In Defense of Master Chief Constantly Taking Off His Helmet in Paramount+’s Halo
Photo Courtesy of Paramount+
The first season of Paramount+’s Halo series wasn’t exactly warmly received by longtime fans of the videogame. Their complaints were numerous: it wasn’t accurate to longstanding lore, it didn’t take place on the titular ring-shaped installations, it featured lengthy side stories that had little bearing on the main plot, there were questionable costuming and set design decisions that made it not “feel like Halo,” and so on. However, one complaint rose above the rest and became a stand-in for fan discontentment. The protagonist, John-117, aka the Master Chief, who pointedly never visibly shows his face across the billion entries in the game series, dramatically removed his helmet in the pilot, and then continued to do so constantly through the remaining eight episodes.
Halo fans were livid at this change. They argued that Chief’s helmet is an iconic element of his visual design and that the ambiguity around his appearance adds an air of mystique to the figure. In the games, Master Chief’s facelessness allowed players to more easily place themselves in his shoes, imagining they were the hero facing daunting odds, and for some, seeing what he actually looked like broke this spell. Additionally, this lack of clarity around his appearance made it easier to view him as a broad metaphor for the unbreakable nature of the human spirit in the face of an impossible foe.
This backlash was further inflamed after Pablo Schreiber, the actor who plays the TV rendition of this character, explained the rationale for a helmet-less Chief in an interview with TechRadar: “When you play a first person shooter, the way that a character is developed is very different than what’s necessary when you’re making long form television. To go on this journey with your protagonist, you’re not going to be able to bring an audience along in a long form story without having access to a character’s face, which tells you what they’re feeling, how they think about everything.”
There was another wave of vitriol over this, with many pointing out a long list of characters who rarely or never take off their masks (such as Din Djarin from The Mandalorian, Darth Vader, Deadpool, and others) but, they argued, still manage to stoke emotions all the same. It is certainly possible to make viewers empathize with a protagonist without having access to their face; it’s just very difficult, and the narrative, shot selections, and voice acting must be entirely tailored around this choice.
However, despite not entirely buying this specific justification, I agree with Schreiber that Master Chief taking off this iconic piece of his armor is directly tied to the core appeal of this deeply flawed but frequently interesting Halo adaptation. In short, John removing his helmet symbolizes his struggle to regain his personhood from a war machine that’s turned him into an emotionless weapon.
If the Halo games are largely concerned with the courageous adventures of Chief as he almost single-handedly battles impossible odds in the war against the Covenant, the show is much more focused on the politics of a heavily-militarized Earth government on the back-foot from this alien assault. Like some of the tie-in novels and brief snippets of the games, the TV series sheds light on this callous human government and the immoral process that made our protagonist into an unstoppable killer.
When we first meet Master Chief and his unit, Silver team, they’re cold and clinical, dispatching a detachment of Elites with uncanny efficiency. Their faces and bodies are hidden by layers of power armor, which, when combined with their disaffected speech, makes them appear profoundly mechanical. On this mission, Silver team comes across Kwan, a girl whose family and compatriots were just slaughtered by the Covenant. But instead of attempting to comfort her, the Chief and company barely register her presence, largely ignoring her until they complete their orders.
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