May learns the true goals of Sarge's team. Meanwhile, Daisy and Jemma are on the hunt to get Fitz back from the Chronicom hunters that took him.
Tropes:
- Amputation Stops Spread: Sarge compares his plan to stop the Shrike to cutting off a limb, the implication being that Earth is the infected limb in this analogy.
- Badass Boast: Davis tries to, by stating "Dropping aliens is what I do best!". The reaction he gets however is just embarassment.
- Bad Guys Do the Dirty Work: The Chronicoms wiped out the Confederacy and hijacked their fleet.
- Big Bad Ensemble: In addition to Sarge and his team, who are revealed to be Well Intentioned Extremists, you now have Altarah and the surviving Chronicoms who will kill anyone who can't or won't help them with their goal to develop time travel, and finally the mysterious and so far unseen Creator behind the Shrike.
- Blue-and-Orange Morality: The Chronicoms believe that Enoch and Fitz "tampered" with the universe, although that's just a pretext to leverage them to help them travel through time.
- Call-Back: Benson wants to explore Peru and Yucatán. Peru
was where they found the 0-8-4 device inside an Incan temple. Yucatán is where Fitz traveled to study the origins of the space monolith. - The Chains of Commanding: Mack struggles with his new responsibilities as director.
- Conflicting Loyalty: Enoch is clearly torn between his friendship with Fitz and his people.
- Continuity Nod:
- Enoch mentions that he kidnapped Team Coulson and then sent them into a dystopian future.
- While it doesn't quite rise to the level of a Catchphrase, Coulson has used "the other thing" repeatedly over the years as a short hand way of acknowledging something being the opposite of what was expected.
- The Corruptor: Sarge wants to turn May to his side. He fails.
- Endangered Species: The Chronicoms, with their homeworld destroyed. All survivors now reside on the former Confederacy ships.
- Entertainingly Wrong: From Sarge's POV, he assumes that Coulson is his doppelgänger. He's been to countless worlds, so showing up on one where another man had his face is too much of a coincidence.
- Even Evil Has Standards: Sarge states that Snowflake enjoys her job a little too much for his taste.
- Flashback: The episode has several to May and Coulson during his dying days in Tahiti.
- From Bad to Worse: Enoch states that having the Confederacy after them would have been preferable compared to the Chronicoms.
- Genius Bonus: In-Universe, Benson calls attention to what Tinker was saying: Pachakutiq. It means "the cataclysmic overturning of Andean time-space".
- Going Native: Altarah notices how much Enoch has changed since spending time with humans.
- Greater-Scope Villain: The mysterious "Creator" behind the Shrike, whom Sarge is looking forward to killing.
- Heroic BSoD: Enoch is still having his existential crisis from the last episode when he first appears. Jemma and Daisy manage to snap him out of it with assurances that he succeeded in his mission to save the Earth, and they are his friends along with Fitz.
- Heroic Sacrifice: Jemma gives herself up to the Chronicoms to save her friends and be with Fitz again.
- If You're So Evil, Eat This Kitten!: Subverted. The person Sarge and Snowflake give May to kill is infected by the Shrike. They just want to test her, and demonstrate to her what the Shrike is.
- Impairment Shot: May, coming to from being drugged, briefly overlaps her flashbacks to her last days with Coulson and what she is seeing around her with Sarge.
- Internal Reveal:
- Enoch learns that the Bad Future has been averted.
- Sarge makes the connection that he had a doppelgänger on Earth, whom S.H.I.E.L.D. was close to.
- Daisy, at the end of the episode, is about to learn about Sarge.
- It's Personal: May tells Sarge that she is gonna kill him painfully for messing with her. She later settles on just knocking him out and capturing him after learning his true motives, however.
- I Will Punish Your Friend for Your Failure: Altarah knows what Daisy can do, so she's hiding Fitz on another ship. If Quake harms her, the Chronicom fleet have outstanding orders to spread across the galaxy so that Fitz will never be found.
- Myth Arc: One is slowly presenting itself. The Chronicoms' home world has been destroyed in what seems to be a series of mysterious annihilations of various planets. Sarge and his crew are travelers from across the galaxy who are seeking to stop the Shrike, who travel from world to world and destroy them to herald the arrival of their creator.
- Obfuscating Insanity: After about four episodes of Snowflake seeming very unhinged, she seems to break the act, and seems more lucid after May calls her "nuts".
- Older Than They Look: Sarge is 100 Earth years old, and claims he'll easily live another 100.
- The Reveal: The bat-like creatures are called Shrike and are somehow related to the mysterious Monoliths that Team Coulson keeps encountering. Sarge's team didn't create them; they are hunting them down to try to prevent them from destroying worlds.
- Sad Clown: Snowflake's Obfuscating Insanity looks a lot like this; she's dealing with the trauma of watching all sorts of worlds get destroyed by putting an impossibly, insanely brave face on it.
- Set Right What Once Went Wrong: The Chronicoms' home planet was destroyed. They want Daisy and FitzSimmons to tell them how they traveled through time so they can do the same to save their planet.
- Shoot the Dog: Benson sympathizes with Elena, as he too had to decide over the fate of his husband when he was rendered brain-dead after an accident.
- Shut Up, Hannibal!: May is utterly immune to anything Sarge offers up.
- Something Only They Would Say: Attention is drawn to the fact that Sarge not only looks like Coulson, but uses many of the same turns of phrase, adding to both May's and the viewer's confusion as to what the relation between the two is.
- The Stinger: Enoch and Fitz are reunited, only for Enoch to release some mysterious gas in Fitz's cell.
- Stupid Evil:
- Altarah and the remaining survivors of the Chronicom. She wants to go back in time to save her home planet, fair enough. But Daisy and the others would probably be more eager to help her if she wasn't holding Fitz captive and threatening to kill them all if she doesn't give them what she wants. Not to mention assuming they're lying, without motive, when they say they don't know how they did it, or deciding to kill them instead of letting them go if they can't help.
- Sarge and his crew are willing to go to any lengths to stop the spread of the Shrike and destroy their creator, as they're a threat to entire worlds. Problem is they're a small crew that, as far as any local authorities who could help them are concerned, can be easily be mistaken for causeless terrorists who themselves are the cause of the Shrike. The fact that they're so ruthless and inscrutable is a major stopping block in their goals.
- This Cannot Be!: Sarge is flummoxed that May considers him the doppelgänger, not Coulson.
- Title Drop: A twofer: Sarge starts out thinking that May killed Coulson, but sees in her eyes that he's wrong, and says it; in a flashback, May asks Coulson if he is having trouble standing because he drank too much, and he counters with it.
- Took a Level in Jerkass: The Chronicoms after losing their planet and reduced to near-extinction will do anything to survive... which also means they will casually kill people who, even if they aren't a threat, are also no use to them either. It might be that only the most ruthless in pursuing the goal survived, much like Thanos, but Enoch's words imply that at least Altarah used to be different.
- Well-Intentioned Extremist:
- Sarge's team. They're trying to save planets from the Shrike and have been following them from planet to planet hoping to destroy them. Trouble is they have no problem leaving massive amounts of collateral damage, and Sarge not so subtly implies he wants to destroy Earth if that's what it takes.
- Also Altarah. She wants to secure the future of her endangered people.
- What the Hell, Hero?: Fitz explodes at Enoch when he tells him that the only way he could save their friends was by telling the Chronicoms that holding Jemma hostage is the perfect way to motivate Fitz to perfect a method of time travel for them.
