So, he and the planet are...wut?
That was mostly theatrics from Dewey. That compac drive was basically a dead man's switch to activate the slave collars they had put on Eureka and Anemone. He had expected that one of them would try to become the replacement control cluster, so this was basically an attempt to self-destruct the new control cluster and make the Coralians destroy themselves from within.
Happened at the midway point. After Morning Glory.I didn't notice when the title cards switched from white-on-black to black-on-white, what event caused that? Meta!