The penultimate episode of season 7.
Tropes:
- Ambiguous Situation: Nathaniel's plan, laid out in Fake Ultimate Hero below, raises the question of whether he knows about the Chronicoms' plan to turn Earth into their new homeworld. If he doesn't, he's an Unwitting Pawn at best, and if he does, his plan is either the result of Suicidal Overconfidence or an astonishing lack of foresight.
- Amnesiac Hero: Once the Chronicom serum disintegrates her neural implant, Simmons only remembers bits and pieces from her past, and is prone to going off on tangents when random words catch her attention.
- Asshole Victim: Despite his (admittedly spite-induced) Heel–Face Turn, nobody wastes any time pretending to be sorry about Garrett's death.
- Bad Boss: Nathaniel promptly abandons Garrett when the latter gets caught by Coulson, May and Elena, leaving him there to die in the explosion. He doesn't even know Garrett's been compromised, he's just unwilling to alter his timetable.
- Big Bad Wannabe: Nathaniel claims that the Chronicoms are working for him, and that enabling their invasion is part of his plan. His biggest accomplishment in the episode is screwing up Sibyl's plan, all while she makes it clear that he is, at best, her lapdog.
- Blatant Lies: Most of what Nathaniel says to Kora during this episode is a big fat lie, particularly his claims that before her death, Jiaying expressed her hatred for Kora and regretted that she'd ever been born (nothing could be farther from the truth). Played with in regards to his claim that Daisy quaked the Earth apart in the original timeline; while it's implied to have been what happened before the team changed history, it was never firmly established whether Daisy or a Gravitonium-empowered Talbot was actually responsible, so Nathaniel's claim could be a deliberate lie (which would fit the narrative he's feeding Kora), or he could simply be misinformed. His insistent claims that Daisy is the villain and driven by The Power of Hate are unambiguously lies, though.
- Boom, Headshot!: Garrett gets one right after he teleports the team into the New York hideout, courtesy of a young Victoria Hand.
- Brutal Honesty: In The Stinger, when Nathaniel demands to be allowed to go after S.H.I.E.L.D. in the New York hideout on his own, Sibyl coldly tells him that he only has a 22% chance of succeeding.
- The Bus Came Back: Fitz returns at the end of the episode after spending the entire season absent.
- Call-Back:
- Sousa recalls how a single Hunter plugged herself into Helios to form a makeshift nuke.
- Coulson, May, and Yo-Yo trap Garrett using a dummied down version of the tech that Fitz used to trap Gordon in the original timeline. May recalls how that fight ended with Coulson losing a hand, and Coulson comments that compared to dying and being resurrected as an LMD, that doesn't seem like a big deal anymore.
- Fitz was hiding in the Quantum Realm this whole time, complete with a crude facsimile of the suits worn by the Avengers. He also wears a helmet identical to the one one worn by Deke in his first appearance.
- Character Development: Coulson and May lampshade theirs, remarking that they barely recognize who they are now compared to who they once were. Coulson looks on this positively, however, remarking that he likes May this way, and likes himself the way he is as well.
- Chekhov's Boomerang: The Sonic Staff that first appeared in "0-8-4" and later in "Turn, Turn, Turn" appears again when Mack uses it against a team of Hunters storming the Zephyr.
- Crazy-Prepared: While taking The Slow Path, Enoch gave a bunch of random S.H.I.E.L.D. agents parts to a device that they were instructed to deliver to Koenig's club upon a specific signal being sent out. All the parts combined form the control unit for a quantum tunnel, retrieving Fitz from the Quantum Realm.
- Darkest Hour: The Chronicoms have arrived at Earth, all the S.H.I.E.L.D. bases around the world except for the Lighthouse have been destroyed, and Team Coulson is left defenseless.
- Death by Irony: Garrett gets killed by an overzealous Victoria Hand, the same woman whose death his older self would order in the original timeline.
- Defector from Decadence: Garrett opts to throw in his lot with S.H.I.E.L.D. after Nathaniel abandons him.
- Dirty Coward: Garrett doesn't need much coercion to try and radio Nathaniel about deactivating the Chroni-bombs once it's clear that he can't teleport away from the blast.
- Double-Meaning Title: Not only did the title get a Title Drop in the last scene, but Garrett's end literally came at (Victoria) Hand.
- Dropped a Bridge on Him: Garrett is unceremoniously killed off within seconds of getting Coulson, May, and Yo-Yo out of the Lighthouse.
- Fake Ultimate Hero: Nathaniel's plan for world domination amounts to this: as he sees it, after the Chronicom invasion, there will be chaos and anarchy, so when he and Kora swoop in and start saving people, they'll easily be able to take over for the benefit of all. How well thought-out this plan actually is is a bit debatable, since he doesn't seem to have a plan for dealing with the Chronicoms if they don't let him have the Earth.
- Heel–Face Door-Slam: A bullet to the head ends any chance of Garrett being a good guy after teleporting everyone to the location of the signal.
- History Repeats: Garrett complains that he saw himself abandoned by S.H.I.E.L.D. in another timeline, only to wind up abandoned again by Nathaniel here. And just like his older counterpart from the original timeline, he's unceremoniously killed in one shot.
- Hypocrite: After being betrayed by Nathaniel, Garrett says "whatever happened to team loyalty?" Garrett betrayed S.H.I.E.L.D. by throwing in with Nathaniel in the first place.
- Idiot Ball: Kora staying behind on the Chronicom ship after letting Daisy go. Even if Nathaniel had been receptive to her change of heart, the Chronicoms definitely wouldn't have been.
- Improvised Weapon: Sousa and Mack combine a pair of missiles, six Hunters, and a metric ton of duct tape to turn those two normal missiles into tactical warheads with enough power to breach the hangar door of the Chronicom ship.
- Inertia Is a Cruel Mistress: Yo-Yo using her Super-Speed in a dark, damaged area results in her injuring herself on a piece of rebar.
- Manipulative Bastard: Nathaniel exploits Kora's preexisting mixed feelings about Jiaying to get her to stay on his side.
- Metaphorically True: To soothe Hand's conscience after she shoots Garrett dead on impulse, the team reassures her that he was a double agent, which, while not true of the Garrett she'd just shot, was absolutely the case with the Garrett of the original timeline.
- Mistreatment-Induced Betrayal: In a fit of irony, Garrett betrays Nathaniel for the same reason that his older self betrayed S.H.I.E.L.D. in the original timeline: being left for dead.
- My God, What Have I Done?: Hand is understandably horrified to believe that she killed a fellow S.H.I.E.L.D. agent. Coulson, May, and Yo-Yo reassure her that Garrett was a double agent (which, while not technically true of this Garrett, was the case in the original timeline).
- My Significance Sense Is Tingling: May feels the deaths of all the S.H.I.E.L.D. agents that are killed in the bombardment.
- Mythology Gag: When Garrett appears in the Lighthouse, he lets Malick know by commenting "This is the Big Bad Wolf. I'm in the hen house." The Season 2 episode in which Simmons escaped HYDRA after spying as a double agent was called "A Hen in the Wolf House".
- Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: Nathaniel dispatching Kora to kill Daisy results in Sibyl's plan being ruined and Kora pulling a Heel–Face Turn.
- No-Sell:
- Mack tries to launch a pair of missiles at the hangar door of the Chronicom ship to blast it open, only for them to do no damage whatsoever.
- Daisy's quake powers can block Kora's power blasts.
- Pun: Coulson dubs the Chronicom explosives "Chroni-bombs". May just stares in disbelief.
- Red Oni, Blue Oni: Nathaniel is the red to Sibyl's blue, always opting for the direct approach, while Sibyl is more patient.
- The Reveal: Fitz has been in the Quantum Realm this entire time.
- Shout-Out:
- Garrett says "Breaker breaker, one-nine" when he teleports into the Lighthouse.
- The radial grenade that Mack uses to take out half a dozen Chronicoms is straight out of Serenity
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- Smug Snake:
- Nathaniel believes that the Chronicoms are either his willing minions or Unwitting Pawns. The reality is that Sibyl barely listens to him and his only accomplishment in the episode is screwing up his ally's plan.
- Sibyl is happy to assume that the 100% chance of the team not being together after this mission is basically a guarantee of her victory.
- Spanner in the Works: Kora confronts Daisy in the halls of the Chronicom ship against Sibyl's orders, thus forcing Daisy to engage her while Deke and Jemma head to the Zephyr. Without Daisy around, Jemma doesn't give up Fitz's location on impulse, thus ruining Sibyl's plan.
- Speak Ill of the Dead: Nathaniel shamelessly smears Jiaying's memory to manipulate Kora into staying on his side, claiming that before she died, she regretted that Kora was ever born.
- Straw Hypocrite: All of Nathaniel's previous talk of anarchy (at least the implication that it was his end goal) is unsurprisingly revealed to be a pack of lies; his actual plan is to take advantage of the chaos to Take Over the World.
- Talking the Monster to Death: Daisy manages to talk Kora down from killing her.
- Title Drop: Sibyl says it as the very last line of dialogue in the episode.
- Tractor Beam: A Chronicom ship tractors in the Zephyr, with additional tractor beams inside the hangar moving it further in.
- Truth Serum: Sibyl has Jemma injected with something that will dissolve Jemma's memory implant. With it gone, Jemma's memories come flooding back all at once and she can't keep them straight. Sibyl's hope is that Jemma, lacking the ability to discern between private and public information, will simply blurt out Fitz's location unprompted.
- You Have Failed Me: Kora comes to see that Daisy isn't bad as Nathaniel had claimed, so he stuns her unconscious and has her locked in a cell.
