Winn's father the Toyman has passed away, but his death may not be the end.
Tropes:
- Bait-and-Switch: The episode opens with Kara giving a stern speech to her friends as if they're about to charge into some epic battle. Cut to karaoke night.
- Berserk Button: For obvious reasons, the Toyman is a very sore spot for Winn.
- Bus Crash: Winslow Schott Sr. is revealed by a newscast at the start of the episode to have died in prison.
- Calling the Old Man Out: Winn is not happy to see his mom who walked away from the family twenty years ago — the night his dad snapped. He calls her out on it. Repeatedly.
- Chekhov's Gun: The 'previously on...' section features a long shot of Toyman murdering the prison guards with a bladed yo-yo. Jacqueline then busts one out at the climax, but focuses on using the yo-yo's string to strangle Winn. Winn uses the actual blades to stab her in the leg and set her up for defeat.
- Crazy-Prepared: Winn's father made precautions strong enough to be a danger to superpowered people like Supergirl.
- Daddy Had a Good Reason for Abandoning You: Mary tells Winn that she left because his father threatened to kill him if she ever came back to see him. Winn is not impressed. As it turns out, the Toyman wasn't kidding. He set up a contingency plan after his death to attack Winn if Mary ever came to see Winn. Even when Winn was little and Mary tried to escape to a Domestic Abuse Shelter with him, Schott rammed them off the road, giving his own son a concussion. This convinces Winn how serious the threat was, as he had been led to believe they were going to Disneyland and had to turn around because of car trouble.
- A Day in the Limelight: The episode focuses mostly on Winn.
- Deadly Dodging: To free Supergirl from the life-sized packaging she's been trapped in, Mon-El goads the T. rex robot into charging at him, then dodges so its tail will bash the packaging.
- Forced to Watch: Jacqueline plans to kill Winn before his mother, as his father had intended should she come near him.
- Gender Flip: In the comics, the second Toyman is Jack Nimball, a man.
- Get Out!: M'yrnn yells this at Alex when she refuses to keep his dementia a secret from J'onn.
- The Heart: Kara tells Mary that Winn is pretty much the one keeping them all together.
- Hoist by His Own Petard: Winn reprograms one of the robot monkeys his father's accomplice sent after the DEO, and uses it to attack her in her lair.
- Hollywood Tone-Deaf:
- Mon-El may have Super-Strength, but he can't carry a tune when doing karaoke. It's all the more glaring because Chris Wood, the actor who plays Mon-El, actually graduated from college with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Musical Theater and appeared in two musicals after graduation!
- While not as awful as Mon-El's singing, there was quite a lot of this going around the episode, as most of the cast are far more competent singers than their characters. Most notably, Alex commenting that Winn was a worse singer than she would have thought, despite Jeremy Jordan being a Tony-nominated Broadway performer.
- Ironic Nursery Tune: The trailer uses a dark version of "Pop Goes The Weasel", which also plays right before the bomb in Toyman's coffin goes off.
- Mama Bear: Mary won't hesitate to do whatever it takes to keep Winn from harm.
- My Death Is Only The Beginning: Even death can't stop a lunatic like the Toyman. That's because he managed to corrupt a janitor at his prison to serve as the "executor of his final wishes".
- Mythology Gag:
- During the opening karaoke scene, James asks Mon-El if Imra is telepathic, which is her most famous power in the comics, only for Mon-El to correct him that she's telekinetic and can't read minds. Only time will tell if this is actually foreshadowing of her having that power after all.
- The robot T. rex that Mon-El fights during the climactic confrontation is famous in the comics as one of Batman's keepsakes in the Batcave.
- The “cape tricks” Mon-El performs when fighting the dinosaur are similar to those he uses in the comics.
- The Resenter: Winn is initially unwilling to listen to his mother's reasoning for abandoning him, as he is too angry about it all.
- The Reveal: We learn what Imra confessed to Mon-El in the last episode. She and Brainy deliberately sent the Legion ship back to Kara's time, because the Blight they've been fighting is actually the third World Killer, Pestilence. They hope to stop her in the past in order to save the future. Mon-El wasn't told because they weren't sure how he'd react to intentionally traveling back to his previous life after being led to believe for years that it was impossible.
- Scatterbrained Senior: M'yrnn is suffering the Martian equivalent of dementia. He's trying to keep it a secret to spare J'onn the pain of losing him again. He is convinced to reveal it at the end of the episode.
- Seen It All: As Kara puts it when Winn's mom asks her, flying monkeys are just a 2 on a scale from 1 to 10 for her.
- Set Right What Once Went Wrong: The Blight in the future is actually Pestilence, a present-day World Killer who will evolve into an even greater threat. The Legion deliberately came back in time to eliminate the threat before it grew out of control.
- Swiss-Cheese Security: Mary is able to grab a loaded weapon from the DEO supply room and leave with no issue. It's not even locked.
- Villainous Legacy: Jacqueline Nimball, a former maintenance worker at Van Kull Maximum Security Prison, got corrupted by Winn's father to carry out his wishes.
- Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?: Jacqueline opts to simply shoot Winn and Mary once Winn frees Mary from the claw. Winn mocks her for her lack of showmanship as a stalling technique so he can summon the repaired robot monkey to grab her gun.
