I have a theory as to how the Marines died in Master Chief’s escape pod. I first noticed that everyone in the pod is strapped down, as one should be in an escape pod, except for Chief. But something wasn’t right, why would everyone aside from Chief be dead when they landed? I’ve concluded that it wasn’t the crash landing that killed all the Marines, oh nay nay. This was the doing of a half-ton super soldier flailing about the cabin upon impact. What else would it be?
When you begin the mission “Halo” Master Chief is a little bit on the light-headed side, obviously from the flailing. And as you exit the craft, one will notice Cortana say “The others…the impact…there’s nothing we can do”. This is in fact an attempt by the AI to relieve Chief of the guilt he is feeling from unintentionally slaughtering his comrades. If a crash had in fact killed the soldiers, the bodies inside the pod would have been horribly mangled from the impact. This is not the case. The scene observed is every individual resting uniformly in their seats, lending credence to the hypothesis that they died from more subtle injuries like severed spines, massive cranial trauma, or heavy internal bleeding from contact with half a ton of projectile Spartan.
As for the bodies outside the craft? If they were ejected from an impact, their bodies would have been spread across the ditch carved by the escape pod. But instead we find them right outside the entrance. This leads me to believe that they were trying desperately to escape the horrors that were within the craft, but were instead forcibly expelled by our beloved hero.
> Makes sense. After all, none of the other pods had dead bodies in them, just the one that MC was in. How do you explain that?
Each pod was equipped with one Spartan-II. This was your “survival Kit” if you will. In hostile situations one would eject from the UNSC ship via the pod and when they would land the Spartan-II would exit the pod and fend off enemies. Now, the major flaw with this is that the pod were developed before the Spartan program. Because of this flaw the Spartans needed to stand up in the pod bracing themselves as best as they could. Most Marines would exit the pod unscathed, but for the crew on the Pillar of Autumn this was not the case.
The funny thing about the topic is that I thought of it 10 years after the game was released. It may have crossed my mind back in 2001 but I don’t recall ever thinking of this.
