The team continues to protect Freddy from the Chronicoms. However, some of the team wonder if they shouldn't just kill him.
Tropes:
- Ambition Is Evil: Freddie's desire to improve his lot in life drives him right into HYDRA's arms.
- Bad Boss: Downplayed and ultimately averted with Koenig. Yeah, he let's Freddy sleep in his bar, but charges him rent, but also gives him a discount on drinks, which he deducts broken glassware from. In the end, he insists on going with the team to find Freddie, insisting the kid's his responsibility.
- Bittersweet Ending: The team succeed in their mission, and in the process, knowingly (and not entirely happily) ensure the eventual rise of HYDRA. On top of that, they're forced to leave Enoch behind in 1931 when the Zephyr time-jumps away.
- Blatant Lies: Elena states she didn't see the bottle fall, when Daisy saw her staring right at it.
- Brick Joke: The Chronicom cops inform Koenig about the team's guise as RCMP officers. After being brought aboard the Zephyr and told they're from the future, Koenig remarks that he's underestimated Canadians.
- Came Back Wrong: May seems devoid of emotion and has gone full Knight Templar on helping her team.
- Comically Missing the Point: When May says that Enoch doesn't have the guts to stop her, he does concede that he has no internal intestinal organs. Of course, May is in no mood to correct him.
- Deliberate Values Dissonance: Koenig's casual sexism contrasting the heroes' modern sensibility is mostly Played for Laughs.
- Dramatic Irony:
- Freddie vows not to become "a coward" like his late father. Both Freddie and his son Gideon prove willing to throw away other peoples' lives to save their own necks (with Gideon being the one who realizes it).Koenig: You just stepped off a building, Freddie!
- Viola claims that HYDRA will be on the right side of history. History disagrees.
- Freddie vows not to become "a coward" like his late father. Both Freddie and his son Gideon prove willing to throw away other peoples' lives to save their own necks (with Gideon being the one who realizes it).
- Driven to Suicide: Malick Sr. took his own life after his fortune was wiped out in the '29 stock market crash, which broke his wife's heart. Freddie is motivated to do better than what he sees as an ignoble death.
- Eat the Evidence: When the Hunters barge into his bar looking for Freddie, Koenig sees the bullet Jemma extracted and left in a shot glass, so he quickly takes the glass and drinks it, bullet and all.
- Exit Villain, Stage Left: The Chronicom plot to assassinate the young Malick is foiled by S.H.I.E.L.D., but they retreat from the fight because they have to make the time window just like the heroes.
- Hidden Depths: Grandpa Koenig is just the owner of a speakeasy, a very low level criminal and businessman, but it's hinted that he's pivotal to the development of SHIELD in general and its science division in particular.
- Hitler's Time Travel Exemption Act: The team debates this heavily over the course of the episode. Especially fitting given HYDRA's ties to the Nazi Party. Coulson even cites the usual problems associated with this trope.
- Hourglass Plot: As opposed to last episode, this time it is Deke who reminds Mack that they should be going for "ripples, not waves" when Mack is being pushy about who Freddie is working for and what he's transporting, as neither he nor Deke were privy to Koenig revealing his full name last episode.
- I'm a Doctor, Not a Placeholder: When Koenig calls her a "dame" and a "bird", Simmons replies with this (she's a doctor and a biochemist, respectively). Nice to have some Added Alliterative Appeal.
- Implausible Deniability: Mack is rightly suspicious when Freddie claims he is merely transporting high-quality hooch, since no-one would want him dead for something so minor unless there's more to it.
- Internal Reveal:
- May learns about the Coulson LMD.
- The team tells Koenig about who they really are in exchange for him helping lead them to Freddie.
- Irony: After finding out who and what Freddie will become, Daisy favors killing him to prevent the rise of HYDRA. In other words, exactly the same mission as the Chronicoms, albeit for a more noble reason.
- Kick the Dog: While Not Herself, May nearly bashes Enoch's head in, using far more force than is necessary to subdue him.
- No-Sell: May jabs Enoch with the sedative he intended to use on her, but since he's a robot, he just shrugs it off and carries on their conversation. This didn't faze her at all, and she immediately questions him.
- Not Herself: A combination of trauma from nearly dying and unforeseen side effects from the healing tube seems to have caused May to suffer from suppressed emotions. She has barely any reaction to seeing the Coulson LMD. Beforehand, she also brutally beats down Enoch and probably would've done lasting damage had the team not stopped her.
- Not So Stoic: Koenig is a low level crime boss and has handled himself incredibly well so far, but when he sees the quinnjet and a chronicom, he freaks out.
- Power Incontinence: Yo-Yo tries to use her Super-Speed to grab the knocked-over bottle before it hits the ground, but while her powers allow her to see at that speed, they don't allow her to move at that speed, so she can only watch as it hits the ground. It's not clear if this is the Shrike corpse interfering with her powers or simply mental trauma from playing host to it.
- Redemption Rejection: Koenig warns Freddy about joining up with HYDRA like his father. Freddy angrily refuses.
- The Reveal: Freddie is delivering a vital component of the super-soldier serum which will be used by Red Skull, and then Captain America.
- Running Gag: "I'm not a(n) X, I'm a Y." From Simmons to Grandpa Koenig.
- Sadistic Choice: The team's moral dilemma surrounding Freddie: either let him live and allow history to take its course, thus allowing the rise of HYDRA and all that that entails, or kill him, thus preventing HYDRA's existence, but potentially undoing the future as they know it.
- Set Right What Once Went Wrong: Daisy orders Deke to take out Freddie in the belief the future will be better without the Malicks, even if it means radically altering the future they know. Deke can't bring himself to do it.
- Shaped Like Itself: Enoch says of the team's radios: "These primitive analogue communication devices are quite... primitive."
- Shoot the Dog: Daisy orders Deke to kill Freddie, considering the possible consequences of preventing the rise of HYDRA to be worthwhile. Deke, however, can't bring himself to do it.
- Shout-Out: During The Stinger, Koenig tells Enoch that their conversation is the beginning of a marvelous friendship, calling to mind a famous line from Casablanca.
- The Slow Path: Enoch is left behind when the Zephyr enters the time window, so he joins up with Koenig to wait until he catches up.
- Smug Snake: Viola smugly claims that by joining HYDRA, Freddie will end up on "the right side of history", and that the heroes have no chance of catching up to their friends in time. She's very wrong on both parts.
- Stable Time Loop: It's implied that Koenig and his descendants become involved in S.H.I.E.L.D. because S.H.I.E.L.D. involves him when they travel back, making him want to be a part of what they will become. He also takes an interest in the LMD project specifically after learning that Enoch is a Chronicom and becoming friends with him, since Enoch is left behind after he is unable to reach the Zephyr before it jumps forward in time.
- Stab the Scorpion: After barely being talked down from killing Malick, Deke still fires the gun. But he is now aiming at the Chronicom hunters behind him.
- Sustained Misunderstanding: Despite finding out that they're from the future, Koenig still thinks the team are Canadians.
- Taking the Bullet: Referenced as a joke— after Koenig pulls his Eat the Evidence trick with the bullet in the drink, he tells the S.H.I.E.L.D. agents that he "took a shot for you."
- Took a Level in Badass: Enoch has installed Hunter combat training to make himself a more capable fighter.
- The Unreveal: It's once again asked, this time by May, how long it took Simmons to prepare this mission. Enoch only replies that it was a "considerable" amount of time.
- Used to Be a Sweet Kid: Averted with Mallick. He has a ruthless streak and demonstrates he's fully capable of being the future head of HYDRA.
- We Have to Get the Bullet Out!: What Simmons does when saving Viola.
- Well-Intentioned Extremist: Daisy is willing to risk the future as they know it to prevent all the suffering that HYDRA will cause.
- Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?: Or ICE her, in Enoch’s case with May. It's unclear whether the pistol was a real gun or not, but they treat it like it is.
- You Are Better Than You Think You Are: Koenig tries this on Freddie, but Freddie rejects it because he sees HYDRA as his ticket to a better life.
- You Wouldn't Shoot Me: May to Enoch and Grandpa Koenig to Freddy. Both are wrong.
