Halo TV series trailer: A new alternate series timeline, a new Chief voice

After years of teases, announcements, and false starts, a Halo TV series starring Master Chief is finally on the verge of existing—and its first substantial, dialogue-filled trailer landed on Sunday.

The flashy, two-minute trailer arrived days after a major announcement last week from Halo's narrative handlers at 343 Industries: This new TV series, exclusive to Paramount+, will not be part of the game series' official canon. That might have been good information to include in the trailer itself, as fans may have missed the memo and wondered why this trailer rewrites a couple of plot cornerstones.

Longtime series scribe Frank O'Connor described the creative decision behind moving the TV series forward with a mix of familiar and brand-new plot elements. "We want to use the existing Halo lore, history, canon, and characters wherever they make sense for a linear narrative but also separate the two distinctly so that we don’t invalidate the core canon or do unnatural things to force a first-person video game into an ensemble TV show," he wrote. O'Connor said that all things Halo up until this point, including games, comics, novels, and online errata, count as "core canon" for the series, while the TV show will exist as a "parallel, similar, but separate timeline," officially dubbed the "Silver timeline."

The trailer is full of familiar Halo elements, not only the seemingly endless humans-versus-aliens battle of the UNSC and the Covenant but also the recognizable weapons, vehicles, and otherworldly armor on each side of the conflict. Yet the trailer showcases more brand-new characters than existing ones, with Master Chief (Pablo Schreiber, American Gods) and Dr. Catherine Halsey (Natascha McElhone, Californication) surrounded primarily by a new "Silver Team" of Spartan super-soldiers: Kai-125, Soren-066, and Vannak-134. Prepare yourself to hear John-117 (i.e., Master Chief) voiced by someone other than Steve Downes—though, to his credit, Schreiber does a fine job sounding gravelly and war-weary in this trailer.

One other familiar Halo face shows up briefly: Cortana, Master Chief's longtime digital assistant. But while the TV version of Cortana is voiced and visually modeled after the character's in-game voice actor, Jen Taylor, her TV-series introduction as a CGI character suffers from awkward, uncanny-valley presentation, with none of the character's typical blue coloration or see-through, hologram-like effects. Perhaps Paramount+ is saving some trippy Cortana effects for the series' March 24 debut.

As far as Halo lore is concerned, this trailer makes a few massive changes that befit a new, parallel timeline. The biggest comes from Master Chief apparently discovering a Halo Array by touching and interfacing with an underground artifact at a Covenant excavation site, as opposed to the simpler "crashed on a Halo" angle of the series' first video game. Speaking of origins, the trailer also hints at a deeper, darker look at the Spartan super-soldier project, which has always been a remarkably dark "train children at a young age" plot wrinkle that the games shrug off. (O'Connor suggests that the TV series will reveal this "dark" content "through the eyes of the kids who experienced it" and "the adults tasked with making it happen.")

The trailer also fast-forwards to a version of Halo 5's central conflict—that the UNSC powers-that-be have become concerned about Master Chief going "rogue." Perhaps his discovery of the Halo Array doesn't align with human military forces' concept of a "need-to-know" basis—but at the very least, the trailer's brief hint at this tension suggests a larger role for the character of Dr. Halsey. We hope both the script and McElhone's performance elevate a character who has generally been stuck on the sidelines in the game series.

While Chief and friends are seen waging war against Covenant baddies—whose CGI constructions are arguably the coolest-looking parts of the trailer—the TV series introduces an entirely new human ally of the Covenant who wraps her foes in weird tentacle-like traps and whispers that they should "surrender to the Covenant." It's hard not to see this new character as a way to save on the CGI budget and have a human actor in place of an entirely CGI one, but perhaps Paramount+ will surprise us on that front.

If Paramount+ and 343I wanted to blow away fans with a TV reveal stunner, however, this trailer wasn't exactly it. Some of the framing of battles and explosions suggests a limited soundstage for live-action sequences, all augmented with CGI, as opposed to anything that looks as sweeping and epic as an average Halo video game battle. And the aesthetic limits aren't helped by the trailer putting a Phil Collins cover song over the iconic Halo theme. That said, we've seen clever, limited CGI work well in recent years, particularly on The Mandalorian, so we'll keep our fingers crossed that this brand-new Halo interpretation makes the most of its modest reach. And compared to other ho-hum live-action Halo efforts, particularly Forward Unto Dawn, it looks like this one will establish some considerable stakes with the popular Master Chief character.

Either way, we won't have long to wait for the results; the series will debut in late March.