Recap / Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. S7E06 "Adapt or Die"

The team, still in 1976, must stop the Chronicoms' latest scheme to destroy S.H.I.E.L.D. Meanwhile, Daisy and Sousa must find a way to escape from Nathaniel Malick.

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Tropes:

• Absence of Evidence: May's empathic abilities allow her to detect Chronicoms by their absence of emotions. Regardless of how well they can simulate them, they no more have real emotions than LMD-Coulson does.
• Affably Evil: Sybil remains calm and civil throughout her talk with Coulson, honestly answering all of his questions.
• Ain't Too Proud to Beg: The Chronicom impersonating Mack's mother tries to get her "son" not to throw her off the plane, in an attempt to screw with him.
• All According to Plan: Sybil anticipated the destruction of Insight and the death of Wilfred Malick, knowing both events would lead S.H.I.E.L.D. to expose themselves and make them easier to stop. It's unknown as yet if she anticipated LMD-Coulson blowing himself up, as she was apparently banking on his being afraid to die.
• All Your Base Are Belong to Us: The Chronicoms are hacking into the Lighthouse's system and try to take over all the agents' identities.
• Ambiguous Situation: By the episode's end the Chronicom Hunter ship is destroyed and a few Hunters that weren't on the ship at the time like Luke and the ones replacing Mack's parents are killed anyway, so it's unknown if the Chronicoms still remain an active threat or if they're gone.
• Badass Boast: From Coulson to Sybil, when she maintains that humanity's weakness is fearing death.
  Coulson: You see, I haven't feared death in a long time.
  Sybil: Is that so?
  Coulson: Yeah. The fact is, dying? It's kind of my superpower.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: Nathaniel says that none of Hydra's main branches interested him, not sacrificing members for a squid alien or taking over the world, but seeing Daisy's powers made him research Inhumans, eventually wanting to gain powers of his own. He decides to take one of the most dangerous powers in existence, and has no idea how to control them, much as Daisy did when they first manifested. This culminates in him demolishing his hideout, apparently killing himself in the process (after he broke almost every bone in his body from the constant vibrations).
• Big Bad Wannabe: While Nathaniel Malick is a real threat by taking Daisy and Sousa out of commission when they could be an enormous asset at the Lighthouse (and ultimately leaving the former in a coma by the episode's end following his experiments on her), he's still a tiny fry when compared to the danger posed by the Chronicoms, and even ends up possibly accidentally killing himself in the episode's climax.
• Big Damn Heroes: Rick Stoner shoots Luke just before he's about to execute Mack.
• Call-Back:
  • After Nathaniel gives himself quake powers, he has the same problem controlling them and suffers the same injuries as Daisy did when she first got her powers.
  • Daisy mentions Jiaying, clearly remembering that Nathaniel's experiments with her are pretty similar at what her mother suffered at Daniel Whitehall's hands.
  • From "All the Comforts of Home", while watching Rick Stoner's projection, Coulson mentions the Hydrogen Wave Crisis being averted during 1972. May suggests that as the cover story for what really happened.
• Calling Parents by Their Name: A drugged, drained, and barely-conscious Daisy recalls how her mother Jiaying suffered similar horrors at Daniel Whitehall's hands that she is enduring at Nathaniel Malick's. She refers to Jiaying by name, instead of describing her as her mother, which is understandable, given Jiaying's last attempted deed, the fact that Daisy had previously shown no qualms about desecrating her remains, and the fact that Daisy is so out of it that she can barely form a coherent sentence.
• Cliffhanger: Deke and Mack are stuck in an unknown time period after the Zephyr departs without them.
• Convenient Coma: What happens to Daisy at the end of the episode, after surviving Nathaniel Malick's experiments on her.
• Cranial Processing Unit: Not explicitly stated, but implied by the way a Neck Snap kills a Chronicom just as easily as a human.
• Dead All Along: Mack's parents were killed and replaced before the Zephyr arrived.
• Determinator: Despite being drained of blood and spinal fluid to the point of near-death, Daisy still had the presence of mind to palm a piece of broken glass so she and Sousa could escape. What's more, according to Sybil, she had an 86% chance of surviving the experience, another testament to Daisy's hardiness.
  Coulson: That's my girl.
• Didn't Think This Through: Nathaniel takes Daisy's powers, only to realize too late just how powerful she is when his bones crack under constant vibrations he can't control. According to Sybil, his plan only had a 22% chance of working anyway.
• Distinction Without a Difference: When Sybil describes the difference between humans and Chronicoms, Coulson points out said difference (mortality) as the reason that the Chronicoms consider themselves "more valuable" than humans. Sybil replies that Chronicoms are simply "less fleeting", but her attitude remains the same either way.
• Dragon Their Feet: Even after Sibyl and the Chronicom Hunter ship is destroyed, a few Chronicoms still remain active (seemingly unaware of the ship's destruction), such as Luke as well as the two Chronicoms that have replaced Mack's parents.
• Elaborate Underground Base: Turns out the Chronicom time ship has been underground throughout their journey, which explains why the team couldn't find it.
• Entertainingly Wrong: Not knowing about Time Travel, Nathaniel Malick assumes that Sousa's youth is because he's an Inhuman, just like Daisy, and plans on performing Whitehall's experiments on him as well if they don't work with Daisy. Luckily for Sousa, he and Daisy escape and Nathaniel — apparently — dies before that can happen.
• "Eureka!" Moment: During his argument with May, Coulson notes that she seems to be showing emotion as she goes on about having to mourn him repeatedly, or at least has learned to imitate it. He then realizes that the Chronicoms must have done the same by stealing memories in addition to faces.
• Exact Words: Annoyed by his digital projection, Stoner is assured by a Chronicom infiltrator that his face will be removed soon enough. He wasn't expecting that she meant it literally.
• Failed a Spot Check: As May lampshades to the Chromicoms about to copy Stoner, never turn your back to the only door.
• Fantastic Racism: While she frames it as The Right of a Superior Species, Sybil's argument for why Chronicoms are superior to humans amounts to this; as artificial beings that don't age or die, Chronicoms see mortal beings, like humans, as weak and irrational for fearing death, and thus, they're inferior to the Chronicoms and will inevitably bow to their superiority or simply die out. Coulson shuts Sybil up with a powerful humanist speech.
• Heroic BSoD: Mack goes through one after finding out that Chronicoms killed and replaced his parents and being forced to personally destroy the one that replaced his mother. He's so out of it afterwards that he doesn't even seem to notice the Zephyr leaving without him and Deke.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Coulson blows himself up with the Chronicom ship, but both he and May note he has an uncanny knack for coming back to life and don't expect this to be the end.
• Hoist by His Own Petard:
  • Luke is killed by Stoner with a Chronicom weapon.
  • Nathaniel Malick is seemingly killed due to being unable to control the powers he stole.
• I Call It "Vera": Simmons named her implant "Diana" and calls her "adorable".
• I Choose to Stay: Sousa is offered a chance to stay in the past like he expressed in the previous episode, but he decides to stick by Daisy as she's being fixed up in the healing pod.
  Sousa: I'm where I need to be.
• Improvised Weapon: Daisy manages to palm (literally, she forced it under the skin of her palm) a shard of glass while being harvested by Nathaniel, which Sousa then uses to stab the guard who comes to collect him.
• Insistent Terminology: Coulson is adamant that he is not a Chronicom.
• Inspector Javert: Stoner is opposing Coulson and May throughout the majority of the episode, until they save him from losing his face.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: The story Sousa tells Daisy to keep her awake revolves around a soldier named Mike Stephens, who mouthed off and stole from his platoon, and who stayed with Sousa night and day after the injury that crippled his leg, inspiring Sousa to do the same for Daisy at the end of the episode.
  Sousa: You wanted to hear my story, right? Right, well... It was... foggy. I can't really remember the hit, but I came to, and my leg was a pulpy mess, and I was completely alone. And then Mike Stephens showed up, and the thing about Mike is he was a resolute ass. He would never shut up. He was always bullying the new guys, stole cigs, but that day, he just kept talking to me. Carried me back from the line. [...] For the next couple of hours, he stayed with me. When the Germans advanced, when the cold got so bad, I thought we would freeze. He just kept telling me, "We are going home." And then, at some point, I was on a field stretcher, and Mike wasn't.
• Just a Machine: May's attitude towards LMD-Coulson, much to his frustration.
• Kick the Dog:
  • Sybil takes a few shots at Coulson's artificial nature, explicitly saying that he's "not a person".
  • The Chronicom who replaced Mack's father gloats about "harvesting their skins", even mockingly calling Mack "son".
• Kill and Replace: The Chronicoms are systematically replacing S.H.I.E.L.D. agents, copying their memories to make their simulations more convincing. They had already pulled this on Mack's parents.
• Manipulative Bitch: At Mack's mercy, the Chronicom posing as his mother adopts her persona again, begging him to show mercy. Mack still manages to find the will to toss her out of the Quinjet.
• Meaningful Background Event: As Coulson exits the virtual world with Sybil and is prepared to detonate the explosives, we can see in the background someone (presumably a Chronicom) descending the hatch into the ship. We also see several human-sized chambers of some kind opening. This, along with Sybil telling Coulson he's "surrounded by hunters" tells us that Coulson would not have had the time to escape the ship before hitting the detonator and really did have no choice but to perform a Heroic Sacrifice.
• Mythology Gag:
  • The Chronicoms stealing the memories and personalities along with "stealing" the physical bodies of individuals to convincingly replace them, is exactly like the "Delta" LMDs in the 1988 Nick Fury vs. S.H.I.E.L.D. comic maxiseries.
  • The Chronicoms replacing agents and other selected people as prelude to conquest also references the comics' Skrulls and the Secret Invasion story arc.
  • Daisy purposefully hides a shard of glass within the skin of her hand, as an improvised weapon. Roughly three years previously (by her chronology) Frank Castle pulled a similar trick with a razor blade in his arm.
• Neck Snap: Yo-Yo kills the Chronicom of Mack's father by snapping his neck.
• Not Afraid to Die: Coulson, at this point; as he says to Sybil, dying is practically his superpower.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • Daisy gets visibly upset when she hears that Nathaniel plans on harvesting her powers.
  • May has a quiet one, of course, when she realizes Mack's parents are Chronicom duplicates.
• Power Incontinence: Nathaniel gains Daisy's powers but can't control them, cracking his own bones before bringing the ceiling down on himself.
• Pro-Human Transhuman: Coulson, now an LMD and functionally immortal like the Chronicoms, gives an impassioned humanist speech to shut down Sybil's belief that Chronicoms are superior.
• Pyrrhic Victory: Luke is seemingly finally killed, the Chronicom Hunter ship is blown up, Nathaniel Malick may or may not be dead, and with both HYDRA and the Chronicoms out of the Lighthouse in 1976 and Project Insight foiled, Stoner gets down to returning things to normal. However, many agents were killed for disguises by the Chronicoms, Daisy is rendered comatose from Nathaniel's experiments, LMD-Coulson sacrificed his life, Mack's parents have been killed in this timeline where he and his brother Ruben are still at a very young age, and his resulting grief over this causes him and Deke to be stranded in the past when the Zephyr jumps due to a malfunction.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Coulson gives one to Sybil, explaining the differences between Chronicoms and humans.
  Coulson: What's the difference between a Chronicom and a human?
  Sybil: Time. Humans have a limited amount of it, and therefore fear death. They act irrationally to prevent themselves or others from experiencing death. Chronicoms cannot die. Time has no consequence.
  Coulson: So that's the difference that makes your species more valuable.
  Sybil: Less fleeting. With a home planet intact, we will exist long after you are gone. Once you realize that, you'll give up, or you'll run out of—
  Coulson: Time. I would argue that you're wrong about three things, if you don't mind.
  Sybil: Please.
  Coulson: First, the difference is sacrifice. Yeah, time is limited, which means sacrifice comes at a real cost. Not just data. Heart and pain and blood and sweat and tears. All the good human stuff. And we will never give up.
  Sybil: You said I was wrong about three things. What's the third?
  Coulson: Me. You see, I haven't feared death in a long time.
  Sybil: Is that so?
  Coulson: Yeah. The fact is, dying? It's kind of my superpower.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: Fact is, Coulson's story sounded stupid crazy, Stoner had no reason to believe him. However, when Coulson and May rescue him from the Chronicoms' memory machine, his first words are "I believe you". He then sets out helping them correct history.
• The Reveal: The implant in Jemma's neck is a memory suppressor designed to prevent her from knowing Fitz's location and thus making it impossible for her to reveal it by accident, since Fitz would be helpless if the Chronicoms ever found him.
• The Right of a Superior Species: Essentially the Chronicoms' logic for why they deserve Earth more than humans do, at least according to Sybil; they don't age or die naturally, and are therefore superior to humans, whose fear of death (both their own and of others) drives them to behave irrationally. Therefore, the Chronicoms, who would thrive on Earth, deserve it more.
• Sarcastic Confession: When Stoner expresses his frustration at infiltrators using the base, including "his face" (i.e. the recordings he made for the enacting of various Lighthouse protocols), the Chronicom impersonating Agent Kojak assures him they will "remove his face". While Stoner reads it as a joke, the audience knows she's dead serious.
• Secret-Keeper: Deke becomes this for Jemma, keeping her implant a secret for the sake of Fitz.
• Self-Disposing Villain: Nathaniel Malick is apparently dead by his own hand, courtesy of his own Power Incontinence after trying to harvest Daisy's powers for himself.
• Shapeshifter Guilt Trip: Chronicom-Lilla tries to act like Mack's mother to stop him from pitching her out of the Quinjet mid-flight, but he steels himself and does it anyway.
• Smug Smiler: Sybil has a superior smirk on her face all throughout her talk with Coulson. When he reacts in an unexpected way (by pointing out that he's not afraid to die) and exits the neuralspace, the smirk vanishes instantly.
• Soft-Spoken Sadist: Nathaniel acts almost cordial when he is about to cut Daisy up.
• Spanner in the Works: May's empathic abilities allow her to detect who is a Chronicom and who isn't, allowing her and Coulson to save Stoner before he is killed and replaced by a Chronicom, and later on determining that Mack's parents are really Chronicoms in disguise. It certainly helps in the latter case that the Chronicom impersonating Mack's father visited her in the cockpit and tapped her on the shoulder as part of his ruse of amicability, unknowingly tipping her off as to their true nature.
• The Stinger: Deke leaves the Zephyr to talk to Mack, but a sudden malfunction in the time drive jumps the team away before either can return.
• Superhuman Transfusion: Nathaniel is able to use Daisy's blood, spinal fluid and some glands in conjunction with Whitehall's research to gain her powers, but he can't control them and it's hard to say if it's permanent.
• Taking You with Me: LMD-Coulson blows up the Chronicom Hunter ship while he's still on board.
• They Killed Kenny Again: This is Coulson's self-described superpower, followed by sacrificing his current body to take out the Chronicoms' ship.
• Thrown Out the Airlock: How the Chronicoms that replaced Mack's parents are defeated (though the one replacing Mack's father had already been given a Neck Snap by Yo-Yo and was at least knocked out at the time, if not outright dead).
• Took a Level in Badass: Coulson and May realize that the Chronicoms are adapting and can now not only mimic the appearances of those whose faces they steal, but their emotions and personalities as well. The Chronicoms take to using their memory-copying machine, not just the face-stealing hand-held device they had been using so far.
• Trojan Horse: Mack's parents were replaced long before they were put in the Lighthouse, so Mack would be motivated to rescue them and bring them to the Zephyr.
• Unbroken Vigil: Sousa recounts how a fellow soldier did this for him when his leg was wounded, and pays it forward by doing the same for Daisy after getting her back to the Zephyr.
• Uncertain Doom:
  • Nathaniel is last seen being crushed by a falling piece of roof, which may or may not have killed him after the injuries he sustained from copying Daisy's powers.
  • Luke is last seen shot by Rick Stoner using one of the Chronicom's own weapons, but it's unknown if he's fully dead.
  • Sybil is only seen in a virtual environment in this episode when Coulson interfaces with the Hunter ship. While the ship itself is blown up, Sybil's fate is unknown.
• Villains Never Lie: Sybil honestly answers all of Coulson's questions, because she sees no reason not to.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Sybil tells Coulson that they plan on killing the humans to have a place for their own species.
• Wham Line: May telling Mack that she didn't feel anything after Mack's father touched her, revealing that he is a Chronicom too.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Mack is not happy when he hears that Deke killed Wilfred Malick.
• Would You Like to Hear How They Died?: In a moment of incredible cruelty, the Chronicom replacing Mack's father gives this gem:
  Chronicom: I harvested their skins. We could have had so much fun together, son.
• You Have to Believe Me!: Once again attempted by May and Coulson now that they're in Stoner's custody. He's still reluctant to believe them, though the base computer suddenly gaining a mind of its own leaves him at least a little suspicious. Nearly getting replaced convinces him fully.

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