Master Chief’s helmet always had to come off in the Halo series

Master Chief, a mostly anonymous hero who is determined to protect humanity, has been an integral part of the Halo series since 2001. He’s definitely got a personality, and we know he has a backstory, but the most important part of the character was that he was a badass who could take on an army of aliens all on his own, and that you could control every second of it.

After a decade of failures, however, it was finally successful. Halo It has made it into live-action. This means that Master Chief is now a character in real life, rather than just an avatar.

[Ed. note: This post contains spoilers for the first episode of Halo.]

“In a first-person shooter video game, the character is created very specifically for the purposes of the game, you’re meant to believe that you’re the Master Chief,” Pablo Schreiber tells Polygon. “But the character is never revealed in any excessive way, so that you can project your own personality onto him.”

This kind of facelessness was a badge of honor for Master Chief after 20 years. Chief, to many, is more Chief his armor and his voice rather than a face. Because he has never been able to see a face before, he doesn’t have one. The helmet is always on.

Schreiber stated that faceless challenges were a challenge the show was required to address early.

“It was very important early on that the helmet comes off, you see the face, and you disassociate your version of who you believe the Chief was,” Schreiber explains. “Rather than being co-creator of the experience as you go along and believing that you’re Chief, we’re now inviting you to sit back on the couch and watch Chief start to discover elements of himself.”

The show’s version of the Master Chief sticks to many of the elements from previous Halo canon. John is John’s name. He was adopted at an early stage by the UNSC. John and his Spartans were then turned into military science experimentation by Dr Halsey, who made them human-powered weapons. But while the game’s mostly leave this lore by the wayside, the series is committed to telling John’s story, and showing audiences the person behind Chief’s famous armor.

“If you’re going to have bring an audience along with you for multiple episodes, and hopefully multiple seasons, you really need to imbue that character with empathy and understanding. And you have to identify with the character in a way that goes beyond thinking you’re him.”