The greatest hurdle was sorting out what to do with the lead Spartan, Master Chief. In the games, the first-person perspective makes Chief a shell for the player. “He’s everybody, right?” says Kane. “He’s you, he’s me, he’s a 6-year-old girl, he’s a 15-year-old person in a different country. Whoever plays the game is him.”
That is perfect for a game character and deadly for scripted drama. But when Kyle Killen (“Lone Star”) came on board as showrunner in 2018, he hit upon a shrewd narrative path that embraces the video game DNA: Master Chief starts as a complete cypher, engineered to be so devoid of individuality that he literally has no sense of taste, and the rest of the season slowly fills out the void.
“We’re going to tell a story about a man discovering his own humanity,” says Kane, who joined the show as co-showrunner in 2019. “In so doing, he’s invited the audience to discover that guy’s humanity too.”
Eventually, Levine says, “we got the script to the place where we said, ‘You know, this is a deep dive into character. What are the costs of turning human beings into killing machines?’”
