Friends and colleagues are constantly recommending television shows that I will never watch. I don’t have the time for it. Most days, I can squeeze in a two-hour block of something, and it’s a crapshoot whether or not I watch a movie, play a game or just sit around mindlessly browsing the internet. A nine-hour show means almost a week of evening entertainment. Even weekly, a nine-week show means consistent availability to watch it. It also means I have to feel like a show is actually using that nine hours wisely. There are some I keep up with — most of the Star Wars and Marvel shows, and Better Call Saul, for instance. But a show really has to be good for me to get over my aversion to the inherently time-consuming nature of their storytelling. Frankly, most shows are a waste of time.

Halo is a huge waste of time, and I don’t think I will watch it anymore.

My essays on the first three episodes were, I think, fair but negative takes on this misbegotten disaster of a program. It’s hard to come up with anything fair about the fourth episode, Homecoming, which displays every single problem with modern serialized television storytelling. It’s a 55-minute exercise in wheel-spinning, in a show that never even really started rolling. By the end, we learn two things: Halsey (Natascha McElhone) is evil and the Covenant is after something called Halo. Wow, no shit? The last three hours established that already.

The A-plot follows Master Chief (Pablo Schreiber) returning to his childhood home of Eradinus II to dig up a time capsule he buried before Halsey recruited him into her living-weapon SPARTAN program. That’s because he had an encounter with a Forerunner artifact early in his life that made him predisposed to connecting with the one in the first episode, which is frankly a boring take on the Halo mythos. Chief should be a human. He’s special in other ways. Down with destiny as a plot device.

Don’t worry, though. There’s a substantially meaningless B-plot about Kwan Ha (Yerin Ha) and pirate spartan Soren (Bokeem Woodbine) traveling back to her home planet of Madrigal to beg her rich aunt for the cash to start a revolution. The cash. To start a revolution. How, uh, thrilling.

Look, I can’t possibly care less about any of this junk. The only action sequence is a badly cut motorcycle chase on Madrigal. Our SPARTAN hero spends the entire episode looking sad and aimless trying to remember what it was like to be a little boy. The Covenant? Well, we see an Elite cadaver, and that’s it for the iconic villains of the franchise. This is not even the halfway point of the series and we’re still seeing separate characters discover the name “Halo.” There is zero chance any of them actually end up on a sacred ring by the finale. What a waste of my time. I’m done with it.