The first season of the Paramount+ Halo TV series has come and gone, leaving some unanswered questions for those new to the franchise. The Halo TV show starts at the onset of the Human-Covenant war, with the Covenant attacking Planet Madrigal in the first episode. While most of the characters, themes, and locales may be familiar to Halo fans, there is still information that may have helped non-Halo fans understand who the Spartan IIs are and where they came from.
In the Halo lore, the Spartan program was initially known as the Orion Project, a government-funded research program headed by the brilliant minds at The Office of Naval Intelligence, or ONI. The purpose of the Orion project was to create genetically enhanced super soldiers with advanced technology available to them during the time. The program was eventually scrapped as the results from the program’s volunteers, seasoned UNSC soldiers, did not meet expectations.
The United Nations Security Council, or Earth’s future unified government, holds domain over the Earth, and the UNSC controlled Inner-Colonies such as Earth and Reach. During the colonization of other planets beyond Earth, there were entire colonies that chose to make their own way without the support or taxation of the UNSC. Thus began the UNSC-Insurrection war, as the UNSC cut off supply lines to most of the outer colonies, and the insurrectionists responded with coordinated terrorist attacks and piracy of UNSC technology and space-bound ships.
The Kidnappings And Experimentation
In an attempt to quell the conflict between the UNSC and outer-colonies insurrectionists, the UNSC and ONI revisited Project Orion in secrecy to experiment on children. The intent was to create an elite contingent of enhanced soldiers to infiltrate behind insurrectionist lines and destroy them from within.
However, the success parameters of the Spartan Program were dependent on the age of the incumbent when they entered the program. And so began the kidnapping of inner-colony children by Captain Jacob Keyes, whereas Dr. Catherine Halsey. Dr. Halsey personally studied and hand-selected most child soldiers during the first wave of recruits.
The children, including Master Chief Petty Officer John Spartan 117, were flash cloned with similar technology used by Dr. Halsey in the show to clone herself. The children were abducted late into the night and replaced with clones. The flash-cloned children eventually died from genetic abnormalities due to the cloning process not yet being perfected, as was evident in the show when Halsey’s clone died from unknown causes. Each family who had their children mysteriously abducted in the night was never aware that the child they buried was a copy.
The child soldiers were vigorously trained and periodically injected with enhancement drugs. In some cases, their skeletal structures were augmented to allow the Spartans to run faster and jump higher than any human ever could. The MJOLNIR power armor was created to provide the Spartans with an almost impenetrable layer of metal and used to provide real-time combat information. The technology used by the Spartan IIs was far more advanced than any military tool save for the galaxy-skipping Slipspace engine.
Some children could not handle the intensity of the training and the surgical augmentations, and either died from injuries or, in the case of Soren Spartan 066, developed severe genetic abnormalities and lifelong mental and physical scarring. Some children, however, despite being horribly deformed and disabled during the Spartan program, eventually ended up working for either the UNSC or ONI in non-combat capacities.
The Spartan II’s performed exceptionally well on almost all of their combat missions during the height of the Insurrection war. Still, progress was ground to a halt when the Covenant showed up and started glassing planets, immediately redirecting Spartan II’s attention away from civil war and toward protection against humanity’s extinction.
The Halo TV series starts off in the early stages of the Human-Covenant war and takes some liberties in adding new characters, such as Master Chief’s Silver Team. The visions Master Chief has during the show are of his first life with his family before he was abducted by Halsey and Keyes and forced to become the savior of humanity.
