The team travels to 1931 to stop the Chronicoms from altering S.H.I.E.L.D.'s past.
Tropes:
- All There in the Manual: The closed captions identifies the mysterious woman who contacts Freddie as "Viola".
- Artificial Limbs: Jemma provides Elena with a new set of artificial arms that look organic (since her cybernetic ones would stand out) and have the ability to feel tactile sensation.
- Bait-and-Switch: The team thinks the Chronicoms intend to assassinate Governor Roosevelt, who later founded the S.S.R., the precursor to S.H.I.E.L.D. Instead, their target is Wilfred "Freddy" Malick, father of Gideon Malick.
- The Blank: The Hunters use an "erasure" device which completely strips the target of facial orifices and bone structure, leaving their head nothing but a patch of skin on an ovoid surface. Deke has to use a device that reconstructs faces from a DNA sample to get an accurate picture of them.
- Blatant Lies: The Chronicom hunters are really bad at infiltration and deceit.Deke Oh, it's you, a trusted officer of the law.
Hunter: As I have always been. [grabs Deke by the throat] - Brutal Honesty: Daisy bluntly tells Coulson he's an LMD when he's confused about suddenly knowing things he's never experienced. She defends it by pointing out that there's no easy way to break that to someone.
- But for Me, It Was Tuesday: When the chief Chronicom states that he's been looking forward to fighting Daisy, she counters by stating that for her it's just another fight.
- Category Traitor: Cain accuses Enoch of being a traitor.
- Ceiling Cling: In The Stinger, May does this to hide from Enoch.
- Crazy-Prepared: Jemma has loaded the Zephyr with period money and firearms from every conceivable decade they might visit.
- Deadly Euphemism: "Wait for the hand off, then pull the thread."
- Facial Horror:
- Luke stealing William Dole's face does not look pretty, and judging by Dole's screaming, is exactly as painful as it looks.
- Cain's head melts from the inside out as part of his Self-Destruct Mechanism.
- Fan Boy: Both Coulson and Mack gush about standing next to (eventually President) FDR.
- Fantastic Racism: Elena doesn't trust Enoch, because he is not human.
- Fish out of Water: The team encounters a lot of racism and sexism, since it is still the '30s.
- For Want Of A Nail: The Chronicoms, having extensively studied Earth history, know exactly which "thread" to pull to achieve their desired outcome. In this instance, killing the ancestor of Malick will set off a chain of events that stop S.H.I.E.L.D. from ever forming.
- Identical Grandfather: While in 1931, the team encounters Ernest Hazard "Gemini" Koenig, the ancestor of the present-day Koenig siblings (L.T., Eric, Billy, Sam, and Thurston). Ernest, like the identical brothers, is also played by Patton Oswalt.
- Immune to Bullets: Coulson's LMD shrugs off a shotgun blast from Koenig's men, though to be fair it only hits him in the top of the shoulder.
- Impersonating an Officer:
- The LMD Hunters take on the guise of NYPD officers to get close enough to kill Freddy.
- Coulson, Daisy, Mack, and Deke pose as Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers to bluff their way past some cops.
- Implausible Deniability: Mack, Daisy, Coulson, and Deke bluff their way past the cops by posing as Mounties.
- Internal Reveal: The Coulson LMD learns everything he missed in a matter of seconds.
- Like Father, Like Son: According to Viola, Freddy's father "took the coward's way out" by committing suicide. The audience knows from past (or future) experience that Freddy himself inherited his father's streak of cowardice, using a trick to avoid sacrificing himself to Hive, which Freddy's son Gideon will also do.
- Kill and Replace: The Hunters strip the faces from three officers that will be present at Governor Roosevelt's event, allowing them to get close to their target without raising suspicion.
- The Knights Who Say "Squee!": Coulson is a huge fan of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
- Make Wrong What Once Went Right: The Chronicoms believe S.H.I.E.L.D. is the only thing preventing them from turning Earth into a new Chronica-2, and so are trying to prevent S.H.I.E.L.D. from ever existing. Their first attempt is to try to kill the father of Gideon Malick to prevent the rise of the modern incarnation of HYDRA, thus giving S.H.I.E.L.D. no reason to form.
- My Skull Runneth Over:
- LMD-Coulson briefly loses touch with reality due to two years of memories he never experienced personally processing in his mind in less than a minute.
- Jemma does this to Cain (the captured Hunter) deliberately, filling his mind full of junk data so he won't be able to process it all and will blurt out what they want to know on impulse.
- No Equal-Opportunity Time Travel: Mack gets some grief over the color of his skin (although in one case, his size is enough to shut the other guy up), and Daisy is looked down on for being a woman, especially since she's posing as an RCMP officer.
- Ontological Inertia: When Daisy worries about their presence in the past having a butterfly effect on future events, Deke posits that instead the timeline will correct for minor changes and they only need to worry about making really big ones. "Ripples, not waves," as Mack puts it.
- The Password Is Always "Swordfish": "Swordfish" is the password for Koenig's speakeasy. Coulson notes that it's a year before Horse Feathers and that the Marx Brothers likely got the idea from this very club.
- Photographic Memory: Coulson's LMD brain seems to have near-perfect recall.
- Red Herring: Roosevelt isn't the target of the Hunters — Freddy (full name Wilfred Malick) is.
- Ridiculous Future Inflation: Inverted when Deke is amazed that it cost him a mere $13 to buy four sets of nice clothing. Coulson points out that they're 80 years in the past and a mere two years into the Great Depression.
- Save the Villain: The team realizes that, to save S.H.I.E.L.D., they must also save HYDRA.
- Self-Destruct Mechanism: Cain triggers a self-destruct mechanism that causes him to melt, though the team manages to get the name of his target out of him before it kicks in completely.
- Shout-Out: Killer robots go back in time to kill someone to change history. When they make that effort, they get the full Terminator music treatment.
- The Slow Path: Jemma says to Daisy that it has been "a while" since they last saw each other, from Jemma's perspective.
- The Stinger: May wakes up and hides from Enoch.
- Time Travel for Fun and Profit: As soon as Deke details his timeline theory, Mack sees where he's going and warns Deke not to file any patents.
- Timey-Wimey Ball: S.H.I.E.L.D. and Chronicom's method of time travel doesn't seem to run with the Multiverse theory like the Quantum Tunnel method from Avengers: Endgame. It makes it clear that erasing S.H.I.E.L.D. from existence will have consequences for the present, making it more similar to the method seen in Runaways (2017).
- The Unreveal: Jemma is evasive about how much time she's spent apart from the team, only that it's been "a while".
- Unseen No More: After two full seasons of encountering Chronicoms, we finally get a glimpse of what their true form looks like.
- Wham Line:Coulson: What's his full name?
Koenig: Wilfred Malick.
