Halo Review: Inheritance (Season 1 Episode 7)
Halo has had a good run of episodes lately and, as a result, there’s no way to look at Season 1 Episode 7, “Inheritance,” as anything other than a tragic misstep.
The storyline surrounding Kwan and Soren has consistently been the weakest part of the show by a pretty severe margin and it’s almost demoralizing as a viewer to have to go back to that after taking a break from it in the prior episode. Halo simply has not given us much of a reason to care about any of that and that has carried through the entire season.
It has been only tolerable up to this point because it hasn’t been a substantial part of the show. It would just be a scene here and there, and then we’d be back at the UNSC or the Covenant. It would just be these little bursts that require so little of its audience.
That all changes on “Inheritance” where its sole focus is on this plotline. There’s so little of this season left that one would think its energy would be better spent on virtually anything else. Apparently, that is not the case. For reasons that escape us, Soren has to leave the planet and then come back, all within the span of this one episode.
That is just one example we could give on how bloated and unnecessary this entire episode is and it never justifies its existence, even once. Did we have to spend an entire dream sequence with Kwan getting beat repeatedly by Master Chief? No, can’t say we did.
The episode does come close to having something worthwhile when it shows a glimpse of Guilty Spark, the floating ball that comes out of the well, which is an iconic figure from the games. Even that gets swept past too quickly to have any kind of impact or satisfaction, though.
Frankly, there’s just no getting around that this did not need to be an entire episode. This is the television version of “this could have been an email.” It makes no sense, at least readily, why this episode couldn’t have been smaller and spread throughout the last two episodes of the season.
The biggest problem is that this storyline is so completely disconnected from the rest of the show and to put any emphasis on it is an uphill battle in the first place. It’s the Family Guy joke: it just insists upon itself.
Let’s focus on some positives here. The first is that Burn Gorman, who plays Vinsher, is delivering a pitch-perfect slimy portrayal of a despot. He’s taken his role from The Expanse and italicized the cartoonish of that performance. No notes; just an excellent and evil bad guy.
There have been few times that we have wanted our time back on watching an episode but we’d like a refund here, please.
What did you think of this episode of Halo? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
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Halo airs Thursdays on Paramount+.
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Drew Koenig
Drew has an ongoing, borderline unhealthy obsession with pop culture, but with television in particular. When he's not aggressively trying to get out of a perpetual state of catching up, he can be found passionately defending the ending of Lost. More of his online work can be found at The Lost Cause and he also co-hosts The Lost Cause Pod.