Well, episode one came with some kind of energy picking up on plots established in season one and creating new ones. One of the plots from season one was Halsey’s escape after her failed coupe. At the end of the season, we saw her presumed dead, but alive and well. What has she been up to?

Halsey (Natascha McElhone) is one of the few characters not completely butchered by inept writers though the characters is written to be unstable. We see the scientist in some room which looks nice, but the scene establishes that she is being kept a prisoner. Why she’s there and how she got there is never answered. There’s a girl, later named Julia, who comes to Halsey and later dies after a nosebleed.

The first instance I had an inkling that Julia (Bronte Carmichael) was a clone was how instant Halsey was about getting answers before the girl died. To me this meant that she knew the girl was dying and was trying to get as much information as possible. Then when Julia appears again, I knew it for certain. They better have some reason for cloning this girl and letting her die repeatedly. You’d think cloning was extremely expensive and they’re practically throwing money and resources away. Anyway, it’s revealed later on that Ackerson (Joseph Morgan) has Halsey. Why is never really explained. And the fact that he has Cortana as well raises eyebrows. Halsey kept Cortana secret because of her agenda, so what is Ackerson’s reason.

Plot two sees Kwan (Yerin Ha) on the run from a bunch of slavers. This has got to be one of the most contrived, useless girl power moments I’ve seen in the series. First, Kwan is tagged as a slave and on the run. We see her alluding slavers and trying to remove the tag, which she had trouble when she tried to cut off with a knife then up and rips it out later. Then, the chase itself is dumb. I guess the director was trying to be cute because the chase is filled with parkour shots. Why?

And, of course, the girl boss moment rears its ugly head. Kwan weighs…what…a hundred twenty pounds? She takes out all four guys with no problem. One guy she flips of a railing with one hand, yanks a guy face first into a counter, somehow cut a guy’s arm off and eject him into space, and physically resist a man easily a hundred pounds heavier than her before stabbing him in the head with the very tracker she removed from her ear.

Look, I’m one of the few people who don’t fully hate Kwan. But she can’t be in the shadow of the more prominent characters, and she can’t detract from the main story. So, what are they going to do with her? Last season, she was supposed to rebuild her family’s legacy. What happened to that? Didn’t she meet one of the Halo monitors? What happened to that plot?

One of the better plots of the episode was Riz (Natasha Culzac). She never really got to shine in the previous season so I’m glad she’s getting more of the screentime. I like that she’s more determined than the others to maintain her discipline as a Spartan. And the fact that she’s pushing herself so hard, how she deals with being a Spartan now she’s got her pellet removed, and her relationship with Louis-036 (Marvin Jones III), a blind, former Spartan. I thought it was an interesting conversation but what I didn’t like is how he’s talking down on her being a Spartan.

For some reason, the writers have a problem with Spartans because they don’t write them as heroes with character. It’s something they touched on in the first season with Soren and MC. We understand that the Spartans have had a rough go, but they make that sacrifice so that humanity survives. And the show plays it down. Instead of Louis talking to her to help her develop as a person and a Spartan, he’s trying to separate the two. There was a moment where Kai and Riz were talking in a locker room, and it hit me. They don’t look or talk like Spartans. They look like regular soldiers.

And we get this training sequence with the Spartans. I don’t understand what the training was. You’d think they would do two-against-two or a free-for-all between the four to get this beacon or whatever it was. It seems like Riz was just running and everyone was just shooting at her, while she was obviously still recovering. But seeing what she could do, how fast she could run, how high and far she could jump, and how well she could climb, why wasn’t she with MC during the fog attack.

I still don’t like the Ackerson/MC storyline. It’s dumb and overly contrived. It doesn’t matter what you think of MC but to consistently disregard this man at every turn. Then the whole idea of Perez lying was just dumb. And what was her reason for lying about what happened at Sanctuary? Survivors guilt. And just how it comes to a head was lackluster. And it just goes to show you that a lot of the characters are way too emotional with little discipline. Half the time we see how incompetent the soldiers are and even with Perez during the fog attack she acted as if it were the first time she held a gun. There’s literally no reason to believe that she is a soldier, was trained as a soldier, or has had any experience in the field. It’s just dumb that Ackerson would not believe a war veteran compared to an obviously traumatized marine. And not to mention, MC actually did something smart investigating the location of Opal Team and the revelation that the Covenant is on Reach.

The Verdict: In the end, Sword was a decent episode, but it did have a lot of dumb stuff going on. The Kwan story wasn’t worth a nickel. The fact that Perez lied was just dumb. Halsey’s story brought some interesting beats, especially with Ackerson’s motivations. I liked Riz’s development. The ending was pretty solid though the writing could’ve been better. Sword gets 2 out of 5.