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Writer's pictureJon Peters

Halo S1 Ep4 Homecoming

It’s time to saddle up for episode four of Halo, titled Homecoming. I’m clinging onto hope that this show will pull through enough to continue to review it; however, if it can’t up its game this episode, I'm going to bail. I’m still on the fence and only hanging by a thread.

Anyway, let's get to it!

We open the show with the Silver Team’s childhood Spartan training. Looks like John (later to become Master Chief) doesn’t like the training and wants to run away. He misses the home he barely remembers. A young Dr. Halsey tells John that he is special and is here for a purpose.

In the present day, Master Chief is quietly brooding over his long-lost memories. Dr. Halsey, though, is excited over the prospect that the Madrigal object isn’t actually a weapon; rather, she thinks it might be an artifact belonging to a super intelligent species. She wants to meet these creatures.

Cortana interrupts Master Chief’s thoughts to annoy him. He’s anxious, she says. Really, though, he’s just ready to go to Eridanus II, which is his childhood home. Cortana doesn’t seem to have much to do, does she?

Over on Planet Madrigal, Kwan and Soren are returning to Kwan’s home. What exactly is their goal? Is it to help Kwan restore balance after Vinsher took over? Is she to be the new rebel leader? Very Star Wars, this aspect of the show. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.

On Planet Reach, Kai-125, taking a page from Master Chief, digs the emotion regulator chip out of her back. She now can experience her full range of emotions. Good for her!

Master Chief lands on Eridanus II, along with Dr. Halsey. He recognizes the house he grew up in, and has a memory of his mother. But they aren’t there for memory lane. They’re there to find the second artifact.

Kwan and Soren land near Madrigal City, a desert city with high walls. Vinsher, who looks like a Nazi if he came from The Matrix, is ruler of the city now. He is, however, polite to the ladies, so he isn’t all bad.

Kwan meets a friend of hers named Attu, who tells Kwan that she’s a wanted woman. Kwan just wants to see her friends, though, and Attu says that she can see them if she comes to her father’s funeral that night. I thought more time had passed in the four episodes of this show. Guess not.

Back with the Spartans, Kai-125 is now more emotionally in tune with herself. We know this because she’s changed her hair style. Ugh. This show is awful.

Dr. Keyes wants to see how the artifact reacts to the Silver Team Spartans. She takes them one by one to the artifact. But first, they must remove their helmet. Why is this show so determined to alienate the fanbase?

Flipping scenes (yet again...why can’t this show just stick with a storyline for more than one minute at a time?), Master Chief digs a hole at a place he recalls from childhood, only to find more drawings. Again with the drawings? Dr. Halsey wants to analyze the drawings back at the ship because Master Chief doesn’t know if they can help them learn the location of the second artifact. He seems more preoccupied, though, with his childhood memories of his parents than the artifact. Which makes sense, but can we just get on with this plot already?

At her father’s funeral, Kwan finds Agatha, one of her father’s generals. Agatha informs Kwan that there is no resistance left and that the people only want protection from the Covenant, which Vinsher provides. The revolution is over. Kwan can’t handle this truth and tells Agatha that the revolution is not over, that her father worked too hard for it. Her raised voice calls attention to her presence, and guards show up. Soren takes them out and they narrowly escape Vinsher’s forces.

Dr. Keyes isn’t having much luck with the Spartans and the artifact. It doesn’t respond to any of them, including Kai-125. Even with her new found emotionally intelligence, she can’t activate the artifact like Master Chief can.

Master Chief, back inside his childhood home, searching for more memories, looks so awkward walking around in his suit without his helmet. I’ll never understand this decision by the show runners. He’s so much cooler when he’s Master Chief and not John.

Master Chief, with Cortana’s help, maps out the memories of his childhood and his home. Dr. Halsey looks on, hoping he can point them toward the second artifact. He recalls yet another hole to go searching for, this time out in the desert. This leads Master Chief to recall that Dr. Halsey had visited Master Chief as a boy. He is becoming aware that he was deceived, but how, exactly, is unclear. This entire storyline seems like nothing more than a time filler due to poor plot development. Just get these two to their destination already.

Dr. Keyes is dissecting a Covenant alien back at her lab. We finally see the needler weapon that the aliens use. Their word for it is Qkhep’os. It’d be great to see more alien technology in this show. And how about some more battles? But I digress. Dr. Keyes is interested in the alien vocabulary, probably so that she can tell her agent in secret that she wants off this show.

Soren wants to leave Kwan on Planet Madrigal because the resistance is over and he doesn’t want to fight Vinsher’s thugs. Kwan, though, thinks he owes her more than just a ride. Vinsher decides it’s time to get a professional to snuff out the two. I’m not opposed to a show about Kwan and Soren, as at times it’s more interesting than Master Chief’s storyline. However, we need to spend more time in this world so that they can build this universe. The jumping back and forth leaves much to be desired.

Master Chief reveals that he knows Dr. Halsey was in his home when he was a boy. He thought he’d met her at the orphanage after his parents died. Will we learn that she had something to do with his parents’ death? Will we care?

In Madrigal City, Soren’s ship has been scrapped. He can’t leave the planet unless he finds another ship. He’s got to travel 200 miles through the desert to find a ship. Another journey for these two.

Kwan, speaking with her aunt, is trying to get the revolution moving again. Her aunt, though, reveals that Kwan’s father was fighting the revolution for mysterious reasons. Before those reasons are revealed, Vinsher’s bounty hunter shows up and kills her aunt, whose name isn’t important enough to mention. Soren shows up just in time to save Kwan, and they flee into the desert.

There are scenes in Halo which remind me of the better scenes in Star Wars’ The Mandalorian, such as when Kwan and Soren are in the streets of Madrigal City. The windswept cyberpunk city is a great setting for a show about two rogue revolutionary types, searching for a cause. And then there are times when Halo reminds me of the worst the sci-fi genre has to offer. Those latter scenes mostly involve Master Chief or Dr. Keyes. The show simply doesn’t work. It’s bland. And for inexplicable reasons it left out some of the most exciting aspects of Halo the video game franchise. It wouldn’t hurt for the show to throw in a couple of Halo battles every once in a while. I find myself not caring about Master Chief, Dr. Halsey, or Dr. Keyes. And worse, it’s just boring.

As I finish this review, I have made up my mind that Halo would be a better show if it was about a desert planet and a dying revolution, with rogue soldiers leading the charge. Throw in some Halo fighting and some (full helmet) Spartans, and maybe Paramount would have something here.

But that’s not what this show is going to be about. Soren and Kwan, as characters, need a lot of work, but the world building in those scenes was better in this episode than Master Chief’s entire story arc so far. Even though the desert planet trope of Star Wars is more than tiresome and played out, it could work on Halo. It’s a different universe, but could use some similar formula.

But the Master Chief plot? Yeesh. It is not good. I don’t fault the actors. They are given some of the most wooden and boring dialogues of any show I’ve watched. Sci-fi often does this (see: Star Trek), and it makes me long for future days when the genre will take itself serious in the way that the fantasy genre finally did with shows like Game of Thrones.

Anyway, the episode ends with Dr. Halsey and Master Chief exploring the mysterious Halo drawing that John did as a child, and its implications for the second artifact they are seeking. It’s not interesting enough, though, to do a play-by-play.

I want to enjoy Halo. But there’s just not enough here to like. I might continue watching it, and possibly doing reviews of the more important episodes (such as a season ending review), but I think my week-to-week recaps are over.

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