Activated by Daisy for the team's journey into the past, he finds himself heading toward 1931 New York. He is told that he is an LMD (Life-Model Decoy) and that the real Phil Coulson has perished. Still adjusting to the strangeness of a synthetic body that no longer eats, tires, or fears death, he joins Mackenzie as he works the speakeasy angle of the investigation. Swordfish... The password is always Swordfish. They enter the Speakeasy in an attempt to get close to the man whose bar will one day become a S.H.I.E.L.D. safehouse. When the underground confrontation turns violent, he discovers the practical upside of his condition: a gunshot only grazes him, and he presses forward unbothered, more concerned with not altering history than with his own safety.

Believing that the target of the Chronicoms is Franklin D. Roosevelt, he is awestruck when he gets to meet him. However, his delight fizzles once the team realizes the past itself is under attack. Recognizing that Roosevelt was not the target, the team finds that the night's true target is an unremarkable young man and the team as a whole must accept the bitter logic that saving the future means protecting the seed of its worst enemy.

Coulson works to keep Freddy's wounded contact alive in the back of Koenig's speakeasy, pressing her for answers about the vials she carried, until the hunters come pounding at the door and force the team into a hidden room to wait out the search. With Mack and Deke unreachable in the field, he raises Enoch aboard the Zephyr and urges him to strengthen the radios, holding the operation together from a corner of the past as the danger closes in.

Coulson is the one who insists on the hard logic of the mission: the unremarkable young man they are shielding must be allowed to live and father the evil to come, because the organization they serve is born only in answer to it. When the hunters move to end Freddy at his rendezvous, Coulson is there alongside Daisy, Koenig, and Enoch to drive them off, ensuring the boy survives and the terrible chain of cause and effect holds.