John is introduced to his new partner, and the relationship gets off to a rocky start. Kwan is determined to return home to Madrigal to fight for her people. Makee’s plans to retrieve the artefact for the Covenant are set in motion.

I honestly don’t really know what to make of Halo week to week. In many ways, it is fairly boilerplate genre storytelling, but then it will do something that really throws a curveball into the works. After the slight disappointment of the second episode, this instalment almost feels like watching a different show.

John is back at Reach, and the Cortana project has been approved. While the show slightly fudges exactly how the ‘science’ of this is supposed to work, it does some fairly solid and unexpectedly deep work around the ethics of it. It takes the opportunity of posing a question you don’t often see in this kind of storyline – what exactly are the ethics of dealing with a clone of yourself, and how much harder is that made by the fact that it is yourself? Yourself with your own brain, thoughts and memories, and more importantly with a much clearer distinction as to right and wrong than you currently have. Halsey gets the opportunity here to converse with a younger, more idealistic version of herself, and the results of that interaction speak volumes about her as a character.

When John finally gets to meet his new AI companion, Cortana herself is much as anyone who has played the games will remember, right down to the voice being that of Jen Taylor, the actress who has voiced the character in the games. Their relationship is not off to a great start, given that John wasn’t exactly clear on how invasive a presence she would be, and his own continuing doubts about everything. However, Cortana is as smart as Halsey ever was, and is able to slowly pry her way into John’s trust, albeit only to a certain extent, while still feeding back to Halsey herself. This opens up several intriguing possibilities about both Cortana herself and also about Halsey and exactly where her loyalties might ultimately lie.

Back with Kwan, she’s already bored of sitting around under Soren’s dubious ‘protection’ and wants to go back to Madrigal and help her people throw off their new oppressor. Soren has no interest though until she brings up the subject of money, and I get the impression that this is a character who’s firmly going to sit in the frenemy column of the show. I wait with interest to see what that means for John going forward.

Meanwhile, Makee undertakes the first part of her plan to retrieve the artefact for the Covenant. We get a bit of a flashback as to how she came to join the aliens as well as a good illustration of just how ruthless she has become under their tutelage. Given the show’s overt signalling that she and John share some sort of talent relating to the artefacts, one can only assume they’re on a collision course and that interesting things will be happening along the way.

And speaking of the Artefact, John is able to see a bit more of what it is and might mean, and that answer leads to a new mission – one on which he will be accompanied by his Silver team comrades as well as Halsey herself. What’s not clear is whose loyalties are going to lie where by the time this all shakes out.

Visually, after a slight downgrade in episode 2, things feel suitably epic and big budget once again here. Cortana is rendered very well, and thankfully less sexualised than she was in the earlier videogame instalments, and in general the kit, ships and other stuff we get to see looks reassuringly solid.

Verdict: Starting to show promise that this one will be deeper than you might expect from a videogame adaptation. 8/10

Greg D. Smith