Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-27794543-20190529041143/@comment-27794543-20190529082750

Seems like a temporal flare causes time to change. In this case, rotting away the plant life and aging Octavia's hand...

Earlier in the episode, we see a map which labels a section as "temporal anomaly". Last episode it was mentioned that the old man (aka Gabriel) might be at the anomaly. It seems that the temporal flare causes some fluctuation of time. We saw that it can age things, perhaps it can also de-age someone. A step in a related concept would be time-travel... but I don't know if the series intends to try that.