6 Things From The Halo Universe You Probably Didn't Know
3. Halo 3: ODST’s Rookie Dies In The Most Unremarkable Way Possible
The grittier, more grounded take on the Human-Covenant war of Halo 3: ODST was a refreshing break from the superhuman power trip of playing as the Master Chief. Wandering around a devastated New Mombasa as the strong but silent Rookie to piece together the stories of the rest of your team, Alpha-Nine, is a desperate, solitary experience. The opening sequence of the game details how billions of lives have been lost, how humanity is on its last legs, its best kept secret, Earth, now under invasion, and how the mission you’re about to undertake is near-suicidal. It’s an earnest expression of the existential position of the human race in the face of a vicious and unrelenting threat.
Despite the insurmountable odds, Rookie and the squad survived their mission, and the rest of the war. The novel Bad Blood follows Alpha-Nine after the war, combating insurgents on the planet Draco III. After an ambush in Draco III’s capitol building, Rookie is captured and beaten before being held as a hostage by insurrectionist Captain Ingridson. Mickey, one of the playable characters of ODST, storms Captain Ingridson’s position in an attempt to force her to stand down. Instead, she executes Rookie with a single shot to the head, putting a shocking end to a character who, frankly, had deserved so much more.
To have the character we shared and survived such a sombre glimpse into loneliness, despair and potential extinction with get taken out in such a throwaway manner feels cheap and undeserved. The lack of fanfare surrounding Rookie’s death, and the fact it happened off-screen in a novel doesn’t seem to do justice to a character who has been through so much.
Perhaps though, it just reinforces a point that ODST, and maybe Halo at large, tries to make. That this universe is unfair, brutal and unforgiving, that even those characters who we’ve seen go to hell and back still aren’t safe from the indiscriminate swing of death’s scythe, or more simply, to quote Reach’s Jorge, that death is a trip “we all make sooner or later”, regardless of how heroic that trip is.
Whether or not you want to buy into any deeper meaning that Halo might have, at least one good thing came out of the Rookie’s death. It encouraged Buck and Alpha-Nine to accept an opportunity to start fresh as Spartan IV’s, leading to Buck’s appearance as a Spartan in Halo 5, which many would argue is one of only a few good things Halo 5 gave us.