Master Chief and Cortana

Master Chief and Cortana Major spoilers for Combat Evolved, Halo 2, Halo 3, Halo 4, Halo 5 and Halo Infinite. I’ve said how much I love Chief and Cortana together, but I want to actually go through some of what happens between them. Because there’s a lot more to it than the two of them getting along while you shoot things. Go back to Combat Evolved. You have this soldier trying to keep people alive after the Pillar of Autumn goes down, and Cortana trying to figure out what they’ve landed on. They need each other immediately. There’s barely time to get your bearings before somebody needs rescuing or the situation gets worse. And then Cortana has to stop Chief from making a catastrophic mistake. He’s been following Guilty Spark’s instructions, and she understands what activating Halo will actually do. They end up in an argument in the control room because the thing Chief thinks he’s accomplishing is very different from what’s about to happen. That’s important. She can tell him he’s wrong. She can get angry with him. He can change course when he understands what she’s telling him. You’re watching them work through something with consequences far beyond either of them. By Halo 2, there’s much more familiarity between them. The banter is there, the confidence in each other is there, and then the game leaves them separated. Cortana stays on High Charity while Chief goes after Truth. Suddenly the person who has been with you through so much is somewhere you can’t simply turn around and walk back to. Halo 3 makes getting back to her part of the fight. And look at where he has to go to do it. High Charity has been taken over by the Flood. Everything about that place is awful. But Cortana is still there, so Chief goes in. Their reunion means something because of the time they’ve spent apart and what she’s been put through. It’s such a different kind of moment from picking up a weapon or reaching the next checkpoint. There’s somebody waiting at the end of that nightmare who needed him to come back. Then the game leaves them stranded together in the broken section of the Forward Unto Dawn. Chief goes into cryosleep. Cortana stays awake. After all the running and fighting and trying to reach each other, they’re finally in the same place, but they’re still a very long way from home. Halo 4 brings another problem with that passage of time. She’s been waiting, and she’s deteriorating. Chief wakes up and has to deal with a world that kept moving while he was asleep, alongside the possibility of losing the person who stayed with him. I’ve already talked about how much there is in that game between them, so I won’t repeat the entire thing here. But the ending matters to everything that follows. Cortana saves him. He’s left having to accept that his effort to bring her home didn’t end the way he wanted. Then Halo 5 brings her back, and that makes the situation so much more complicated. Because the person Chief wants to reach is also the person imposing her will through the Guardians. Her plan has consequences for everybody else. His attachment to her doesn’t make those consequences disappear. And when she locks Chief and Blue Team inside a Cryptum, that’s an enormous break in the trust they had. There’s something genuinely disturbing about taking a relationship built on relying on each other and reaching a point where one of them decides the other no longer gets a choice. Whatever Cortana believes she’s protecting him from, he hasn’t agreed to it. Fireteam Osiris has to get them out. I love Cortana, and I don’t think loving a character means you have to explain away everything they do. This part of their story deserves a real conversation. So does the distance between what she intends and what other people suffer because of her decisions. By Infinite, Chief is trying to understand what happened to her while working alongside the Weapon. That brings all that history into a new relationship. His hesitation makes sense, but the Weapon also has to be allowed to be herself. She hasn’t personally lived through every decision that made him cautious. And Cortana’s final sacrifice on Zeta Halo doesn’t turn everything that happened before it into something simple. There’s regret there. There are consequences. There’s somebody left behind who has to keep going. That’s why I can’t summarize Chief and Cortana with one neat description. They’ve been partners, they’ve been separated, they’ve gone back for each other, and they’ve reached a point where being together again wasn’t enough to make things right. I love what they have in the earlier games. I love the familiarity, the jokes, the trust. And the later parts are difficult partly because that earlier relationship means so much. There’s a lot to care about before anything goes wrong. I could talk about these two for a very long time. They’re a huge part of why Halo gives us so much to discuss.