Earth destroys Mars's moon, Deimos, in response to the MCRN's nuking of Phoebe. This creates tensions in Bobbie Draper's squad. Holden and his crew return to Tycho Station, angry at Miller for killing the lead scientist on the protomolecule project. Fred Johnson offers Miller safe passage off Tycho, but Miller's investigations show that action must be taken against Eros. Johnson and Holden reach the same conclusion when Amos figures out how to get one of their prisoners to talk. Miller realizes that Eros must be destroyed, and that Fred Johnson has the equipment necessary to do so.
This episode contains the following tropes:
- All for Nothing: Why everyone's mad at Miller for shooting Dresden, but Amos is able to get the surviving scientist talking (ironically, the man who Miller saved from getting shot).
- Blue-and-Orange Morality: A sociopath is entirely self-centered, so Amos is the only one who understands how to get through to the scientist. He's not a psychopath—he just can't relate to anything he's not interested in.
- Detonation Moon: Deimos is nuked in tit-for-tat retaliation for Phoebe. Everyone is waiting to see how Mars will respond.
- Fire-Forged Friends:
- The Earthborn member of Draper's squad gets tired of being taunted by the others and strikes out, forcing Draper to knock him out. He refuses to denounce Draper for striking a subordinate, earning the respect of the others.
- Miller, finding himself penniless and friendless, finds himself forcefully adopted by the two OPA guys he partnered with in the Spin Station attack.
- Future Music: The signals coming from Eros are being played as the latest trend in (bad) music. It's not until they're played for the scientist that everyone finds out they're actually signals being transmitted.
- Important Haircut: Miller shaves and returns to his previous mohawk-type style, though it's not apparent until the end of the episode that it's this trope.
- Lack of Empathy: An Invoked Trope via artificial brain modification with the scientists working on the protomolecule project. It turns out that the reason the station guards had non-lethal weapons is because they were like prison guards to control these sociopaths. Amos, who isn't so different when it comes to sociopathic behaviour, is able to get the man talking.
- Persona Non Grata: Johnson tells Miller to pick a ship and get off Tycho. At first it looks like he plans to join the Mormon expedition, but he actually plans to use their ship to destroy Eros.
- Rewind, Replay, Repeat: Realising that only a fluke stopped them from being destroyed by the stealth ship, Alex becomes obsessed with rerunning the simulation to find a way of defeating it whilst saving the other Breaching Pod that was destroyed.
