The crew picks up a being that wants to explode... and doesn't care who or what explodes with him.
Episode Tropes:
- Affably Evil: Mr. Deadly is polite, pleasant, and would very very much like to explode and cause a multi-star system apocalypse at your earliest convenience.
- All for Nothing: The crew had planned to send Mr. Deadly to a safe distance outside the galactic plane so they can detonate him safely. When one of the spies they fought said the Trigger Phrase to activate him early, they resort to teleporting him via singularity grenade. Since the grenade is designed to send him anywhere in the galaxy randomly, no one really wants to figure out how many lives are lost.
- Awesome, but Impractical: All of Krieger's weapons are technically impressive but impractical to actually use, like his singularity grenade; a black hole, even a small one is far too dangerous to ever actually weaponize. The clients he tries to sell them to are thoroughly unimpressed and call out the weapons as dumb.
- Beast Man: Tex, one of the spies based on Charles, has a few feline traitsnote
- Chekhov's Lecture: Archer expounds at length on "spaghettification," the effect where objects and people drawn into a black hole are stretched into noodles as they go in, which he appears to have read up on out of sheer terror of it happening to him. This ends up happening to Mr. Deadly as he's sucked into Krieger's singularity grenade.
- Death Seeker: Mr. Deadly spends the entire episode trying to get someone to say his trigger phrase so he can detonate.
- Also Cheryl, to the point that they had to knock her out and lock her in Ray's room to keep her from activating Mr Deadly.
- Do-Anything Robot: Mr. Deadly is an incredibly powerful doomsday device that's also advanced enough to pull ships out of hyperspace, communicate with insects through pheromones, and grow genitalia to have sex.
- Doomsday Device: The episode plot revolves around a robot/walking talking bomb with a death wish who, when detonated, will destroy dozens of solar systems.
- Fluffy the Terrible: An incredibly powerful doomsday device with enough yield to take out several civilizations on a starfaring scale calls himself Mr. Deadly.
- Hope Spot: Mr. Deadly's trigger phrase appears to do nothing once it's inevitably spoken, and he presumes that Lana's self-sacrifice has showed him how to grow beyond his programming as a sentient weapon. Turns out there's just a slight delay.
- I Cannot Self-Terminate: Mr. Deadly cannot trigger his own detonation, which is why he tries to get someone else to detonate him, either through his trigger phrase or by shooting him.
- Internal Homage: The two spies who serve as antagonists for this episode are 1999's versions of Charles and Rudi, the gay Cuban spies.
- Lampshade Hanging: When Mr. Deadly asks for Cheryl's name she says there's some debate on that.
- Poor Communication Kills: The crew brings Mr. Deadly aboard their ship because they misunderstood his gestures.
- Sense Freak: Played for laughs; Mr. Deadly starts to turn around on his drive to blow up after having sex, all twenty seconds of it.
- Taking the Bullet: Lana dives in the way of a laser blast aimed at Mr. Deadly. She's wearing Krieger's experimental body armor, so she's okay, but it convinces Mr. Deadly to give up his desire to detonate.
- Taking You with Me: Discussed. Mr. Deadly was built by an ancient alien race who believed that mutual destruction was preferable to defeat. The war ended before he could be used, much to his frustration.
- Additionally, when Archer and Pam prepare to shoot Mr. Deadly, he notes that he will automatically explode when he's killed.
- Trigger Phrase: The words "Please Detonate" need to be said to detonate Mr. Deadly.
- Too Dumb to Live: Cheryl really wants to detonate Mr. Deadly.
