This season, the agents have been fighting a dystopian future that was somehow caused in the past. While they’ve been looking for a way to stop it, there are now clues that maybe they can’t. Kasius is also determined to blow up the Lighthouse, and has a bit too much confidence. The episode may be messy in the final act, but a suitable prologue to next week’s episode before its Olympic break.

SPOILERS BELOW

Most of the episode centers on Mack and Elena’s efforts to convince the people at the Lighthouse to fight back against the Kree and Kasius, while Coulson and his crew hope to get the Zephyr off the ground. Both of these plots spark discussions about whether fighting back will solve anything.

The remaining humans in the Lighthouse are worried Kasius will kill them all. He sees himself as their god, and the reason they’re alive at all. However, he seems to obsess on that too much. Dominic Rains has been an interesting villain, but he overacts a bit too much. He might be getting too desperate, and it’s not a good look.
He should feel confident, because he’s planted hundreds of bombs in the Lighthouse, and one push of a button will kill them all.

Flint (Coy Stewart), though, wants to fight and kill Kasius, Even Elena is eager to do the same, but Mack prefers Flint stay out because he’s 16. He prefers a solid plan to stop the Kree threat.
They all get a surprise when Tess (Lisa Harrow), who was thought dead, is back as Kasius’ messenger. How he was able to resurrect Tess isn’t clear, but she mentions something about knives. Her message is direct: surrender or die.

Meanwhile, there’s a lot of activity in the Zephyr. May is still stunned to learn she raised Robin after her mom died, but Coulson is hoping Flint can reassemble the Kree monolith and get them back home. Voss (Michael McGrady) tells Deke (Jeff Ward) that he thought bringing the SHIELD agents from the past to kill them would be the best way to change their future. Deke almost kills Voss but doesn’t. This leads to an interesting exchange with Deke and Daisy over whether killing someone to save others is ethical. After all, Voss almost did that to Daisy.
Daisy now wonders if she does wind up cracking the Earth. Maybe the Kree device that has muted her Inhuman powers should be kept, and she can be Daisy Johnson rather than Quake or Destroyer of Worlds. That wouldn’t be too bad, but still making her the prime suspect in the destruction of Earth is unfair to her.
That’s when the show finally comes up with another possibility: a time loop.

Fitz and Simmons see how the Zephyr’s been rewired many times. Then Simmons sees a plan to upgrade the ship, and how it would work with artificial gravity. When Fitz sees the gravitorium flowing in the ship, it occurs to him they wouldn’t know about the upgrade if they hadn’t seen it first. Add Voss’ claim that SHIELD failed to save the world in the past after “a light was seen in the sky”, Fitz thinks that maybe SHIELD is really to blame via a casual time loop. That’s also horrible, but at least all the blame is not on Daisy. She still thinks not returning will save everyone, but she could be wrong. So could Fitz, for that matter.

After several tries, the agents get the Zephyr off the ground thanks to a gravity storm. It’s just a matter of using the storm to get airborne. However, Sinara (Florence Faivre) manages to sneak aboard, gunning for Daisy.

The last scenes toggle between the Zephry and Kasius’ confrontation of Mack and Elena. It’s a strange mix because one side has a lot of talking while the other has a lot of fighting.  It doesn’t mesh as well as Dirk Gently doing the same thing. Let’s take them separately.

At the ship, Daisy and Sinara battle each other, and all Sinara care about is beating Daisy. She’ll take Daisy back to Kasius, dead or alive. Deke tries to help, and makes a little progress against her. It looks like Sinara will beat her, until the ship reaches outer space. Sinara winds up floating towards a long pole Daisy has, and gets stabbed by it. It’s just like the picture Robin drew last December. It’s another hint the future may not be avoided.
Kasius is told by zombie Tess to meet Mack and Elena, or they’ll blow up his Inhuman breeding program. He doesn’t scare easy because he can still blow up the Lighthouse. When they meet, Kasius recognizes Elena, which is odd because they’ve never met (unless they did in the timeline where they weren’t sent to the future). They get in a standoff where Kasius is declares himself a god, and vows to make them die over and over again. Elena just calls him a “cruel, sad, little blue man.” She’s about to steal his bomb switch, but he has a force field to keep her away. It doesn’t matter, because while they were talking, Flint and the other humans just moved the bombs while they got to another floor. When Kasius does push the buttton, no one is killed. Mack, though, blasts the breeding equipment to ashes.

It looks like the good guys will come out on top, and maybe figure a way to break the time loop without Daisy sacrificing herself. That is, until Kasius predicts the agents’ next move.
How? He has a seer of his own.
Does that mean he knew Sinara would fail? If so, that’s more cruel than killing his brother. Come to think of it, did he foresee everything that happened this season?
An article in TV Guide has said the identity of Kasius’ seer will be “beyond shocking.” That means he somehow cloned Robin (since she is half-Inhuman), he has the real history that he wiped out from Earth, or it’s something else.

There’s also Flint to think about. His powers to merge rocks could reassemble the monolith, and he didn’t use those powers this week. All he knows is that he doesn’t want to lose Tess again, but will he have to sacrifice himself to save everyone?

It was a confusing episode,  but it was a proper set up to what could be the climax next week, the last episode until early March.