Having escaped the time storm, the team must face Nathaniel Malick and his allies.
Tropes:
- All Your Base Are Belong to Us: With Jemma as their hostage, Nathaniel and Garrett take over the Zephyr, with only Deke left on board to save her.
- Ambiguous Situation:
- Resolved with Jiaying saying that she thought her longevity was her greatest gift until she had Kora. This indicates Kora was her first child and Daisy doesn't have any other long-lost half-siblings, or descendants thereof, out there despite Jiaying having been around for generations.
- Daisy muses that Kora committing suicide in the original timeline is what led Jiaying to leave Afterlife and take up charity work, eventually meeting Cal while he was working for Doctors Without Borders. If that is the case, then Nathaniel preventing Kora's suicide might have already ensured that Daisy won't be born in this timeline, though Jiaying's death later in the episode leaves the matter unclear (and renders the point moot).
- Anarchy Is Chaos: Nathaniel's vision of anarchy certainly sounds like this, coupled with Might Makes Right.
- Asshole Victim: Li's hostility is a big part of what fueled Kora's Face–Heel Turn, and he remains convinced that he should have killed her right up to his own death, so it's hard to feel sorry for him.
- Awful Truth: Jemma speculates that Fitz may in fact be dead and she simply hid the memory from herself because it was too painful, based on how Daisy described her reaction to the implant being removed in the previous episode. Deke refuses to buy it.
- Bittersweet Ending: The inhumans have been rescued from Malick, but Jaiying is dead and Jemma's been kidnapped.
- Call-Back:
- When Coulson doesn't recognize young Garrett, he reminds him that Coulson once killed him with an alien laser.
- Young Garrett enjoyed watching Coulson's deaths in the Timestream. Especially the one when a long-haired guy stabbed him with a pointy stick.
- Continuity Nod: The ending of the episode, especially The Stinger, is similar to the ending of "The Bridge". A member of the team is kidnapped, and the kidnapper wants very specific information locked in the person's memories.
- Curb-Stomp Battle: May wipes the floor with Garrett, who eventually remembers that he can teleport and flees before she can do more.
- Dead All Along:
- May believes that Kora actually succeeded in killing herself in the original timeline. Daisy further speculates that this is what led to Jiaying turning to charity work and eventually meeting Cal.
- Discussed after Daisy informs Jemma about her extreme emotional distress in response to an unknown memory when her implant was removed in the last time loop. In the wake of this information, Jemma begins fearing that this may be the case for Fitz and that the time drive that everyone assumed Fitz was operating remotely was merely following a pre-programmed procedure. Deke refuses to hear it.
- Death Glare: Nathaniel gives one to Daisy after being quaked onto his back. Daisy gets her own, far more intimidating, glare after Nathaniel kills Jiaying.
- Defiant to the End: After having his powers forcefully transferred to their associate Durant, Nathaniel tells Kora to put Li out of his misery. His last words are telling her that he should've killed her long ago.
- Didn't Think This Through: Nathaniel didn't consider whether transferring the powers of Inhumans with deformities might also transfer the deformities, and Garrett didn't think to ask about side-effects until he was already undergoing the procedure. Luckily for Garrett, it turns out that doesn't happen (at least in his case).
- Dies Wide Open: Jiaying is shown to still have her eyes open after Nathaniel snaps her neck.
- Dirty Coward: When he realises that he doesn't have the upper hand on Daisy anymore, Nathaniel starts backing away in fear, and when May arrives and shoots him in the arm, he turns tail and runs.
- Dramatic Irony: Jiaying offers Daisy comfort over the pain inflicted by her mother in the future, unaware that she herself is Daisy's mother. When she learns the truth from Nathaniel towards the end of the episode, she is horrified.
- Effective Knockoff: Nathaniel may have stolen his powers from Daisy, but thanks to an effective gap of several years due to him taking The Slow Path, he has much finer control over her power than she does. He demonstrates this by firing off a quake blast that also has rotational force, which hits much harder with the same amount of effort. However, he recoils in fear when Daisy threatens to let loose, hinting that despite his greater control, he may lack the raw power she can unleash.
- Evil Is Petty:
- Garrett consoled himself about his future death by watching Coulson die over and over, his favorite being when Loki stabbed him.
- Nathaniel telling Jiaying all about her future Face–Heel Turn and death is cruel enough, but doing it all in front of Daisy is a whole new low.
- Forgot About His Powers: While fighting May, it takes Garrett a few moments to remember that he can teleport to avoid her attacks. Justified, as Garrett has only has his powers for a few hours, if that.
- Future Me Scares Me: Jiaying is horrified to learn that the mother who hurt Daisy in the future is her.Jiaying: Sometimes trying to do the right thing can come out all wrong.
- Hairstyle Inertia: Young Garrett has the same slicked-back hair as he will in the future, to say nothing of his fashion sense.
- Hate Sink: Continuing this since his debut, Li's death is the most cathartic at the hands of Kora.
- Have We Met?: Coulson's reaction to a young Garrett.
- Headphones Equal Isolation: Deke spends most of the episode listening to music while repairing the time drive. This keeps him from hearing May's urgent call about the Zephyr being hijacked until it's already taking off and he can feel the vibrations.
- Heroic Sacrifice: Gordon teleports himself and Coulson out of the Inhuman containment room even though he's weak from having his blood drained to empower Garrett. It ends up killing him.
- History Repeats: Daisy is again forced to watch Jiaying die, only this time, it's the genuinely kindhearted and compassionate woman she never got to know, rather than the murderous villain she became. Of course, in this instance Jiaying is killed trying to protect Daisy, as opposed to being killed to protect Daisy.
- Hoist by His Own Petard: Durant manifests a knife to throw at Yo-Yo. She uses her Super-Speed to grab it and stab it in his leg before Mack punches him out cold.
- Hypocrite: Nathaniel criticizes the leaders of Afterlife for picking and choosing who gets to undergo Terrigenesis. His solution is to forcibly drain power from Inhumans so that he can pick and choose who really deserves them, reserving such power for his own allies.
- I Meant to Do That: Garrett doesn't say this after teleporting into the ceiling and falling to the floor, but the way he adjusts his coat makes the trope clear.
- I Want You to Meet an Old Friend of Mine: This episode reunites Dollhouse costars Dichen Lachman and Enver Gjokaj.
- Internal Reveal:
- Daisy learns about Kora, the older half-sister Jiaying never mentioned.
- Jiaying learns Daisy is her daughter, as well as her future before all the time meddling.
- Irony: Garrett, the Clairvoyant, finally gets access to something that provides clairvoyance... twenty years before he became the Clairvoyant.
- Kick the Dog: Nathaniel Malick gets quite a few in:
- While Li is an Asshole Victim, draining the goodhearted Gordon is far less defensible.
- He reveals, in gruesome detail, Jiaying's bleak future in the original timeline, up to and including her attempt to murder Daisy and her own death.
- After killing Jiaying, he quips that Jiaying won't live forever, and Daisy won't live at all.
- Mama Bear: Jiaying begins draining Nathaniel's life force in retaliation for him attacking Daisy, after she learns of their relationship. Even when he manages to throw her off and threatens to kill her, she still tries to grab him, leading to her Neck Snap.
- Mercy Kill: Nathaniel frames his order for Kora to kill Li as this; indeed, despite having the power to make his death slow and painful, Kora kills him quickly.
- Moral Myopia:
- Nathaniel draws a moral equivalency between S.H.I.E.L.D., HYDRA, and the Inhumans of Afterlife, and considers his anarchic goals to be "justice" for their "oppression".
- When Coulson objects to Gordon's treatment, Kora states that someone who has "died and killed" as much as he has should know that "justice isn't always pretty", either not knowing or not caring about what kind of person is getting Gordon's powers.
- Garrett remarks that the Timestream showed him everything "[Coulson] did to [Garrett]"; Garrett naturally omits all the things he did to countless people. It's possible that Sybil deliberately hid that part from Garrett.
- Neck Snap: Nathaniel snaps Jiaying's neck with his powers after she tries to drain his life force.
- Nerd in Evil's Helmet: Garrett is over the moon to get teleportation powers (happily latching on to the word after learning it from Coulson), and getting to fly the Zephyr makes for, in his words, the "best day ever".
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
- Despite knowing that there was a specific reason why Jemma blocked her memories of Fitz, Daisy still chooses to inform her about the loop where whatever she remembered caused her extreme emotional distress. To the surprise of absolutely no-one, all this does is serve to compromise Jemma's state of mind in this episode, as she immediately jumps to thinking about a possible worst-case scenario where Fitz has been Dead All Along.
- The initial raid by S.H.I.E.L.D. to attempt to take back Afterlife allows Nathaniel to seize Gordon's teleportation powers for Garrett, indirectly causing Gordon's death in the process, 32 years ahead of schedule. From there, Nathaniel kills Jiaying, kidnaps Jemma, and hijacks the Zephyr. It's safe to say that things have gone From Bad to Worse for the timeline.
- Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: Nathaniel boasts that he has better control over Daisy's powers than Daisy herself, on account of having had them longer than she has in relative terms. When he snaps Jiaying's neck, however, Daisy loses her temper and the entire building begins to quake, with Nathaniel clearly terrified. Lucky for him, in a sense, May shoots him in the arm and cuts that potential battle short.
- "Not So Different" Remark: Nathaniel tells Coulson that S.H.I.E.L.D., HYDRA, and the Inhumans of Afterlife only care about being in control.
- Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist: Nathaniel paints his goals as a noble defiance of the future fate laid out for people, but given that the people he's saving include mercenaries like Durant and future HYDRA leader John Garrett, his good intentions start proving more than a little shaky. He is also more than willing to facilitate the Chronicom invasion as long as he benefits from it.
- Not What I Signed on For: Garrett says this when it's unclear whether or not Gordon's power transference will cost him his eyes. The fear of potentially being rendered blind ends up activating his new power.
- Oh, Crap!: When Daisy is getting ready to unleash her full power against Nathaniel after he kills Jiaying, he defensively raises his hands and starts backing off, clearly terrified of what she'll do if she's not holding back.
- Paradox Person:
- Daisy becomes this when she continues to exist even after her mother is killed in the timeline before Daisy's birth. However, if Time Travel works like it does in Avengers: Endgame, then this is actually to be expected, somewhat counter-intuitive to most examples of the trope in fiction.
- Also played with in Deke's case. It's made deliberately ambiguous if Fitz is still even alive.
- Power High: Garrett gets very excited after gaining Gordon's powers.
- Power Incontinence: Garrett's control over Gordon's powers leaves something to be desired; according to Nathaniel, it took three tries to get them into the Lighthouse.
- Screw Destiny: Nathaniel's recruits were going to be killed by S.H.I.E.L.D. in the original timeline.
- The Slow Path: Nathaniel points out he's had Daisy's powers for seven years from his perspective, longer than Daisy.
- Smug Snake: Nathaniel's confident demeanor disappears fast when he realises that his greater skill with Daisy's powers can't match her superior strength. As soon as there's a chance that he could lose, he starts backing away, and once he's injured and outnumbered, he runs off.
- The Stinger: Nathaniel reveals to the captured Simmons that, as per Sibyl, every future where they failed involved Fitz, so they want her to help them find him.
- Superhuman Transfusion: Nathaniel has refined the process of transferring powers to the point that all it takes is about a half-hour of sitting in a machine which transfers blood and other fluids from the source to the recipient.
- Time-Shifted Actor: Appropriately enough, the young John Garrett is portrayed by James Paxton, son of the late Bill Paxton.
- Too Dumb to Live: Barely thirty seconds after explaining how Jiaying used her life-force absorption powers to nearly kill Daisy, Nathaniel walks within arm's reach of Jiaying, who immediately grabs him by the neck and begins to drain him.
- Trojan Prisoner: Kora allows herself to be captured because she wants to meet Daisy, and her demeanor doesn't suggest it'll be a happy one. Coulson grabs her anyway, since they made a promise to Jiaying.
- Used to Be a Sweet Kid: According to Jiaying, Kora was a sweet, withdrawn kid who clung to her mother's leg, only changing when she underwent Terrigenesis and developed her destructive powers.
- Wham Episode: Gordon dies, Jiaying dies, and Jemma is kidnapped by Nathaniel and Garrett with only Deke in a position to help her.
- Wham Line: If you're familiar with the first season of the show, Nathaniel Malick describes the near future of the S.H.I.E.L.D. recruit he's poaching.Nathaniel: Seven years from now, in the Balkans, you get wounded real ugly, lying there with your guts out...
- What the Hell, Hero?: Daisy is obviously not very happy with May for not telling her about her sister. May was actually trying to tell her, but Gordon and Jiaying dropped in a lot faster than she thought they would.
