Team Coulson tries to find out their role in Robin's visions, while Kasius brings retribution down on the humans.
Tropes:
- Awesome, but Impractical: Mack's shotgun-axe is given a lampshade when Flint points out that the heavy axe-head would make shooting harder. Mack counters that it's for chopping heads off. Then again, considering Mack's heavy-built, maybe it's not really a problem for him. After seeing him blast apart then decapitate a roach, Flint sees the appeal.
- Bait-and-Switch: When Robin calls May "Mom," it looks like she is mistaking her for her dead mother. It turns out that May adopted Robin after Polly (her birth mother) died.
- Blessed with Suck: This episode really stresses how much of a burden, if not outright torture Robin's powers are. She constantly sees Past, Present, and Future at the same time, can barely tell them apart, and is so incoherent to most people that it borders on The Unintelligible.
- Breaking the Fellowship: For whatever reason, their meal in the diner was the last time anyone saw Team Coulson together. That's why Robin had them abducted at that moment.
- Call-Back:
- Daisy tells Deke about Cal.
- Among the goodies Fitz hid in his storage crate are splinter bombs, not seen since several seasons ago.
- Chekhov's Gun:
- We are led to believe that Robin is a little loopy after continuously calling May "Mom". Turns out there was a real reason to do so.
- The white monolith apparently left a piece behind that is used in a machine that will link with the monolith in the past. This was how they were brought to the future.
- Yo-Yo appears to be wearing gloves when she goes out to confront the Kree whereas everyone else is not. Later on in the season, we find that she is actually using her mechanical arms.
- Casual Danger Dialogue: While on a ship experiencing much turbulence during the end of the world, Robin gently tells May "Don't worry, we survive the crash", right before the Zephyr crashes.
- Dead All Along: Deke is told by Voss that his father is out on a mission and will be back soon. Turns out that Deke's father was actually murdered by Voss quite a while back.
- Death Seeker: In a flashback, Elena decides to attack the Kree rather than give up her freedom, and since Mack is gone she's lost hope that things can be set right.
- Despair Event Horizon: Fitz in the Lighthouse's original timeline crossed it when young Robin described Jemma's death. He loses any and all hope of fixing the situation and rips down the blueprints he made for a time machine, all the while ranting about how time cannot be changed.
- Died in Your Arms Tonight: Robin agonizes and dies in May's arms. As she experiences time in a different manner, she barely even acknowledges the wound and treats it as if she's going to sleep, because from her perspective, she is.
- Difficult, but Awesome: If you are as big and strong as Mack, then a shotgun-axe is a wonderfully useful weapon.
- Dismantled MacGuffin: Only one small piece of the white monolith remains, but Team Coulson needs the whole thing to get back to the past. Presumably this is why they need Flint, since his power might be able to detect the missing pieces and he would also likely be needed to meld them together.
- Exact Words: When Robin foretells the end of time is coming, she's referring to her own death, since she presumably can't see anything that happens after that.
- Expendable Alternate Universe: If time branches, as Deke asserted, their going back will just create another branch. It will not fix this Bad Future timeline. The plan of Voss to fix his own world by killing Daisy is a Time Paradox.
- Flashback: A weird combination of this and Flash Forward. First, we see a series of flashbacks that detail roughly how the Lighthouse came to be. May, Elena, Fitz, and Simmons retrofitted it to house the population, and eventually accepted the help of the Kree to make sure humanity would survive. These are from Robin's perspective. It's eventually discovered that this group did try to get back to the past from the future to avoid the catastrophe that destroyed the world in the first place, and that the flashbacks were actually efforts by the remaining team to try to sow things for the future. See also Stable Time Loop.
- Foreshadowing: Robin keeps repeating that this is "the last day". Actually, it is the last day of her life, as she's killed by Voss.
- Glad-to-Be-Alive Sex: After everything they have been through since the beginning of the season—not to mention everything that happened in the Framework arc last season—Fitz and Simmons waste no time doing this once they have a moment alone.
- Innocently Insensitive: Young Robin in the Lighthouse's original timeline saw a vision about Jemma's death and described it to Fitz, causing him to cross into Despair Event Horizon.
- Inseries Nickname: Flint is dubbed "Pebbles" by Mack.
- It's Quiet… Too Quiet: Elena was the first to point out that Fitz's weapons cache was left in a level of the Lighthouse that was infested with Vrellnexians - but after getting in there and finding what they're after, Mack and company haven't come across any of them. It's because they're being herded elsewhere.
- I Want Them Alive!: Kasius tells Sinara that he wants Daisy brought back alive, but that he'll accept her bringing back a trophy if that's unfeasible.
- Kick the Dog: Kasius wastes no time in venting his frustration by driving the Vrellnexians from level 3 to the main human habitat, causing a massacre.
- Killed Offscreen: The Flashbacks/Flash Forwards imply Mack dies at some point. Elena makes a Last Stand against the Kree, alone, understanding that their goal is to enslave the people in the Lighthouse. Fitz also mentions Simmons being killed. There's no mention of Daisy or Coulson after the world is destroyed, implying they also die at some point. Later, Fitz is also not shown, implying that May was/will be the last of the team to survive. Voss also killed Deke's father at some point.
- Mind Screw: Past!Robin is telling Past/Future!May about her future, a future in which Future!Robin is telling Present!May about their past/future together, including the day on which Robin did/will tell her about this day. Is your head hurting yet?
- My Greatest Second Chance: Two of them.
- In the original timeline, May took the chance to be a mother to Robin after giving up any pretensions of motherhood after the disastrous Bahrain incident.
- Mack seems to be relishing the chance to protect a young person after losing Hope in the Framework.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: In the Lighthouse's original timeline, the Lighthouse was refitted by May, Yo-Yo, Fitz, and Simmons, who eventually collaborated with the Kree to ensure humanity's survival. Given that the overseer is completely okay with eliminating humanity, it's safe to say that they screwed up.
- Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: The Lighthouse humans are ready to turn into an angry mob against SHIELD and Flint. Then Kasius releases the roaches on them and SHIELD and Flint save them. Now they are so grateful that they're willing to remove their metrics, the very symbol of their enslavement to the Kree.
- Not Now, Kiddo: Young Robin in the Lighthouse's original timeline urgently tries to inform others of important events or remind them of when her visions will be relevant, but is repeatedly brushed aside by everyone except May.
- Papa Wolf: Mack does not take kindly to the Lighthouse residents threatening Flint. This goes hand-in-hand with My Greatest Second Chance.
- Parental Substitute: May becomes this to Robin in the original timeline, after her real mother was lost during the calamity. Robin calls her "Mom".
- The Purge: Kasius launches one. This time it is not a "renewal" but "retribution", the full-blown elimination of the humans of the Lighthouse, by driving the Vrellnexians from level 3 to the main human habitat on level 10.
- The Resenter: When his father was banished to the surface, Deke originally didn't care, as his work basically got his mother killed beforehand.
- Set Right What Once Went Wrong:
- Voss tries to do this by killing Daisy, since she has yet to cause the calamity and won't be able to if she's dead. When that falls through, he settles for stabbing Robin to keep her from telling them how to return home. No luck there, either, as she tells May with her dying breath.
- This is ultimately revealed to be the reason the team was brought to the future in the first place. In order to save the whole team from the destruction of the world, Robin sent Enoch to collect them from the last place they were all seen together before it happened. In order to get them the information necessary to prevent the world breaking, they were then sent forward to the future, specifically to just before Robin's death, by which time she would hopefully have had the vision which tells them how to do it.
- Shout-Out: Mack says "Hello, gorgeous" to his shotgun-axe. He also refers to the Kree as the Blue Man Group.
- Spotting the Thread: Deke realizes that Voss killed his father when he learns Voss had the piece of the monolith that belonged to his mother. His reasoning is that his father would have never left it with Voss for any reason.
- Stable Time Loop: Subverted. We are treated to a series of flashbacks of young Robin with the team, however
Word of God explains that those scenes are from the original timeline when Enoch never abducted them from the diner. - There Is No Kill Like Overkill: Elena and Mack blast off several limbs of a Roach, and then Mack decapitates him.
- Time Machine: The Zephyr has a machine built by Fitz and Simmons which is able to link with the monolith through time using a piece of the same monolith itself. This is how the team was brought to the future.
- Understatement: When Daisy and Deke talk about his father, Daisy tells him about how she didn't meet her father until her 20s. When Deke asks how that turned out, she says it was a rough start but worked out. (This is also a Half-Truth because Calvin lost all memory of her.)
- Unstuck in Time: Robin perceives all of time at once. This means she says things when she thinks they are relevant but are either before or after the fact. She tried to tell Elena and May about the importance of Flint fifty years before he was born, for instance.
- Well-Intentioned Extremist: Voss wants to kill Daisy to prevent the Bad Future, but he doesn't try to kill anyone else on the team, either locking them away from the fighting or offering mercy so long as the rest of Team Coulson doesn't interfere.
- Wham Line: May knows how to save the world in the past. Just one question: "Who's Flint?"
- What Happened to the Mouse?: We don't know what happened (or will happen, from the team's perspective) to Coulson or Daisy after the team travels back in time. Daisy disappeared just before the Earth was destroyed, and Coulson goes without mention.
- You Can't Fight Fate: Fitz in the flashback still firmly believes this, assuming that they're stuck in an endless time loop, instead of creating an alternate timeline.
- You Have to Believe Me!: The flashbacks show Robin is upset when no one listens to her. It is partially justified since, by that point, the humans have already surrendered themselves to the Kree.
