Characters / MCU: Daisy Johnson

Main Character Index > Heroic Organizations > S.H.I.E.L.D. > Leadership (Nick Fury) | Team Coulson (Phil Coulson | Daisy Johnson | Melinda May | Leopold Fitz | Jemma Simmons) | S.S.R. (Peggy Carter | Howling Commandos) | Other Agents

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Spoilers for all works set prior to Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame are unmarked.

Daisy Johnson / Skye / Quake

"With great power comes... a ton of weird crap you are not prepared to deal with."

Species: Inhuman

Citizenship: Chinese-American

Affiliation(s): Rising Tide (formerly), S.H.I.E.L.D.

Portrayed By: Chloe Bennet

Voiced By: Andrea Higa [Disney dub], Analiz Sánchez [Sony Dub] (Latin-American Spanish dub), Fabiana Aveiro (Brazilian Portuguese dub), Victoria Voynich-Slutskaya (Russian)

Appearances: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. | Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: Slingshot

"The one thing that I don't need time to understand is that we are all in this together. I tried to take the blame for everything not too long ago. I dyed my hair, I ran away. I thought that separating myself from the team would help me protect it, but in truth, I kind of just lost myself."

A civilian hacker who draws the attention of S.H.I.E.L.D. and is tracked down by Agent Coulson's team. Despite the objections of both his subordinates and superiors, Coulson makes her part of The Team. Went by the name Skye before discovering her birth name of Daisy Johnson.

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A-C

• The Ace: Evolves into this, she starts of as an accomplished computer hacker with a wide range of contacts through the Rising Tide hacktivist group. Phil Coulson put her in charge of the Clairvoyant mission because she "sees things in unique ways" and was a master at pattern recognition and analysis. She is able to pickpocket people without getting noticed. Under Ward and later May she is trained to be a field agent to become a expert marksman and martial artist holding her own against and defeat almost all enemies including the Kree. She also reached her genetic potential after undergoing Terrigenesis and gained vibration manipulation powers in season 2. Those include shockwaves, earthquakes, propel herself in the air and cushion her falls, able to sense and tap into the vibrational energy and later basic quasi-telekinetic feats. Becomes a Broken Ace in Season 3 after Hive infects her, turning her into his mole within S.H.I.E.L.D. and even leaves team temporarily after blaming herself. She recovers from this eventually in season 4.
• Action Girl: Once Skye fully takes up her identity as Daisy Johnson she quite firmly is put on May's level, arguably even higher due to her superpowers.
• Action Survivor: In season 1, she's not quite an Action Girl, but she can survive against standard mooks when the situation calls for it. This changes in season 2 wherein she's able to hold her own against Agent 33, who has much more combat experience than Skye does.
• Adaptational Dye-Job: In the comics originally her hair was black, here it is brown. The comics subsequently redesigned Daisy to have brown hair.
• Adaptational Hairstyle Change: She has long hair that's usually dyed blonde. In the comics, she has short black hair.
• Age Lift: Daisy Johnson's age is generally given as 19 in the comics (which is why it was so impressive that she became Director of S.H.I.E.L.D. after Steve Rogers stepped down), but the revelation that Skye is Daisy Johnson, it becomes a case of this since, even though the actress is only a few years older than Daisy's comic book age, it's established that she's actually older than that, making it an example of this.
• Ambiguously Brown: Chloe Bennet is half-white and half-Chinese. As Skye is an orphan, her ethnic background was unclear. Season 2 later on confirmed that her father is white and her mother is Chinese.
• Ambiguously Human:
  • Since she's been revealed to be a 0-8-4, she could conceivably be anything. She might not even be human.
    Skye: [jokingly] Like, what, you think I'm an alien?
    Coulson: Well...
    Skye: Hold on, are you saying that I'm an alien!?
    Coulson: It's a theory.
    Skye: No, a theory is what scientists use to prove things in nature, this is you telling me that I might be an alien! That's not something you just say like it's no big deal!
    Coulson: I was trying not to rattle you.
    Skye: Guess what? Epic fail!
  • She's an Inhuman, which means that she's entirely human until exposure to Terrigen Mists... which happened in episode 2:10.
• Anti-Hero: She started off as the one shown to have ulterior motives for joining S.H.I.E.L.D. in the beginning. After her much needed Character Development, she is now a good guy, but don’t expect her to pull any punches in achieving her goals.
• Apologetic Attacker: in "S.O.S., Part 1" Skye apologizes to May when she uses her powers as a trump card in their fight.
• Ascended Extra: With the revelation that Skye is Daisy Johnson, the show becomes this for her backstory. In the comics, Daisy was introduced as one of many members of Nick Fury's new squad, who became a Breakout Character and the most prominent member of that team, but all that's known about her backstory is that she was the long-lost daughter of Mister Hyde and the protogé of Nick Fury. In the show, though, we now have a season-and-a-half worth of details for her backstory leading up to how she got her powers.
• Ascended Fanboy: She's always Squeeing over superheroes, and then becomes a member of S.H.I.E.L.D. Then she gets her own superpowers. Then she becomes the leader of a superhero team.
• The Atoner:
  • After being outed as The Mole for the Rising Tide, she works at regaining the team's trust. "FZZT" shows her listing them off: memorizing S.H.I.E.L.D. protocols, "yes sir, no sir" and wearing the bracelet.
  • After being released from Hive's control and her attempt to Heroic Sacrifice herself fails, she becomes a vigilante to atone for her previous actions.
• Audience Surrogate: She's a superhero fan and the only main character who starts out as a civilian.
• Badass Adorable: Treats her friends warmly and is generally helpful and nice to people, at least if they're innocent. After taking levels in badass and getting her superpowers she can wipe the floor with most of her enemies in direct combat.
• Badass Boast: In "No Regrets" Daisy gives one after Framework May asks if she's really an Inhuman.
  Daisy: Powerful enough to bring this whole place down.
• Badass in Distress: Due to Deke's betrayal, Daisy ends up captured by the Kree.
• Bad Vibrations: Whenever her Quake powers start to activate uncontrollably.
• Bash Siblings: With Robbie Reyes as the series progress, notably during the finale of Season 4 where they fight LMDs together. Coulson is even disappointed not to have been able to see this.
  Coulson: I missed it, didn't I? You two together, and we missed it. Damn!
• Battle Couple: First is with Ward, second is with Lincoln, and third is with Daniel Sousa.

• Beauty Inversion: Averted. In the pilot, she's homeless (living in her van), yet she's perfectly clean, her hair and makeup is immaculate, and there's not so much as a wrinkle in her clothes. This is possibly justified by the fact she had a boyfriend who did have a place to stay at the time.
• Beauty Is Never Tarnished:
  • Averted in "T.R.A.C.K.S." where she bleeds profusely after being shot in the stomach by Quinn. Subsequently averted in "T.A.H.I.T.I." as a direct result - she's unconscious, slowly dying in a hospital bed, with grayish skin and tubes sticking out of her, and generally does look like someone fighting for their life without much consideration for the aesthetics of the thing.
  • Discussed after her transformation into an Inhuman. Raina is quite upset that Skye's appearance remains exactly the same, while she got stuck with a hideous and painful new body.
  • Also Averted when her mother tries to kill her with her life draining power.
  • Once again Averted; in the Framework, Daisy's face is a bloodied mess after she's been tortured by Fitz. She remains this way for the entire episode.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: She tried to get Mike to embrace his powers. He did. Just not in the way she expected. A season and a half later, she gets powers herself - and they freak her out. In "Girl in the Flower Dress", Coulson warns her that the truth about her parents may be worse than not knowing.
• Belligerent Sexual Tension: Definitely hinted at with Ward, until he betrays The Team and show his true allegiance.
• Berserk Button: Go ahead, try to kill Director Coulson. She'll threaten to kill you without a second's hesitation. Even if you are her father.
• Beware the Nice Ones: Good-natured hacker Skye. By the end of Season 2 not only does she gain arguably the most dangerous set of superpowers S.H.I.E.L.D. has so far encountered - enough to concern Asgardians and Kree - but she also becomes a walking embodiment of It Gets Easier as she cold-bloodedly kills a dozen HYDRA mooks. Indeed, as of the end of Season 2, she has one of the largest confirmed on-screen body counts of any character in the series, rivaling even May. A large part of Season 5 revolves around her powers supposedly going haywire and destroying Earth itself in a Bad Future, though that turns out to be inaccurate.
• Body Horror: Her first attempts to control her Quake powers simply redirect them onto her own body, resulting in dozens of hairline fractures in her arms.
• Bound and Gagged: Courtesy of a pissed-off Ghost Rider in "Meet the New Boss". She gets out of it in a few seconds by using her Quake powers.
• Boxed Crook: An understated version. In "The Laws of Inferno Dynamics", by referring to Daisy as "Agent Johnson" in front of the press as they're confronting the notorious Inhuman outlaw Quake, Mace was offering to retroactively take responsibility for her actions as Quake so long as she returns to S.H.I.E.L.D., which she accepts.
• Brain Bleach: Daisy's reaction to finding Deke making out with Snowflake.
  Daisy: I need bleach for my eyes.
• Brainwashed and Crazy: In "The Team", Hive infects her, turning her into his mole within S.H.I.E.L.D.
• Broken Pedestal: When Ward is revealed as a HYDRA mole, Skye loses her Love Interest and her S.H.I.E.L.D. mentor in one go, something that clearly hits her very hard.
• Brought Down to Badass:
  • Skye in "S.O.S., Part 2" spends half the episode with her hands locked in power-suppressing gauntlets, but she still retains the fighting skills she learned from May and the hacking skills she had before ever joining S.H.I.E.L.D.
  • During the "Agents of HYDRA" arc, Skye in the Framework had not undergone Terrigenesis, meaning Daisy couldn't quake her opponents, but she still had all of her combat training from the real world. Then May puts her through Terrigenesis in "No Regrets", giving Daisy her powers in the Framework.
  • In Season 5 Daisy gets an inhibitor when she is captured by the Kree, meaning she can't quake the Kree she fights. So she resorts to using her bare hands to fight them, which is more than enough.
• Buffy Speak: One of the most prone to this in Team Coulson. From the look of it, she gets it from her dad.
• Canon Character All Along: Though sharing her name with a minor War Machine character, Skye was not introduced as having a counterpart in the comics. "What They Become" reveals she's actually the MCU version of Daisy Johnson AKA Quake, daughter of Calvin L. Johnson AKA Calvin Zabo AKA Mr. Hyde.
• Castfrom Hit Points: Without her custom gauntlets, Daisy's use of her vibration-controlling powers is slowly shattering her own bones.
• The Chains of Commanding: After stepping reluctantly into the role of director in Season 5, when Coulson isn't available to lead the team. Daisy later acknowledges in "The End" that she isn't fit to be a leader, surrendering command over to Mack, a decision Coulson agrees with.
• Chekhov's Skill: The first episode shows that she encrypts all of her computers with location-based keys. She uses this same encryption on the backup drive of The Bus' files.
• Cold Sniper: After making her first kill with a sniper rifle, she's surprised to find her heart rate is perfectly steady.
• Combat Pragmatist: Typically in a fight, she will use her speed to avoid hits, ducking around objects and moving around the room, as well as using improvised weapons, Gun Fu, and later her powers.
• Comic-Book Movies Don't Use Codenames: Averted, finally, in Season Four. She's referred to as Quake. "Hot Potato Soup" reveals that she doesn't actually like the name, though eventually it grows on her.
• Conflicting Loyalty: Skye is grateful to the Inhumans for helping her but also still thinks of herself as part of S.H.I.E.L.D., which puts her between a rock and a hard place when Gordon pays a visit to the Iliad and things go downhill from there.
• Cool Car: Only kind of in one episode. She "borrows" a Lamborghini Gallardo off of a rich millionaire in the episode "The Magical Place"
• Covert Pervert: It's implied in the stinger of "Eye Spy" that she used the x-ray glasses to see Ward naked.
• The Cracker: She isn't malicious, but she was deliberately causing trouble for an international security agency. Quinn even calls her a "black hat," which is the term for this in the hacker community.
• Curb Stomp Cushion: Daisy's powers make Ruby's loss to her pretty much inevitable, but Ruby performs admirably hand-to-hand and even manages to stop Daisy from quaking her at one point by slicing her palm. Daisy just uses the other hand and quakes her into a tree, ending the fight.

D-K

• Daddy Issues: Sarge, having been informed of Daisy and Coulson's past relationship, accuses her of this. Despite her claiming otherwise, Daisy's response proves that Sarge isn't far off the mark.
• Dark and Troubled Past:
  • Enough to make her erase her identity at least once. As the episode "Girl in the Flower Dress" reveals, so did S.H.I.E.L.D. at one point; the one document Skye was able to dig up from her past was a S.H.I.E.L.D.-redacted paper concerning her. It turns out that she was dropped off at the orphanage by a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent. "Seeds" reveals that she's an 0-8-4. Some unidentified party (possibly her father and/or HYDRA) killed everyone connected to her in an attempt to get to her, including her family, her entire hometown, and her S.H.I.E.L.D. protection detail. The last surviving members unpersonned her and arranged for her to get randomly shuffled to a new foster home every few months in an apparently successful attempt to hide her.
  • Clarified partway through Season Two. Her hometown was raided by a HYDRA team claiming to be S.H.I.E.L.D. and all the residents, including her mother, were taken and used for Whitehall's experimentation. The aftermath left the village dead and her father a madman bent on avenging his wife and recovering his daughter. Then clarified further in the season finale. The village actually survived HYDRA. Jaiyang's healing factor works by draining life force, and she forced Cal to feed the village to her to bring her back. Not only that, but she Came Back Wrong and a Fantastic Racist to boot. Cal's descent into darkness was driven by hers; he became a monster in order to be allowed to remain in her life.
• Deadpan Snarker:
  • She's prone to quite a few one-liners when the situation calls for it.
  • She's said "Hail HYDRA" sarcastically twice so far, and she tries to disguise the sarcasm the second time around, thinking it was Whitehall who was calling Bakshi's number (It Makes Sense in Context).
• Death Seeker: After being freed from Hive's control at the end of season 3 she suffers from both immense guilt and horrific withdrawal. Daisy thinks a Heroic Sacrifice is the only way to atone for her actions under Hive's thrall, Lincoln stops her by sacrificing himself instead. After becoming a vigilante she begs Ghost Rider to kill her during their first fight at the start of season 4.
• Dented Iron: By season 4, she'll wrap up her forearms in bandages and pop pills to quell the pain of using her powers when she wasn't wearing her customized gauntlets.
• Despair Event Horizon: Lincoln's death affects Daisy so much that she leaves S.H.I.E.L.D. to become a vigilante.
• Determinator: Daisy has fought and used her powers despite shattered bones, major blood loss and hallucinogenic alien puffs.
• Deuteragonist: The second person driving most of the show's plot, after Coulson. Part way through Season 2, they seem to swap places, as Coulson's main character arc (uncovering the secret of his revival and the alien code stuck in his head) resolved, Daisy's Inhuman connection became the show's driving Myth Arc.
• Doesn't Know Their Own Birthday: Having grown up bouncing from foster home to foster home since she was an infant, Daisy didn't learn her birthday until after meeting her biological parents as an adult. She also didn't know her exact age; when she learns her birth date, she realizes she is a year older than she previously believed.
• Dork Knight: Shows delight in talking to Mike his powers, and her backstory is confirmed to have cosplayed in front of Stark Tower. In the episode "Eye Spy", Ward alleges that she says "bang" when firing gun.
• Dude Magnet: Had two love interests and most of the male cast were at one point attracted to her.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: She had one hell of an awful life and journey - maybe second only to Fitz - with more and more traumatic experiences per season gradually turning her into a Broken Ace. Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. ends with her finally getting her well-deserved happy ending, living the dream of being an outer space explorer with the man she loves.
• Easily Forgiven:
  • Played with; after the blow up in "Girl in the Flower Dress", Simmons was sympathetic to her from the beginning, Fitz has forgiven her by the start of the next episode, Coulson is midway (having imposed her Restraining Bolt punishment yet keeping her on board), Ward has not, and May (who didn't trust her in the first place) hasn't changed.
  • Everyone is willing to forgive Daisy for what she did under Hive's sway — except Daisy herself.
  • When she leaves the team after her Trauma Conga Line in Season 3, this is played with as various characters just want her to come home, but Fitz and Simmons are still angry, and by this point S.H.I.E.L.D. itself considers her a rogue agent. Elena helped her while she was rogue, and Mack is more upset Elena didn't tell him she was in contact with Daisy. May gives a more Tough Love approach, but is all too ready to forgive Daisy, while Coulson plays this completely straight. Director Mace has to bend the rules to cover their asses in order to get her back into the fold, but she still has trouble being signed to the Sokovia Accords because of the crimes she committed while rogue.
• Embarrassing Last Name: She chose the name Skye because she hated the name given to her by the orphanage, which is Mary Sue Poots. "Poot" is a slang word for farting.
• Embarrassing Nickname: She doesn't love the "Quake" moniker, but she gets used to it.
• Empowered Badass Normal: She becomes the Marvel Cinematic Universe version of Daisy Johnson AKA Quake, so she gets genuine superpowers in the form of vibration after she is trained as a field agent by Melinda May.
• Everyone Has Standards: After joining S.H.I.E.L.D. as The Mole, she explicitly forbids the Rising Tide from hacking the organization, as seen in "Girl in the Flower Dress", and she breaks up with her boyfriend for doing just that. When she does hack S.H.I.E.L.D. in "The Hub", it's for a selfless reason, and she's upset to find out that there isn't an extraction plan for Ward and Fitz (what she doesn't know is that she and the rest of Coulson's team are being trusted to pick up Ward and Fitz themselves once the two have completed their mission).
• Expository Hairstyle Change: Between Seasons 2 and 3, her shoulder-length waves are cut short, right in time with her accepting her identity as an Inhuman (and re-taking her birth name). After she leaves S.H.I.E.L.D. in the wake of Lincoln's death at the end of Season 3, there's a six-month timeskip where she lets her hair grow out to below her collarbones. By the beginning of Season 4, she's cut it back to jaw-length, then by the Agents of H.Y.D.R.A. arc, her hair goes back to shoulder-length.
• The Face: Coulson says she has the potential to become this for his S.H.I.E.L.D. team; talking to people, building rapport, acquiring information without being scary, etc. As of season 3, she's the one making first contact with new Inhumans like Joey, and in Season 4 has become the best-known current S.H.I.E.L.D. agent.
• Failed a Spot Check: Daisy is easily spotted by the security system she set up at S.H.I.E.L.D., tipping them off to her location and Hive's bought town. Coulson thinks it's an Obvious Trap, while Mack believes it's her way of Fighting from the Inside. In reality, it was actually this, and her warning to Fitz that S.H.I.E.L.D. should stay away was genuine. She simply forgot about being discreet because, in her words, she was "no longer thinking like a spy."
• Foil: To Ward. In the beginning, Skye was the one shown to have ulterior motives for joining S.H.I.E.L.D., but when her plans go awry, she undergoes some much needed Character Development and sticks with S.H.I.E.L.D. until the bitter end. Meanwhile Ward is a true blue Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., but not really, since he's been playing the whole team right from episode 1. When his true colors are shown, he doesn't change allegiances like Skye, but sticks with HYDRA, until the end.
• Foster Kid:
  • Part of the reason she seeks to fit in with the S.H.I.E.L.D. team; she wants a real family.
  • Several of the families she stayed with wanted to keep her permanently but were under orders to keep her moving for her protection. Skye just thought none of them wanted her.
• Friend to All Children: Daisy has an immense care for children and their well-being and is surprisingly capable of handling them, she first showed these instincts with Ace Peterson and later Robin Hinton.
• Future Me Scares Me: Her fate of supposedly quaking the Earth apart in a Bad Future scares her, to the point of refusing to remove a Kree-implanted inhibitor chip that supresses her powers. Eventually gets over it once she figures it was actually Talbot's gravity powers that would tear the Earth apart, just in time to stop him.
• Genki Girl: Whenever she meets a superhuman, she's all squees.
• Goth: Starts dressing as this when she becomes a vigilante.
• Glowing Eyes of Doom: Her eyes glow after injecting herself with the Centipede serum and blasting Talbot off into space.
• Good Is Not Soft: Daisy grows in to this, the series follows her character arc from being a meek and mild hacker to her first kill to being able to kill a room full of mooks without breaking a sweat.
  • Daisy demonstrates this by killing a room full of HYDRA mooks, including shooting two who have already been knocked out, just for safety. Possibly emphasized by the fact that she spends a good part of the episode overseeing a rehearsal of said encounter in anticipation of May having to do it before she realizes she has to do so herself. At no point does she express any qualms about having to kill a bunch of men.
• Groin Attack: She uses one against a random guy in the pilot and pretends Mike made her do it, causing the guy's friends to attack Mike. This allows her to escape.
• Guile Hero: First demonstrates this in "The Asset" when she infiltrates Ian Quinn's party, then in "The Magical Place" she finds a way around the Restraining Bolt (and even uses the Restraining Bolt itself to her advantage at one point) and locates the place Coulson is being held without S.H.I.E.L.D.'s resources.
• Gun Fu: Displays a John Wick-esque version of this during the shootout scene in "The Dirty Half Dozen" in this clip where she single-handedly takes down nine HYDRA agents with no help from her superpowers. Pretty impressive for a girl who once got the safety confused with the ammo release.
• Half-Human Hybrid: Her mother was an Inhuman. Her father is human... more or less.
• Has a Type: So far the men she's been attracted have Tall, snarky, and scruffy men who have some Troubled but Cute aspects. In "Emancipation", Hive later implies that she likes the bad boys.
• The Herald: Based on her conversation with Mike, she saw herself as the one delivering the Call to Adventure and inspiring him to fully embrace superheroing.
• Heroic BSoD: In "Absolution", after she recovers from her brainwashing at the end of the previous episode, she feels despairing and self-hating.
• Heroic RRoD: The first method she tries to gain control of her Quake powers ends up with her using them on herself until she breaks her own arm.
• Hero with Bad Publicity: Daisy has it rough ever since Season 4.
  • When she goes rogue after the end of Season 3, the public thinks she is a terrorist because she destroys Watchdog assets. Mace handily flips this around at the end of the Ghost Rider arc so that she soon has legions of fans. But even then, a resentful and fantastically racist senator continues attacking her and, by association, S.H.I.E.L.D. for her so-called "undercover" missions.
  • Then Aida and Watchdogs frame her for supposedly quaking Jeffrey Mace to death.
  • Then Aida and Watchdogs frame her again by having a Daisy LMD to shoot Talbot to almost-death.
  • Afterwards, she's transported to an alternate future where some people claim that she cracked the earth apart. Will she ever have enough of this?
• Horrible Judge of Character: in Season 6, Daisy and May trust a non-corporeal entity called Sarge/Pachakutiq too easily, due to him inhabiting a copy of Phil Coulson, who was created by the monoliths. He had both his actual and Coulson's memories. The confusion of dealing with multiple memories led him to incorrectly believe that Izel had killed his "family" and erased his memory. Adopting the alias Sarge, he led a squad on a mission to wipe out Izel and her parasitic race, the Shrike. In the season finale, thinking that they got through to the real Coulson. Daisy brings Sarge with them on a mission to stop the Big Bad Izel. When Sarge and May are confronting Izel, it was revealed that Sarge is indeed not Coulson, but Pachakutiq instead. Pachakutiq after realizing what memories were real, betrays the team and then almost fatally stabs May with his sword and throws her in the nearby portal. May manages to get back in one piece, but passes out from the wound, only saved from certain death by Simmons' arrival seconds later.
• Humanoid Abomination: She's an 0-8-4 but as revealed in "Ragtag", there was more to the legend. Story goes that the village was attacked by monsters, and the monsters were the 0-8-4 (Skye)'s parents. Eventually it is revealed that she is an Inhuman, and so for all intents and purposes an ordinary human unless exposed to Terrigen Mists... which happens in "What They Become".
• Humble Hero: She is uncomfortable with all the praise that Director Mace and the character witnesses he finds heap on her.
• I Have Many Names: Skye (her hacker handle), Mary Sue Poots (the name she was given at the orphanage), Daisy Johnson (her birth name, which she later retakes), Tremors (Mack's nickname for her), Quake (the media's name for her after Season 3, and as of Season 4's mid-finale, apparently her official S.H.I.E.L.D. codename). In season 5, in both the present and future she gets called, the Destroyer of Worlds.
• Impersonating an Officer: A heroic example. In "The Magical Place", she poses as Agent May to get a lead from a businessman as to where Coulson was being held. The real May is amused when she finds out.
• In the Hood: Does this in the 2nd season in her transition to Action Girl. She wears a gray hoodie.
• Insistent Terminology: As of Season 3, she insists on being called "Daisy Johnson" rather than "Skye". Only Coulson (who still defaults to it in stressful situations) and Simmons (who was off-planet when the change occurred) still occasionally called her Skye, but quickly got used to calling her Daisy.^note Also, Daisy said that Simmons could still call her Skye
• It Gets Easier: Part of her character development. In the first season as she trains under May the point is made that she never has had to kill anyone and when she is forced to snipe an inhuman, leading to his assumed death, her reaction to this is shown. By season 2, she's shooting disabled opponents in battle without flinching.
• It's All My Fault:
  • After being released from Hive's control, Daisy developed self-loathing, blaming herself for all her actions that the dark Inhuman had forced her to carry out. She was adamant that she should be punished for her actions under Hive's sway, refused to listen any attempts by others to forgive her.
  • She starts blaming herself, after May gets stabbed and thrown into the portal, due to her misplaced trust in Sarge who betrays the team in the season 6 finale.
• It's Personal:
  • Daisy is more than happy to hand Ivanov a beatdown for his role in creating the Watchdogs.
  • She is more than willing to get revenge on Sarge/Pachakutiq after he betrays the team.
• Jack of All Trades: Her unrivalled hacking abilities make her an excellent asset to S.H.I.E.L.D., and she's also shown to be quite the Guile Hero. With combat training from her superiors, she becomes combat-capable enough to the point that she's able to hold her own in the field.
• The Knights Who Say "Squee!": She's a skilled hacker who turns into a giggling fangirl in the presence of metahumans.

L-Y

• The Leader: She was the team commander of the Secret Warriors in season 3.
• Like a Daughter to Me: Coulson admits that Daisy is like a daughter to him.
• Like Brother and Sister: With Mack as of Season 3. She even describes him as "like a big brother" in "Failed Experiments".
• Logical Weakness: Daisy has the ability to generate powerful vibrations from her hands, which have the same effect as a small, localized earthquake. The constant use of this ability begins to cause internal damage, and in Season 4, a running plot point is that she has to take special drugs to help heal and regrow her shattered bones.
• Made of Iron: Implied to be a side effect of her vibration powers. During the final battle with Graviton, she gets slammed through the pavement from skyscraper height with enough force to leave a massive crater. Most people would be left resembling chunky salsa by that, but Daisy survives and is still conscious after impact.
  • During the season 6 finale, Sarge headbutts her with enough force to send her flying back ten feet, but she quickly brushes this off.
• Mad Scientist's Beautiful Daughter: She's quite the looker, and her dad is Mr. Hyde, so there's that. There's also the fact that they don't get along, so the betrayal part comes prepackaged.
• Married to the Job: Says so in "Heavy Is The Head". Season 4 starts out with the argument that it is S.H.I.E.L.D's ideals rather than the organization itself she's married to; she goes rogue and becomes the outlaw known as "Quake" to bring down villains like the Watchdogs.
  Skye: S.H.I.E.L.D. is my life.
• Master-Apprentice Chain: Like Gordon before her and her own mother before Gordon, she has taken up the role of aiding new Inhumans through Transition in season 3.
• The McCoy: Plays the part to Coulson's Kirk and May's (and occasionally Ward's) Spock in the first season. Character Development and the introduction of other hotheads like Mack and Hunter causes this to diminish over time.
• Meaningful Name:
  • Her legal name is revealed to be Mary Sue Poots, a Fandom Nod to the viewers who felt she received an unreasonable amount of Character Shilling during the series.
  • Her birth name, Daisy, is fitting for someone with earthquake producing powers.
• Meaningful Rename: Skye takes her birth name, Daisy Johnson, during Season 3 of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.. This is not only in honor of her father, but also reflects her newfound role as leader of the Secret Warriors.
• Minored in Ass-Kicking: Mostly a Guile Hero and hacker, but she's gotten some combat training from Ward and is particularly good at disarming enemies. Moving through season 2 and into season 3, this has become a major as she gains more skills and her Quake ability.
• Mistaken Age: Due to being an orphan, she had her birth year wrong, and is actually a year or two older than she thought. The S.H.I.E.L.D. agents who dropped her off might have done this intentionally in order to hide her, or they just genuinely made a mistake.
• The Mole:
  • For the Rising Tide. It seems to be an open secret, at least between Ward, Coulson, and the higher brass. After being outed in "Girl in the Flower Dress" and forced to wear a Walking Techbane bracelet for several episodes, there's been no indication she's still reporting to Rising Tide, at least until Season 2, when it's hinted that Rising Tide may be an ally of sorts to Nu S.H.I.E.L.D. in at least a couple of episodes.
  • Temporarily when Daisy got infected by Hive in "The Team" on the rescue mission.
• Morality Pet: For Ward, who claims his attachment to her is genuine. He exploits this to beat a lie detector, and Skye returns the favor leading him into a wild goose chase.
• Movie Superheroes Wear Black: After Daisy gains her superpowers she is often seen going into action dressed in black. In Season 4 her whole appearance is mostly black.
• Ms. Fanservice: Provides the female eye candy in the main cast.
  • Ward comments on her beauty under truth serum; she then exploits this to make Ward squirm while she interrogates him.
  • Towards the end of "The Asset", she's seen running around barefoot in a wet dress. Typically if any of the female castmembers is seen barefoot, it's usually her.
  • She has an underwear scene in "Girl in the Flower Dress".
  • Moments revolving around her to this effect off taper a bit after these instances, but they return in Season 3, where she's taken to wearing a Spy Catsuit in the field and her first scene out of it is in a low-cut tank top.
  • In the opening scene of Season 4, the viewers are treated to a full-screen shot of her butt as she's getting dressed, a shot that contributed to that episode's TV-14 rating. Once she goes back to wearing her Spy Catsuit, she typically unzips the top down to where the band of her bra is.
• Murder Is the Best Solution:
  • Daisy decides that if Izel killing Sarge made his memories resurface, killing him again will have the same effect. Much to Fitz-Simmons and Deke's disapproval, she's right.
  • When the team encounters Wilfred Malick, future head of HYDRA and father of Gideon Malick, in 1933, Daisy orders Deke to kill him in order to prevent all the damage he'll cause in the future. Deke can't bring himself to shoot Wilfred, however, much to Daisy's anger. Whether this would have been the best solution is ambiguous, but after an encounter with an older and significantly more dangerous Wilfred, Deke comes around to Daisy's way of thinking and eventually shoots him dead.
• Mythology Gag:
  • Skye spends a lot of time wearing wrist-mounted devices, starting with the Restraining Bolt, then the heartbeat monitoring watch during her field training, then the various power suppressing gloves and such she gets to control her powers, and the nullifying cuffs she gets shackled with by Jiaying. While at first subtle, it becomes pretty clear in hindsight these are a nod to her identity as Daisy Johnson, a character known for her arm gauntlets in the comics.
  • By the end of Season 3, several incidents have her being explicitly being referred to as "Quake" by newspapers, and she's also sporting black hair like her comic counterpart.
  • In the "Ghost Rider" pod of Season 4, Coulson — who has resigned from the post of director of S.H.I.E.L.D. — states that Jeffrey Mace was not his first choice to take over that position and implies to Daisy that his first choice was her. She laughs it off, saying, "Maybe in the comic book version". In the comics, she actually did hold the position for some time, and later in the series, she does unofficially hold the position before handing things over to Mack.
• New Meat:
  • Not only is she the most junior member of the team, as of "End of the Beginning" she is the single most junior member of S.H.I.E.L.D. Due to what happens in the following episode, she ends up keeping that distinction until Hunter decides to stop just being a mercenary on contract and fully joins up in the stinger for "One Door Closes", nearly a season later. When working in her primary strengths (hacking and data analysis), she doesn't make rookie mistakes, but she does tend to make them when working in the field which is an area she freely admits she needs more training in, especially after one of those rookie mistakes gets her shot. She grows out of this role over the course of the second season.
  • When she discovers that she is a Inhuman this trope happens a second time as she is the newest member of that group and says that she feels like "the new kid".
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: During the season 2 finale, when she knocks a Quinjet carrying a case of Terrigen crystals off of a carrier, said crystals contaminates schools of fish, which end up being processed as fish oil caplets for human consumption, resulting in a Mass Super-Empowering Event that couldn't have come at a worse time given that the Ultron Offensive had just happened. Of course, it was a desperate attempt to prevent her bigoted and batshit insane mother from committing genocide against non-Inhumans, but still...
• Not in This for Your Revolution: Initially, Skye accepted to join S.H.I.E.L.D. to keep on the search for her parents. She fully committed to S.H.I.E.L.D. as time advanced.
• Not Quite Flight: After the six-month timeskip in "Ascension", Daisy is shown using her quake blasts as repulsors to launch herself off the ground.
• The Not-Love Interest: To Coulson. As the naïve newcomer she fulfills the stereotypical role of the Love Interest for The Hero, but their relationship is firmly established as substitute father-daughter within the first couple of episodes.
• Number Two:
  • After breaking off his friendship with May, Coulson turns to Skye, who is the only member of his team that he truly picked himself and who looks up to him as a surrogate father, as his confidant. Starting in season 2, she shows frustration that he doesn't confide in her anymore.
  • She becomes this again in Season 5, whenever Coulson needs to leave the base. Especially after Coulson is forced to step down and Daisy leads The Team during his absence, or at least tries to.
• Odd Friendship: How Simmons views their friendship, saying that they're "nothing alike". But after Fitz, Daisy is Jemma's best friend, and vice-versa.
• Official Couple: It took her a very long time to get over Lincoln's death - somewhere between three to four years, but she was finally able to find love again with Daniel Sousa. Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. ends with the two a couple exploring the universe aboard the Zephyr.
• Old Shame: In-universe example. Skye was once one of the "sweaty cosplay girls" that hang around Stark Tower.
  Skye: [Embarrassed] It was one time.
• One-Man Army: "The Dirty Half Dozen" cements her status as this, when she singlehandedly kills ten HYDRA guards in a display of hand-to-hand (and gun) badassitude during an epic oner, all without using her powers. It happens again in season 3.
• Only Known by Their Nickname:
  • At first there was nothing else known about her name other then Skye. S.H.I.E.L.D. unpersonned her as a child to hide her from whoever killed her family, her entire home town, and virtually every single member of the team sent to protect her.
  • In "The Only Light in the Darkness" we find out what Skye's real name is... the name she was given in the orphanage, that is. It's Mary Sue Poots.
  • "A Hen in the Wolf House" implies that she has a third name, which was given to her by her biological parents. It's revealed in "What They Become" to be Daisy.
• Orphan's Plot Trinket: The little data drive she keeps stashed away, containing all the info she could gather on her parents' identities.
• Person of Mass Destruction:
  • Her powers allow her to manipulate the vibrations of all matter. It's speculated that she could grow powerful enough to crack a continent. At present, she's at least powerful enough to flatten a large area around herself and make objects explode, and she has no real training in how to use her powers. While training with the Inhumans, she manages to shake an entire mountain, causing a small avalanche.
  • In the Bad Future the team finds themselves in at the start of season 5, a version of Daisy is implied to having quaked the whole earth apart, though eventually, it turns out that the real culprit was Talbot/Graviton.
• Portmanteau Couple Name: In-Universe there are people shipping her with Black Widow, calling them "Quack".
• Power Incontinence: She has quite a hard time controlling her Quake powers, due to her not having any help understanding them like her parents were planning to do.
• Pragmatic Hero: Daisy is willing to defile her own mother's grave to save Coulson. Of course, her last encounter with Jiaying didn't exactly leave her with much reason to be sentimental. Season 7 shows that she's also prepared to commit cold-blooded murder (or order someone else to) and possibly damage history if it means preventing the harm that HYDRA will cause.
• Psychic Nosebleed: Daisy gets a nosebleed when the portal machine is activated, as her power enables her to acutely sense the intense vibrations being generated by it.
• Purple Is Powerful: In season 6, her new costume and her hair have purple accents. Just like her Marvel Rising counterpart.
• Race Lift: Daisy Johnson is white in the comics, while Skye, her MCU counterpart, is half-Chinese, as is the actress who plays her. The comics subsequently redesigned Daisy to look more Asian and her mother was retconned into being Chinese when we briefly see a photo of her.
• Recruiting the Criminal: She's part of an anti-S.H.I.E.L.D. movement called "The Rising Tide" to reveal their cover-up of the world's superheroes, but is quickly caught by them and hired.
• Red Baron: Daisy gets the nickname "Destroyer of Worlds" in Season 5. Considering that that name is meant quite literally, she's not fond of it.
• Restraining Bolt: As of "Girl in the Flower Dress", she has been given a bracelet that will monitor her and restrict her use of electronics as well as other unnamed properties. Coulson disables it at the end of "The Magical Place".
• Running Gag: Anytime she attempts to imitate Fitz-Simmons's British accents, it's terrible and even she knows it. Though she's yet to attempt an imitation of Hunter, she does become the object of his scorn when she refers to him as Trainspotting, suggesting that she can't even hear the differences between quite disparate British accents. (Which still doesn't explain why her impression of Fitz sounded Australian...)
• Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!: This is her biggest strength. S.H.I.E.L.D. agents are bound by the rules and bureaucracy of the system, but Skye isn't an agent and thus often ignores the rules in the name of doing the right thing. This is also the reason that May lets Hand kick Skye off The Bus in "The Magical Place." She knows that Skye will work much better when she doesn't have a bunch of by-the-book S.H.I.E.L.D. agents looking over her shoulder.
• Security Blanket: Having lived in her van, she'll crawl into one of the Bus's vehicles when she feels a need for safety or solitude. She seems a little surprised when Coulson first finds her there.
• She Cleans Up Nicely: When going undercover in "The Asset". She never looked nicer.
• She Knows Too Much: Robbie wants to kill Daisy because she figured out his identity, but this is complicated by the fact that he can't because she's not guilty of anything. He resorts to going through her stuff looking for an excuse, which helps lead him to his next target instead.
• Shipper on Deck:
  • Daisy has been shipping FitzSimmons longer than anyone else on Team Coulson. In "FZZT", she tells Fitz that she wished her relationship with Miles had been more like Fitz's relationship with Simmons. In "Let Me Stand Next To Your Fire", she lured Simmons into a meeting by finding the perfect apartment for her and Fitz, and even got it for them (rent-controlled, even, and with only a little bit of her blood on the door). But she proved herself the captain of the ship in "Self Control" when she told Simmons that she would go through the highly trained S.H.I.E.L.D. agents and LMDs hunting them if only to see Fitz and Simmons reunited.
  Daisy: Through all the insane crap we have gone through, the one thing I have known without a doubt, the whole time, is that you and Fitz belong together. This is not how your story ends.
  • For Mack and Yo-Yo too - Daisy even says that the hardest thing to believe after returning from space mid-season 6 is not that S.H.I.E.L.D. is currently dealing with an alien with Phil Coulson’s face, but simply that Mack and Yo-Yo weren’t back together yet after they split up at the end of season 5.
• Ships That Pass in the Night: In-Universe, people ship her with Black Widow.
• Shoulders-Up Nudity: Has a moment in the episode "The Inside Man" after she takes off her shirt before having sex with Lincoln.
• Sixth Ranger: She's recruited from the Rising Tide during the pilot while the other members of the team are already S.H.I.E.L.D. agents working for Coulson and she has to be convinced to join them. However, this all happens in the pilot episode, unlike most examples of this trope.
• Smug Super: Once she actually gets a proper handle on her powers, she becomes very confident with how dangerous she can be. Unfortunately, this also translates to overconfidence with certain opponents. Robbie Reyes in particular was an enormous wake-up call for her, though she still falls into this from time to time.
• The Spook: In the words of Coulson, "We know nothing about her. Do you know how often that happens? It never happens."
• Supporting Protagonist: Coulson is the headlining star and leader of main cast but the plot also focuses heavily on Skye's development as a character and her perspective on things. This helped by her being the initial outsider of the team which gives her a slightly more relatable perspective.
• Spy Catsuit: During Season 2 she wore a Civvie Spandex equivalent of this, wearing a tight jumper and skinny jeans that evoked the look in a more realistic sense. Starts wearing a real one in Season 3 when she takes over as the lead field agent after May's departure, and even keeps it in-order to use her seismic powers properly after going on the run as Quake, the Inhuman vigilante.
• Stealth Insult: "Hail HYDRA." Spoken to Ward after revealing she had called the cops on him using her laptop.
• Superhero Packing Heat: Despite possessing vibration powers that could level a building, Daisy uses a gun. The gun is sometimes loaded with I.C.E.R.s, but it is a real gun, and Daisy is willing to kill, if she thinks there is a very good reason.
• Sympathy for the Devil: Daisy feels very sorry for Ruby, outright telling Hale that her daughter is not to blame for her current state and could have been an excellent S.H.I.E.L.D. agent. And after Yo-Yo kills her, she is outright horrified.
• Swiss-Army Superpower: Her vibration powers have a surprising amount of range of abilities. Besides knocking people into walls or destroying objects, she can deflect bullets and induce cardiac pumps to restart a human heart. Later, she also learns how to levitate objects and cushion falls, and launch herself into the air. She also has the Required Secondary Power of absorbing vibrations, which allows her to detect seismic activity and artificial vibrations, and gives her some level of Super-Toughness.
  • In Season 6, she is able to contain a nuclear explosion with her quake powers, and shortly after uses them to completely disintegrate a horde of Shrike.
• Teacher/Student Romance: As of midseason 3, all of her love interests have also been her teachers. Miles was her Rising Tide mentor, Grant Ward was her S.H.I.E.L.D supervising officer, and Lincoln helped her through the Inhuman transition.
• Techno Wizard: Managed to hack into S.H.I.E.L.D. databases, as well as gain some information about Centipede before they were able to. Oh, and did we mention she did this from a van that she was living in? The girl's impressive.
  • It's mentioned that she created the security systems at the Playground basically from the ground up. This ends up backfiring when she gets brainwashed by Hive, and the team can't stop her from hacking the base.
• Token Super: She was this for the team's original roster, being an Inhuman capable of causing vibrations.
• Tomato in the Mirror: Much like Mjolnir and the device from the second episode, Skye is a 0-8-4. As a baby, many S.H.I.E.L.D. agents were mysteriously killed trying to protect her, forcing S.H.I.E.L.D. to put her into hiding to protect her.

• Took a Level in Badass:
  • Ward begins her combat training at the start of "The Asset" and she uses it to effortlessly disarm Ian Quinn later on. The episode ends with voluntarily punching out a heavy bag.
  • Her storyline in "The Magical Place" is all about this. She steals the car of a Centipede associate and crashes it with herself inside, just so she can get his roadside assistance to arrange a tow truck to take her to his address. While there, she uses his computer to call his office and pretends to be an LAPD officer, flawlessly coming up with a plausible explanation about why he needs to come home immediately. Once he arrives, she poses as Melinda and effortlessly bluffs him into giving up everything he knows about Centipede's property purchases, even tossing a couple of mooks along the way. This gives S.H.I.E.L.D. Coulson's location. Even May seems impressed.
  • By the end of "Nothing Personal", she has taken yet another level of badass during the entire episode. Calmly stalling for time against Ward and making him a well-known and wanted fugitive.
  • As of the season 2 premiere, "Shadows", she's said to have undergone training from May between seasons and even joins her in the field being more than able to hold her own.
  • Training with May is shown to really pay off when she holds her own against Agent 33 in single combat.
  • As of "What They Become", she has taken another level, after her Inhuman powers are activated. At the start of Season 3, she's casually flipping cars and enemy mooks.
• Town Girls: The (seemingly plain yet technologically gifted) Neither to May's Butch and Simmons's Femme.
• Undying Loyalty: Towards her father figure Coulson.
  • This becomes evident especially in season 5, where Coulson is slowly dying over the course of the season. She and May were willing to save Coulson using the only remaining Centipede serum, instead of it using on herself to defeat the Big Bad Graviton. In the end, Coulson had to convince Quake he would take the cure, but instead he hid the syringe containing the cure within her gauntlets to give her power. Daisy was prepared to use their last dose of serum to save Coulson, instead of using it on herself to save the world.
• Ungrateful Bitch:
  • Raina very subjectively refers Skye as this as a part of her Never My Fault statement in "Aftershocks".
  • in "The Honeymoon" Deke accuses Daisy of this when she berates him for trying to save her.
• Unknown Rival: Daisy has no clue who Ruby is, or why she hates her so much.
• Unperson:
  • She can do this on request, and it's implied she did it to herself, hence why she's an unknown to S.H.I.E.L.D. It turns out that this is her reason for learning how to hack in the first place. Her parents themselves have been the subject of this, by S.H.I.E.L.D. no less, as was Skye herself shortly before being put into foster care.
  • In "Providence," at Coulson's request, she does this for every member of Team Coulson so that they can more easily go off the radar.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom:
  • She unknowingly brings a HYDRA agent to Providence by chatting on the phone with Ward, who had, in a bit of Dramatic Irony, been with HYDRA all along.
  • In ""The Honeymoon", by providing Talbot a means to contact his family, Daisy allows Candice Lee to have Talbot's wife trigger his brainwashing and make him a Manchurian Agent.
• Vibration Manipulation: In season 2, Skye gains the power to generate and control vibrations.
• Vigilante Man: When Daisy left S.H.I.E.L.D in season 4 she became one of these; she takes out banks and bridges to take down the Watchdogs' resources and funding, but only her own team really knows this is what she's doing it all for. The rest of the world knows her as the outlaw "Quake". She rejoins the team fully at the end of the "Ghost Rider" arc.
• Villain Killer: Vigilante Man period aside, she has killed her fair share of major villains, killing Gideon Malick in Season 3, both Sinara and Graviton in Season 5, and also both Nathaniel Malick and Sibyl in Season 7.
• The Watson: She serves this role, especially in the first season. She would frequently ask questions or go against S.H.I.E.L.D.'s policies, with both often resulting in trial by fire and/or a history lesson. She still serves a minor role as this in the later seasons, but usually simply asking questions about some shared knowledge that she isn't in on, resulting in a less painful history lesson.
• We Help the Helpless: Coulson's lessons have sunk in pretty well by the second season.
  Skye: He could hurt people!
  Jiaying: Those people aren't my concern.
  Skye: Well, they're mine. I'm a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent.
• What the Hell, Hero?:
  • She doesn't like what she finds out about the mission in "The Hub", and she makes it perfectly clear to Coulson when he catches her hacking S.H.I.E.L.D. to learn the truth.
    Coulson: What did I tell you?
    Skye: You told me to trust the system, and the system sent Ward and Fitz in there to die.
  • Throughout season 4, she ends up on the receiving end of this trope numerous times after leaving S.H.I.E.L.D. to avoid hurting them again. Not for lack of respect, though— Daisy understands that her absence did hurt the rest of her friends (in an emotional sense), it just takes her quite a while to shake off the guilt from the events that led to Lincoln's demise.
  • Daisy calls out Yo-Yo in "All Roads Lead..." for killing Ruby when she might have been talked down, but Yo-Yo sees it as having saved the world and is unrepentant. However her actions going by Yo-Yo’s expression before she struck could be a combination of Yo-Yo getting revenge for her brutal mutilation at the hands of Ruby as well as acting out due to her recent trauma, and the prophecy taking its toll on her.

Alternate Versions

Daisy Johnson LMDs

Daisy Johnson LMDs

Species: Life-Model Decoy

Portrayed By: Chloe Bennet

Appearances: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

Android duplicates of Agent Daisy Johnson, created to dispatch the Inhumans.

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• Chekhov's Gunman: Once the team returns to the destroyed Playground, they find the containment rooms unscathed. The Daisy LMDs were kept in one such room but were nowhere to be found. Turns out that at least one of them survived and went on to shoot Talbot, framing Daisy in the process. That particular LMD was subsequently incinerated by Ghost Rider, but it is unknown if the others are still out there.
• Impostor Forgot One Detail: Although they are modeled after Daisy, they lack her powers.
• Spotting the Thread: Subverted. When Daisy discovers the inactive Daisy LMDs while on the run from LMD Mack, she strips down to her underwear to match them and hides among them. LMD Mack thinks he's spotted the thread and found Daisy when he finds one with a loose shoulder strap, but Daisy had intentionally tampered with one of the LMDs to trick him and escape.

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"It's funny what can happen when someone believes in you."