Mack and Deke are stranded in the 1980s when the Zephyr takes off unexpectedly. While they wait to catch up with the rest of the team, Mack mourns his parents and Deke forms a new team. Meanwhile, Sibyl implements a new plan to achieve her goals.
Tropes:
- Alternate Timeline: As confirmed by this episode, enough threads have been pulled to change history in subtle but important ways. Mack's parents' deaths in 1976 mean he grew up without them in this version of events.
- Ambiguously Gay: Olga tells Roxy (in Russian), "My heart resides forever in your beautiful clutches."
- Arbitrary Skepticism: Subverted; Deke claims that May wouldn't believe what happened to him and Mack, but it turns out that the truth isn't unbelievable, just ridiculous (May is most astounded by the fact that Deke formed a band).
- Arc Words: "As I have always been" is once again uttered, this time not by Enoch but by Sibyl.
- The Bad Guy Wins: Sibyl makes off with the timestream data core and delivers it to Nathaniel Malick.
- Beard of Sorrow: Mack grows one similar to Thor's while living in self-isolation. He trims it back to normal before taking on Sibyl's robots.
- Been There, Shaped History: Deke borrows The Breakfast Club's "Don't You Forget About Me" for his band two years in advance, and has implicitly done this with a number of songs, like "Walk Like an Egyptian" and "Here I Go Again", although his memories of the lyrics are imperfect.
- Benevolent Boss: Deke is an enthusiastic leader to his new team, treating everyone well, showing concern for Olga's welfare, and forgiving the Chang Gang when they abandon him mid-battle.
- Big Damn Heroes: Mack and Roxy save the team from one of Sibyl's robots, finally bringing Mack back into action.
- Blatant Lies:
- After Russell buys her flowers, Sybil responds: "A truly human gesture, which I appreciate."
- "My name is Deke Shaw, and I wrote this song."
- Rolling into view after slaughtering Cricket's girlfriend, "Can you please help me I am lost."
- Bloodier and Gorier: This is probably the most violent episode in the series preceding the previous episodes. It shows plenty of blood being shed by robotic killing machines. Ironically, it's a Breather Episode otherwise.
- Blood Knight: Olga draws a knife and smiles at the sight of one of the killer robots.
- Blood-Splattered Innocents: Cricket's girlfriend is covered in his blood when one of the robots kills him.
- Bloody Hilarious: The goriest episode of the season, and the funniest.
- Brain Uploading: Coulson and Sibyl survived the destruction of the ship by uploading their minds into computers.
- Breather Episode: While Mack's emotional state throughout the episode is no laughing matter, there's a lot more comedy and lighthearted movie references following the relentless darkness of the previous episode.
- The Call Knows Where You Live: Deke refuses to let Mack hide in his Heroic BSoD.
- Chekhov's Gun: Russell is seen working with a robotic arm on wheels before meeting Sibyl. When Mack blows up Sibyl's last drone, the arm is shown escaping with the timestream data core.
- Clark Kent Outfit: While Mack's Beard of Sorrow and figure suggest he has let himself go to seed (like Thor), he's actually just hunching and wearing slightly baggier clothes. When he finally goes into action mode, it is shown that, yes, Henry Simmons is still very much S.H.I.E.L.D.'s resident Mr. Fanservice.
- Comically Missing the Point: Deke tells Mack that Cricket sells coke as a side job, but thinks it's the soft drink and is confused as to why he's never seen Cricket drinking it. Yet Deke also notes that his band's behavior is passed off as a product of substance abuse.
- Continuity Nod:
- This isn't the first time Mack has fought killer robots.Mack: Oh no, not again!
- Neither is it the first time a Mr. Fanservice in the MCU has grown a Beard of Sorrow and descended into alcoholism following the death of his family.
- This isn't the first time Mack has fought killer robots.
- A Day in the Limelight: With Mack and Deke stuck together for 20 months.
- Decapitated Army: Invoked by Olga, who says that the robots will keep coming until they destroy the lead robot. Subverted in that they just blow up all the robots anyway, since Sibyl only had three to start, and she was controlling her drone remotely.
- Dirty Coward: The Chang Gang flees at the sight of Sibyl's laser-shooting drone, though Deke forgives them for it.
- Disappeared Dad: Roxy assumes Mack is this to his past self, because, naturally, he looks exactly like himself.
- Do Not Taunt Cthulhu: When Cricket and his girlfriend first encounter a robot:Cricket: [mocking Robo Speak] My name is 'Dumb Robot'. [makes beeping noises]
Robot: You should not have patronized me. [kills Cricket with a buzzsaw] - Drowning My Sorrows: Mack spends his Heroic BSoD drinking beer and building model cars.
- Egocentric Team Naming: Deke starts a band called "the Deke Squad".
- Entertainingly Wrong: Roxy assumes that the boy Deke checks in on and who has the same name as Mack is Mack's abandoned son; Deke either didn't explain Time Travel to his new team, or didn't go into detail about the situation with Mack's younger self.
- Eye Beams: Sibyl's robot is able to fire lasers from its single eye strip.
- Facepalm: Mack's reaction upon hearing that the band's drummer had been selling coke.
- Fire-Forged Friends: Deke and Mack are finally friends after this episode.
- Fish out of Temporal Water: Deke repeatedly fails to recognize that Cricket is strung out on drugs. Thinks he's on soda.
- Genre Savvy: Mack immediately recognizes a killer robot (his nemesis) as a threat and books it.
- Gilligan Cut: When Deke mentions they should fall back to HQ, Mack pleads, "Please tell me you didn't." Cut to the refurbished Lighthouse, with Mack fatalistically saying, "Of course you did."
- Hand Signals: Amusingly used by Sibyl's crude robot hunters.
- Heroic BSoD: Mack's continues on from the previous episode. Stranded in 1982, he gets a house and spends all of his time drinking beer, building model cars, and watching TV.
- Hidden Depths:
- Mack changes his view on Deke when he learns from Roxy that he has been looking out for Mack's younger self, buying him and his brother school supplies and toys.
- On a more humorous note, while Deke is a real dingus at lyrics, he has a perfect ear for the music he stole.
- Hidden in Plain Sight: The Deke Squad uses their band as a cover for their operations, as it allows them to move heavy equipment easily and their oddities are passed off as them abusing drugs. At least, that's the plan.
- Homage: The entire episode is one massive sendup to The '80s, and references to various works from said era abound.
- Horrible Judge of Character: Oh, Deke.Deke: Cricket? Who would murder him? Cricket's a saint!
- How We Got Here: The episode opens with Deke explaining to May exactly what happened after the Zephyr left them stranded in 1982.
- Huddle Shot: Right before the Gauntlet, Deke gives his band a pep-talk with their heads put together and filmed from below. They conclude it with a Team Hand-Stack.
- Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: Russell is impaled by a power drill. The drill then starts spinning.
- Implausible Deniability: "Can you please help me? I am lost." Said by the robot that just murdered a woman and is covered in blood.Chang: I think it's a trick.
- I Need a Freaking Drink: Within seconds of Deke's band starting to play, Mack demands a drink from the bartender.
- Killer Robot: Sibyl tricks Russell into creating robots for her. These bots have a buzzsaw blade, guns, and drills for weapons.
- The Load: Cricket, despite being well-liked by Deke (who considers him "a saint" for God alone knows what reason), is utterly useless as anything other than a drummer and drug dealer. Even Coulson thinks Deke should just fire him, and Cricket is the first one to die when Sibyl's robots attack.
- Lock-and-Load Montage: Mack, which starts off with trimming his Beard of Sorrow.
- Malaproper: Olga says that the robots will not "lick" defeat unless they take out the lead robot. She meant to say "taste defeat", but Deke gives her points for trying.
- Not Quite Dead:
- Sibyl's body was destroyed when Coulson blew the Chronicoms' ship sky high, but she survived by uploading herself into the nearby town's power grid.
- Coulson managed to survive being blown up by uploading himself onto a hard drive that Deke recovered and installed into a Max Headroom-esque AV set-up.
- Following his Uncertain Doom in the previous episode, Nathaniel Malick is revealed to have survived in The Stinger.
- "Not So Different" Remark: After getting stranded, Deke tries to sympathize with Mack by bringing up the fact that he too lost his parents, but Mack blows him off.
- Offscreen Moment of Awesome: Deke makes sure to befriend the Mackenzie family and provides financial support to them as well. Mack is thoroughly shocked and grateful when this is revealed.
- Out-of-Character Alert: Coulson notes that Sibyl's direct assault on the team using Killer Robots is far less subtle than her usual manipulations of specific events. He thus concludes that Sibyl would only resort to this if she's been deprived of her ability to read the timestreams. This revelation comes a bit too late, however, as Sibyl is able to find the data core while the agents are distracted by the robots.
- Out of Focus: Simmons, May, and Yo-Yo only appear at the end of the episode, while Daisy and Sousa don't appear at all.
- Overdrawn at the Blood Bank: Cricket's girlfriend is grabbed by a robot offscreen and murdered, which causes a good amount of her blood to spray and spill out back into view for a couple seconds.
- Ping Pong Naïveté: Deke doesn't get that "coke" is short for cocaine, yet he's familiar enough with casual drug use to know that any strange behavior his team exhibits can be passed off as such.
- Percussive Maintenance: When the hard drive holding Coulson's personality doesn't display immediately his face on TV, Deke slams his fist on it to make it start properly.
- Psycho Party Member: Downplayed. Olga is a loyal teammate, but she's definitely a bit off-kilter, using live explosives during a training exercise.
- Pun: Deke's cover band is a cover for their S.H.I.E.L.D. operations.
- Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: The Deke Squad is a motley crew of bandmates that Deke hopes to turn into an effective team of S.H.I.E.L.D. agents. For the most part, they step up admirably by the end of the episode.
- "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Mack calls Deke out for his childish behavior and his tendency to steal innovations (songs, in this case) from the future to pass them off as his own. Deke lets it slide, because he cares more about helping Mack get over his funk than trying to defend himself.
- Rhetorical Question Blunder: Upon learning that Sibyl survived, Mack tells Roxy that "someone is going to pay." After a beat, she asks if it's the robots and he confirms he meant the robots.
- Robosexual: Russell falls in love with Sibyl while building her a new body. It's not clear if Sibyl deliberately cultivated these feelings or if he was just lonely, but either way, it doesn't end well for him.
- Sacrificial Lamb: Cricket, who is brutally killed by Sybil's minion, alongside his lover, without any greater look into his character.
- Shout-Out:
- The title is a reference to Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure.
- The "eyes" of Sybil's robot seem to be a lot like a scanner light, à la Knight Rider, as well as that of the Cylons from Battlestar Galactica. The head itself is based on the Killbots from Chopping Mall, as is its behavior.
- Deke singing covers of popular yet-to-be-written rock songs is one to Back to the Future.
- Coulson complaining about Cricket playing videos in his VCR slot is a shoutout to Cronenberg's Videodrome.
- Mack refers to Sibyl's robot as "Short Circuit", also doubles as a Creator In-Joke as the robot was built and puppeteered by Johnny 5's creator Eric Allard.
- Deke and Mack perform Dutch and Dylan's iconic handshake from Predator.
- The hunters' battlecry is certainly evocative of another group of robot (well, cyborg) baddies.
- Coulson spends the entire episode as an expy of Max Headroom.
- The fountains of blood that were spilled would not be out of place in '80s horror films such as A Nightmare on Elm Street or Evil Dead.
- Olga's thick Russian accent is also reminiscent of classic '80s movie villains from the Soviet Union.
- The cheap-looking cheesiness of the gore and violence along with the campy reactions and attitudes are straight out of low-budget '80s films. On the same note, Cricket and his girlfriend finding a robot and Cricket's grisly fate harken back to any number of the era's Slasher Movies.
- The last third of the episode has nice touches to Arnold Schwarzenegger and action movies from the 1980s. Mack quotes verbatim "We Fight for Love" from Commando, and even does a handshake with Deke similar to Dillon and Dutch's from Predator.
- A lot of the dialogue is in the style of an eighties' or nineties' comicbook, very expositional and not what would be natural to say in those situations.
- Deke points out that young Mack scored a lot of points playing Mrs. Packman, and that he cried when reading "Where The Red Fern Grows".
- The Slow Path: Mack, Deke, and Coulson have to live for roughly 20 months in the 1980s until the Zephyr reappears and they can rejoin the main team.
- Sound-Only Death: Cricket's girlfriend is dragged offscreen by one of the robots to the sound of power tools and screaming, followed by a massive arterial spray and pool of blood.
- Start My Own: Deke cannot contact the '80s version of S.H.I.E.L.D. for help, so starts his own mini-S.H.IE.L.D. using the mothballed Lighthouse as a base and recruiting various skilled but kooky characters as his team.
- The Stinger: Sibyl cuts a deal with a very much alive Nathaniel Malick.
- Surfer Dude: Check out that righteous title, bro!
- Technology Porn: An inordinate amount of time in The Stinger is spent on a lone surviving robot driving around before giving Malick the hard drive he requested.
- This Is a Drill: Russell gets a drill through the chest after Sibyl is done with him.
- Took a Level in Badass: By the time Elena and May find their friends, the Deke Squad has become a legitimate part of S.H.I.E.L.D.
- Tragic Keepsake: Mack mourns his parents' deaths by building model cars, since he can't work on cars with his father like he used to.
- Undead Tax Exemption: Despite suddenly being stranded in the past with nothing but his motorcycle and his clothes, Mack somehow manages to buy a house and live comfortably. Deke at least launches a successful music career by passing off songs from the future as his own creations.
- Undying Loyalty: Deke refuses to give up on Mack in his depressive state, bringing him groceries and trying to bring Mack back into the world. Even when Mack shows no interest in his friendship or verbally tears him a new one, Deke remains steadfast.
- Unnecessary Combat Roll: Olga is overly fond of using these.
- Villainous Valor: Despite losing just about all of her resources, Sibyl manages to build herself back up into a threat by manipulating a computer repairman into building her a new body and using that as a starting point to renew her plans.
- Wham Shot: The episode ends with Nathaniel Malick picking up the timestream data core.
- What the Hell, Hero?:
- Mack is still angry at Deke for killing Malick.
- Deke is able to take Mack's insults, but when he attacks his team, he gets pissed.
- Roxy lays into Mack for cutting himself off from everyone, and she's especially angry that Mack didn't check up on his younger self and brother while Deke did.
- You Have GOT to Be Kidding Me!: Mack is incredulous that Deke formed a band while stranded in the 1980s. So is May.
- You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Sibyl has Russell killed after he aids in starting her robot army for this reason, as well as because He Knows Too Much.
- You Wouldn't Believe Me If I Told You: Deke says this to May about his exploits when May is debriefing him, to which she responds "Try me." The part she doesn't believe is that Deke formed a band.
