In a journey to the past, another part of Alisa's and Jessica's tragic history is revealed.
This episode contains examples of the following tropes:
- Accidental Murder: Alisa apparently didn't plan on outright killing Stirling, only roughing him up. Too bad she has Super-Strength...
- Ambiguous Situation: Stirling was clearly a toxic influence on Jessica, but it's not clear if he genuinely loved her and was just a screw up, or if he was intentionally just using her so he could live easily without working.
- Body Horror: Along with a long look at Alisa's injuries, we see how Inez got injured, while Alisa broke Luanne's neck.
- Brick Joke: Jessica wears a Hellions T-shirt at one point. They'd been mentioned by Karen Page way back in the first episode of Daredevil season 1.
- Call-Back: In the past, Touch of Evil gets projected onto a building's exterior, and Jessica and Trish start watching, seemingly setting up their present-day pizza and a movie habit, seen in the premiere.
- Continuity Nod: When dealing with Trish's drug dealer, Jessica gives him a non-face damaging variant of a Billy Russo special.
- The Corrupter: Stirling meets Jessica when she is a struggling college student who's been rejected by Trish. A month later she's paying for both of them through stealing and had dropped out of college.
- Cruel to Be Kind: Dr. Malus keeps Alisa sedated and away from Jessica because, in her current mental state, it would be bad for both of them.
- Damned by Faint Praise: Trish asks Jessica to say something positive about "I Want Your Cray Cray". The only thing she can think of is that "It took the It's Patsy theme out of my head, so there's that."
- Doom Magnet: Jessica mentions how everyone around her keeps dying, this time her boyfriend Stirling.
- Easily Forgiven: Averted. Jessica is pissed after Alisa finishes her story and punches her across the room.
- Fair-Weather Friend: Jessica rightfully calls Trish's friends out as the leeches they are.
- Five-Second Foreshadowing: Luanne is rolling up Alisa's socks after Inez removes them and finds the sedative pills in there, and goes pale at the realization that Alisa is just pretending to be asleep. She shouts a warning to Inez before Alisa suddenly bolts upright, maiming Inez, and then breaking Luanne's neck.
- Framing the Guilty Party: Because no one saw Alisa at the scene, and Stirling was last seen alive leaving the bar with the gangsters who were extorting him, the police were led to assume that they were the actual killers and were probably viewed as liars when they claimed Stirling was still alive after the meeting.
- It's All About Me: Trish is self-absorbed to a degree.
- Kleptomaniac Hero: Jessica in her youth is a regular thief.
- Know-Nothing Know-It-All: Stirling has the feel of this regarding running a club. He claims to know the 'art' of running a club (something he thinks his former boss didn't), but his actual approach appears pretty incompetent (as his former boss points out, he's not so much 'building loyal customers' as he is just trying to get laid). Despite this, he tells said boss to his face about how he's going to open his own club, despite having no actual understanding of the business.
- Loan Shark: Stirling borrowed money from Wyatt for his 'Club Alias' project. A year later, with no return on the investment, Wyatt is annoyed and comes to collect.
- Mama Bear: Alisa does not take lightly Jessica being considered by Stirling as a bargaining chip. Too bad she Does Not Know Her Own Strength.
- Manipulative Bastard: Zigzagged and potentially averted. Even though Stirling's nice to Jessica, it is implied he was also manipulating her into stealing stuff for them both, and he later pimps her out to Wyatt as a bodyguard not just to save his own ass, but also demands a cut of whatever Wyatt gets. Then again, he may have simply pretended to go along with it 'to save his ass'.
- Meaningful Echo: Early in the episode, when Alisa gets out of her bed, Luanne sounds the alarm when she tries to escape into the corridor to get to Jessica. Later, when Alisa breaks free of her restraints after being improperly sedated by Inez, Luanne rushes to the alarm like before, but Alisa, remembering the last time, grabs her and breaks her neck before she can press the button.
- My God, What Have I Done?: After accidentally killing Stirling, and having murdered Luanne beforehand, Alisa returns to Dr. Malus, acknowledging that she is too dangerous to be anywhere near Jessica.
- Neck Snap: Similar to how she killed Simpson, Alisa twists Luanne's neck a good 180 degrees.
- Once More, with Clarity:
- Jessica's memory of "a person with a meat face" is seen in detail, this time from Alisa's POV. It turns out that Alisa had woken up, still horribly disfigured from the crash, broken free of her restraints, and tried to kidnap Jessica after fighting her way down a corridor of orderlies before Dr. Malus sedated her.
- We see Luanne's death, initially just described to us by Inez.
- Outliving One's Offspring: Alisa has to learn from Dr. Malus that her husband and son didn't survive the accident and her only daughter is out of her reach.
- Posthumous Character: Stirling died long before the events of the first season.
- Screw This, I'm Outta Here: When Alisa returns after killing Stirling, Dr. Hansen decides she want no further part in the experiments and tells Dr. Malus that she's out.
- Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll: Well, trade the last for "bubblegum pop" and you get what leads Trish to a musical career. Once Jessica stops her from giving a dealer a blowjob in exchange for drugs, she realizes it's a bad path.
- Shout-Out: The movie being projected onto the wall near the end is Touch of Evil.
- Secretly Selfish: Stirling appears to be a charming Nice Guy who paints himself as chasing a dream of running a bar, but underneath he's using his charms to get Jessica to steal anything they need so he doesn't have to get an actual job, borrows money from gangsters he's unable to pay off (and later agrees to pimp Jessica out to them as muscle), and apparently puts very little effort into opening up his club. He also encourages Jessica to reconnect with her sister solely so he can network and get Trish to invest in him. Of course, Jessica has no problems with breaking ATMs, stealing dresses and other things, so it wasn't like she didn't know.
- Suffice to say, it was always a messed up relationship. Even after Jessica found out about the circumstances of Stirling's death, she hated Alisa for doing it all the same.
- Start My Own: Stirling wants to open his own place, Club Alias, but he's had to borrow money from some gangsters to finance his investment.
- Stylistic Suck: "I Want Your Cray-Cray" is an autotuned Limited Lyrics Song monstrosity set to a very terrible Three Minutes of Writhing music video. Jessica finds it physically painful to listen to.
- Tempting Fate: Stirling is doomed the moment he says he'll name his club "Club Alias," because there's no way Jessica would've named Alias Investigations after that unless it was because he meant something to her.
- Too Dumb to Live: Trish's drug dealer is already violently restrained by Jessica and yet calls her a bitch again.
- Whole Episode Flashback: Except for the very last minute of the episode, this entire episode is one lengthy flashback about how Alisa had tried to get in touch with her daughter around 2007.
