What happened to Jemma during the six months (4,722 hours, to be precise) she was trapped on the alien planet and why she says she needs to go back.
Tropes:
- Action Survivor: The normally base-bound Simmons shows she's capable of fending for herself fairly well when thrown into an utterly unanticipated situation with no supplies.
- Ate His Gun: Will kept a bullet in his gun in case he felt the need to do this, but meeting Simmons convinced him it could be put to better use.
- Ax-Crazy: The last of Will's fellow astronauts went mad and tried to kill Will with a hatchet. Will had to kill him in self-defense.
- Black Bra and Panties: A non-romantic example. When she's swimming or hunting the pond creature, Jemma strips down to her camisole bra and underwear, both so that she won't have to deal with her clothes weighing her down, and she'll have less to dry out.
- Buffy Speak: Will insists he's not "science-y". When he later describes the crack in the wall and what it does, Jemma snarks that it sounds "science-y" to her.
- Call-Back: Will refers to the mysterious entity as "Death", which is all that was written on the ancient scroll describing the Monolith.
- Companion Cube: Jemma's phone, specifically the picture of Fitz. Occasionally, she records an audio log, but most of the time we see her using the phone, she's either talking to a picture of Fitz or looking at her birthday video.
- Continuity Nod: The sword of the 19th century nobleman is found by Jemma in the "No-Fly" zone, along with a sextant that helps her relocate the portal.
- A Day in the Limelight: The episode focuses entirely on Simmons and her time stranded on the alien planet.
- Deadly Dust Storm: The planet is prone to them, but they are eventually shown to be something far more sinister.
- Death World: Will (and Simmons, eventually) think the unnamed planet is literally Hell. The surface is almost completely barren, daylight only comes once every 18 years, the core radiates heat which compensates for the lack of sunlight, some abstract intelligence actively prevents escape and there's a monster on the surface which lives solely to kill anything that isn't it.
- Despair Event Horizon: Simmons finally loses hope when her Message in a Bottle fails to get through the portal, and they now have no means of predicting exactly when and where the portal is going to open again.
- Didn't See That Coming: NASA sent the astronauts through the portal with all the equipment and power they could possibly need to survive on an alien planet for years if not decades. Unfortunately, it's all solar powered, and the sun only comes around for a short time every eighteen years. Later episodes reveal this was not an accident, they were actually sent by HYDRA as sacrifices for It.
- Doing in the Scientist: Simmons initially thinks that Will's stories of "It" and the planet having "moods" are just symptoms of his long isolation and that there is a scientific explanation. When she sees "It" for herself, and that a gorge suddenly became much wider when they needed to cross it, she decides otherwise. Given that It is actually an ancient Inhuman with immense power, there was likely a scientific explanation after all.
- Early-Installment Weirdness: "It" apparently has the ability to drive people insane, produce illusions, and warp the surface of the planet. These might mesh with the abilities later demonstrated by Hive when it comes to Earth. The "illusions" of A Form You Are Comfortable With could instead be the corpses of other humans possessed by Hive, and the insanity might me produced by Hive trying and failing to possess living humans.
- Failure Is the Only Option: It goes without saying that all of Simmons's efforts to find a way home or get a message to Fitz are doomed to fail.
- Fire-Forged Friends: Simmons and Will become great friends through the grueling struggle to survive on the alien planet. After they fail to deliver the message in a bottle, Simmons realizes how little hope she has and they get a Relationship Upgrade.
- Foregone Conclusion: As a flashback episode, we know Simmons will eventually escape and Will will not, while all their efforts to get themselves or a message through will fail in the meantime. Will's survival, on the other hand, is an open question until The Stinger.
- A Form You Are Comfortable With: "It" takes the form of something the observer will trust in order to lure them in. The illusion fails upon close inspection.
- Framing Device: At the end of the episode, it's shown that Jemma was telling the story to Fitz.
- Genius Loci: The planet is alive and it actively tries to stop anybody from leaving ever. Maybe.
- Glad-to-Be-Alive Sex: After five months of dealing with Maveth and the failure of her "message in a bottle" idea, Jemma finally breaks down, and then begins a romantic relationship with Will. They're together until Fitz rescues her seven weeks later.
- Go Mad from the Isolation:
- Will is clearly unhinged from being alone on the planet for fourteen years. He locks Simmons in a cage for a week because he isn't sure she is real. Until she hits him.
- Simmons thinks this is what happened to his former crew, but comes to believe his story when she sees "It" for herself. Simmons was actually correct, as It, despite its immense power, doesn't have the ability to drive others to insanity.
- Green-Eyed Monster: Subverted. Simmons is worried that Fitz will react with jealousy when he hears about her relationship with Will. He then reveals he's found a way to rebuild the Monolith and he's going to help her get him back.
- Hand Wave: Simmons is able to use her iPhone on-and-off for around four months, including doing battery-heavy things such as watching a video occasionally, which she explains as a result of Fitz doing some brilliant engineering to extend the battery life. The phone only runs out of power when she wires it into Will's NASA computer, and even then she gets a lot of life out of it.
- Heroic Sacrifice: Will stays behind to fight "It" while Simmons escapes.
- He Will Come for Me: While on the planet, Jemma initially keeps herself sane by telling herself that Fitz will find a way to rescue her. She loses hope after her and Will's attempt to escape fails, but she becomes absolutely ecstatic when she sees the flair Fitz fired in "Purpose in the Machine".
- Hope Spot:
- Will manages to launch a Message in a Bottle at the portal... which closes right before the bottle reaches it.
- Longer-term variation: Jemma's positive and hopeful attitude is a spot against the 14 years of isolation that Will had to live through, right before she has to escape through the portal again, leaving him all alone once more.
- Human Sacrifice: Simmons at one point muses that people were being pitched through the portal with no hope of return just to be fed to "It". She is correct, though it is later revealed to be a bit more complicated...
- I Want My Beloved to Be Happy:
- Fitz to Simmons after he reveals that he has been working on a way to reconstruct the Monolith and resolves to bring Will back, to which Simmons starts to cry. He may not be happy about it, but at least he wants Simmons to have a chance with her new beau.
- Will to Simmons: when confronted by the "creature" while trying to reach the portal that Fitz opened, he is sure to tell Simmons to reach the portal first. If one of them is going to make it, Will certainly wants Simmons to be reunited with Fitz if he is unable to reach the portal in time.
- Man-Eating Plant: According to Jemma, the tentacle that tries to kill her in the water pool is a monster plant. Whether it thrives in water, or if it somehow can produce or gather it, is unknown.
- Message in a Bottle: Simmons makes one to toss through the portal when she and Will find it. Unfortunately, a large canyon between them and the portal delays them just enough for their attempt to send it to fail.
- Minimalist Cast: The vast majority of the episode only has Simmons and Will. Fitz appears in a bit of stock footage at the beginning and new material at the end, and the rest only show up in a video on Simmons's phone.
- Nothing Is Scarier: "It". We never see its true form, only briefly glimpsing it as a shadowy figure and a mockery of an astronaut carrying the nobleman's sword.
- Once More, with Clarity: In "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. S3 E2 "Purpose in the Machine"", Fitz fires a flare into the portal. Toward the end of this episode, Simmons and Will see the flare shoot out of the portal, which gives Simmons hope that Fitz and the team have found a way to rescue them.
- One Bullet Left: Will only has a single bullet for his gun. He had planned to kill himself with it in a pinch.
- Prisons Are Gymnasiums: Simmons does some pull-ups in the cage that Will locks her in.
- Rage Against the Heavens: After a few days waiting for sunrise, Simmons finally snaps.Simmons: How long are the nights on this planet? There has to be a sunrise eventually.
[time advances to 72 hours]
Simmons: Where is the sun?! What did you do to it?! I want the sun! [crying] I want it! [sobs] - Relationship Upgrade: Will notes that Simmons and Fitz had to have gone through this otherwise she wouldn't speak his name so much (as Season 2 viewers will know, they didn't, but were certainly on the way there). Eventually Simmons and Will get one of their own.
- The Reveal:
- A hindsight example. The monolith appeared to undulate randomly, when in actuality it was due to the alignment of the planetary system it led to. It also disproved theories that its undulations were related to Inhuman DNA, and that Jemma was an Inhuman descendant (for now).
- This episode shows why Simmons wants to get back to the planet after having just escaped it.
- Shout-Out:
- The three NASA astronauts who died before Jemma showed up were named Austin, Taylor, and Brubaker, referencing noted fictional astronauts Colonel Steve Austin, Colonel George Taylor and Colonel Charles Brubaker. The way they died also reference their namesakes. Austin jumped off a cliff (Steve Austin crashed in his test vehicle), Taylor went crazy with an axe (George Taylor arrived on a future Earth where most humans had regressed to using primitive tools like axes), and Brubaker set himself on fire (Charles Brubaker was believed killed when the capsule the public was told he was in burned up on re-entry).
- Also, Will and his crew came through the monolith in 2001, the same year another astronaut met a big, black monolith and passed through it.
- The cake in the video of team Coulson celebrating Simmons' birthday is a TARDIS.
- The title of the episode may be a reference to 127 Hours, as the overall premise is somewhat similar.
- "Project Pathfinder", the name of the NASA exploration program that sent Will and his fellow astronauts through the monolith, has been used before in efforts to communicate with and rescue space travelers stranded on the other side of the galaxy as well as explore alien worlds beyond the solar system.
- The plant-creature that Simmons fights, defeats, cooks and consumes certainly seems to be a smaller cousin of the Watcher in the Water.
- A shapeshifting, reality-warping Eldritch Abomination called "It" that is also implied to be the location itself? Sounds familiar...
- Special Edition Title: Instead of the normal title sequence, "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." is displayed in a "space-y" font over a wide shot of the alien landscape.
- Starfish Aliens: The only creature other than "It" is a worm-like plant creature that lives in the water and tries to eat Simmons when she goes for a swim. She pays it back by hacking pieces off and eating them.
- The Stinger: Will is shown on the planet as the sun rises, he throws away his gun and walks away as the sun goes back down.
- Technology Marches On: In-universe, Will is awed by Jemma's smartphone. He is particularly impressed by it having 120 GB of memory, something that would have been literally an impossibly huge amount of hard drive space for such a small device when he went through the portal back in 2001; he actually has to repeat what she said to make certain he heard it correctly. For reference, new computer HDDs were 10GB-40GB in 2001 (and that was still the standard 3.5 inch internal variety), and the first iPod was released in that year, with only a 5GB capacity.
- This Is for Emphasis, Bitch!: When Simmons returns to the water pool and fights a hostile life form for nourishment (and wins), she makes sure to put in a celebratory verbal jab while hauling it ashore.Jemma: You're dinner, biatch!
- Time Title: The title refers to how long Jemma was stranded.
- What Year Is This?: Will asks Jemma this shortly after being convinced that she is actually real. His reaction to hearing "2015" is understandable when we shortly find out he's been there since "2001".
- When the Planets Align: The portal opens in response to the alignment of the planet and its moons.
- Whole Episode Flashback: The episode is Jemma telling Fitz what happened to her on the planet and why she's desperate to get back there.
- Wormsign: "It" moves with the sandstorms. In later episodes we learn "It" is Hive, a parasitic superorganism; its parasites fly with the sand.
- Wounded Gazelle Gambit: Jemma fakes food poisoning get Will to open the cage and check on her.
