Coulson and the team work to get back to Lighthouse to reunite with Mack, Yo-Yo, and Flint. Kasius moves to recapture Daisy and suppress the human uprising.
Tropes in this episode:
- Artificial Gravity: The Zephyr has a Gravitonium generator just like the station, which allows it to maintain gravity during a gravity storm. Fitz realizes this must also be why the shattered remnants of Earth still have mostly normal gravity and a breathable atmosphere.
- Artistic License – Space: Subverted. Previous episodes showed that a broken shell of the Earth's crust is somehow still able to maintain breathable atmosphere and semi-regular gravity. While this is nowhere near realistic, this episode explains that the gravitonium is responsible.
- Back from the Dead: Kasius uses Kree blood to revive Tess and sends her to deliver his demands. She is incredibly pale and ghastly.
- Big Damn Heroes: Deke shows up as this for Daisy, grabbing Sinara with a grappling claw just as she's about to finish Daisy with a knife. He promptly gets the crap kicked out of him, but it's enough to draw Sinara's attention while Daisy regroups.
- Big "NO!": Kasius does this when Mack destroys all the terrigen and blood samples he and Yo-Yo stole from the genetics lab.
- Call-Back: The Kree's resurrection blood makes a return, having not been seen since the first season when it was used on Coulson (after being stabbed by Loki) and Daisy (after being shot by Ian Quinn).
- Chekhov's Gun: Kasius seems to already know Yo-Yo; he seems surprised to see her and knows her full name, addressing her first as "Yo-Yo Rodriguez" and later as "Elena". He also seems to know about her powers and has prepared accordingly. The reason is revealed in the next episode.
- The Comically Serious: Enoch is constantly making unhelpful observations throughout the episode, to the annoyance of May.
- Curb-Stomp Cushion: Without her powers, Daisy still gives Sinara a very good fight, but is ultimately overpowered and on the receiving end of a brutal No-Holds-Barred Beatdown. Without Deke and the timely gravity storm, she would have died.
- Deflector Shields: When Elena tries to run up and grab Kasius' detonator, she bounces off a forcefield generated by the staves held by the guards flanking him.
- Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: Kasius is confident enough that Humans Are Bastards and will always turn on each other for the sake of self-preservation. He fails to realise that The Apocalypse Brings Out the Best in People, and Team S.H.I.E.L.D. uses that against him.
- Expecting Someone Taller: In a fairly rare example of a hero directing this trope at a villain, Mack is rather surprised/confused when he sees Kasius actually looks rather unimposing for a Kree.
- Forgot About His Powers: Why exactly Sinara didn't use her telekinetic spheres to dispose of Daisy and Deke is anyone's guess.
- A God Am I: Kasius boasts of being a god to the humans. Elena and Mack are having none of that, and tell him off repeatedly.
- Heroic BSoD: FitzSimmons are left quite shaken when they see that the Zephyr has been refitted with Gravitonium based on their theoretical designs, realizing that they could only have developed it if they had seen it. Fitz believes that this is proof they're caught in a Stable Time Loop, and almost crosses the Despair Event Horizon then and there, but Jemma points out that it's proof that they manage to go back to their time.
- Hoist by His Own Petard: Kasius is tricked into using his own bombs to separate the human levels of the Lighthouse from those occupied by the Kree completely, leaving him no avenue of retribution except against the few that stayed behind to trick him,
and his remaining human servitors. - I Did What I Had to Do: Voss once again justifies his actions towards Deke. He also explains that he killed Deke's father in self-defense.
- If You Kill Him, You Will Be Just Like Him!: Deke is given the opportunity to kill Voss, but ultimately decides against it and allows him to seek shelter with the rest of the evacuating survivors. He explains that he doesn't believe in pointless violence.
- Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: Daisy kills Sinara by maneuvering a broken pipe so the Kree warrior will impale herself while the gravity is momentarily out. This isn't the first time it's happened to the Number Two of a Big Bad.
- Ironic Echo: Tess delivers Kasius a message that Mack and Elena will destroy all of his work with "the push of a button" (the same wording he had her use to describe how he could kill all the humans), while showing him a blood sample and terrigen crystal to indicate what they mean.
- It Gets Easier: Discussed by Mack and Yo-Yo regarding Flint. Yo-Yo points out that Flint can hold his own against the Kree and that he's killed before, but Mack is worried that Flint is developing a taste for it.
- I Would Say If I Could Say: When the Zephyr is doing a bumpy takeoff in a gravity storm, Enoch comments, "If I had a stomach, the vomiting would begin now!"
- Kneel Before Zod: Kasius demands this of the group during his A God Am I theatric, but Elena just laughs at him defiantly.
- Leeroy Jenkins: Both Elena and Flint are extremely eager to kill Kasius. Mack tries to cool them down and argues with Elena over the ethics of letting Flint fight and kill in the first place.
- Negated Moment of Awesome: Elena charges at Kasius, only to be stopped in her tracks by his Deflector Shield.
- Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: If Kasius hadn't been so specific about how he could kill all the humans, Mack might not have figured it out at all, or it at least would have taken him longer.
- No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: Daisy and Sinara get into a brutal fistfight. Sinara ultimately gets the upper-hand and punches Daisy in the face numerous times.
- Not Helping Your Case: Played for laughs. When Daisy makes a crack about May being a super-strict mother, May just glares at her. Daisy says that May is proving her point.
- Not Hyperbole: When Tess warns that Kasius can burn all the humans with a push of a button, Mack quickly realizes that it isn't a bluff and isn't metaphorical: he has remote-detonated bombs set up on the O2 lines on every floor.
- Number Two: With Sinara sent to Earth to hunt down Daisy, Hek-Sel becomes Kasius' leading minion and closest collaborator.
- La RĂ©sistance: After realizing Kasius intends to wipe them out entirely, the humans of each level of the Lighthouse join together to fight against their Kree oppressors.
- The Reveal:
- The team's immediate plan for Flint to use his Inhuman powers to locate other fragments of the White Monolith.
- Fitz and Simmons discover that the Zephyr has been upgraded with Gravitonium. They surmise from the identical design on the station that they invented both systems.
- As is explained, before the destruction of the planet, some kind of alien object came from the skies, beginning the chain of events that led to the planet's destruction. Daisy is still believed to have caused it, but this was the catalyst for that.
- Stable Time Loop: Fitz fears this after discovering the Gravitonium generator on the Zephyr, believing that he'll now be able to invent it after seeing the design. Furthermore, he thinks that the Gravitonium, not Daisy, may ultimately be what destroys the Earth.
- Talking Is a Free Action: Nope. Mack and company explicitly exploit the fact that Kasius likes to talk down to his enemies a lot so that they can relocate the bombs and the population.
- Technobabble: FitzSimmons gave Coulson an explanation for how and why Flint can use his powers on the Monolith pieces. Coulson briefly tries to relay that information before giving up and just saying that Flint's power works on rocks.
- Unspoken Plan Guarantee: Done twice. The first is when Elena and Mack say they're going to give themselves up, only to break into the genetics lab and steal all the blood samples and Terrigen crystals. The second is when they try to bargain for the samples with Kasius, but are in fact stalling so the humans can remove his bombs and move them to an unoccupied level, separating them from the Kree.
- Villainous Breakdown: Kasius has a big one after he realizes that the humans have relocated his bombs and escaped the explosion, completed with a Big "NO!" after Mack blows up his terrigen and blood samples.
- Wham Line: Kasius knows that Team Coulson is on their way in the Zephyr without being told, because he has a seer of his own.
- Worf Had the Flu: With her powers disabled, Daisy can't just quake Sinara out of commission, and she's up against an opponent who is just as skilled a fighter and physically superior to humans. Though she puts up a valiant effort, Sinara ultimately overwhelms and severely beats her, requiring an intervention by Deke to allow Daisy a chance to swing the fight in her favor once more.
- You Killed My Father: Deke considers killing Voss because of this, but he ultimately relents.
