Sarge's crew looks for supplies while S.H.I.E.L.D. tries to figure out who they are.
Tropes:
- Bad Boss:
- The Controller decides to kill his entire engineering crew when Fitz proves to be more effective, and turns down Fitz's proposed solution to spare their lives because it's "too complicated".
- Sarge is implied to be one; after Pax suggests taking some time to relax and enjoy Earth, Sarge tells Jaco to keep an eye on him and starts musing about finding a replacement.
- Batman Gambit: Fitz knows that there is no guarantee that the Controller will stick to his part of the deal, and could space him at any moment, so he engineers a way to force him to try killing off his incompetent crew and his stowaways, and sabotages the airlock systems to open the cargo bay door instead of the airlock.
- Berserk Button: Benson inadvertently hits the team's and especially May's for insinuating that Coulson might have never died.
- Blatant Lies: Pax tries to claim to a security guard at the shipping depot that he and Sarge are there on official business. It falls apart quickly when he can't cover for the fact that, being an alien, he has no idea what kind of agency they'd be representing.
- Call-Back:
- LMDs are considered as a possible explanation for Sarge being a lookalike for Coulson.
- Fitz gets one when he mentions that he knows what it's like to be pragmatic about people's lives, from his time as the Doctor.
- Can't Kill You, Still Need You:
- Fitz bargains for his life by pointing out that he's a better engineer than anyone else on the ship. It works for a time, but as the Controller points out, no one is irreplaceable. Fitz saw that outcome coming, though.
- Sarge spares Dana because she can access the vault and might know where to find what they're looking for. May helps her escape before that usefulness runs out.
- Chronic Hero Syndrome: Fitz can't stand by and let the Controller kill the Silvians, even though they're extreme xenophobes.
- Continuity Nod:
- A dark one to A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Thor's Hammer. In that One-Shot, Phil Coulson thwarted a convenience store robbery. Here, Sarge is the one robbing a convenience store.
- At the convenience store, Sarge's eyes stop on a pair of sunglasses similar to Coulson's before choosing a different pair.
- Cool Shades: Sarge steals a pair of appropriately sinister sunglasses.
- Due to the Dead:
- The agents mourn Fox, with Keller in particular beating himself up over it.
- On the bad guys' side, Pax is the only one to bother much with Tinker's death, calling Snowflake out for going so carelessly through his belongings.
- Evil Is Petty: When Sarge's crew robs a grocery store, Pax has fun pretending to shoot the owner.
- Exact Words: After Sarge and company pick up supplies at the convenience store, Sarge tells the group, "Let's vanish." As their rig drives away, it disappears similarly to a Helicarrier.
- Faux Affably Evil: In stark contrast to Coulson's Nice Guy attitude, Sarge really shows his colors here, both against strangers like Dana, as well as towards Pax, who is on his team.
- Five-Second Foreshadowing: "You may be a hell of an engineer, but you don't look like much of a fighter.
- Foreshadowing: Sarge seems unhappy at first when he is told his team is out of PEGs, only to proclaim that Earth "does have it all" as he shows one of his men an ad for a watch and jeweller's company.
Anyone who knows about watches knows they run on piezoelectricity, which fits the acronym PEG (piezoelectric gems). - Hoist by His Own Petard: Expecting him to betray them, Fitz reprograms the airlock controls so that Viro's attempt to space the whole crew results in him killing himself and his guards instead.
- Human Aliens: To blend in with the aliens on the ship, other than learning their language, all Fitz has to do is use some kind of gas to change his eye color.
- I Need a Freaking Drink: Benson says he is making one for Mack before showing the memory file. After playing the memory file, which shows the destruction of a world, Benson drinks it himself.
- Impostor-Exposing Test: The crew of the freighter asks where Fitz is from when they suspect he's lying about his identity. He claims to be from "really far North", which is an irradiated wasteland on their world.
- Internal Reveal: Benson learns about all the crazy stuff the agents have gone through during the last years, including the fact that Coulson already died once before.
- Invisibility Cloak: Sarge's big rig has a cloaking device.
- Karmic Death: The Controller gets thrown out the airlock, the same thing he wanted to subject his engineer team to.
- Locked Out of the Loop: Understandably, Fitz and Enoch are unaware that the timeline has been altered and that Fitz no longer needs to be in cryostasis.
- Missed Him by That Much: The Zephyr One arriving just as Fitz's ship leaves the system.
- Mysterious Past:
- Even Sarge's team don't know much of anything about him; Pax tries to get him to open up, but is told not to hold his breath. The most we get here is that Coulson's name "rings a bell".
- This goes double for the entire Big Rig crew. We know next to nothing about them, other than they have advanced tech, including cloaking, energy guns, and portal devices, and they escaped a planet that was slowly being destroyed.
- No-Sell: Jaco shrugs off most of May's attacks until she starts hitting him with heavy objects and using knives.
- Out-of-Character Alert: Fitz exposes himself as an alien to the crew of the freighter when he expresses disgust at the Xandarian snails they're transporting, which are a delicacy to the species.
- Portal Slam:
- May tips over the panel with the portal on it so Snowflake, who's in the vault, will run into the floor when she tries to pass through.
- Sarge does this to May after Snowflake trips her into the portal, grabbing the anchor device on the vault side so May is left stranded in the vault.
- Pragmatic Villainy: Sarge tries to talk Dana out of doing anything heroic so as not to complicate his operation, and he keeps her alive despite her pressing a silent alarm because she might be useful. Judging from his bemused reaction to Snowflake slaughtering the guards at the jewellery store, Sarge hadn't planned on killing anyone at all.
- Properly Paranoid: Fitz rewired the airlock so the door on the opposite end of the cargo bay would open instead, correctly guessing that the Controller would likely try to space him despite his worth.
- See the Invisible: When she deduces that Sarge's truck is cloaked, May uses a handful of dirt to confirm her theory.
- Spotting the Thread: May finds the cloaked truck when she spots its tire tracks, which have stopped clean where it parked.
- Stupid Evil: The Controller decides to space his engineering crew when Fitz proves more competent, rejects Fitz's offer to train them because it's more complicated than killing them, and is ready to space Fitz as well when he stands up for the engineers. Had he actually succeeded, the Controller would have no engineers left to do any actual work.
- Swarm of Alien Locusts: The strange bat creatures that emerged from the portal in the previous episode appear to be destroying the world Sarge's team came from.
- This Cannot Be!: The team's reaction to learning that Sarge's DNA is a 100% match for Coulson, a man they know to be dead.
- Thrown Out the Airlock: The Controller tries to space his engineering crew, save Fitz and Enoch, because he doesn't feel like paying them when Fitz will do their work for free. When Fitz steps in the airlock with them to stop him, the Controller decides to space him, too, since he can hire more workers. Fitz, however, reprogrammed the doors so the cargo door on the other side would open, spacing the Controller and his goons instead.
- Wham Shot:
- Sarge's DNA being revealed to be a perfect match for Coulson's.
- The memory file Benson finds that shows Sarge's crew witnessing the destruction of a world.
- Weird Currency: Invoked by Sarge when he goes on how "you can tell a lot from a world by its money." When an aide says it's "paper with faces on it," Sarge scoffs "great, one of those", but says it's easier than dragging a load of coins around.
- Worthless Yellow Rocks: Sarge describes diamonds and other precious stones as being "trash". They're much more interested in common crystals that can be used to power their tech. Pax tells Jaco to take some diamonds anyway, as they're valuable on Earth. The rocks they're interested in are common quartz, which you can find pretty much everywhere just by... kicking rocks.
