I’ve been questioning this for months (since Nov. 6 2012 when I beat the game) but was too lazy to post my question… The thing that confuses me (which I’ve been to lazy to put on the forms) is that well you know how at the end, he detonates the nuke? He’s touching the nuke to detonate it. Point blank range. How did Cortana separate him and the bomb enough to enwrap him in Hard-Light?
…yes that is one of my copied comments from Facebook. Still though, how did she get Hard-Light in between John’s hand and the bomb? Any theories or just a bad plothole?
Well, magic one way to go. But I think the most likely route is that the bomb was activated, but didn’t really explode when Chief hit the button. Cortana did say they would have a narrow exit window when Chief detonated the bomb. It is also possible Cortana was simply able to envelope Chief in hardlight very quickly.
This probably is better in the Halo 4 or Universe forums, but…
I always thought it was Cortana with some heavy-duty hard light. Just supposition on my part; it’s not at all clear what happened in the game, and no steps were taken to really explain it. It was all a bit too much cortana ex machina for me.
> Well, magic one way to go. But I think the most likely route is that the bomb was activated, <mark>but didn’t really explode when Chief hit the button. Cortana did say they would have a narrow exit window when Chief detonated the bomb.</mark> It is also possible Cortana was simply able to envelope Chief in hardlight very quickly.
The highlighted.
I can buy that Cortana was able to quickly envelope Chief, and I realize that hardlight is some durable stuff…but how the heck was it able to protect Chief from a NUKE BLAST at POINT BLANK RANGE, especially as the ship was coming apart? I mean, how strong is hardlight really?
> I can buy that Cortana was able to quickly envelope Chief, and I realize that hardlight is some durable stuff…but how the heck was it able to protect Chief from a NUKE BLAST at POINT BLANK RANGE, especially as the ship was coming apart? I mean, how strong is hardlight really?
As strong as the plot demands that it be.
I’ve asked myself the same question for so long, then i realised the answer was so damn obvious.
The answer is: 343i said so. Nothing really more to it. It would have been much more smarter for chief to press the button on the nuke and then throw it before it blows, thereby giving the hardlight bridge a better chance to shield him, but ultimately the outcome is the same.
The same reason why the shields on the Chief can allow him to fire a gun. It’s small enough to get between him and the blast, yet hard enough to resist the blast. Plus, there’s Cortana in the ship, being able to control the Hardlight systems is a snap if she can make physical copies of herself to restrain the Didact.
If anything, we can safely assume that the shields the Spartans and Elites use are very, very weak versions of Hardlight, and that she used just about all of the ships power to protect him from the explosion in the same manner that she used the Master Chief’s shields to make a ghost move faster than any ghost we’ve driven.
> I’ve been questioning this for months (since Nov. 6 2012 when I beat the game) but was too lazy to post my question… The thing that confuses me (which I’ve been to lazy to put on the <mark>forms</mark>) is that well you know how at the end, he detonates the nuke? He’s touching the nuke to detonate it. Point blank range. How did Cortana separate him and the bomb enough to enwrap him in Hard-Light?
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> …yes that is one of my copied comments from Facebook. Still though, how did she get Hard-Light in between John’s hand and the bomb? Any theories or just a bad plothole?
Because this is my final form?
Perhaps he hit it and took his hand away from the nuke straight after he did so, like bopping it and the nuke took a small amount of time to detonate after being struck?
I’m going to say that it was luck.
The Power of Love trumps the laws of thermodynamics.
Yeah, the end of the game would have made significantly more sense (and been more interestingly dramatic) if Master Chief got to the bomb, picked it up, struggled to his feet, and after priming it, threw it at the core of the machine. After you threw it you should have seen what almost looked like a blue wave starting to come down from the top of the screen before collapsing, the screen going black, and hearing the explosion.
I did like that if you were observant you could see Cortana’s ability to manipulate the bridge before the detonation, when the Didact is dangling the Chief he is well past the edge of the bridge, and when he’s dropped if you’re looking you can see the bridge stretch out to catch him.
> I’ve been questioning this for months (since Nov. 6 2012 when I beat the game) but was too lazy to post my question… The thing that confuses me (which I’ve been to lazy to put on the forms) is that well you know how at the end, he detonates the nuke? He’s touching the nuke to detonate it. Point blank range. How did Cortana separate him and the bomb enough to enwrap him in Hard-Light?
That’s just the thing, guys. This will be the biggest twist in Halo, yet.
It’ll start subtly, in H5 cutscenes, with Chief frantically painting the Eye of Jupiter as UNSC psychiatrists dismiss his actions as PTSD. He continues his rehab on the Infinity, while the UNSC is searching for Jul, Halsey, and the rest of the Janus Key. Every jump, Chief is heard screaming “YOU ARE GOING THE WRONG WAY!!” He leaves the Infinity, knowing that before finding the Janus Key he needed to find a proper ancilla to help him - Medicant Bias. It is at the end of H5 where he encounters Medicant Bias’s tomb - where the Didact has taken residence to rebuild his army of Promeathens. As this was the location where the slipstream portal led to at the end of H4, Chief also is shocked to find a carcass of a S-II.
Halos 6-14 lead to a progressively more explicit plot about religion, in which Chief discovers that
A.) his carcasses’ DNA matched his own and
B.) concludes the ENTIRE Halo saga by narrowly defeating the Flood & by outright ruining the religion plot arc by showing the players that Chief was in fact, an Angel.
In the legendary-only cutscene, it forwards to another 100,000 years in the future, in which a civilian-clad Chief & real-life Cortana are walking through a busy city center in the middle of a bustling humanoid civilization.
Pan to Chief and Cortana, who are shaking their heads in disbelief as they stop by a store window to witness merchants mutating customer’s pets with odd ‘biological spores.’
Cortana: “All of this has happened before,”
Chief: “But the question remains - does all of this have to happen again?”
The credits roll as the Halo theme is overlaid into a Pink Floyd tune with suggestive lyrics.
Cortana transolcates Chief away from the explosion/ship and shields him in a hardlight bubble. Hardlight is strong enough to be used as shielding and armor against forerunner grade weapons, and is stated in-game to render the nuke useless until you deactivate the shield protecting didact.
> The Power of Love trumps the laws of thermodynamics.
Ah, the moral of the story.
> I can buy that Cortana was able to quickly envelope Chief, and I realize that hardlight is some durable stuff…but how the heck was it able to protect Chief from a NUKE BLAST at POINT BLANK RANGE, especially as the ship was coming apart? I mean, how strong is hardlight really?
You could say it might be plot armor. Even though I personally think it’s a little stupid that hardlight is THAT powerful if you ask me…