Let’s Talk About That Bonkers Halo Infinite Ending

See? Same thing. But the devil’s in the details.

Let’s place that dateline: 97,368 B.C.E. is shortly after the Halo network was fired in 97,455 B.C.E., thereby wiping all sentient life from the galaxy (well, save for those who hid away on the Ark, an exogalactic facility). Huh.

It’s also telling that Despondent Pyre, the AI unit responsible for monitoring Zeta Halo, is talking in this convo. If you’ll recall, by the end of Halo Infinite, Despondent Pyre is very, very dead. The other chatterbox is the Grand Edict, a presumably high-ranking member of the Forerunner, the people who imprisoned the Endless. At the end of their conversation, the Grand Edict mentions that Offensive Bias, another AI unit, has been deployed.

Offensive Bias?

In Halo Lore, Offensive Bias was designed as a failsafe for Mendicant Bias, a rogue AI unit whose 100,000-year-spanning storyline would require at least ten more blogs for an appropriate rundown. For now, I’ll direct you toward the character’s impressively thorough bio page over at Halopedia.

Some fans believe that Halo Infinite is engaged in temporal hijinks. After all, that cutscene is dated to nearly 100,000 years ago; how else could Atriox have ended up there (err, then) if not for time travel? It makes sense that Atriox would want to zip back in time, too. His planet, after all, had been obliterated by Cortana; the only way to stop that from happening would be to fall back on some Avengers: Endgame-level plot turns.

Plus, there’s that whole thing in the current-day Halo storyline where Master Chief mysteriously blips off the radar during his fight with the Harbinger only to reappear three days later. And some of the dialogue in that final voiceover—particularly the part where Despondent Pyre says “Time is not a construct we can control,” only to have the Grand Edict say “We cannot allow it to be theirs”—indicates that time travel will play a role in future Halo storylines.

Other fans aren’t so sure.

One theory posits that the dateline is purely there to put a time to the conversation we’re hearing, not the events we’re seeing. The conversation still happened nearly 100,000 years ago, the theory suggests, but Atriox setting the Endless loose is going down either during or shortly after the event of Halo Infinite. There’s precedent for such a hoodwink: Halo 4 pulled a similar trick with its Legendary ending.

Halo Infinite ends on open questions beyond the matter of time travel—specifically about who, or what, the Endless are. One Reddit user put forth the idea that the Endless is actually the Flood, a hivemind species from the original Halo trilogy, hellbent on eating all sentient life in the galaxy. Another user took that notion a step further and, by stringing together various glyphs and development assets from across the Halo oeuvre, compiled a convincing argument that the Endless is indeed a hivemind, but is more technologically advanced than the Flood. (Seriously, the theory is ridiculously well-researched, and worth reading in full.)

Wherever or whenever Halo goes next, the Endless are certain to play a major role. In 2020, developer 343 Industries said that Halo Infinite wouldn’t receive a sequel, and would instead serve as a base platform for “the next ten years” of expansions and such. Last month, as NME reports, Microsoft filed a trademark for “Halo: The Endless.” Maybe Halo Infinite isn’t so finite after all.