I believe it's Installation 04, technically,
so first Halo, what are you going to do? First
contact of the Halo device. Yeah. There's some
evidence humanity has to believe that this could
be a superweapon. Humanity being like Oni, Halsey,
Cortana. Everyone else is like, what the hell
is this? So they land on it. They're like, alright,
let's see what this is. Covenant lands on it
soon, sure enough. Start finding out that the
ring is inhabited. Mostly just by Forerunner
constructs. Nothing too special. Sentinels. At
this point on Halo, they're just kind of floating
around, making repairs, existing. Nothing too
fancy. And then the Covenant decide to play a...
What is that game show where it's like, what's
behind the door? You could win a brand new car.
Is it fair to say that they see the humans more
as a nuisance? Because they're like, it's one
ship. They've got a guy who's running around
on the surface, but they're not concertedly sending
the military to kill Master Chief. They're just
like, oh, just look for the materials. We need
to uncover what's going on. It's more of that
Master Chief, in a way, gets a bit of a lucky
break of they're not focusing on the humans.
They're distracted by the Forerunner tech, which
is why he's able to circumnavigate their battle
lines. do some damage, and it's only until this
point when you realize, oh, we weren't the threat
all along. There's something else living here,
and it's scary. Part one is like, because the
Halo Rings, again, for a little bit more, is
how the Covenant would ascend as the Forerunners
did in their belief. You activate the Halo Rings,
you get to be gods along with your Forerunners.
Now you ascend with them, alongside them, and
you can live in an eternal paradise. And then
as they're poking around, they open a door. And
as the Master Chief is fighting, and the rest
of, if you read the book Halo of the Flood, you
actually get to see what the rest of the Pillar
of Autumn's crew was doing. Like, guerrilla war,
they've got a couple bases here and there, trying
to do what they can on the Halo rings. There
are actually, Halo rings are also part wildlife
preserve. They were cut from the games for technical
reasons, but there were supposed to be animals
and stuff around. So, you know, there's foraging,
scavenging, seeing what the hell this weird thing
is. They've never seen anything like it, even
after 30 years of fighting aliens. Covenant open
a door. It gets quiet in that little area. Captain
Keyes is like, we think there might be weapons
in that door. Why are they being so quiet about
it? They might have found something cool. Captain
Keyes goes to investigate. Why is Captain Keyes
falling silent now? He must have been captured
by the Covenant. And where is Johnson? Where
is my boy? Where is Johnson? Johnson apparently
just book it and ran, which I don't blame him.
He's built different. Don't worry about it. He's
built different. So now it's time to send in
the chief. Like, all right, what's going on here?
What's going on here? He shows up. Whole bunch
of grunts running for their lives. And jackals,
which is different. That's different. Usually
we're the ones running. What's going on here?
Dio dives into the facility. It's very quiet.
There's one crazy Marine. Why is he crazy? Horror
is a war. Get away from me! Get away from me!
You're dead. You're dead. Oh, God. That's concerning.
Why are the walls glooping? Why are they making
gloopy noises? let's go in deeper why not he
goes in deeper finds a recording and oh zombies
exist that's fun oh they're mushrooms that uh
can control oh shit the flood are now here uh
the third participant of the human covenant war
though a very brief one is here to be a problem
uh the flood for those unaware Oh, good God.
How do I summarize this after all that has been
released about the Flood and everything? The
Forerunner, as you can guess from the name Forerunner,
they were the civilization that ruled the galaxy
before anyone else. The Flood are the corrupted
remnants of the guys that came before them that
the Forerunners killed. They tried to kill everyone
once, as Master Chief soon finds out. In order
to defeat the Flood, because there was no other
option for the Forerunners, they just had to
kill. Everything in the galaxy. Basically larger
than a spider. To starve the flood out. And they
contain the rest. To try and. Study and just
keep them. From getting out and escaping. That's
always a good idea. We need to understand that
they. No kill it. Put it in the fire. Put it
in the furnace. They take over the bodies and
minds and biomass of those around them and add
them to the ranks. They're proper zombies. Well,
much more horrifying zombies because these ones
can leap 50 feet at you. And they can use guns
and pilot vehicles and even ships. And are guided
by a vastly intelligent hive mind. It's like
the tyranids if the hive mind would sometimes
speak poetry at you. It's an articulate, tyrannid
hive mind. Like, yeah, they can speak. And I
must admit, I think the first time I saw the
Halo anniversary cutscene of the grave mind,
I think my jaw dropped because of, like, how
gross it was. Oh, yeah. How interesting it was.
I'm like, ugh. Yeah, it's nasty. The Covenant
are... Now also dealing with this threat, the
sentinels around the Halo have realized, oh,
the flood's out. That's bad. Humanity's now dealing
with this too. Everyone on Halo is like, why
does this exist? This is a new awful problem.
We only have one group of aliens to deal with.
Chip's Dubbo like, what is that? Oh, let's shoot
it with the rifle, Chief. Let's go. God bless
Chip's Dubbo. Humanity, it's bad. It's not great,
especially on the Halo ring. There's more battles
taking place again, like there was another planet,
I forget the name of it, but around the same
time as Reach, just a little cutback to the rest
of the outside universe, that about 90 % of the
fleet around that planet was destroyed, so the
Covenant in the background is still mulching
its way through humanity. But in Halo, you can
see, you know, Spaceman 117. fighting for his
goddamn life. Eventually, he meets a Forerunner
AI, which, if you read the Forerunner trilogy,
and as much as I know people don't like a lot
of Forerunner stuff, anything since 343, the
Forerunner trilogy is quite a good read. I would
recommend it. 343, Guilty Spark, a Forerunner
AI, the Monitor of Installation 04. who is actually
the digitized personality of an ancient human.
Fun fact. They put him in a robo body. And is
it worth briefly touching on like humans existed
before the Covenant and they were there at the
same time as the Forerunners? It is. Actually,
that being said, I guess they had that brief
little tangent. All the species did exist, because
before the Halo's fire, the Forerunners basically
went around cataloging everyone they could in
massive preservation chambers, like, let's just
save what we can, because we're going to kill
everything else. Humanity did have an ancient
space empire, and they did at one point fight
the Forerunners, which, fun fact, their allies
in that war were the Prophet Race. How are the
turntables? You gotta get the Palpatine for that
one. Ironic. But yeah, on Halo, the Flood is
out rapidly assimilating everything. Just taking
over everything, adding it to their biomass.
Including good old Captain Keyes. And the Flood,
too, is interested in the human homeworld of
Earth. For less religious reasons than the Covenant
were granted, the Flood simply want it just to
eat. That sounds like a mighty fine buffet, said
the Gravemind. This was never, I don't think
it was ever even put into any kind of Halo canon.
But the original idea they had at Bungie behind
the Flood was that, you know, as a... I'll just
say it now. The Flood, as more and more Flood
exists, they get smarter. Because it adds your
intelligence to the Hivemind. Every corpse added
is a little bit more brainpower for the Flood.
To have. Makes something called a proto -grave
mind. Which is that weird icky ball sack thing.
Captain Keyes was a part of. Which is very smart.
Then if it gets bigger. Makes a grave mind. Which
is the massive disgusting ugly. Tentacle thing.
That speaks in iambic pentameter. I think it
is. And originally, like I said, I don't believe
this was ever added to any game or book, but
the idea that the Bungie office was that the
grave mine was not the end. They would then make
more grave mines in other planets, and if they
made enough grave mines, the Flood could then
create a new universe by destroying the current
one. Wow. Putting the Dead Space universe to
shame there. We're like, we can become moons.
We're making a new universe, mate. Follocks.
Yeah. So even at some level, even before the
Florida trilogy, the flood were eldritch zombies.
Hmm. But Master Chief has one and Cortana. They've
got one less ace up their sleeve. Even after,
you know, Guilty Spark tells them to go activate
the halo ring, which Cortana says, no, don't
do that. That'll kill everyone. So Master Chief
doesn't. That ace up his sleeve, the Pillar of
Autumn slipspace engine. turn it on set it to
overdrive and it blows up i must say i don't
know how you felt the first time you played halo
but um i remember when i was at the end of the
game on that and i'm like i don't know i'm like
teenage yet less than a teenager at the time
when it was released and that final level kicks
in and the music's there and you just see the
pillar of autumn beached on like the edge of
this crevasse and you have and you have like
the flood but it's just like it's just barren
and you're going through the corridors again
and you're like this is where this started and
especially for me this was like a very important
game for me because it was so different and it
was just that going from this full of life level
full of lots of staff and crew and keys and cortana
and i'm like keys is dead i don't know where
johnson is all the crew are dead although i haven't
seen a human being in forever and so echo for
i hope echo 419 is okay and then it's like going
through there and it's like i remember when this
started it was about fighting the covenant and
now this threat makes them pale in comparison
you're like wow that was so well done i love
it yeah so yeah it's phenomenal First Halo blown
up. Master Chief escapes. Gets back to Earth.
Gets himself a fancy new suit of armor. Somehow
Sergeant Johnson got off too. Don't worry about
it. They did cover that in one of the books.
Like there was some him and like three other
people. Ships Dubbo! Ships Dubbo and I believe
also another Spartan too, Naomi. I don't remember
if it was Naomi. She's on the ship, isn't she?
Because when you look at the beginning of the
game, there's a readout of vital signs, and it's
like John 117 and her, I think? There's that.
I know at the end of Halo Reach, in one of the
final cutscenes, if you pan the camera to the
right, it's the only cutscene you can move the
camera during. You can see her taking a nap in
a cryo chamber. Because she was critically wounded,
so they put her in the freeze tank to keep her
alive. So that happens. Get back to Earth. Halo
2, everyone's having a great time on Earth. And
then we cut to the Arbiter, as he will soon be
known, not having a great time. Also, Ron Perlman's
here. It should be noted that at this point,
War had been going on for a while. The elites
at first threw themselves into it. They're the
military arm of the Covenant. Let's take down
these heathens. They started growing some respect
for humanity over time and began to wonder, why
don't we invite them to join the Covenant? They
would see cases of lone human soldiers dying
to buy time for people to escape. Humanity as
a whole fighting tooth and nail. They were like,
humans? They're pretty honorable warriors. We
like them. We like what they're doing, which
for an elite, you know, we can maybe talk about
them another time. For an elite, acknowledging
you as a potential equal in any way is like,
ooh, that is one hell of a compliment. So a lot
of the elites were like, they're pretty cool.
Why don't we let them join? Sergeant Forge, giving
them heck. And for the record, I'd have kicked
your ass the first time if it wasn't for the
lady. Yeah. Just like, yeah, turn on the rest
of the news. Within the Covenant also, the elites
and the prophets, a lot of politics go on in
Covenant high society, as it were. Lots of big
hats. Lots of big hats, lots of bickering. The
prophets have always wanted to get definitely
won over on the elites. And now, as more and
more elites are wondering, why are we still fighting
humanity? Surely they should be offered at least
a chance to say yes and join, right? Because
unlike anyone else, humanity was never given
that option. I guess the grunts weren't either,
but they weren't genocided. They were just enslaved.
But the grunts are so small. I'm just going to
kick you until you say yes. Yeah. Humanity didn't
even get that. So combined with this, we get
to Halo 2, where the Arbiter is made the Arbiter.
A great warrior and an influential leader. nothing
but coincidence that the figures that are arbiters,
uh, are usually people who could politically
threaten the profits. That's just a coincidence.
These highly influential elites are given the
honor of being told to die in a suicide mission
for the profits. Uh, we now have the arbiter,
uh, who after letting halo blow up, uh, is told
this is the only way forward for you unless you'd
like to be executed. Of course, uh, shortly into
the game, Covenant finds Earth. The worst case
scenario happens. They trip over it on accident.
The Prophet of Regret thought it was just a foreigner
dig site. Little did he know, oh, this is the
homeworld of humanity. So now the battle for
Earth has begun. Chief is fighting. Everyone's
fighting. Earth cities are getting glassed in
the background as the battle goes on. Rip new
Mombasa. Rip new Mombasa. Eventually, they cut
to another Halo ring because, of course. They
find another one. There's seven of those things.
This one, unlike the previous ring, the flood
are already out. And so while Master Chief goes
down there, kills the prophet of regret, one
of the three major religious leaders. It's a
bit of a wild card. Even in the early cutscenes
of Halo 2, you can tell the other two don't respect
regret as much as... Truth is obviously in charge.
What's the other one? Truth, regret, and... Mercy.
yeah mercy's like the old guy who who's like
you can tell by the way they've pitched it probably
regrets the young one he's the old one and then
truth is the one who's like the real power who's
kind of manipulating them both and regrets like
oh i know i've been like told to get rid of the
humans on earth but oh shiny shiny jingly jangly
jingly jangle oh is that a halo ring off he goes
gets chased and then they're like oh he's really
badly prepared to invade this halo ring and the
other prophets you get like from them, getting
like, why have you broken away from the main
force? What are you doing? You're being stupid.
Which causes Master Chief to punch him in the
face until he dies in one of the boss fights
of all time. One of the most underwhelming boss
fights of all time. Jump and press punch. I love
Halo, but gosh, their boss fights are pretty
bad. It is then... As the elites argue, we could
have saved him if the Prophet of Truth allowed
more reinforcements to be delivered. But such
was not the case. And as Truth puts it, no, you
failed to protect him. It just is what it is.
We will be changing the Honor Guard of the Covenant
to the Brutes. It is now the Brutes who will
protect the Prophets. The Arbiter is sent in
to retrieve the key that activates Halo. Succeeds.
And then Ron Perlman shoves him into a pit with
a gravity hammer. The Chief... Ardorous Chieftain
of the Brutes. And Master Chief and the Arbiter
get to meet each other for the first time and
have a one -on -one with the Gravemind. Who informs
them that, look, you gotta stop that key from
turning. You gotta keep the... Keep Regret from
turning on the Halo Array. Do you say Ron Perlman?
Do you mean Keith? Or no, that's not Ron Perlman.
Keith David is the Arbiter. Yeah, Keith David
is the Arbiter. Yeah, who's Tartarus? It's another
big voice actor. Oh, that's a good question.
I can't remember. I know Keith David is the Arbiter.
Hood is Ron Perlman. I'll check for you. I'll
check for you. In the meantime, again, it's the
rest of Halo 2. You got to stop the... Evan Michael
Richardson. There you go. That's who it is. By
this point, by the way, High Charity and the
largest Covenant fleet anyone's ever seen has
warped over the Halo Ring. So the Gravemind sends
Master Chief to High Charity, teleports him there
because the Flood are insane and they can just
teleport you if they wish. They're usually more
interested in eating you, so they don't usually
do it, but they can. And the Arbiter just remains
on the Halo Ring to... Go a different route.
Master Chief almost kills the Truth and Mercy,
those prophets, and starts running around High
Charity just causing problems. The floods show
up to High Charity, more problems. It is a bad
day to be a citizen of High Charity. The Arbiter,
meanwhile, is explaining to the rest of the elites
that they're now marked for death by the prophets.
And the Covenant Civil War, the Great Schism,
begins. At first, it's just the elites and anyone
under their command who might side with them
fighting the rest of the Covenant. Master Chief
almost stops the Prophets from taking Miranda
Keyes and Avery Johnson to the Halo Ring, but
doesn't quite make it. He's stranded on High
Charity. And Mercy's gone. Mercy gets killed
by the Flood. Truth could have stopped that and
naturally didn't. And to be fair, Master Chief
does pull the flood off and pop him where he's
like, he's gone, but I'm not going to be malicious
about it. Like, there you go. He's more moral
than truth. Yeah. And Halo 2 ends with Sergeant
Johnson pointing a scarab at the Arbiter. You
don't like me and I sure as hell don't like you,
but we got to do what we got to do. So they go
kill Tartarus, Chieftain of the Brutes. 343 Guilty
Spark shows back up. Tells them all that, yes,
there's actually six more Halo rings. A beacon?
Listen, Tilkabow, don't make me. Don't shake
the light bulb. And, you know, the Arbiter's
like, where do we go? Why the Ark? We get the
most... awful cliffhanger in video game history
you mind telling me what you're doing on that
ship sir finishing this fight did you have to
live through that wait i did not my first halo
game was three it was oh it was bad i'm finishing
halo 2 and i was like i will say i was allayed
a bit by steve by's cover of the halo theme in
the credits i'm like all right i'll give you
Okay. I'm going to play some LAN parties. But
like, oh, it was excruciating. But what was the
time frame between 2 and 3? Like a couple of
years? Three years. Yeah, makes sense. But oh,
it was a good game. Cut to Halo 3. The Battle
of Earth is in full swing, though. And it's a
mess. The elites are on our team now. That's
something. Some Covenant tech is on our side
now. We can fight a bit more evenly. But Earth's
defenses have been shattered by this point. Lord
Hood says as much that we're kind of all dead.
He doesn't want to go to the Ark because he's
like, we have nothing to go to the Ark with.
And not only that, if we abandon Earth, it's
like, okay, let's say we win the fight to get
the Ark. What are we coming back to? Like a glass,
a marble? A marble planet? No good. I live here.
I'm one of the idiots who lives here. That's
Ron Perlman. No, I'm not doing it. But he does
allow Captain Keyes' daughter Miranda to go and
lead the charge. He does. Between the threat
of the Covenant activating Halo and Cortana,
who had stayed behind on High Charity and was
tortured by the Gravemind. Yes, the Flood can
torture robots. Robots can feel pain, turns out.
Hmm. Just enough tentacles, you can do anything,
says the Flood. And between, you know, again,
the threat of the Covenant activating the Ark,
because they have made it to the Ark, as well
as the fact that a whole lot of Flood were going
to be on their way through High Charity, which
they have taken over by this point and turned
it into a meat garden. I like that. Meat garden.
Yeah. Which, fun fact, all of that flood biomass
you see in the High Charity level, that used
to be an alien. That used to be part of the Covenant.
And probably a little bit of human, just to admit.
Because I think the first ship that crashes is
a Pelican, and it's full of human blood. Yeah,
the in amber clad, the frigate from early on
in Halo 2 crashes, and then a Pelican flies out
of it. And then, oh, it was full of flood. There's
a little bit of human in that lasagna as well.
Yeah. Somewhere in the layers. Don't eat it.
It's poisonous. It's bad. So the final act of
the Human Covenant War is to stop Truth from
turning on the Halo array and maybe stop the
flood while we're at it. We may, which, sure
enough, it's the plot of Halo 3. We get there.
Truth gets killed after one final effort. Probably
my favorite mission in all of Halo. The Covenant
is just the title of it. And they succeed. They
manage to kill Truth between the Chief, the Arbiter,
Hall of Humanity, the Elites. They... You must
be silenced. And what was the actor who played...
I don't remember who played Truth. He was in
Superman as Zod, and he was in Oblivion, I believe,
as the Mankar Cameron. Truth Factor. Hey, what's
his name? Chancellor Valorum, is it? Oh, no,
it's Michael Wincott. Completely different. No,
that's Halo 2. No, it was Terrence Stamp in Halo
3. They swapped actors between 2 and 3. So, yeah,
the Mankar Cameron from Oblivion slash Zod from
Superman was also the Prophet of Truth. I knew
he sounded different. I just figured the... Oh,
that's cool. I didn't know that. Yeah. And with
that, though, the Human Covenant War officially
came to a close. It was 2553 by this point. The
rest of Halo is not technically part of the Human
Covenant War. It is Master Chief and the Arbiter
and Sergeant Avery Johnson blowing up the Ark.
Rest in peace, Avery Johnson. You pissed off
the light bulb so it melted your skin. Every
day. When I go to bed every day, I have a picture
of him in a frame and I give it a kiss before
I go to bed. But with that, the Gravebite was
destroyed. All of the flood that were out and
about in the galaxy at that point were destroyed.
They show back a couple more times. But the day
was ultimately won at the cost of... Let me see
if I can... If I can find a nice casualty figure,
because that one... Give me one moment. That
I didn't prepare. Let me check the high score.
I need to check the table for how many casualties.
What was the Arbiter's kill count at the end
of it? Yeah, let me... It would appear that prior
to the Human Covenant War... Uh, there were...
23 billion people, humans, died during the war,
and then billions more coveted. Ooh. And, like,
Halo... Master Chief is just, like, raising his
hands, like, I got at least 2 billion on my own.
He's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, fair enough, mate,
fair enough. Kurt, they're like, well, I did
my bit, but then I pretended to die, and then
I didn't die, and then I made the spot and freeze,
but then I did die. Although, for a few more
highlights, I must shout out Vice Admiral Danforth
Whitcomb. Have you seen a picture of this man,
Andy? His mustache is, I think, took out Covenant
on its own. He gave them one hell of a final
present after he died, which was to leave a recorded
message in a Death Star in a can. that took out
about 300 Covenant ships and a refueling station
that was going to invade Earth. There were a
lot of, like, cool bits throughout the Human
Covenant War that just for the sake of, you know,
not getting into every little detail, there was
quite a lot of cool things like that. The last
technical action of the Human Covenant War was,
I think, a couple years later, though, when Spartan
Gray Team, who had another Nova bomb, they were
behind enemy lines and had no way to contact
humanity. They didn't know if there was any humanity
left. They had a vote. Do we turn on this Nova
bomb over this elite colony? They voted yes.
They didn't know there was a truce. They were
like, ah, it's fine. I think the Arbiter forgave
him. Which, on the one hand, good on him. Arbiter's
a real one for that. On the other hand, he did
kill one billion people. So he was probably like,
that's, uh... That's fair. At one point, the
opponent's like, who am I to judge? I've committed
so many war crimes. I don't know. Live and let
live, said Keith David. Yeah. And, you know,
for a little bit after the war, humanity was
in pieces. The rest of the Covenant now had to
figure out what to do now that there's no Covenant
anymore. I know, for example, like, well, the
grunts mostly just kind of kept doing whatever.
They're grunts, right? Like, they just kept kind
of hanging around whoever they were already with.
The elites and the brutes would then fight a
bit of a murderous war. That's still going on.
Yeah. The elites also... I want to say it was
like about 3 ,000, maybe 4 ,000 years of the
prophets handling all the engineering and everything.
The elites had to figure out kind of like humanity
in like 40K, like... How do we build our ships?
But also, a fair few of them defected to side
with the Brutes for some reason. In the new stuff,
they're all like, we fight with the Brutes because
I guess they're just indoctrinated enough to
be like, we're going to avenge the Prophets.
There was a lot of different splinter groups
after the fact, as you could expect from the
fall of a galaxy -spanning empire. Some just
wanted to remake the Covenant. Some are just
still sticking to that diehard belief. Some of
them joined, you know, the Banished, which was
its own thing. Again, not even part of the Covenant,
which, you know, those were like originally brutes
who fought the Covenant. Some elites are like,
well, you don't like the Covenant, but we don't
like humanity and you don't either. So, hell,
why not? At the end of the Human Covenant War,
to say the powers that be were in a bit of a
mess was an understatement. Yeah. There was some
hope at the end. You know, rebuilding can begin.
Humanity is, if nothing else, got access to a
whole lot of new toys through reverse engineering
of Foreigner and Covenant stuff. So, hey, rebuilding
could begin. Peace was made with at least the
elites. Very tentative peace because the Office
of Naval Intelligence is awful. They just suck.
Yeah. I think that's one of my favorite things
in one of the post -Human Covenant War books,
is that Oni was funding a bunch of those splinter
groups to keep the elites fighting amongst each
other. And all of that amounted to the Infinity
Mac blasting them basically all at once. Taxpayer
dollars well spent. Yep. It's like one day the
Arbiter walks in and is like, what is that? It's
like, oh, that's a mass autopsy of the elite
species. Why? Oh, we just haven't shut it down
since the end of the war. The war was two years
ago. Why are you still doing this? Don't worry
about it. Don't worry about it. It's fine. I
guess, you know, last thing, two last notes.
We'll end on the Arbiter, because I love me some
elites. The Arbiter would go on to become the
leader of Sanghelios and try and rebuild parts
of the rest of the Covenant splinter forces.
The title of Arbiter was once again a position
of respect long after all the years where the
Covenant made it a disgraced title. And one last
fun fact. The Arbiter thought Sauron was real.
Like actually J .R .R. Tolkien Sauron. Yes. Some
cultural differences. uh happened and he thought
someone i think someone made like a reference
to sauron and he was like must be some great
evil from ancient human times because he didn't
know that they were just talking about a book
that just reminds me of star trek with uh the
klingon wharf where he's in the bar one day and
he's like give me a human drink and they give
him prune juice and he just gulps it down and
goes warrior's drink. It's not a warrior's drink.
He's happy. Let him enjoy it. Let him have fun.
Let him be. Funny little note to end on. The
Arbiter thought Sauron was a historical figure.
Yeah. And he was. It's an interesting timeline
because there's obviously so many characters.
You've got the Spartans, you've got the Navy,
you've got the Grunts on the ground, you've got...
All the politics of the Covenant going on in
the background. You've got the literal grunts.
Yeah, the literal grunts. I find these days I
have to siphon off post -Halo reach Halo content
to enjoy the original stuff untarnished. But
what it stands... I'm always like... I'm a la
carte taking bits of the Halo 4 onward stuff
that I like and don't like. I like this. I don't
like that. I like this. I don't like that. I
will say I do like the Forerunner trilogy a lot.
I have something that's going to get me yelled
at in the comments section, and I know for a
fact it's going to get me yelled at. But I'm
sorry. Even when Bungie was running the show,
they decided the Forerunners were aliens. GuiltySpark
was either speaking in metaphor when he called
Master Chief Forerunner, or, you know, he was
clearly rampant. Or maybe it was just the case
if he was like, oh, humans were there before,
so Forerunner could be a catch -all term of like,
there's the species, but then there's just like,
you were here before, you're the before -time
species. It's that. But I have vivid memories
of reading a terminal in Halo 3 that says, humans
and the Forerunners fought a war in ancient times.
And it was not called a civil war, which would
kind of imply they're different species. And
I'm sorry, even when Bungie was in control, the
Forerunners stopped being humans and passed Halo
2 at the latest. I still remember when you'd
play Halo 3 on the Xbox 360, you'd go to the
terminal, it would open the app in the Halo Waypoint
app on Xbox 360, and it would play a video and
it would tell you all the lore. So it did happen.
I was there in the olden days. It's true. And
to be fair, like, Halo, they didn't know what
they were doing in a broad sense at Halo 1, and
they had to be, like Warhammer, they had to be
together as they went. Yeah. So I am very sorry,
people who are going to yell at me in the comments.
It was not 343 that made the Forerunners aliens.
That was Bungie. No. Oh, God, no, fuck. See,
early on, I mean, with Halo CE, Halo was still
like a soft marathon sequel. Yeah, yeah. Look
how that turned out for them. Uh -oh. Uh -oh.
Yeah. Any closing thoughts for the Halo Human
Covenant war? I mean... we've done broad strokes
are there any like good books to investigate
or um or just simply this game or that game which
you would say contact i think like halo wars
is quite good halo wars is quite good uh obviously
the original halo trilogy reach and odst bangers
um let's see what else uh the it's i know there's
well there's like the i think it was for the
build -up of halo 3 or it might have been i don't
remember when halo legends came out But either
way, fun animated shorts for Halo. You should
absolutely watch Halo Legends. You can find them
on YouTube for free. So you might as well. There
is... I'm also... It wasn't called Halo Legends,
but... It might have still been called Halo Legends
as a book. Halo Evolutions. I always think it's
just another book called Halo Legends. No, there
is... No, never mind. Halo Evolutions, though.
It's a nice collection of stories throughout
Halo, some of which are during the Human Covenant
War. I like them. They're fun reads. Yeah, I
quite like that. That's got some stuff about
Cole. Fall of Reach, I will say. Reach came after
the book Fall of Reach so Bungie did do some
retconning which I know even back during when
Reach was released people were upset about that
I prefer as it is in Halo Reach and then like
you kind of said Andy you can pick and choose
stuff from the Fall of Reach that you like more
there is that animated live action film as well
which is like it's a tie -in to Halo 4 but it's
set before Halo 1 where it's like Pulaski and
some of the guys who would go on to be officers
are saved by Master Chief in the very early days
of the Human Covenant war. Is it Forward Unto
Dawn? I think it's Forward Unto Dawn, yeah. Also,
fun fact, Chief is like 17 at that point. Yeah,
and he pops down, he's like 17 foot, and you're
like, oh my word. But it also is good at establishing
that him and... It is Pulaski, isn't it, from
Halo 4? Yeah, I think he's the cool guy. He's
the one who's like, he becomes Captain. Or is
it Lasky, not Pulaski? Yeah, Lasky. Lasky. So
it's him and Lasky meet at that incident, and
then when Halo 4 happens, they have like, oh,
I remember you. You saved me and my school kid
friends who were in this military base from dying,
and you killed a bunch of hunters. That was cool.
But yeah, there's Halo Legends. There's that
film. there's some lore here like even like the
halo trailers it's like check out the halo trailers
for odst for halo 3 with the believe campaign
um they had like the halo 3 believe campaign
trailers alone have so much like just charm and
character going into them charm and character
and there's like that one trailer where it's
like a really it was the i think it was supposed
to be like a test subject because spielberg was
originally going to make a halo tv series but
he dropped out and it was like that one cinematic
is basically the guys who target locked master
chief when he was falling onto earth so they
knew where to pick him up and so they had to
make sure they didn't miss the time frame of
like He's burning up in atmosphere. Because if
you miss it, we don't know where he is. And I
liked when Halo did little cinematic trailers.
Stuff like that, yeah. The Halo Reach one where
it's the original Noble Six. and it's cat running
through cat had her arm in that one still yeah
and then she lost her arm and then tom i think
it's tom who's the guy who was before hate noble
six picks up the bomb and chucks it into the
super carrier and you get those trailers and
they're so well made and it's a shame that's
like a bygone era of game trailers yeah that's
that's not even just halo that's just gaming
in general just in general which is sad yeah
but yeah yeah uh Fall of Reach is good. Read
The Flood. Halo Legends, watch. And Halo Evolutions,
read. They're good stuff. Odd One Out is the
best short. I might as well cause more fights.
I like the funny Dragon Ball Z Spartan. I'm sorry.
He's one heck of a mama. And there's the Gundam
episode where it's like the guy in a big mecha
suit. Which one was that? Be Human. I think so.
You just say, ba -ba -ba -ba -ba -ba -ba. Wow,
they have Gundams in Halo. That's cool. But yes,
other than that, any closing thoughts for the
Halo Covenant War? Or the Human Covenant War,
I should say, from Halo? I just, I think I'll
close with, I think the reason, part of why it
drew me to Halo so much is that I like how Halo
does humanity being at a losing front. Because
in the games, it doesn't show as much because
you're Spaceman John Master Chief kicking ass,
right? And then you read a book and it's like,
oh, Jesus Christ, humanity is getting its shit
pushed in. Like, it is horrific. Which, like
a lot of different, like, a lot of alien stories
have, you know, or stories with aliens, like,
humanity is on the losing front. But it doesn't
necessarily come across that way. I mean, you
know, even Independence Day. Hello, boys, I'm
back. Or, you know, like 40K will a lot of the
time say, you know, X aliens are a threat. And
then we read Space Marine Man murders a high
fleet on his own. Like, I feel like you're telling
me one thing and you're showing me another. Yeah,
I don't know. With the work like Halo Reach alone
put into like this is humanity's greatest bastion.
And it was like a small hurdle for the Covenant.
The best trailer for the games that does this
is the life trailer for ODST, where it's the
ODSTs with the Welsh music in the background.
And it's like them drop potting in and it's all
grimy and dirty. I feel like what they should
have done with the Halo series is be like, do
it from the perspective of some Halo grunts,
do it from some like ODSTs or UNIT. And then
like Master Chief is this kind of almost mythical
feature who would pop in at one time and just
crunk the hell out of the Covenant. And then
be gone. And it was almost like, did that even
happen? But it's like, follow the gritty kind
of like the, the trailer that I mentioned before
about like them target locking him. And it's
like, the guy's got the big spiker in his shoulder
and the medics pulling it out. And he stuck to
the wall. Like have that grimy gritty part of
halo law. And then the Spartans pop in, but they're
not the focus. Cause otherwise you have them
going through weird love stories and taking the
helmets off in the first episode. And you're
like, what is this? Get out of here. Get out
of here. I think it does a good job. I like all
the ways everyone's portrayed in the Human Covenant
war, even the aliens. I think they did a good
job with the aliens too. That opening cinematic
for Halo 2 was such a breath of fresh air. Even
when I played it originally, I was like, oh,
I get to see the perspective of the Covenant
where it's like... Here's Master Chief and Johnson
being rewarded for winning, and here's the loser
of that exchange being punished and how they
treat him. Getting horrifically tortured. Yeah,
and how the two sides of the coin are... That's
really cool. And then you see a bit more of that,
which is nice. But yeah, I guess that's our first
episode of Sci -Fi Sit -Down. Indeed. Please
let us know in the comments if there's any other
sci -fi settings you would like us to talk about.
I'll put it out there. I'd love to talk about
a bit of Mass Effect. But yeah, we'll see what
we can do. And if you want us to talk about more
Halo or other settings that are not Halo, let
us know. Yeah, I think this was a good start
to the series. Yeah, let's do it. Yeah, so let
us know and we'll go from here. Awesome. Great.
We'll see you guys on the next episode then.
Bye everybody. Bye.