WARNING: This article contains major spoilers for "The Totally Excellent Adventures of Mack and the D," the latest Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. episode.
Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. couldn't resist dropping a Doctor Who reference in "The Totally Excellent Adventures of Mack and the D."
In this week's episode, the Chronicoms scrambled to recover after Phil Coulson dealt them a serious blow. Although he destroyed their ship, which was filled with Hunters, their predictor Sibyl managed to escape by sending her consciousness into a nearby power grid. There, she plotted her next move.
First, she needed a body, so she got in touch with a lonely computer repairman named Russell. Under her instruction, he built her a ramshackle body and fell in love with her in the process. This didn't end well for him, as he knew too much about her. When he walked in on her building a body for a Hunter, she had him killed with a buzzsaw.
Of course, since they were trapped in the 1980s, Sibyl didn't have any advanced technology at her disposal. Her creations looked nothing like the humanoid aliens from earlier episodes; instead, it was abundantly clear they were robots, with short octagonal heads, a post for a body, two hand-less arms and treads for wheels. In fact, they didn't look like much of a threat, until they were equipped with weapons like guns and saws.
In this, these poor excuses for Chronicoms begged comparison to Doctor Who's Daleks, another alien species that appears like a robot and has a penchant for genocide. This did not go unnoticed by the show's creators, who acknowledged that fact by giving one Chronicom the Daleks' famous catchphrase.
As Mack stormed out of the Lighthouse, he ran right into a Chronicom Hunter. The elevator doors slid open to reveal the robot, which held a drill in one hand and a machine gun in the other. "Exterminate!" the Chronicom cried as it opened fire. Fortunately, it was slower than your average Chronicom and Mack had time to dive out of the way.
Since these Hunters were a lot clunkier than their humanoid counterparts, Mack and the Deke Squad were able to defeat them fairly easily. Unfortunately, though, this attack was merely a distraction so Sibyl could retrieve the Time Stream and use it to resume her fight against S.H.I.E.L.D. As such, she lives to fight another day, even though her ramshackle Hunters did not.
Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s final season airs Wednesdays at 10 pm ET/PT on ABC. The series stars Ming-Na Wen, Chloe Bennet, Henry Simmons, Iain De Caestecker, Natalia Cordova-Buckley, Elizabeth Henstridge and Clark Gregg.