Halo Season 2, Episode 6 Ending Explained

Warning! This post contains SPOILERS for Halo season 2, episode 6, “Onyx”

Halo season 2, episode 6 ends on a major cliffhanger. Not only does the ending set up the final episodes of the season, but it also sets up the show’s long-awaited future. Set before the events of the first Halo game, Paramount’s Halo show starring Pablo Schreiber as Master Chief John-117 is rapidly approaching the very thing the franchise is named after. As such, narratives have begun to culminate with everything pointing toward an arrival on the first Halo ring.

Halo season 2 is centered on its version of the Fall of Reach from the core Halo franchise canon, along with its preceding buildup and subsequent fallout. Set in its own “Silver Timeline”, John-117 is betrayed by the UNSC and ONI who left him without his armor on Reach, despite knowing that a Covenant invasion was both imminent and equally inevitable. Now, Master Chief and his few remaining allies arrive on ONI’s secret world of Onyx in Halo season 2, episode 6, resulting in some key confrontations. To that end, here’s Halo season 2, episode 6’s ending explained.

Why Master Chief and Makee Touching The Artifact Is So Important

Cortana’s Guiding Everyone To The Halo Ring

While Soren and his wife Laera go off in search of their kidnapped son Kessler in Halo season 2, episode 6, Kwan-Ha and Doctor Catherine Halsey discover the Forerunner research being conducted by Miranda Keyes on Onyx. This leaves John-117 free to go after Col. James Ackerson and Admiral Parangosky, the primary UNSC and ONI leaders responsible for the tragedy of Reach. Having betrayed Master Chief and his team by taking their armor and leaving countless civilians to die, John-117 is determined to get some payback.

However, this leads to a brutal confrontation with Kai-125 who’d been manipulated by Ackerson, having left Reach before the invasion to train his new Spartan-IIIs. Although Kai incapacitated John-117, she couldn’t bring herself to kill him. After Kai left John bleeding on the floor, Cortana reached out to Master Chief despite being in the custody of Makee and the Covenant.

Guiding Master Chief to the Forerunner artifact in ONI’s possession, Cortana knows that John-117 getting to the Halo ring before the Covenant is crucial. At the same time, Makee makes her way to the artifact the Covenant took from Reach. Despite her claims to Cortana that she’d lost her ability to connect with the artifact as a “Blessed One”, the episode ends with John and Makee touching and seemingly activating both Forerunner artifacts at the same time.

It looks as though this is the starting pistol where both Master Chief and the Covenant will receive the coordinates to the first Halo ring. It’s also likely that Makee couldn’t access the Covenant’s artifact due to its key-sized hole in the middle, the same shape and size as the artifact touched by John. In place of bringing the artifacts together physically, it follows that they both had to be touched simultaneously by “Blessed Ones”.

Why Kai Turns On Col. Ackerson

She Still Believes In John-117

Following her fight with John-117 and the seeds of doubt he’d planted, Kai-125 confronts Col. Ackerson about Reach. Confirming that she believes Master Chief about how he and the rest of Silver Team were abandoned without their armor, it truly does seem like she’s done blindly working for Ackerson. This is combined with her frustrations regarding the Spartan-III training simulations and how Ackerson has them programmed, attempting to condition his new soldiers with fabricated hope outside the realities of actual combat.

Ultimately, it’s revealed that Ackerson was stalling for time as he’s dispatched a black ops team to execute John-117 and finish what Kai couldn’t. As such, this does look to be the final nail in the coffin for Kai and Ackerson’s partnership. Finally realizing the harsh and cold truth about Ackerson and UNSC’s command at large, it does look as though Kai-125 will attempt to rejoin Master Chief in the episodes to come.

The Arbiter Attacking The Priest Sets Up The Covenant’s Halo Future

Foreshadowing The Great Schism

Before Makee touches the artifact aboard the Arbiter’s command ship in Halo season 2, episode 6, the ship’s Sangheili priest Uto’ Mdama confronts Var ‘Gatanai about Makee and the transmission Cortana has sent to Onyx. Having clashed with the Arbiter earlier in the episode, the priest didn’t understand why they weren’t headed back to High Charity as ordered by the Covenant Hierarchs. He didn’t know that Makee had convinced the Arbiter to help her seek out the Halo ring on their own as a means of independently restoring his honor in defiance of the Hierarchs’ hypocrisy.

Now, the priest demands that Makee be executed for her treachery thanks to Cortana, urging the Arbiter to kill her so as not to add more shame to his name as the Covenant’s disgraced Arbiter. However, this only prompts the Arbiter to rise against the priest, resulting in a battle between those choosing to remain loyal to ‘Gatanai and those serving ‘Mdama. While it’s not shown by the episode’s end, the odds are high that the Arbiter will succeed in killing the priest, allowing him to continue his own Great Journey to the Halo ring as guided by Makee.

The confrontation between Var ‘Gatanai and Uto ‘Mdama is a preview of future Covenant tensions that will likely form as seen in the core Halo canon. Eventually, the Hierarchs’ hypocrisy is revealed, resulting in the Great Schism where the vast majority of Elites leave to form the Swords of Sangheilios as allies to humanity, the true bearers of the Forerunners’ Mantle of Responsibility. However, the Covenant still persists with a new faction led by the Sangheili Jul ‘Mdama (the same clan as Halo‘s new priest). However, it remains to be seen how closely the Halo show will adapt this future.