Lana monitors simultaneous missions in her state-of-the-art control room, but Archer and the gang experience technical difficulties.
Episode Tropes:
- Birds of a Feather: Archer tries to bond with Trevor with their lack of father figures, only though Archer is doing so to have sex with Trevor's widow mother (and make sure she doesn't carry a life-threatening disease from her husband she could give to Archer).
- Call-Back: Pam was made the leader between her and Ray because Lana didn't want to risk Ray suddenly betraying the Agency out of nowhere like he did when he joined Fabian and IIA.
- Child Prodigy: Trevor is revealed to be just a teenager smart enough to be part of a black market operation with mainframes.
- Control Freak: The control room provides Lana with the means to check on multiple missions at once, but as expected, the team operates pretty badly under her watchful eyes until Cheryl "wisely" points out that it's best for everyone to just do missions without Lana controlling them.
- Did Not Think This Through:
- Lana made a hefty investment on a fancy control room overhaul with advanced state-of-the-art machinery, and was told that it was all "user-friendly". Unfortunately, it was done on a whim and Lana expected everyone, including Greg, to just roll with instead of training for preparation. All episode, the staff struggles with the features, the room shuts down randomly due to excess power consumption, and eventually falls apart when everyone is absent.
- Cheryl brings a giant deli sub for the workers in the control room before the mission began, which was thoughtful of her except for one problem: while she kept it in office to not forget, she hid it under her desk (for a week!) instead of fitting pieces in the fridge. This results in the drones getting so sick, they rush to the bathroom to throw up and leave Lana and Cheryl alone for the rest of the episode.
- Don't Celebrate Just Yet: After all three missions do end in success, Lana decides to celebrate by getting drunk with Cheryl and leaves the control...only for the control room to start destroying itself and two out of three teams suddenly getting caught in big problems and calling for extractions.
- Exact Words: Archer promises Trevor not to date his mother. He never promised to not bang her.
- Failed Attempt at Drama: Lana's attempt at being dramatic falls flat as the drones completely ignore her, at first because they're busy doing their jobs and again after Cheryl brings in a giant submarine sandwich for everyone.
- Heel–Face Turn: After he's found out to be part of the black market's mainframe operation, Trevor easily drops the whole deal because he doesn't want to disappoint his mother who doesn't know what he's doing with his "game consoles."
- Hopeless with Tech: Trevor's mother has no idea her son is using highly advanced equipment rather than fancy game consoles.
- Joisey: "New York's lurching afterbirth", according to Archer, who went off-mission between missions amd contracted head lice along the way. As punishment, he is forced to track one of the mainframes to a normal house in New Jersey with Cyril. The only saving grace is that he met and got it on with the mother of the hacker running the mainframe.
- Offscreen Moment of Awesome: The way Krieger deals with the bats impresses Zara so much that she wishes everyone could see him in action, which isn't possible because the camera moves away from their screen to see how the rest of the teams are dealing with their missions.Zara: Watching this is an unforgettable moment! Anyone who doesn't see this has a worse life for having missed it!
- Romancing the Widow: Archer does this to Trevor's mother and has sex with her, to Trevor's chagrin.
- Tempting Fate: The more Lana feels things are going smoothly, the more far off it becomes. The more she tries to get things back on track, the more chaotic it gets. It goes so off the rails that she then comes to the conclusion that some things can't be controlled.
- In cruel Dramatic Irony, Lana is convinced by Cheryl to finally let her friends and associates wrap things up after the mission seems complete, only for the control room to fall apart while Pam and Zara's teams call for extraction.
- Two Lines, No Waiting: Three, in this case. Dragon Run is an online black market system with a security protocol made up of three protective mainframes. If any of the three is compromised, then the system can be automatically deleted for confidentiality. Lana splits the other agents up in each mainframe's location and they must be hacked simultaneously in order to avoid triggering the protocol. The data will then be sent to the Agency, allowing Lana to transfer it to Interpol for a large bounty.
- Vomit Discretion Shot: All of the drones rush out of from the control room thanks to the large sub Cheryl gave them, after being kept under her desk for a week.
