"We're gonna teach them a lesson, and we want you to join us. I know, I sound bat-guano crazy. Except S.H.I.E.L.D.—nah. Not so mighty anymore."
Cal assembles a team of people from the S.H.I.E.L.D. Index to send a message to the world and to Coulson. Skye gets a psychological evaluation from Dr. Gardner, May's ex-husband. Hunter discovers more about Bobbi and Mack's secret.
Tropes in this episode include:
- Absurdly Sharp Blade: Karla is able to slice a guard's throat with a swipe of her razor nails, which it should be noted aren't made of any special material.
- Amicable Exes: May and Gardner are divorced and still friendly. May even laughs at one of his jokes.
- Big Damn Heroes: Gordon teleports in and abducts Cal, thus allowing Coulson's team to deal with the other superhumans.
- Body Horror: Karla's fingers with the razor blades grafted to them and Angar's mouth that's been covered for years and has an unnaturally hinged jaw.
- Brown Note: Angar's voice induces instant catatonia, not only in humans but seemingly any living thing that can hear it. He drops a flock of birds in addition to the high school students he was using it on.
- Call-Back: The Grumpy Cat mug whose provenance Coulson wondered at in "A Fractured House" makes its reappearance. Turns out it belongs to Fitz because of course it does.
- Continuity Nod: Dr. Gardner works at Culver University, the same college that Bruce Banner and Betty Ross once worked at. It's also where Darcy did her internship with Jane Foster.
- Designated Girl Fight: Bobbi and Karla end up squaring off in a locker room.
- Dumb Muscle: Francis Noche. He used special steroids to give himself super strength, but as a consequence, his intelligence was affected.
- Femme Fatalons: Karla grafted razor blades to her fingers.
- Foreshadowing: Simmons suggests the word "Gifted" has become obsolete, and they need a new term for people like Skye with natural-born abilities. Fitz had already called her heartbeat "Inhuman."
- Forgot About His Powers: With just a word, Angar could have stopped the final battle cold in its tracks, since no one was wearing any ear protection. Coulson does punch him in the throat at the first opportunity, but that still required Angar to let Coulson get that close in the first place.
- A Glass in the Hand: Cal crushes a coffee mug as he rants about losing his daughter.
- Heroic RRoD: The method that Skye developed to control her powers didn't so much shut them down as it did focus them internally. When she loses control at the stadium and focuses on her hands, she ends up with hairline fractures all along her arms and up to her clavicles, along with numerous ruptured capillaries.
- Irony:
- Simmons wondering with Fitz about what two people who separated but still kept a special relationship (May and Gardner) could be able to talk about, considering their own relationship with each other is really on the rocks at the moment.
- Simmons considers Fitz lying to her as absolutely unforgivable and the effective end of any relationship they might have salvaged for themselves, despite the fact that she's lied to him at least once this season in a way that ended up causing him major harm. Bobbi's eye roll in the background when she says this can practically be felt.
- Lethal Chef: Gardner is not so hungry that he will risk trying May's cooking again.
- Made of Iron: May fights a guy with Super-Strength with no noticeable injuries afterwards.
- The Masquerade: Gordon shows up to kidnap Cal because his crusade against S.H.I.E.L.D. carried the risk of exposing his society/group of superhumans attempting to live in secret.
- Mythology Gag:
- Karla Faye Gideon appeared in Daredevil as a woman who lied to protect her abusive husband from Daredevil.
- The braces Skye wears after damaging her arms resemble Quake's gauntlets.
- Angar the Screamer was the late husband of Songbird from the Thunderbolts, who also had the Super-Scream power.
- Not Helping Your Case: For all of Cal's rhetoric on how unfairly S.H.I.E.L.D. treats the gifted, the people he recruited (all people who had deliberately used their powers to commit crimes, most of them violent ones) are the reason why S.H.I.E.L.D. felt the need to monitor and control gifted people so closely.
- Not Me This Time: During one of Skye's sessions with Gardner, the Bus starts shaking and he assumes her to be responsible. Skye is sure this isn't her powers doing this; it's the Bus taking off.
- Psycho Serum: The source of Cal's powers is a serum he created. It costs him in stability but grants him great strength.
- The Reveal:
- Mack and Bobbi are working for a different, previously unknown faction of S.H.I.E.L.D. which considers itself to be the real S.H.I.E.L.D.
- Cal experimented on himself to try to make himself stronger so he could take on the people who killed his wife. His unstable personality was a side-effect.
- Serious Business: Simmons claims that the main reason that she's so upset about Fitz hiding Skye's secret was because he falsified research data to do so.
- The Slow Walk: May does one before her fight with Francis.
- Title Drop: In the short conversation between Gordon and Cal at the end of the episode:Gordon: You're a science experiment. You're not one of us.
- Unusually Uninteresting Sight: None of the workers or other patrons at the diner seem to have paid any attention to Cal's group even though one has a very noticeable mask covering his entire mouth or that one has razor blades for fingernails.
- Villains Out Shopping: Cal and his group of superhumans stop for breakfast at a diner during their road trip.
- Volumetric Mouth: Angar's jaw can unhinge, allowing him to stretch his mouth far wider than a normal human's.
- Wham Line:Hunter: Who are you working for?
Mack: S.H.I.E.L.D. The real S.H.I.E.L.D.
