Captain Jacob Keyes started to have bad luck from the first moments of Halo 1. His ship, preparing for a secret mission, was ambushed when the Covenant attacked Reach. They fled blindly, only to arrive at Halo 04 and find the Covenant waiting for them. After a valiant effort, the ship crashes on Halo and Keyes is taken prisoner.

The Master Chief and Cortana mount a daring rescue, so the player has to get inside a Covenant cruiser, find the captain, and keep him alive until the end of the level.

Almost immediately after, however, the captain's search for hidden weapons to use against the Covenant lead to the discovery of the Flood, who take him captive for the second time in the game. The Chief's second valiant rescue attempt fails, as they recover only the neural implants he needs to set the Pillar of Autumn to self-destruct, destroy Halo 04, and supposedly end this whole nightmare.

Crashed, captured and Floodified.

So perhaps Julie Benz should have known going in that there's a bit of bad luck associated with characters sharing the last name "Keyes" in Halo games.

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At the start of Halo 2, Commander Miranda Keyes accepts a posthumous medal of honor for her father. She gets caught up in the Covenant attack on Earth led by Regret, follows his ship to Delta Halo, finds the Index, gets captured by Tartarus, and forced to activate the installation.

That is perhaps nothing to the misfortune that befell her after Halo 2 ended: Bungie said they didn't need her for Halo 3 according to an interview she did with TVGuide.com a few days ago (thanks Septimus). Which was too bad, she said, because she enjoyed doing Halo 2.

What's stranger than all that is the reason Bungie gave her for why they were making the change:

"I was informed a couple of weeks ago that they are actually changing the voice of Captain Miranda Keyes, and giving her an accent."

That is at least three kinds of weird. Jacob Keyes had no particularly discernible ethnic accent that I can think of, so it's hard to imagine a reason for literally doing what Benz says Bungie wants to do. The obvious conclusion to jump to is that Keyes, surrounded by escaped Flood on Delta Halo, not to mention the Gravemind-infested High Charity high in orbit, doesn't manage to escape the system without getting Flood infected, just like her father did, so the "accent" line may be just a reference to the Flood's characteristic gurgles. Of course, if that were to happen you'd imagine Bungie would let the audience see it in a cutscene, which you'd think would still require some input from Benz-- unless they already recorded it for Halo 2. That also makes sense, given that Halo 2 was originally supposed to be longer than it ended up being.

One can only hope, if that is the case, that the Flood does indeed, by nature or design, preserve the memories and personalities of the organisms it absorbs. Perhaps then it'll be a reunion with her fallen father.