'Halo' Episode 4: 'Homecoming' portrays Natascha McElhone's Dr Halsey as a cold visionary
One of the bigger reveals in 'Halo' Episode 4 was how Natascha McElhone's Dr Halsey functions. The actress plays a scientist for the United Nations Space Command (UNSC) and the creator of the Spartan-II Project. While the first three episodes showed her closeness to John-117 (Pablo Schreiber) and the drive to find out more about the artifact, the latest episode sees her daughter Miranda (Olive Gray) shed more light on her mother.
In the storyline that sees Miranda work with Kai-125 (Kate Kennedy), who removes her emotion suppressor pellet just like John, and even dyes her hair with a shade of pink as a way to show that she's discovering her human self. But in her attempt to help Dr Halsey, she does reveal her true side — something that Miranda deduces to be a glitch that her mother would fix. She also cements the notion that nothing her mother, Dr Halsey, does is by coincidence and that makes her a rather dangerous and mysterious person.
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Prior to the series premiere, McElhone, in an interview with TVLine previewed her character. "She has an arrogance,” the actress remarked. “But if you’re a scientist, and if you’re looking at it through the portal that she is, there’s a rationale behind all of it. We spend most of our resources killing one another or going to war. How is that progress? No, we need to advance our species, or we’re not going to survive."
“In terms of human relationships, Halsey is not invested in those in a way that perhaps a normal person in our world might be. She’s not really interested in her progeny,” McElhone explained.. “She’s interested in how she can upscale and improve our brains, and our minds, and how we can better create predictive systems” — which is the foundation of her mysterious, controversial Cortana project," she added.
These statements from McElhone just show how much Dr Halsey cares about her work and the lengths she would go to bend the future to her will. Whether this will put her in harm's way or make her the villain is something that remains to be seen.
'Halo' Episode 4 is available for streaming on Paramount+