In Defense of Master Chief Constantly Taking Off His Helmet in Paramount+’s Halo

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.

Soon after, we find out why they behave this way. The UNSC, the military arm of an imperialistic Earth government, sanctioned a program that involved kidnapping children from their parents so they could be experimented on, brainwashed, and then implanted with emotional suppression pellets that would make them perfect soldiers. Of the small percentage who survived this process, those left were dubbed the Spartans, super soldiers meant to suppress insurrectionist factions that defied the central Earth government. The Spartans were granted serial numbers, like John-117, and kept under strict watch to monitor “deviance.”

It’s not until the Master Chief touches an alien artifact that something changes, as memories from his past override some degree of his programming. Shortly after, he receives orders to kill lone-survivor Kwan so the UNSC can freely shape the narrative around what happened there. But instead of following through on this directive, he disobeys, taking off his helmet for the first time in an effort to get Kwan to trust him. And more than showing his face being an act of good faith, it dovetails with a general defiance against the organization that sought to eradicate his humanity and personhood.

For the remainder of the first season, Chief struggles with who he is versus who the UNSC and the Spartan program director, Doctor Halsey, molded him into. After removing his emotional suppression pellet in Episode 3, he explores the planet Reach with an entirely new set of eyes, able to experience its textures and pleasures in a way he couldn’t before. This newfound freedom and quest for self proves infectious, and another Spartan in his unit, Kai-125, eventually removes her pellet as well, going on a parallel journey to John, which is arguably even more powerful given how well she’s frequently characterized. Eventually, in Season 2, we see how the entire squad has undergone this same process, each finding new things to appreciate where they didn’t before (even if those like Vannak are hesitant to admit it).

John removing his helmet is the central visual metaphor that holds all this together. When he has it on, he’s the Master Chief, a symbol of human resistance against the Covenant, not an individual, but an idea. At one point, we see UNSC propaganda of our protagonist, and unsurprisingly, he’s wearing his full battle armor, cutting a valiant frame meant to make the people of Reach feel secure. Admittedly, John realizes that, given their ongoing war with an enemy that literally uses giant death lasers to turn human-settled planets to glass, the Chief is a figure that needs to continue to exist, at least for the time being. Whenever he’s in combat, he dons the helmet again, adopting the carefully cultivated mythos that is the lynchpin of a faltering war effort.

But instead of the series feeling like a military recruitment video for the UNSC, it takes the much more compelling stance of showing how, even though he’s consigned to be a pawn for an uncaring regime, John still struggles against his surroundings, carving out personal identity within a system attempting to crush him under its heel.

Listen, I’m not here to argue that the Halo TV show is some flawless masterpiece of science fiction storytelling. The first season felt meandering whenever it wasn’t squarely focused on the previously described UNSC plotline. It somehow managed to completely bungle a storyline about revolutionary action against the crooked Earth government, spent too much time on a silly pirate planet that clashed with the series’ general aesthetic, and there were a boatload of other frustrating writing and characterization decisions throughout, some of which affected our protagonist.

Admittedly, even when it comes to the series’ best plotline around John, it almost certainly would have been more emotionally resonant if he removed his helmet for the first time much later to symbolize his growth (like what happened in The Mandalorian). Instead, we only get a brief flash of who the Master Chief was before his transformation begins.

But still, even with these caveats, I was surprised that, after all the secondhand outrage I had heard about the show, when I finally checked it out, there were still quite a few well-considered ideas to be found, which the improved second season has further honed in on. Instead of sanding down the weird dystopian edges primarily found in the series’ extended canon, it focused almost entirely on these aspects, leading to commentary on how militaries and governments seek to dehumanize and destroy individuality to craft the perfect soldier—in this case, the Master Chief. Despite this show’s far-flung worlds, grandiose prophecies, and apocalyptic wars with extraterrestrials, its most affecting element is watching John discover who he is when he finally takes off the helmet.

Elijah Gonzalez is an assistant TV Editor for Paste Magazine. In addition to watching the latest on the small screen, he also loves videogames, film, and creating large lists of media he’ll probably never actually get to. You can follow him on Twitter @eli_gonzalez11.

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