Arriving on Onyx, where ONI has a secret facility, John, Soren, Halsey, Laera and Kwan set out on their various objectives. Meanwhile, Kai struggles with survivor’s guilt, Perez struggles with SPARTAN-III training and Ackerson and Cortana and Makee find themselves on the same side.

There’s a lot of positioning this episode as we get the big cast all in place for the finale. It feels a little like it too and the actual progress in Kwan and Halsey’s plots isn’t especially major. However, when you look at the episode up close, there’s a lot going on here.

Starting with the villains, Shabana Azmi’s Parangosky, Charlie Murphy’s Makee, Viktor Akerblom’s Var ‘Gatanai and Joseph Morgan’s Ackerson all get some chunky stuff to do. Akerblom and Murphy especially give some much needed context and nuance to the Covenant. Makee’s horror at what they’ve done, and what’s going to be done to them in revenge is painfully human even though she’d hate to admit it and Akerblom’s stoic turned believer is either her greatest ally or weapon. It’s a tough thing to land, a character whose villainy is their fragility but they both do good work here. The Covenant feel alien and what’s evil to us is if not justifiable then certainly contextual to them. The religious element of their existence, the terror they feel at the idea of someone else getting the Halo is really well handled and I hope we get more of that in the final two episodes of the season and hopefully next year.

Parangosky and Ackerson, weirdly, are very similar. Both sets of villains are motivated by the fear of what the other will do them. The difference being the Covenant’s atrocity is something they choose to see and face, and in the case of Makee and ‘Gatanai try and make something of. Azmi and Morgan’s ONI officers are the sort of evil that would make Carter J Burke nod approvingly. People who don’t think too hard about the human complexities but focus on the ‘big picture’. The sort of people who would write ‘Who don’t we save?’ on a whiteboard. The Covenant are villains, ONI are monsters. I know which I want to see suffer the consequences of their actions first.

Over on Team Good Guy, the Chief and Soren get some fun material this week, especially the Chief. Pablo Schreiber does laconic, slightly broken badass so very well and his interactions with Soren, the other gunslinger left standing, are great. Exhausted, furious, and having just a little fun, the two men are clearly having fun knocking the house that built them down.

The rest of the cast fare less well with two exceptions; Kai and Perez. Kate Kennedy has been the show’s MVP from episode 1 and Kai’s arc this season is very compelling. Wracked with survivor’s guilt, she plays through simulations of the corridor fight from Reach to try and make a difference she’s manipulated again by Ackerson into taking the Chief down. The fight is gnarly, one injured and unarmed man against a furious Spartan wearing what amounts to a tank but it puts them both on the same page again. Kai sees Ackerson, and the Chief, and herself, for who they really are. That unites her with Perez, her most gifted and troublesome pupil who ties the episode together with repeated runs in a simulator. These scenes, with a group of SPARTAN-III’s space jumping to a Covenant vessel, give the episode most of its brutal action and also serve as an echo of Kai’s newly returned centre. Perez wins when she shouldn’t, and finds the simulation simply stops. They aren’t expected to survive. But Spartans don’t listen to the odds.

Verdict: Rounded out with some lovely Chief/Cortana scenes with the pair working in lockstep, this is an episode that’s deceptively slow but covers a lot of ground. Complicated, and then very simple it sets up the end game and puts the pieces where they need, and in some cases even want, to be. 8/10

Alasdair Stuart