Warning: this review contains full spoilers for Halo: Episode 7! If you need a refresher on where we left off, here's IGN's review of Halo: Episode 6 - "Solace."
Everything comes with a cost. And for Halo, it seems the price of watching the show's best episode to date is to immediately follow it with the worst. "Solace" makes the mistake of focusing entirely on the show's weakest storyline. Worse, the series is still no closer to revealing why that storyline matters in the first place.
"Solace" didn't succeed solely because it ignored Yerin Ha's Kwan Ha and Bokeem Woodbine's Soren-066, but their absence certainly didn't hurt, either. Since Master Chief and Kwan Ha parted ways in Episode 2, the series has routinely failed to justify the decision to keep the latter in the spotlight. Why, with all the drama afoot within the UNSC and the steadily worsening scale of the war against the Covenant, does this random freedom fighter matter? Why is Madrigal so important to the bigger picture? The video game lore certainly gives fans little to go on, as in that version Madrigal is just a minor world that becomes one more casualty of war.
One would certainly hope that an episode entirely devoted to Kwan Ha's quest to liberate her home would answer those questions. Eventually, she and Soren have to become more than mere side characters with no tangible connection to the larger story. But even with all the allusions to the secrets of Madrigal and the true destiny of the Ha family in Episode 7, this storyline remains dull and lifeless. It comes across as a much more bland and formulaic sci-fi series crudely grafted onto the Halo mythos.
And that's really the sticking point here. It's not simply that Kwan Ha's arc feels so completely divorced from everything else going on in the series. Even in a vacuum, it simply doesn't make for compelling television. This episode is littered with bland sci-fi tropes that have been executed far better elsewhere. Kwan Ha's charge into the sandstorm is Mad Max: Fury Road with no payoff. The sage women of the desert are basically bargain-basement Fremen, there to do little but spout cliches and send Kwan Ha on a textbook desert vision quest. And all so she can find out she has to "go back to where it started"?
That last part speaks to a peculiar pattern in the series where characters are forced to take a long, roundabout journey to wind up right back where they started. Take Soren, who goes on a whirlwind quest of his own that seems to amount to very little. The opening doesn't make it clear how much time has passed since Episode 5, so there's an initial sense of confusion as to whether we're seeing Soren hallucinate or if he actually made the trip back entirely offscreen. And by the climax, he's right back on Madrigal, as the episode banks on an attachment to these two characters that really hasn't formed at all.
If nothing else, the climax does at least break up all the sci-fi cliches with a bit of action. Though it should be said that watching Soren shoot, stab, and punch generic goons is a poor substitute for the Spartan vs. Covenant battles one would normally expect from a Halo series.
The one highlight of Episode 7 is Burn Gorman's Vinsher Grath. Mind you, Grath is a one-note villain with utterly no depth, but there's something to be said for Gorman's willingness to just throw caution to the wind and chew every piece of scenery he can find. He's basically just playing a deranged Space Nazi here and clearly having the time of his life. That may not even come close to justifying the major plot detour this week, but it's something.
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