Silver Team head out to the Visegrad Array to find out the truth. What they discover instead is so much worse.

This is a slow knife drawn across the throat of an episode. Marisha Mukerhee’s script methodically lays out the truth, the lie Ackerson is hiding inside, why he’s doing it and the stark hypocrisy of human culture. It embraces the chaos embodied Ackerson is leaving in his wake too, and at the same time shows us the vibrant culture of Reach made all the more so by how little time it has left.

This is an ensemble, as the show so often is, but this episode is Joseph Morgan’s to own. His Ackerson is a careful methodical man who is acutely aware of the horror he’s perpetrating and clinging to the possibility of victory as a result of it the same way a drowning man clings to a life raft. Morgan’s careful delivery has played up to now like a man holding his cards to his chest. After this episode it’s recontexualised as a man who is aware of what he’s doing, convinced it can’t be done any other way and walking into the wind of atrocity one step and one word at a time.

The scenes he shares with Halsey and his father, played by the legendary Bill Forsyth, are the highlights of the episode. In the former, we discover Ackerson’s sister was a Spartan candidate lost in the process and he’s been torturing Halsey with flash clones of her,. In the latter, we see Ackerson’s gentle, compassionate side as he helps his ailing father. Then the steel falls again as he asks his son to make sure he isn’t captured alive. Ackerson grants his wish, and ensures his father dies with another flash clone of his sister. It’s horrific and considerate, kind-hearted and monstrous. The same loving son and grieving brother gaslights his best soldiers and sacrifices the entire civilian population of one of the largest human worlds because their deaths will motivate the survivors. He does all of this while making sure he himself is evacuated. An abject monster, but one who has a plan, and a plan as inexcusable as it is understandable.

That pained humanity unites Morgan with the other standouts this episode, Danny Sapani and Natasha Culzac. The former gets a fantastic scene with Morgan that bookends an equally great scene with Pablo Schrieber’s Master Chief. In that, Morgan shows us Ackerson revelling in being able to stop the Chief and sowing discord amongst Silver Team. In the latter, Ackerson shows Admiral Keyes that everything the Chief suspected was true and they’ve already given up. They win the war by losing Reach and Sapani’s barely contained disgust is a perfect match for Morgan’s glacial calm. Meanwhile, Culzac continues to have some of the most interesting work to do in the season, as Riz struggles to come to terms with the very real possibility that she can’t fight anymore. She gets an incredible scene partner in Krondon as Louis 036, a bling Spartan turned trainer and the whole plot meshes neatly with Ackerson’s. He’s focused on winning the war by any means necessary. Riz is starting to focus on there being something other than war. The soldier is taking faltering steps into a new world even as her boss is closing the door on that world ever happening at all.

It’s a very personal take on the apocalypse, made doubly so by the scenes Schrieber and Rodlo share. Schrieber uses his physicality so well, playing the Chief’s discomfort at being out of armour and in civilian spaces with every inch of his frame. Sitting next to Rodlo’s Perez in church, he doesn’t look like the weapon Ackerson prefers or the demon that the Covenant have vowed to kill. He looks the same as everyone else in the episode: fragile, mortal, in danger.

Verdict: A subtle, calm hour of TV crammed full of skin-crawling tension. Next time, the fall. 9/10

Alasdair Stuart