MCU: Defenders – Allies - TV Tropes

Franklin Percy "Foggy" Nelson

"We're gonna make a difference. I know it doesn't feel like it some times, but we are."

Species: Human

Citizenship: American

Affiliation(s): Nelson's Meats (formerly); Columbia University (formerly); Landman and Zack (formerly); Hogarth, Chao & Benowitz (formerly); Nelson, Murdock and Page

Portrayed By: Elden Henson

Voiced By: Daniel Streeter (Latin-America Chilean Spanish dub), Felipe Drummond (Brazilian Portuguese dub)

Appearances: Daredevil | The Defenders | Jessica Jones | Luke Cage | Daredevil: Born Again

"Come on, we're gonna be business partners. We're gonna share everything with each other. Our thoughts, our dreams, bills, crushing debt... There is no one I'd rather be doing this with, buddy. Seriously."

Matt's best friend and business partner at Nelson, Murdock and Page.

• Adaptational Slimness: While he's still a bit chubby in this adaptation, it's not to the level of his comics counterpart.
• Adaptation Dye-Job: He has his actor's natural blonde hair in this version while in the comics, Foggy had brown hair. He also has blue eyes instead of brown.
• Adaptation Name Change: He's still Franklin "Foggy" Nelson, but his middle initial "P." is now given a full-fledged middle name, in this case, "Percy".
• The Alcoholic: He's such a hard drinker that Marci smuggles him a bottle of liquor while he's recuperating from getting shot during the Reyes assassination, and they both sip it straight from the bottle.
• Ambulance Chaser: Both Wesley and Mahoney label him (and Matt) as such. Foggy, for his part, is completely, hilariously shameless about this and even goes as far as bribing Mahoney for inside scoops.
• Back for the Dead: After a seven-year absence, Foggy finally returns in Daredevil: Born Again...only to be sniped by Bullseye and bleed to death outside of Josie's bar.
• Badass Bookworm: Graduated from Columbia Law cum laude, defends Karen from two guys with his softball bat, even talks down two gangbangers trying to settle a score in an emergency room by appealing to their inner pragmatism.
• Bash Brothers: Take Foggy on in a legal battle, and he will dance circles around you. Get Foggy and Matt to tag-team against you, and you won't even have time to catch your breath before they hand you your ass.
• Batter Up!: He saves Karen from being attacked by two thugs outside Elena Cardenas' apartment building.
• Best Friend: He and Matt have been best friends ever since they met at law school.
• Beta Couple: He and Marci are this to the alpha couple of Matt and Karen.
• Beware the Nice Ones: Despite looking like a pushover, he's willing to stand up and deliver a "The Reason You Suck" Speech to bullies.
• Big Beautiful Man: Foggy is pretty handsome, to say the least, and manages to attract not one but two very beautiful women, Marci Stahl and Karen Page.
• Bromantic Foil: Zig-Zagged Trope. Foggy comes across as a money-obsessed Unlucky Every Dude, and Lovable Coward compared to the morally upright, Chick Magnet, and stoic Matt, and is often used as comic relief. In later episodes (especially after his and Matt's falling out), it's revealed that he's not quite any of those things. Under the right conditions, Foggy is far more selfless, attractive, and brave than the average person. However, he still fits this trope in comparison to Matt, so he acts as a competent foil.
• The Bus Came Back: He's set to make his return in Daredevil: Born Again, 6 years after the cancellation of Daredevil..
• The Cameo: He makes a minor appearance on the second season of Jessica Jones where he tries to help Jeri fight off her partners who are trying to buy her out, only for his help to be rudely rejected.
• Celebrity Paradox:
  • Hawkeye reveals that The Hunger Games exists in the MCU. Elden Henson played Pollux in the films.
  • Grey's Anatomy was referenced in one episode of Jessica Jones. Elden Henson played Damon in one episode of its spinoff show Private Practice and Matt Smithson in one episode of the show itself.
• Character Development: Beginning Season 1 as a money-obsessed lawyer who responded to legal complications with pessimism, Foggy winds up as a By-the-Book Cop in Season 3 who's determined to put Fisk away in legally valid way, contrasting Matt's one-track desire to kill the crime boss.
• Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: People underestimate Foggy at their peril. As goofy and silly as he is, when time calls, Foggy can still lay down a beating on some street thugs with a bat. Or talk them out of trying to fight each other in a crowded emergency room. And while it may seem at first glance that Matt is the brains of their operation, Foggy is an extremely capable attorney who repeatedly leaves rivals up to and including the corrupt and connected Manhattan DA wondering what the hell just happened as he mops the floor with them, which is probably why said corrupt DA quickly resorts to under-the-table methods of screwing with Nelson & Murdock to avoid having to match wits face to face.
• Dies Differently in Adaptation: In the comics, Foggy was (seemingly) killed at Vanessa's orders in order force Matt into getting Fisk out of jail and exonerate him for his crimes. In the MCU, Foggy is shot dead by Bullseye as part of his revenge against Daredevil.
• Deadpan Snarker: This seems to be his natural state of being, he drops it only when things get really serious. Mostly.
• Embarrassing Nickname: "Foggy Bear", his ex-girlfriend Marci's nickname for him, is this at first. Once they get back together, though, it becomes more of an Affectionate Nickname.
• Fat Best Friend: Foggy is a bit chubby compared to Matt, no surprise thanks to Matt having to be fit to go out as Daredevil. He also seems aware of it, as he insists that Matt is always luckier than him at scoring girls.
• Flipping the Bird: Does this to Matt when asking How Many Fingers? Matt accurately says he's holding up one finger.
• Foolish Sibling, Responsible Sibling: The responsible to his younger brother Theo's foolish. Foggy is a brilliant lawyer who helped take down Wilson Fisk while Theo was stupid enough to be tricked into committing fraud and money laundering to secure a bank loan by Fisk himself.
• Glad-to-Be-Alive Sex: Has this with Marci after his near-death experience at the Bulletin.
• Gold Fever: Foggy can be subject to this on occasion, trying to balance getting billable clients to keep the lights on at Nelson & Murdock with being ethical and helping people. He eagerly accepts James Wesley's check because of the large sum he's offering, but immediately decides he wants out once he sees that Wesley wants them to defend an obviously guilty sociopath.
• Guile Hero: Foggy's main gimmick in the series has him going up against people who have far more power and money than he does, standing in their way, and taking their legs out from under them with his thorough understanding of the legal system and a sheer inability to be intimidated.
• Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow: He had much longer hair and a goatee back in college but now has shorter hair and is clean-shaven.
• The Heart: As Foggy is packing his boxes in "The Dark At The End Of The Tunnel", Matt points out that Foggy was always the one who would stand up for anybody and appeal to the inner goodness of each and every person.
• Hero of Another Story:
  • Whatever he legally did prior to the start of The Defenders, he manages to get Luke Cage out of prison at the start of the series.
  • Aside from a single appearance in Jessica Jones Season 2 to remind us that he still works at Hogarth, Chao & Benowitz, Foggy doesn't have any role in that show's narrative, other than to establish that this is still the same universe Daredevil takes place in.
• Heterosexual Life-Partners: Foggy and Matt have been hanging out since law school and are as thick as thieves until the strain of representing Frank Castle and Matt's Daredevil work causes them to decide to move on from the firm and each other. Luckily, they still remain (awkward) friends by The Defenders, and are basically back to this by the end of Season 3 after reconciling, even deciding to go into business together once more.
• How Many Fingers?: Tries to test if Matt's blindness is legit by Flipping the Bird at him.
• Hypocrite:
  • After calling out Matt for lying to him and having a Secret Identity, Foggy lies to Karen to keep Matt's secret. Foggy is rightfully angered at being forced to make that decision.
  • He calls Matt one for being a lawyer by day and a vigilante at night. Except he's guilty of the same thing (going out at night and snooping for crime and physically putting a stop to it should it find him), though not to the level of violence Matt inflicts or is subjected to.
• Innocently Insensitive: He tells Karen that his falling out with Matt shouldn't take away from their efforts to stop Fisk, and says, "You can't just run around killing people, and call yourself a human being." while being completely unaware that Karen had just shot and killed James Wesley in self-defense. This hits Karen hard, but she doesn't say anything to indicate that.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Early on he seems more interested in money than in helping people, but he's immediately uncomfortable with dealing with the mob and Frank and goes out of his way to help others who are being pushed around by shady people, even outside of work. He even spends an episode working on Elena's plumbing. In the first episode, he openly needles and insults Matt over the phone in a playful way in order to get him out of bed.
• The Lancer: He's Matt's best friend, confidant, and partner who's just as much a capable lawyer as him.
• Let's Get Dangerous!: He has his moments. The first one, and one of the most memorable, is the "The Reason You Suck" Speech he gives to Marci.
• Like Brother and Sister: After receiving a lot of Ship Tease with Karen for much of Season 1, they end up as this by the end of the season when Foggy gets back together with Marci while Karen and Matt begin to develop a romance, and they remain as this in all subsequent seasons.
• Lovable Coward: Zig-Zagged Trope. Foggy is not as eager as Matt or Karen to put himself in danger, but he can easily be persuaded to do the right thing to help people, and he risks his life to save others during the aftermath of Fisk's bombings.
• Mistaken for Gay: When he first meets Matt in his college dorm room, he compliments Matt on being a very, very, good looking guy, causing Matt to stammer, but he quickly corrects himself and tells Matt that they'll make great wingmen for each other.
• Motor Mouth: When meeting Luke Cage for the first time in person, he tells him that they spoke a lot on the phone but Luke corrects him and says that he spoke a lot.
• Muggle Best Friend: Foggy's not a secret vigilante like Matt or a crusading investigator like Karen. He's just a lawyer trying to do the best he can.
• Nerves of Steel: He isn't fit, isn't that intimidating, and has no superpowers, but Foggy faces many very powerful foes on both sides of the law, often scared out of his mind but stands his ground until he gets to the truth. For example, Foggy faced down Dex and didn't even flinch when a baton thrown at his face was caught by Matt.
• One Degree of Separation: Along with Jeri Hogarth and Claire Temple, Foggy is one of only three people who have direct ties to every Defender: he is Matt's best friend and former law partner, his new law firm works with Jessica and Danny, and Foggy himself is Luke's attorney.
• Only in It for the Money: Subverted. In their relationship, Matt is usually the one to talk about helping people and Foggy is usually the one to talk about money, but when push comes to shove, Foggy will help the little guy and will not overlook evil for a paycheck.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: Although people will refer to him as Mr. Nelson, including folks like Wilson Fisk, everyone else, including his friends, call him by the nickname of Foggy.
• Only Sane Man: Unlike Matt or Karen, Foggy doesn't like to actively seek out dangerous situations, though that's not to say he can't handle himself when he is put on the defensive.
• Overshadowed by Awesome: Foggy graduated cum laude from a prestigious law school and was offered a partner track at a major law firm immediately after his internship. For most people, this would be lighting the world on fire, but Foggy's best friend and partner Matt Murdock is smarter than he, more handsome, and also a superhero, so Foggy always comes across as a bit of a loser by comparison.
• Platonic Life-Partners: After having Ship Tease with Karen in Season 1, they settle into this dynamic by the time of Season 2.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: A fellow lawyer who's willing to help Matt despite his mysterious disappearances and unorthodox beliefs.
• Related in the Adaptation: Anna Nelson is now his biological mother as opposed to being his stepmother like in the comics.
• Romantic False Lead: Ends up being this to Karen. He and Karen receive a lot of Ship Tease in the beginning and middle of Season 1, but he instead ends up with Marci, and Karen becomes a Love Interest to Matt (whom she had a very obvious crush on from the beginning).
• Sacrificial Lion: His sudden death at the first episode of Born Again is to showcase just how monstrous and spiteful Dex is.
• Screw the Money, I Have Rules!: Less than Matt, but it is there. When James Wesley hires them to defend John Healy, Foggy wants to accept simply due to the size of their check. Once he meets Healy, he quickly realizes the man is an obviously guilty sociopath and he doesn't want anything to do with him, money be damned.
• Secret-Keeper:
  • Eventually, once he and Matt mend their friendship. He is one of Matt's first ones, as Father Lantom and Claire are the only two major characters who learn the secret before he does.
  • As of Season 3, he's also one of the few people who knows that Karen Page is the one who shot and killed James Wesley after Karen confesses to him under attorney-client privilege.
• Sex God: According to Marci, he's really great in bed.
• Sharp-Dressed Man: In Season 3, when he mounts his District Attorney campaign, he begins sporting three-piece suits tailored by Martin Greenfield Clothiers. He particularly favors an old-fashioned seventies style in three-piece suits of rich chocolatey browns.
• Shipper on Deck:
  • Despite his acting annoyed, Foggy sincerely gives Matt the best of luck in having a relationship with Karen, and can't help but smile when Matt and Karen are flirting in his presence.

    Foggy Nelson: Careful, Matt.
    Matt Murdock: What's that?
    Foggy Nelson: Keep going like this, you just might end up happy. And for a Catholic boy, that's a very dangerous thing.

  • When Matt and Foggy meet up for drinks at Josie's after the quake, Foggy can't help but ask Matt how he and Karen are doing, relationship-wise.

    Foggy Nelson: I talked to Karen. She said you two grabbed coffee. I don't mean to pry, but where are you guys at? Relationship status?
    Matt Murdock: We're uh, "figuring ourselves" out.

• Significant Wardrobe Shift: Once Nelson & Murdock is dissolved and he accepts Jeri Hogarth's offer, Foggy starts wearing smarter, more formal clothing, gets a haircut, and begins slicking back his hair.
• Spanner in the Works: Foggy is responsible for Matt getting involved with the Hand, having sent him to be Jessica's lawyer when she gets arrested by Misty Knight. This is subverted when you consider that Matt (as Daredevil) was on the Hand's radar as far back as Season 1, when he "killed" Nobu, not to mention the countless Hand ninjas he took down in his efforts to redeem Elektra. And Stick made it clear that by virtue of who Matt is, a clash and an ultimate showdown with the Hand was inevitable.
• Sudden Sequel Death Syndrome: In the pilot episode of Born Again, Foggy is shot in the chest by Bullseye outside of Josie's, with Karen desperately trying to keep him alive before he succumbs to his wounds. His death emotionally devastates Karen and Matt.
• Theme Naming: He and his older brother Theo were named after the Roosevelt brothers who served as presidents.
• Time-Passage Beard: Born Again shows that Foggy has grown a beard, complete with a shorter and neater hairstyle, sometime after the Snap happened.
• Took a Level in Badass: He really comes into his own as a lawyer when he defends Frank Castle, more or less by himself, since Matt was busy investigating the Hand. And though he loses the case (through no fault of his own), Jeri Hogarth is impressed enough that she offers to make him a partner at her firm. It's also revealed in The Defenders that all those times Claire told Luke she knew a great lawyer who could fix his problems with the law, she was talking about Foggy rather than Matt. And in Season 3, we see him use this as a platform to run for District Attorney after some words of encouragement from Marci.
• Unlucky Everydude: Foggy sees himself as this, but how true it might be is all relative. Compared to Matt, he doesn't seem to attract that many dates, but he has a gorgeous girlfriend in Marci Stahl, and Elena Cardenas briefly acts as a Shipper on Deck for him and Karen.
• Undying Loyalty: No matter how hurt he is by the secrets Matt keeps from him, or how strained their friendship becomes, Foggy never stops looking out for Matt and tries to help him however he can. This is most pronounced in Season 3, where, even after Matt coldly tries to push him away for his own safety and even steals his wallet to break into a prison, Foggy acknowledges that Matt's been a crappy friend but still refuses to follow suit and give up on him. Karen puts it best near the end of the season:

  Karen Page: Despite the fact that you've been a complete asshole to him, he'd still follow you over a cliff.

• Was It All a Lie?: Is understandably hurt when he learns Matt is a vigilante and asks if he's been lying about his blindness since they met.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Once he learns Matt's the Devil of Hell's Kitchen, Foggy ends up regularly delivering these to Matt for getting hurt or compromising the firm's integrity.
• With Friends Like These...: He's still incredibly loyal to Matt despite Matt constantly lying to him and keeping secrets from him that not only affect their friendship, but also their law firm. Karen even lampshades this, stating that he would still follow Matt over the edge of a cliff even though he's been a complete asshole to him.
• You Are Better than You Think You Are:
  • He tells Marci this when he needs help exposing her firm's dealings with Wilson Fisk. And it works.
  • Foggy himself is on the receiving end of this from both Karen and Marci regarding his skills as a lawyer.

Claire Temple

"I'm not special. I just keep running into special."

Species: Human

Citizenship: American, Cuban

Affiliation(s): Metro-General Hospital (formerly), Chikara Dojo

Portrayed By: Rosario Dawson

Voiced By: Cecilia Valenzuela (Latin-America Chilean Spanish dub), Esther Solans [Daredevil], Noemí Bayarri [Jessica Jones, Luke Cage] (European Spanish dub), Mônica Rossi (Brazilian Portuguese dub)

Appearances: Daredevil | Jessica Jones | Luke Cage | Iron Fist | The Defenders

"Sometimes, if you want justice, you have to get it yourself."

A nurse contracted to treat the numerous injuries Matt ends up receiving during his nights of crime-fighting. From there, she manages to be pulled into the lives of all of New York's street-level superheroes. She also has a romantic relationship with Luke Cage.

• Action Girl: After receiving self-defense training by Colleen Wing, she is capable of going toe-to-toe against Hand ninjas and come out unscathed.
• Action Survivor: Claire is by no means able to fight on the level of Matt or the other Defenders, but she's still able to stay alive and occasionally defend herself when the need arises. And as of the end of Luke Cage Season 1, she's apparently deciding to become a full Action Girl.
• Adapted Out: Because the Defenders saga was largely disconnected from the main MCU story until Spider-Man: No Way Home, her brief marriage to Bill Foster doesn't exist.
• Advertised Extra: By all marketing appearances, she's one of the main protagonists of Daredevil along with Matt, Foggy, and Karen. While she's an extra by no means, she only shows up in five episodes and in one of them only for one scene. Urich, Vanessa, Wesley, and even Owlsley have much more screen time than she does. Then in Jessica Jones (2015) she only appears in the season finale, though she does rack up more screen time in that one episode than you'd expect. Then she only shows up in three episodes in Season 2 of Daredevil. It's finally averted in Luke Cage, where she shows up in eight episodes (episodes 5-11, and the Season 1 finale) and almost never leaves Luke's side.
• Ambiguously Brown: As a character played by Rosario Dawson, this is a given. It's not until Luke Cage where it's confirmed that she's Hispanic on her mother's side. A remark by her mother about Luke resembling her father and being raised in Harlem suggests she may be African American as well, just like her actress. Season 2 confirms that she's Afro-Cuban.
• Amicable Exes: Though her romantic relationship with Matt was brief, the two remain close friends and she continues to help him out.
• Arbitrary Skepticism: By the latter half of Iron Fist, she's seen a lot of strange things. She still has trouble believing Danny Rand got the Iron Fist from defeating a dragon called "Shao-Lao the Undying", thinking Davos is talking about something the size of a komodo-dragon, even though she already knows about K'un-L'un.
• Back-Alley Doctor: She becomes this as time goes on, using her medical skills to patch up anyone with whatever she can scrounge up.
• Batter Up!: When Matt rescues her from the Russians after they kidnap her, she picks up a baseball bat and uses it to take out the last thug.
• Beware the Nice Ones:
  • She's none too happy when Matt asks her to help save Vladimir and takes quite a bit of pleasure in instructing Matt to cauterize his wound with a road flare.
  • In her first appearance, Claire used her medical knowledge to help Matt find Semyon's trigeminal nerve and inflict rather painful torture on him for the location of a kidnapped boy and bashed the head of her kidnapper with the same steel bat he used to beat her up earlier after Matt came to her rescue. This woman is tougher than she looks.
  • In Season 2, she takes down a Hand ninja by pushing him out of a window. This, right after she lets out a roar of utter fury after the same person killed her friend/colleague.
  • When she makes her intro in Luke Cage, she's introduced chasing down and beating up a mugger who tried to steal her purse. During the hostage situation at Harlem's Paradise, she knocks out one of Diamondback's goons and, with help from Misty Knight, fights Shades to a standstill. At the end of the season, she's seen checking out a poster for self-defence classes.
  • After said training, she manages to acquire a pair of claws and fight Hand ninjas. Successfully.
• Breakout Character:
  • After many complaints about her Advertised Extra status, the show producers confirmed her return in Season 2 of Daredevil, before they announced any of the other cast members, excluding the titular hero.
  • She's also become the Netflix shows' equivalent of Agent Coulson, going on to appear in Jessica Jones and being a major character in Luke Cage and Iron Fist.
• The Bus Came Back: She returns in the season finale of Jessica Jones, which sets her up to have a larger role in Luke Cage.
• Butt-Monkey: It's a Running Gag that in her first appearance each season on any show, we get an update on how things have gone downhill for her since last time:
  • Jessica Jones: She's lost her lease due to constantly using her apartment as a makeshift emergency room for Matt.
  • Daredevil Season 2: She's been relegated to the graveyard shift for removing Luke from the hospital.
  • Luke Cage: Metro-General has gotten her blacklisted at every hospital in New York City for refusing to go along with the coverup of the Hand's attack.
  • Iron Fist finally breaks the pattern, as she's come to terms with her apparent fate of being the medical assistant of New York's superheroes, and can even fight alongside them.
• Borrowed Catchphrase: Iron Fist shows her twice using Luke's infamous "Sweet Christmas!"
• Celebrity Paradox:
  • Star Wars has been referenced numerous times throughout the MCU. Rosario Dawson plays the live-action iteration of Ahsoka Tano.
  • SpongeBob SquarePants was alluded to in Avengers: Infinity War and Iron Fist (2017) (where Claire herself appears as a major character). Dawson guest-starred As Herself in an hour-long episode on Season 6.
  • DC Comics has been referenced a number of times in the MCU. Dawson played several roles in several DC movies, most notably voicing Wonder Woman in the DC Animated Movie Universe.
• Commonality Connection: She bonds with Foggy over their shared concern for Matt.
• Composite Character:
  • She is a combination of two obscure characters from the comics: Dr. Claire Temple who was Luke's on-and-off girlfriend before he married Jessica, and Linda Carter aka Night Nurse, a nurse who made a name for herself patching up New York superheroes who didn't want to risk their secret identity going to a regular hospital.
  • In Iron Fist she quite unexpectedly adds to this a Decomposite Character vibe as she gains a pair of bladed gauntlets, which is reminiscent of the Defenders' Hellcat, even though Trish Walker is also in the franchise. Though that is subverted as Trish's transformation to Hellcat unfolds after this during Jessica Jones Season 2.
• Dare to Be Badass: During Luke Cage, she's fully embraced the fact that she's a Weirdness Magnet and decides to use her talents to help the Gifted (in particular, Luke) and spurs him to be a badass protector of the city. She is often the one making the speeches about how the Gifted she meets like Luke and Danny should use their powers to fight criminals in NYC.
• Damsel in Distress: Gets kidnapped by the Russians, who try to get information on the man in the mask out of her. She gets her revenge in Episode 6 when guiding Matt through cauterizing Vladimir's bullet wound.
• Damsel out of Distress: When Matt rescues her from the Russians, the last man standing uses her as a Human Shield. She then knocks him out after Matt disarms him.
• Deadpan Snarker: Especially when she hears about Matt's powers.
• Demoted to Satellite Love Interest: By The Defenders and Season 2 of Luke Cage, the narrative treats her mainly as Luke's girlfriend and not much more.
• Doom Magnet: As Brad Jones noted while binge-watching Iron Fist and The Defenders, if the credits show Claire is set to appear, expect that someone will get a grisly injury only her medical training can fix. At least, that's the case most of the time. (see also Weirdness Magnet)
• Eating the Eye Candy: She enjoys watching Matt and Luke shirtless.
• The Everyman: She fits the bill even more than Coulson, just being a regular civilian trying to live her life until Matt was thrown in her building's dumpster. She just can't stop running into superheroes in trouble ever since.
• Florence Nightingale Effect:
  • She and Matt develop feelings for each other while she's stitching him up but knows that she can't have a relationship with him.
  • This is followed by her saving Luke Cage, which leads to a romance.
• Foreshadowing: The training she receives from Colleen Wing, while incomplete, is enough to let her fight defensively against Hand agents, who are highly skilled assassins. It turns out, that the reason Colleen's techniques are so effective at countering those of the Hand is because they are OF the Hand.
• Good Is Not Soft: Her main reason for supporting Matt. She believes in his ideals and thinks these people who wreck Hell's Kitchen deserve punishment and need to be stopped.
• Here We Go Again!: She gives this vibe after meeting Jessica Jones and Luke Cage in the first season of Jessica Jones. When she meets Malcolm Ducasse later, both of them lament their mutual statuses as a Weirdness Magnet. Then she can only Face Palm at finding out her martial arts teacher is friends with Danny.
• Hospital Hottie: She's a night nurse played by the gorgeous Rosario Dawson who gets the attention of Matt Murdock and Luke Cage.
• I Just Want to Be Special: Madame Gao tries playing on her insecurity about this, suggesting Claire hangs around Gifted folk because she wants to be a hero with powers like Matt or Luke, and is upset that she hasn't become one. Doubles as a "Reason You Suck" Speech because Gao describes this desire as a selfish attempt at feeling special, that if her moment of being special was going to happen it would have happened already, and that she is trying to use the experiences of the Gifted for her own gain.
• Irony: Claire takes up self-defense classes with Colleen Wing to protect herself and perhaps even repel further dangerous weirdness in her life, and winds up getting dragged into Danny's war with the Hand because he and Colleen need her medical expertise in saving Radovan's life.
• It's Personal: As much as she doesn't want to get involved, the Hand attacking Metro-General and Claire's colleague Louisa Delgado getting killed gives her personal reason to fight the Hand.

  Claire: They came at me in my home. Attacked my hospital, murdered my friend.

• Love Interest: Starts as one for Matt, until they end it, and later becomes one for Luke, which sticks.
• Love Triangle: With Jessica and Luke. Unbeknownst to Jessica.
• The Medic: She ends up becoming the medical support to all of the local Gifted heroes of New York. Sews up Matt's wounds, which is handy considering how often he gets the living hell beat out of him. By Luke Cage, she has quit her job at the hospital due to the events of Daredevil Season 2.
• Morality Pet: More or less one for Luke.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Living in a world of superheroes hasn't been good for her. Fixing Matt's injuries in her apartment gets her evicted, then walking out on her job to save Luke Cage forces her into a hellish schedule to make it up. Her indignation at the orders to keep quiet about The Hand attacking the hospital and killing three of her coworkers pushes her to quit her job.
• Only Sane Woman: She is the one who points out to Matt that he needs body armor, as well as the fact that he doesn't really have any plans to significantly improve Hell's Kitchen, and the city will never be safe. And in Iron Fist, while everyone around her is playing their roles straight out of a kung-fu revenge movie, she consistently tries to point out the more sensible, practical options available to them.
• Promoted to Love Interest: To Matt Murdock in the MCU continuity, though only briefly. They would be considered a crack pairing in the comics. She then becomes the canon love interest for Luke Cage.
• Put on a Bus:
  • She leaves town toward the end of Season 1 of Daredevil. She leaves again towards the end of Season 2, to appear in Luke Cage. (Although, "leaving town" is relative, since she's still in Manhattan, just a few miles and a simple ride uptown on the 2 train.)
  • She's still with Luke at the start of Luke Cage, but their bridges burn very quickly after a fight over Luke's decision to beat Cockroach to a pulp. It culminates in Claire leaving town to visit relatives in Cuba.
• Race Lift: The comics version of Claire Temple is African-American, while the MCU version is half-Latina and half-African-American.
• Resign in Protest: She leaves her job as a nurse when the hospital covers up the Hand's attack on it that resulted in the death of one of her co-workers.
• Screw the Money, I Have Rules!: She quits her job as a nurse after finding out that the hospital would rather get paid to keep silent about the unrecorded patients than report to the authorities about what they found from the autopsy of the Hand ninja that she killed.
• Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!: A common theme for her, at least once per season.
  • She helps Matt because she believes in his cause despite most of what he does being completely illegal.
  • In Jessica Jones Season 1, she assists Jessica in sneaking Luke out of the hospital when the police show up, looking for him because of what he did before Jessica managed to knock him out.
  • In the second season of Daredevil, this causes her to quit when the hospital administration not only intends to cover up the killing of three employees by the Hand by claiming it was a junkie but also ignore the body of one of them had already undergone section.
• Second Episode Introduction: She makes her debut in the second episode of the first season of Daredevil.
• Secret-Keeper: She knows Matt's doing something questionable but keeps quiet about it out of respect.
• Seen It All: She starts out awestruck by Daredevil's abilities. By the time she meets all the Defenders...

  Danny: I am the Iron Fist.

  Claire: What the hell does that mean?

• Technical Pacifist: Claire is staunchly against killing and violence in general. By the time she meets Danny, she's still against killing, but she is willing to fight if the need arises. However, she somewhat averts the trope when she prods Danny and Colleen into allowing her to come with them to enact a plan to capture Madame Gao by beating up her thugs and taking her hostage strictly out of revenge for her fallen friend, making her a pacifist in name only.
• Thou Shalt Not Kill: She does however continually advocate for not killing people, including members of the Hand.
• Took a Level in Badass: After three seasons of just patching heroes up, her first appearance on Luke Cage has her chasing down a would-be mugger and giving him a beating. She later helps a severely wounded Misty fight Shades to a standstill in the club. Afterwards, she takes up martial arts classes if this is going to be her life now. After some of Colleen Wing's training, she's able to fight a Hand goon without taking a scratch.
• Transplant: She debuted in Daredevil, then joined the casts of Luke Cage and Iron Fist. She also guest-starred in the series finale of Jessica Jones.
• True Love Is Boring: After spending the second half of Luke Cage Season 1 establishing a relationship with Luke, Claire abruptly dumps him and leaves the show at the beginning of Season 2.
• Twofer Token Minority: Claire is female, half-black, and half-Cuban, which makes her a threefer.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Often is the one to reprimand the heroes for morally reprehensible behavior from recklessness to excessively violent tendencies, having done so for Matt, Luke, Danny, and Colleen whether they heed her words or not.
• Weirdness Magnet: She's naturally pretty nonplussed about working on Luke's Judas bullet wounds, after a stint as Matt's regular medical assistant. When she meets Danny, she's a little pissed about how this keeps happening to her.
• Wet Blanket Wife:
  • She is very displeased with Matt's vigilantism — in particular because he admits to having no long-term plan. When it's clear that he won't stop what he's doing, she ends their relationship before it ever really has a chance to start.
  • Her encounters with Matt and Jessica eventually cause her to accept the lifestyle of being an assistant vigilante, leading her to constantly push Luke to help innocent people and use his powers to their full potential. That is until Luke's vigilantism causes him to become more and more like Daredevil Season 1 Matt, and a fight over Luke's near-fatal beating of Cockroach drives her away.
• Wolverine Claws: She swipes a pair of bladed gauntlets from the Hand when forced into combat in China, and decides to keep them.
• Wrong Genre Savvy: Attempts to convince Matt to change his brutal vigilante ways by using their relationship as leverage. This might have worked if Matt weren't a Blood Knight.

Elektra Natchios

"I know who I am. The Hand did not reduce me to this. This is who I've always been."

Species: Enhanced human

Citizenship: Greek

Affiliation(s): Chaste (formerly), Columbia University (formerly), Hand

Portrayed By: Élodie Yung, Lily Chee (young)

Voiced By: Judith Noguera (Latin-America Chilean Spanish dub)

Appearances: Daredevil | The Defenders

"I don't care about good or bad. Truth is, I've never felt more whole, more alive, than right now."

Matt's old flame from college, who also happens to be a Greek assassin and member of the Chaste hunting members of a criminal organization known as "the Hand".

• Above Good and Evil: The quote on her page image. She says that after Matt tries to get through to her by telling her that he feels goodness in her.
• Action Dress Rip: Elektra does this before she and Matt start fighting the Yakuza in "Regrets Only".
• Action Girl: From a young age, she was trained by the Chaste to become a formidable warrior.
• Adaptational Dye-Job: Her comic counterpart has blue eyes, but this adaptation of Elektra possesses dark brown eyes instead.
• Adaptation Origin Connection: In the comics, Elektra was born to Hugo and Christina Natchios, her biological parents. While in the MCU, she is Conveniently an Orphan, then taken in by Hugo and Christina at Stick's request, and they raised her as their daughter.
• Adaptation Personality Change: This Elektra is a lot more flirty and cheekier than her usual portrayal, who is typically quite calm and composed.
• Adaptational Badass: The Elektra of the comics is undoubtedly a formidable assassin and fighter . However, the MCU version is given the status of a Black Sky, a prophesied Living Weapon that is sought by the Hand, making her even more more dangerous.
• Adaptational Modesty: Elektra's pre-resurrection outfit has pants and some more coverings on the torso. Post resurrection, she gets a suit closer to her iconic red bathing suit/leotard but with black leggings to tone down the Stripperiffic nature of the outfit. She often wears a long black coat over it to further tone things down.
• Adaptational Superpower Change: Her powers in the comics were more psychic in nature, possessing abilities such as telepathy, telekinesis, hypnosis, and precognition. In the MCU, she has a superhuman physiology instead, possessing powers such as Super-Strength, Super-Toughness, and Super-Speed. She also ages much slower than a normal human.
• Adaptational Villainy: The Elektra of the comics is no saint, alternating between heroine and villain Depending on the Writer (and sometimes being both under the pen of the same writer). However, the MCU version is almost entirely depicted as a sociopathic hellraiser who serves as a Toxic Friend Influence to Matt. She also doesn't have her father's death as a catalyst for her amorality like in the comics.
• Affably Evil: Despite being an assassin who has zero compunctions about killing, she's pretty playful and personable.
• Affectionate Nickname: Stick calls her "Ellie".
• The Ageless: One of the superpowers the resurrection elixir The Hand used to raise her from the dead is an unnaturally long lifespan, which means she ages far slower than the average human and can allow her to live for many centuries.
• All Girls Want Bad Boys: She's drawn by Matt's inner darkness and greatly approves when he becomes violent and bloodthirsty. It's later Played With though as she also becomes drawn to Matt's good influence on her and decides to reject her destiny as the Black Sky because of him.
• All of the Other Reindeer: She wasn't well-liked by the other initiates of the Chaste. Because she was a Black Sky, and they knew it.
• Ambiguously Human: It's never really specified what a Black Sky is. Elektra looks human enough, but she's a bloodthirsty killer even as a child and after her resurrection she's inhumanly fast and strong, and the Hand need her help for reasons that are never really clear.
• Anti-Hero: She's an assassin, but is hunting members of a criminal organization that doesn't care if they destroy entire cities.
• Apocalypse Maiden: She's the Black Sky that the Hand have been hunting down for years.
• Assassin Outclassin': Stick sends Jacques Duchamps to assassinate her as punishment for her decision to leave the Chaste and possibly to prevent the Hand from using her as a Black Sky. It ends as well as you would expect when you try to have an assassin assassinated.
• Awesomeness by Analysis: Elektra profiled Matt in their first meeting based on his wingtip shoes. Likewise, Matt profiled her based on the fact that she was profiling him by his shoes.
• Ax-Crazy: Elektra tolerates killing more than Matt does.
• Back from the Dead: The Hand brings her back to life in The Defenders.
• Badass Normal: Elektra is a deadly martial artist without any kind of superpowers who can utilize any form of weapon. The Resurrection Elixir turns her into an Empowered Badass Normal.
• Bare-Handed Blade Block: Inverted. In "Fish in the Jailhouse", Elektra uses her sais to grab Danny's wrist as he attacks her with the Iron Fist.
• Batman Gambit: In "Fish in the Jailhouse", Elektra goads Danny into attacking her with the Iron Fist, and maneuvers herself so she's standing in front of the wall and them guides the Fist into the barrier.
• Battle Couple: She's this with Matt when they're taking on The Hand, but they don't really play the couple part straight until the end of the season.
• Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Not even death detracts from Elektra's good looks when the Hand exhume her corpse at the end of "A Cold Day in Hell's Kitchen".
• Became Their Own Antithesis: Goes from fighting the Hand to becoming its leader.
• Becoming the Mask: She dated Matt in college on Stick's orders, with the intention of drawing him back into the fold in the war against the Hand, but instead fell in love with him.
• Belligerent Sexual Tension: Has loads of these with Matt. He insists that he's fully moved on from her and many of her attempts to flirt with him end up annoying or making him angry, but it becomes clear that they enjoy fighting together and despite Matt's insistences, it's clear that he still has lingering feelings for her.
• Beta Outfit: Her vigilante outfit for most of the second season consist of a black vest, black pants, and a red sleeveless turtleneck. In the season finale, Melvin Potter makes her an upgraded red and black outfit that provides her more protection.
• Betty and Veronica: The Veronica to Karen's Betty for Matt.
• Bifurcated Weapon: After getting ressurected by The Hand, she chooses two wakizashi short swords that can be combined into one as her weapon of choice.
• Big Bad: Becomes this for the final two episodes of The Defenders after killing Alexandra.
• Big Bad Wannabe: Downplayed. It's clear that Murakami, Madame Gao, and Bakuto aren't too happy with Elektra's takeover and plan to kill her once she has used Danny to get them the substance. It's also quickly clear that Elektra doesn't give a shit about the Hand either and really just wants to give in to her darker impulses and be free... and, of course, she wants to get the attention of Matt.
• Big Eater: We see her constantly eating and drinking. When she and Matt eat at a diner following a fight with ninjas, she has an entire plate of food, pie, coffee, and a glass of water. When Matt takes away her pie, she has a moment of actual anger.
• Black Bra and Panties: When assassins come to her penthouse to kill her, she takes of her silk bathrobe that show that she was wearing black underwear underneath before getting dressed.
• Black Cloak: After being resurrected by the Hand, she wears one to conceal her identity.
• Blatant Lies: Two lines, two lies.

  Elektra: [sais in hand] We need to talk.
  Stick: [raising sword] I'm all ears.

• Blood Knight: She is always up for a good fight.
• Came Back Wrong: When she is revived by the Hand, she has amnesia and doesn't even remember who Matt is... which isn't really an example, since the Hand specifically resurrected her to be exactly like that and tell her she should act like the person she was before is basically dead. Played straight later on when she does get her memories back, and turns on them for her own end.
• Came Back Strong: Getting resurrected as the Black Sky by The Hand, enhanced her physiology to Super-Soldier levels. She's strong enough to send people flying with her blows and durable enough to survive getting hit by a car and get up almost immediately.
• Casting Gag: This is not the first time Élodie Yung played an assassin who frequently wears red, dual wields blades and is the apprentice of a Master Swordsman.
• Child Soldiers: Her role as the Black Sky would have been a child soldier turned human killing machine. Even both the Hand and the Chaste took interest in her when she was a little girl, training her to become that weapon. Only Stick didn't see it that way and gave her a good life.
• Color Character: She's the Black Sky.
• Color Motif: The majority of her outfits, her bathrobe, and the car she stole to take Matt out on a joyride are red.
• Combat Pragmatist: She's willing to use anything she can to defeat her opponents. This includes emptied submachine guns, a corkscrew, a rebar, and even stealing her opponent's sais to kill them with it.
• Cool Car: During the night she and Matt first meet, she drives away with him in a red convertible sports car that she stole. She also drives a dark green Ferrari on the way to Roscoe Sweeney's mansion to break into it with Matt.
• Cool Sword: Post-resurrection, she wields a wakizashi sword that can split into two.
• The Corrupter: While Matt was in college she tried to make him a killer by presenting him with the man who ordered his father's death. On Stick's orders, it turns out.
• Costume Evolution: Before their final showdown with Nobu on the roof, Matt personally has Melvin Potter tailor Elektra an upgraded suit. After Elektra is resurrected by the Hand, she gets a new version in red that evokes her classic comics outfit.
• Curtains Match the Window: Both her hair and her irises are dark brown.
• Danger Takes a Backseat: Elektra hides in the back of Stick's car to ambush his two underlings.
• Dark Action Girl: She's seen beating up dozens of criminals, leaping off rooftops, and generally going toe-to-toe physically with a highly trained vigilante like Matt. After her resurrection, she becomes Alexandra's main assassin, until she kills Alexandra and declares herself in charge of the Hand.
  • Even in the flashback scenes that show her early relationship with Matt show signs of this. If her facial expressions are anything to go by, she appears to be getting a sexual thrill from the idea of Matt executing his father’s murderer.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Elektra confesses to having committed her first kill at the age of twelve, with no other justification than to see what it felt like.
• Dating Catwoman: She's the Catwoman of the arrangement, being an incredibly toxic influence to Matt in their younger years and remains one to him when they reunite in the present day.
• Deadpan Snarker: She's got a bit more "snark" than "deadpan", considering how she loves getting under peoples' skin like this.
• Death of Personality: Following her resurrection, Alexandra tells Stick that Elektra is dead and all that remains in her "vessel" is the Black Sky. Matt does manage to bring Elektra's memories and much of her personality back, but he can't undo her transition into The Unfettered.
• Demoted to Extra: As a result of Stick taking his place as Elektra's paternal figure, Hugo Natchios is given far less prominence here. In the comics, she was very close to him and his death deeply affected her. In the MCU, he was merely her adoptive father and his death doesn't affect her as much as it did in the comics.
• Destination Defenestration: After killing Stick and knocking out Matt, Luke, and Jessica in "Ashes, Ashes", Elektra escapes with Danny by jumping out a window, using a car parked below to break her landing.
• Destructive Romance: Her relationship with Matt is ultimately this. When the two dated in college, Matt almost ruined his future because of Elektra's toxic influence on him as the two constantly broke into places and committed crimes together. When she comes back into his life after ten years and enlists his help, his law firm and romantic relationship with Karen Page fell apart because of their working together getting in the way of both. And it's not just a one-way street: Matt's positive influence has a negative effect on Elektra; she struggles with self-loathing because Matt's restraint makes her feel like a monster, her strive to be a better person because of him causes her to reject Stick's teachings and puts her in the crosshairs of the Chaste (who, by virtue of her being the Black Sky, consider her too dangerous to leave as a Wild Card), and ultimately results in her death and resurrection by the Hand when she chooses to side with Matt against them.
• Did You Actually Believe...?: In Season 2, she reveals to Matt that Nobu's group, the Hand, never left New York. They just froze their operations and waited for Matt to take out the competition. Now, with Fisk in jail, Madame Gao leaving, and everyone else dead; Hell's Kitchen is ripe for the taking.
• Didn't Think This Through: By killing Alexandra Reid, Elektra has threatened a big part of the Hand's public connections, from corporations to organized crime. She flat out states she doesn't care.
• Died in Your Arms Tonight: Elektra gets stabbed by Nobu instead of Matt, leading to her death while Matt cradles her in his arms. Subverted following her resurrection.
• The Dog Bites Back: The Fingers really shouldn't have implied to Elektra that she was replaceable.
• The Dragon: To Alexandra. Until she kills her and takes over anyway.
• Driven to Suicide: After finding out of her true nature as a Black Sky, she contemplates killing herself by jumping off a building. Matt manages to talk her out of it.
• Dude Magnet: She tells Matt that every man she's ever met has wanted to sleep with her. True to form, Matt senses the heartbeats of several partygoers at the Yakatomi Building elevate after she takes off her coat to reveal her red dress.
• Dual Wielding: Her weapons of choice are a pair of sais. After getting revived by Alexandra, also wields two wakizashi short swords that she can combine into one before switching back to her sais near the end of the series.
• Early-Bird Cameo: Referenced via flashback in "Nelson v. Murdock" by Foggy as that "Greek chick" Matt dated in college. In Season 2, we see some of their college dating life.
• Eating the Eye Candy: In "Regrets Only", Elektra checks out Matt as he changes into his tuxedo in the back of the vehicle. In turn, quite a few people check out Elektra as she enters the room in a red dress—Matt notes several elevated heart rates.
• Empowered Badass Normal: Elektra is already a badass Action Girl from the start. After she was resurrected with the Resurrection Elixir, she gains superhuman strength, speed, and durability.
• Enfant Terrible: She murdered her first victim at age twelve as she wanted to know what killing somebody felt like.
• Erotic Asphyxiation: While they were having sex on the boxing ring in Fogwell's Gym, Matt grabs her by the neck while she's on top of him, much to her arousal.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: While he started off as just another target, she genuinely fell in love with Matt. Even when their relationship was at its most hostile, it's easy to see she never stopped loving him. While her relationship with her parents (adopted or otherwise) isn't really shown, it's clear from flashbacks that she also genuinely loved Stick (a sentiment he returned) and was heartbroken when he had to leave her. Despite the latter, she is ultimately the one to kill him in The Defenders.
• Evil Brit: Elektra sports an RP accent that's blended with Élodie Yung's natural accent. The "evil" part kicks in after she's revived by Alexandra.
• Evil Costume Switch: Her outfit as The Black Sky looks quite similar to the outfit Melvin Potter made for her but with the colors inverted.
• Evil Feels Good: Elektra is mildly aroused by killing Alexandra.
• Evil Is Easy: Part of her wants to be good if only because Matt wants her to be good, but her darker nature means that she can't help but enjoy fighting and killing and this ends up leading to her taking over the Hand even after her memories return and she breaks free of Alexandra's control and kills her.
• Eye Scream: In "The Dark at the End of the Tunnel", Elektra uses her new sai in one of the ways it's best suited, putting out someone's eye.
• Fatal Flaw: Elektra tends to enjoy violence and killing too much and can be over reliant on it. This frequently drives a wedge between her and Matt as unlike her, Matt actively refrains from killing people. She also winds up unintentionally sabotaging the Frank Castle trial when she threatens one of the witnesses in the trial, much to Matt's chagrin.
• Femme Fatale: She frequently uses her stunning good looks for infiltrations and assassinations.
• Fighting Your Friend: In "The Dark at the End of the Tunnel", Elektra goes after Stick for sending an assassin after her.
• Final Boss: Takes over the Hand for the last two episodes of The Defenders.
• Foil:
  • To Karen Page. Both are love interests for Matt, both have very troubled childhoods, both have a "my way is the right way" attitude towards what they do, and both have killed people. Where they differ is that while Karen is wracked with guilt over killing James Wesley, Elektra has no remorse and actually enjoys killing.
  • To Danny Rand. Both are skilled warriors trained since childhood and command considerable wealth. Elektra was raised as an orphan before Stick arranged for her to be adopted by Hugo Natchios and his wife. Danny was born rich and became an orphan. Both were seen by their masters as nothing more than weapons, called "The Iron Fist" and "The Black Sky" instead of their names. But, where Elektra is amoral and self-serving, Danny is altruistic and social. Fittingly, while the rest of the Defenders fight the remaining Fingers of the Hand, Danny and Elektra face off, and Elektra even tries to manipulate Danny over to her side by using their commonalities.
  • To Colleen Wing. Both began as a love interest of a main character (Matt; Danny) and both are very influential on that character. Where they differ is that Elektra was a negative influence on Matt and caused him to neglect his actual friendships with Karen and Foggy, whereas Colleen provided moral support that made Danny a better person. Likewise, Colleen started Iron Fist as a recruiter for the Hand, but broke ways with them after getting a crash course on how terrible they truly are; Elektra started her arc in Daredevil as a member of the Chaste, but then died at the hands of Nobu and was resurrected by the Hand as an assassin.
• Foreshadowing:
  • The color scheme of her outfit (black with red highlights) is very similar to the Hand ninjas outfits in season 2.
  • After taking a drink out of the German beer in Matt's refrigerator, she tells him it tastes like piss. Which is how Stick describes it too.
• The Gadfly: She really enjoys getting under Matt's skin.
• Genius Bruiser: She's both an incredibly deadly assassin and an extremely clever manipulator who's fluent in multiple languages.
• Get Out!: Said word for word by Elektra not once, but twice towards Stick in "Guilty as Sin".
• Good Feels Good: Says as much when she's dying.
• Gorgeous Greek: Naturally, it wouldn't be Elektra without this trope. While she is still very beautiful, she is ethnically Asian from an indeterminate origin that is only Greek by adoption.
• Head-Turning Beauty: Elektra insists that if they work together there will be no sex. Matt is exasperated by her arrogant assumption that every man she meets wants to sleep with her, only for Elektra to point out that in her experience every man does.
• The Heavy: Serves this role for the Hand during The Defenders as she serves as the most active member of the group and is directly responsible for the Hand getting access to both Danny Rand and the dragon bones needed to create the Substance. Fittingly she ends up becoming the Big Bad of the final two episodes after killing Alexandra.
• Heel–Face Turn: In "Guilty as Sin", Elektra attempts to do this when she sends Stick away and decides to stay with Matt. However, shortly afterward she kills again.
• Hero Killer: She kills several members of The Chaste after being revived by The Hand during the events of The Defenders and eventually manages to kill Stick.
• Hijacked by Ganon: In the antepenultimate episode of The Defenders, she suddenly kills Alexandra and takes control of The Hand, usurping her place as the new Big Bad of the series.
• Hitman with a Heart: Despite being a dangerous and sadistic assassin, she genuinely did fall in love with Matt despite being sent by Stick to seduce him in an attempt to recruit him to the Chaste.
• Hoist by Her Own Petard: Nobu kills her with her sais.
• Honey Trap: She was sent by Stick to seduce Matt so he can be recruited into The Chaste's war against The Hand. Unfortunately for Stick, she genuinely ends up falling in love with Matt.
• I Am a Monster: Elektra realizes this after she kills the teenage Hand ninja in "Guilty as Sin".
• Immortal Assassin: Getting resurrected by the Hand made her The Ageless and turned her into an even more dangerous assassin.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: By Nobu, leading to her temporary death. She then uses this tactic to kill Alexandra Reid.
• Improvised Weapon:
  • While fighting Hand ninjas alongside Matt in Midland Circle, she picks up and uses a rebar to fight off their swordsmen.
  • She picks up a corkscrew and uses it in her fight against Jacques but Jacques quickly disarms her of it.
• In Love with the Mark: She was sent by Stick to seduce Matt in order to recruit him into the Chaste but fails because she genuinely fell in love with him.
• In Love with Your Carnage: Elektra seems very... excited by Matt's beatdown on Roscoe Sweeney after the man taunts him about killing Matt's father. She also gives an exhale of satisfaction when killing Alexandra.
• Instant Expert: Because she is a Black Sky, Alexandra says that she will master any weapon she chooses.
• In the Back: She stabs Alexandra from behind while she's chewing out the other founders of The Hand for their incompetence and then takes her role as their leader.
• In the Hood: She wears a dark hooded robe after being revived by the Hand.
• "It" Is Dehumanizing:
  • Elektra takes extreme offense at Nobu calling her "it". It's worth noting however that the Hand nonetheless treat her with reverence, indicating that to them, calling the Black Sky "it" is simply the proper form of addressing such a powerful entity.
  • Elektra grows tired of Alexandra treating her as an "it" and Alexandra refers to Matt by his night-time alias instead of by name and makes this clear.

    Elektra: His name is Matthew. [pulls her sai out of Alexandra] And my name... is Elektra Natchios. You all work for me now. [decapitates Alexandra's dead body] Any questions?

• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Despite her ruthlessness, Elektra does have a kind heart and cares about Matt.
• Jury and Witness Tampering: An unintentional example, as she frightens Gregory Tepper, the medical examiner, into confessing that he forged fake documents and covered up the truth behind the deaths of Frank Castle's family. Unfortunately, this renders his admission inadmissible because it was made under duress.
• Kick Them While They Are Down: She decapitates Alexandra's fresh corpse after claiming her leadership of the Hand.
• Klingon Promotion: Elektra kills Alexandra Reid in "Ashes, Ashes", then takes her place as the leader of the Hand.
• Lady Macbeth: She was a corruptive influence on Matt during their college years, with the two of them breaking and entering into other places and Elektra encouraging Matt to give into his violent urges. Even in the present day, Matt struggles to resist her influence in him.
• Lady in Red: She loves wearing red and the color red in general. It's the color of all of the dresses she wore in the series, the color of her bathrobe, the ninja outfits she wears, and she even colors her nails red. Even the sports car she stole and took a joyride with Matt in was colored red.
• Lightning Bruiser: Following her resurrection, Elektra gains superhuman strength, speed, and durability. Danny and Colleen best sum it up in this exchange:

  Danny: Whoever she was, she moved faster than anyone I've ever seen.
  Colleen: Yeah. She hit like it, too.

• Love Confession: When revealing to Matt that she was sent by Stick to seduce him in order to recruit him into the Chaste, she tells him that she failed because she genuinely fell in love with him.
• Love Redeems: It is ultimately Matt's love that convinces her to go against the Hand instead of joining them.
• The Lost Lenore: Though not really touched upon, it's clear the Elektra was Matt's first love and the one he seriously wanted to spend his life with. Even after all the shits she puts him through (and discovering she's a Black Sky) in Season 2, he still chooses to be with her. When she is killed by Nobu (and gone forever after The Defenders), he is left devastated and her memory still haunts him, as Matt knows damn well that try as he might, no other woman will understand him the way she did.
• Manic Pixie Dream Girl: She was a very dark version of this for Matt in college, and still is to a degree.
• Manipulative Bitch: Matt flat-out accuses Elektra of manipulating him and he's not wrong. When Matt turns down her ask for legal help, she pays the money anyway, knowing that Matt will be driven to find out what she's up to. In the past, she arranges for them to break into the house of the man who murdered Matt's father, then 'accidentally' let slip Matt's name in the hope of forcing Matt to kill him to protect himself. When Matt visits her to ask her about this, it turns out she's known all along that he's Daredevil and has created a scenario where they'll have to fight side-by-side to survive.
• Master Swordswoman: She's incredibly proficient in using swords in combat as seen when she fights using two wakizashi swords. Justified in that she's a Black Sky and she can thus master any weapon she chooses in armed combat.
• McNinja: She's an Asian assassin who's not from Japan and has Greek citizenship.
• Moe Greene Special: While fighting off Hand assassins in "The Dark at the End of the Tunnel", she kills one of them by stabbing them in the eye with her new sais.
• Morality Pet: She's this to Stick, but getting him to admit it is a completely different story. Tragically, his soft spot for her winds up costing him his life.
• Movie Superheroes Wear Black: She wears black clothing with touches of red, rather than her completely red comics getup, when doing assassination work. Post-resurrection, she gets her iconic red comics costume, paired with a long black cloak.
• Ms. Fanservice: Basically any time Elektra is in her costume counts, not to mention the flashback scene in which she's dressed in form-fitting black and when Matt visits her at her penthouse, she's wearing a red silk dressing gown, and then proceeds to get changed, resulting in the audience getting a glimpse of her underwear.
• Muscles Are Meaningless: She gains superhuman strength, speed, durability, and other attributes after being brought back to life with the Ressurection Elixir while still retaining her slender physique from before she got killed and revived.
• My God, What Have I Done?: In "Ashes, Ashes", Elektra gives a brief glance back at Matt and appears to have a remorseful look on her face before escaping out the window with Danny.
• Mysterious Past: It is revealed in "The Dark at the End of the Tunnel" that Elektra's diplomat parents were a family that Stick placed her with to hide her from both the Hand and the Chaste. Stick refuses to say where he found her originally.
• Mythology Gag: Kills an assassin sent to kill her with his own sais, referencing her own death in the comics. Unfortunately, she takes his sais for herself, and her comics fate comes to pass. Her traditional comic outfit gets one during Daredevil in the form of the red dress she wears while infiltrating the Yakuza party. It's not the exact same as her classic Hand outfit, but it's close, and the resemblance is punctuated when she intentionally rips the side of it to move more easily, mirroring the open sides her comic outfit has. Then she gets that traditional comic outfit for real once she is resurrected by the Hand.
• Neck Lift: Grabs John Raymond in this way when she tracks him down to Jessica's apartment, but John shoots himself rather than let her strangle him.
• Neck Snap: Does this to one of Sowande's henchmen to prove to him that she really is the Hand's ultimate weapon.
• Never Bring a Knife to a Fist Fight: Jacques Duchamps was comfortably winning his fight against her until he brought out his sais, which she quickly takes from him and kills him with.
• Never Found the Body: Elektra's body was never found after the collapse of Midland Circle in "The Defenders".
• New Old Flame: Much like in the comics, she's this to Matt. This causes tension for Matt as he had recently started dating Karen and true enough, it became one of the catalysts for their relationship falling apart.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero!: She tries to help Matt out by strong-arming the crooked medical examiner into admitting that he falsified the death certificates on Frank Castle's family. However, because she got him to confess under duress, his confession (and thus Matt's best chance of getting a mistrial) are inadmissible, causing Matt and Foggy to have a fight because Foggy believes Matt was behind Elektra's actions. Matt is EXTREMELY pissed at Elektra for this.
• No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: She gives one to the last sparring partner she fought when Stick had her fight multiple grown men as training. It had gotten so brutal that Stick had to step in and restrain her to prevent her from killing him.
• Not Brainwashed: Elektra claims this in "The Defenders", but Matt doesn't buy it.
• "Not So Different" Remark:
  • Elektra is drawn to Matt because of the darkness she senses in him, and suggests he feels the same for her.
  • Elektra tries to use this on Danny, stating that they both decided to Screw Destiny. However, Danny counters that no, they are not at all alike, since Elektra killed her masters and Danny's masters taught him loyalty.
• Off with Her Head!: Elektra decapitates Alexandra after impaling her through the back. She likely did this to prevent her from coming back because Hand members will come back to life if they aren't beheaded.
• Omniglot: She's fluent in Greek, English, Japanese, and French. She also took Spanish classes at Columbia University.
• One-Woman Army: As the Black Sky, Elektra is established as being one of the best fighters in the world to the point that Alexandra tells her that she has more power and skill in combat than anyone can learn in a single lifetime. This is proven in The Defenders as she can take on all four members of the team, both individually and as a group, and that by the time of the Final Battle she is considered the most dangerous opponent the group has to beat.
• Pay Evil unto Evil: She fatally stabs Alexandra in the chest while she's in the middle of arrogantly boasting about having captured Danny.
• Pint-Sized Powerhouse: As a child, she was able to take down several opponents who were all bigger and stronger than her with nothing but her skills as part of Stick's harsh training.
• Pistol-Whipping: While fighting off Hand members pretending to be Yakuza in Bay Ridge Rail Yard, she takes two emptied submachine guns from them and uses them as melee weapons.
• Playing Drunk: She and Matt pretend to be a drunk couple looking for privacy to fornicate in order to fool the security in the Yakatomi Building during their infiltration.
• Prefers Proper Names: Most people call Matthew Murdock "Matt" or "Matty", but Elektra never calls him either of those nicknames and always calls him by his full first name.
• Professional Killer: She works as an assassin, killing the enemies of the Chaste.
• Race Lift: Élodie Yung is French-Cambodian, but Elektra's characterization firmly establishes her as being Greek. In this continuity, Elektra was an Asian child who was adopted by Ambassador Natchios and his wife, so she's only Greek by adoption.
• Rags to Riches: She was an orphan taken in and raised by Stick at a young age, but was later adopted by Hugo and Christina Natchios, a wealthy couple who couldn't have a child on their own. Getting adopted into a rich family gave Elektra a life of affluence and luxury and she even took control of her adoptive father's business when he passed away.
• Red and Black and Evil All Over: Becomes this after being resurrected as the Black Sky in The Defenders, wearing a new red and black costume that resembles her previous one but with the colors inverted.
• Red Is Heroic: Becomes this when she decides to help Matt in the Season 2 finale.
• Red Is Violent: Elektra tends to wear a red scarf and red clothing, and she can be highly vicious in battle.
• Rich Bitch: How Matt sees her at first.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: After Stick tried to have her murdered, she goes on a bloody warpath to try and kill him. She slaughters every Hand and Chaste member in her quest for vengeance and even threatens to kill Matt if he stands in her way. Fortunately, Matt was able to talk her out of doing so.
• Rule of Symbolism:
  • Elektra is presented as a siren as per her Greek ancestry. Matt's first indication of her presence is aural (the jangling of her bracelets), and she's shown to have a disturbing influence on Matt, inciting him to increasingly reckless and criminal acts in the past, while in the present day her mere pretense makes him agitated as if he's constantly fighting the effect she has on him.
  • The scene where Matt and Elektra are discussing marriage involves her hand feeding him from the tip of a large kitchen knife. That shows such a marriage would be more Unholy Matrimony than Happily Ever After.
  • When Elektra hands Sweeney's torture over to Matt in the flashback, faint thunder rumbles in the background.
• Sadist: She definitely has shades of this. She becomes aroused when Matt brutally beats the man who killed his father, and is positively giddy the entire time, even though Matt is practically in tears. Matt eventually calls her out on this when she keeps showing that she enjoys killing.
• Safety in Indifference: She acts pretty nonchalant about everything, and working with Matt seems to be more of a game than anything else. But as we learn more about her it comes increasingly obvious this is just a mask she uses to prevent herself from being hurt. She genuinely loves Matt but knows he could never love the real her, and also like Matt, Stick managed to give her some abandonment issues.
• Screw Destiny: Matt convinces her to spurn her destiny as the Black Sky and help him take down the Hand. Unfortunately, she gets killed while doing so and the Hand revives her to make her the Black Sky not long afterwards.
• Secret-Keeper: Elektra knows full well that Matt is Daredevil.
• Shadow Archetype: While Karen Page shares a lot of positive qualities with Matt, Elektra has shares more of his darker qualities and even has a more similar backstory. Both were orphans who were trained by Stick, both are very talented at fighting, enjoy the thrill of violence which is why they go out at night fighting other criminals as vigilantes, suffer from attachment issues because of Stick abandoning them at a young age, and have an inner darkness they feel in one another. The difference is that Matt refuses to give in to this darkness by avoiding killing while Elektra has no such compunctions and even enjoys killing people.
• Slashed Throat:
  • She does this to a Chaste member who tried to kill her when she was a child.
  • She also does this to a young member of The Hand who attacked Matt in his own apartment.
• The Smurfette Principle: She's the only female member of the Chaste to be seen so far.
• Sociopathic Hero: Her actress even describes her as a sociopath, stating that the world is a game for her adns he'll get what she wants from it by any means necessary. She's willing to refrain from killing for Matt's sake, but it's made clear she quite enjoys killing. This is the first clue that she is the Black Sky, and she was like this even while being trained.
• The Starscream: In The Defenders, she eventually kills Alexandra and forcefully takes over The Hand. The surviving leaders allow her to do as she wants while plotting to deal with her when the time comes.
• Stealth Hi/Bye: Elektra pulls such an entrance on Matt in the ending of "Penny and Dime". Matt being in a bit of a lovesick daze after kissing Karen is the most likely reason he doesn't notice her right away.
• Strong and Skilled: She was already a natural in martial arts and assassinations, but getting revived as the Black Sky gives her a superhuman physiology that gives her the ability to master any weapon she chooses to wield and allows her to apply her fighting skills masterfully. She's able to easily curbstomp Jessica Jones and Luke Cage because while they're as powerful as her (maybe even more powerful in Luke's case), they're nowhere near as skilled as her in combat.
• Strong as They Need to Be: Subverted in that, after her resurrection, she seems to fight Luke and Jessica with ease, yet fights on par with the Badass Normal ones, but ultimately gets the better of Danny during their fights and holds back when fighting Matt.
• Super-Senses: As the Black Sky, she was able to take on and kill several Hand ninjas in a dark room without much difficulty.
• Super-Speed: Elektra turns into a dangerous Lightning Bruiser after being bought back from the dead by The Hand with the Resurrection Elixir. She's able to overwhelm opponents such as Daredevil and Iron Fist in one-on-one fights with her inhuman agility and speed and kill multiple Hand ninjas in less than 30 seconds. Danny even said that she moves much faster than anybody he's ever encountered.
• Super-Strength: Elektra's resurrection grants her superhuman strength that allows her to send her opponents flying with one hit.
• Super-Toughness: She managed to get back on her feet not long after Jessica rammed into her with an SUV.
• Super Window Jump: After killing Stick and capturing Danny, she makes her escape by crashing through a window.
• Tainted Veins: Has these on her neck after being slashed in the stomach by a Hand ninja's poisoned blade.
• A Tankard of Moose Urine: She takes a bottle of German beer from Matt's fridge and tells him they taste like piss, which is what Stick also said about the drink.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Matt helps her fight bad guys, but he isn't happy about it due to their past and her attitude toward life.
• That Woman Is Dead: Following her resurrection, Elektra, as she was, is no more, for she has become Black Sky.
• Time-Shifted Actor: Lily Chee plays a twelve-year-old Elektra during flashbacks in the episode "The Dark at the End of the Tunnel" while Élodie Yung plays Elektra as an adult.
• Together in Death: She's entirely willing to spend the rest of her life and the Nothing After Death with Matt, whether fighting against him or alongside him.
• Tomato in the Mirror: She's actually a Black Sky child whom Stick abducted and tried to raise on the side of good.
• Trespassing to Talk: She breaks into Matt's apartment to ask for his legal help in her dealings with Roxxon Corporation. In truth, however, she needs more than just his legal expertise.
• Troll: She loves annoying Matt and getting under his skin.
• Troubled Fetal Position: In "Take Shelter", Elektra lies down this way while going to sleep on Matt's bed, slowly regaining her memories.
• Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: She killed her first victim at the age of twelve, all because she wanted to know what killing somebody felt like.
• Truer to the Text: She is more in line with her comic counterpart than Jennifer Garner's iteration of the character, from resembling her comic counterpart more to her moral ambiguity and violent personality.
• Turned Against Their Masters: Elektra kills Stick and Alexandra, seeking to be free from any restraints and obligations. She even tries to appeal to Danny and persuade him to follow suit.
• Twofer Token Minority: Elektra's female and a person of color.
• Tyrant Takes the Helm: While Alexandra Reid was also quite dominant, she at least listened to the other Fingers of the Hand. Elektra flat-out tells them that she doesn't care at all about what they think and directly threatens them.
  • Which doesn't stop them from preparing to dispose of her as soon as she gets them what they need.
• Uncertain Doom: She's last seen getting caught in the collapse of Midland Circle in The Defenders, but as Matt survived, she may well have too.
• Uptown Girl: Matt is from the middle-class whose law firm frequently struggles financially while Elektra's incredibly rich as a result of being adopted into a very wealthy family.
• Use Their Own Weapon Against Them: Elektra kills Jacques by stabbing him with his own sais, and promptly claims said sais for herself.
• The Unfettered: She has no problem with killing, unlike Matt, and in fact is willing to kill him too if he gets in the way of her mission.
• Unrelated in the Adaptation: Unlike in the comics, Hugo and Christina Natchios aren't her biological parents and instead adopted her at Stick's request so she could be safe from The Hand.
• Violently Protective Girlfriend: Not above threatening Matt's witnesses to help him or killing anyone who attacks him. When Alexandra orders her to kill him alongside the other Defenders, she responds by stabbing her In the Back and decapitating her.
• We Can Rule Together: Elektra offers an alliance to Danny in "Fish in the Jailhouse". He turns her down.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Gets one from Matt after she ruins Frank Castle's trial by threatening a witness.
• White Shirt of Death:
  • In "Guilty as Sin", Elektra gets her white shirt splattered when she gives the ninja a Slashed Throat.
  • In "The Man in the Box", Elektra is a white sweater of death after killing Jacques Duchamps.
• Worf Had the Flu: Elektra during much "Guilty as Sin" is weakened after being injured by the Hand ninjas with poisoned weaponry. As a result, she can barely walk and is entirely helpless in a fight. When a Hand ninja attacks Matt in his apartment, her attempt to step in and help gets quickly thwarted by the ninja as a result of her weakened state. Had she been fully healthy, she would have easily killed the ninja on her own.
• Working with the Ex: She teams up with Matt to fight the Hand, despite the two of them being a couple and then breaking up while in college.
• Would Harm a Senior: She pulls no punches fighting Stick when she finds out he tried to have her assassinated. In The Defenders, she ends up killing him and later kills Alexandra to take control of The Hand.
• Would Hurt a Child: Elektra slashes a Hand ninja's throat in "Guilty as Sin", despite him only being a teenager.
• Would You Like to Hear How They Died?: Elektra taunts Danny about the way the Chaste soldiers screamed when she killed them.
• Wrestler in All of Us: While fighting Yakuza thugs with Matt in the Yakatomi building, she takes out one of them with a clothesline.
• Yandere: After regaining her memories after her resurrection, Elektra wants to remain immortal, but also still wants to be with Matt. However, she also continues to fight him because "the game is fun". By their final fight in "The Defenders", the confrontation descends from fighting to flirting. By the time the bomb goes off, Matt and Elektra are actively making out.
• You Are Better than You Think You Are: Matt seems to be the only one who thinks this, and in the end, it's his belief in her that keeps her from joining the Hand after being revealed as the Black Sky.
• You Are Worth Hell: Elektra notes that even if they defeat Nobu, the Hand will keep coming after her. Matt decides that if Elektra is going to spend the rest of her life on the run, he'll go with her, because despite his love for New York, Elektra is the only one who can understand Matt and his world. It doesn't work out that way.
• Young and in Charge: She takes control of the Hand after murdering Alexandra. The other founding members are several centuries old while she had a natural lifespan until her recent death and resurrection, making her this trope.

Kirsten McDuffie

Species: Human

Citizenship: American

Affiliation(s): Murdock & McDuffie

Portrayed By: Nikki M. James

Appearances: Daredevil: Born Again

A former Assistant District Attorney in New York City turned legal partner of Matt Murdock.

• The Matchmaker: She sets up Matt with Dr. Heather Glenn despite the two not really looking for a partner for personal reasons. It works, much to their chagrin.
• Shipper on Deck: For Matt and Heather.

Cherry

Species: Human

Citizenship: American

Affiliation(s): NYPD (formerly), Murdock & McDuffie

Portrayed By: Clark Johnson

Appearances: Daredevil: Born Again

A former New York City Police Department Detective, now working as a private investigator for Murdock & McDuffie.

• Canon Foreigner: Unlike Kirsten, he has no known comic counterpart.
• Jaded Professional: When discussing his reasons for retiring with his partner at Josie's, he states that vigilantes like Daredevil and White Tiger are the future, making traditional law enforcement obsolete.
• Private Detective: Becomes this after retiring from the force.
• Retired Badass: Born Again opens with his police retirement party at Josie's, but he still proves capable when working as a private detective.
• Secret-Keeper: He discovers that Matt is Daredevil in the aftermath of Bullseye's shootup of Josie's bar. One year after the incident, Cherry now works for Matt as a private investigator, even snooping into Wilson Fisk's campaign to see if the man's actually being legit or not.

Malcolm Joseph Ducasse

"I don’t want powers. I mean, I do not want to be on the receiving end of them either, but I don’t know, I just like people too much."

Species: Human

Citizenship: American

Affiliation(s): Kilgrave Victim Support (formerly), Cheng Consulting Management (formerly), Hogarth and Associates (formerly), Alias Investigations

Portrayed By: Eka Darville

Voiced By: Darwin Le Roy (Latin-America Chilean Spanish dub), Alexandre Drummond (Brazilian Portuguese dub)

Appearances: Jessica Jones | The Defenders

"So what, it's just every man for himself, then, huh? Everything I learned in church, all the praying that my mom did for the sick and the dying, all the... all the community projects my dad worked on, basically, everything that they taught me... it was all bullshit? They're idiots and I'm just the only asshole in the world who didn't know?"

A social worker who lives down the hall from Jessica and is her assistant at Alias Investigations.

• Adaptational Badass: In contrast to the socially awkward creep he was in the comics, Malcolm is much more socially aware and eventually grows to be a skilled detective, spy, and can even defend himself in a fight.
• Adaptation Name Change: In the comics, his name was Malcolm Powder.
• Adaptation Personality Change: In the comics, Malcolm is a socially inept, mildly creepy Stalker with a Crush who repeatedly expresses inappropriate thoughts, and writes Daredevil off as a pussy because of his handling of his identity being outed. The show has him as a much nicer guy with much better social skills, with his creepiness being from his drug use and is only temporary, before he gets over it.
• Addled Addict: He's got a drug problem when we first meet him. It turns out that Kilgrave had ordered him to become a junkie. Season 2 then reveals that he actually had been a bit of a drug user even before Kilgrave came along.
• Age Lift: In the comics, he was a high school student but is a young adult who went to college in the MCU.
• Ascended Extra: Malcolm gets to play a much more proactive role in the events of Season 2.
• Because You Were Nice to Me: Attempts to help Jessica in the later parts of the season because she rescued him from Kilgrave.
• Beneath Notice: No one notices a junkie, not even when he's taking covert pictures of his superpowered neighbor for months.
• Break the Cutie: Kilgrave forced him to become an addict. After Jessica saves his life and helps him get clean, he has a new lease on life and tries to do as much good as he can with the Kilgrave support group. All his attempts to help others go horribly awry, and after a misanthropic speech from Robyn he ultimately crosses the Despair Event Horizon, comes to resent Jessica for a time and nearly leaves town; albeit to a life Jessica believes would have been better for him. After a more uplifting talk with Claire he decides to stay on as Jessica's assistant, though he seemed willing to stick around beforehand.
• Celebrity Paradox:
  • Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. reveals Power Rangers series exist In-Universe. Eka Darville portrayed Red Ranger (Scott Truman) in Power Rangers RPM.
  • Planet of the Apes was referenced by Trevor Slattery in Iron Man 3. Malcolm's actor Eka Darville played Sylva in Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes.
• Dark and Troubled Past: His Dogged Nice Guy persona notwithstanding, Season 2 of Jessica Jones reveals that he played around with drugs and hurt people (albeit much more mildly) before meeting Kilgrave. In Season 3, Erik (human evil detector) notes that Malcolm gives him a headache (3 out of 10).
• Darker and Edgier: His counterpart in the Alias comic mostly served as comic relief; this version of the character has a bit more weight to him.
• Decomposite Character: His Dogged Nice Guy socially inept tendencies from the comics seem to have been transferred onto Ruben.
• Distressed Dude: Being a Non-Action Guy, he requires Jessica to save him a few times from Kilgrave. He also gets held hostage by John Raymond.
• Due to the Dead: Attempted, even when he's throwing what's left of Ruben's corpse into the harbor.

  "Bel anteman pa di paradi."^note 

• Girl Friday: Slides into the role of Jessica's assistant in Season 2, taking her calls and helping her through a Heroic BSoD.
• Going Cold Turkey: One night is all that it takes to break him off his drug addiction. Given that the addiction was only because Kilgrave was giving him orders to do so in the first place and he's probably fighting the urge daily even when not under Kilgrave's control, but he's mostly clean by the end of the first season.
• He Cleans Up Nicely: By the end of Season 2, he's cut his hair short and has started putting on suits which make him look real good.
• The Hedonist: Jessica Jones Season 1 implies that Malcolm was a good kid with a bright future before Kilgrave ruined his life by turning him into a junkie, only for Season 2 to establish that he was a college dropout who was a notorious partier long before he met Kilgrave (explaining Kilgrave's excuse "He was an addict waiting to happen!"). And when he kicks the heroin addiction, it's suggested that he simply replaced it with sex.
• Mistaken for Gay: Happens a couple times in Season 2. The first time is a somewhat humorous occasion when Jessica sends him to talk to their landlord about Oscar. The landlord, unbeknownst to Malcolm, is gay, and Jessica was hoping that the man would take a shine to the attractive Malcolm. The second time takes a darker turn where, after tracking down Benowitz to a gay night club, a group of bigots harasses and attack Malcolm, and Trish is forced to save him.
• Mr. Fanservice: He has many shirtless scenes in Season 2, including a very explicit one where Trish undresses him and the camera focuses on her hands squeezing his ass.
• Nice Guy: He was planning on getting into social work before Kilgrave ordered him to get addicted to drugs. After being freed from Kilgrave, he proves to be one of the most altruistic people in the series. He suffers a lot for it, but in the end his good heart won't let him walk away.
• Race Lift: He's white in the comics, but black here.
• Really Gets Around: In Season 2 of Jessica Jones he's recovered, but still struggling, and seems to have turned to casual sex as a coping mechanism.
• Recovered Addict: Jessica's able to help him go cold turkey. For the small appearances he makes in The Defenders, he looks much healthier and happier than he ever did in Season 1 of Jessica Jones (2015).
• Scary Black Man: Invoked by Jessica in one of her more Anti-Hero moments, where, after Ruben tells her "everyone is a little racist", she pushes a drugged-up Malcolm into a (young, attractive) white nurse at a hospital, causing a scene that allows her to steal some sufentanil from a medical supply cabinet. It obviously doesn't sit well on her conscience, but she saw it as necessary to stop Kilgrave.
• Secret-Keeper: In Jessica Jones Season 3, he finds out early on that Trish is the masked vigilante and tries his best to keep that a secret from Jeri. It's rendered naught when Jeri deduces Trish's secret and he later suggests to Jessica outing her Secret Identity to the public after Trish commits too many crimes and murders.
• Static Stun Gun: He uses this against Trish to stop her from going after Gregory Salinger.
• Swapped Roles: After getting clean from his drug addiction, Malcolm attempts to become the emotional support to Jessica. Even giving her advice on how to beat her alcohol addiction.
• Taking Up the Mantle: Season 3 ends with Jessica leaving Malcolm the keys to Alias while she plans to run away to Mexico, essentially leaving the firm to him. While she changed her mind about running away, the fate of Alias remains unknown.
• Took a Level in Badass: By Season 2, Malcolm has gotten himself into shape, works out regularly, and has apparently learned how to fight. He throws down three on one with a group of homophobic thugs who had mistaken him for gay and only gets overwhelmed when they hit his injured shoulder.
• Trademark Favorite Food: He seems to have a preference for peanut butter.
• Used to Be a Sweet Kid: From what Jessica's able to dig up, he seemed like a pretty stand-up guy until Kilgrave recruited him as a spy and got him hooked on drugs.
• We Used to Be Friends: At the end of Jessica Jones Season 2, his relationship with Jessica is pretty much destroyed, with him going so far as to accept Pryce Cheng's job offer.

Patricia "Trish" Walker / The Masked Vigilante / Hellcat

"No one touches me unless I want them to."

Species: Enhanced human

Citizenship: American

Affiliation(s): Hollywood Records (formerly), WNEX New York (formerly)

Portrayed By: Rachael Taylor, Catherine Blades (teen), Audrey Grace Marshall (young)

Voiced By: Jessica Toledo (Latin-America Chilean Spanish dub), Priscila Amorim (Brazilian Portuguese dub)

Appearances: Jessica Jones | Luke Cage ^note  | The Defenders

"We should have a codeword. If you say it, you're still you. Something you would never say. Like 'pickle juice' or 'sardines.'"

A former model and child star known as "Patsy" who is Jessica's adoptive sister and best friend. Formerly the host of the popular radio show Trish Talk on WNEX radio, currently selling women's fashion and uplifting quotes on a home-shopping-network show.

• Absurdly Sharp Claws: Trish absolutely mangles Sallinger's face with just her fingernails.
• Abusive Parents: Upon seeing the bruises from her Krav Maga training, Jessica assumes they're from her mother. In a flashback to their teenage years, she tells Jessica that her mother hit her with a People's Choice Award. We later see her mom trying to make Trish vomit because she ate something unapproved. And Dorothy even pimped Trish out to Max Tatum for roles.
• Accidental Murder: During her vigilante crusade trying to expose and take down criminals, she accidentally murders a Dirty Cop who's been killing young drug dealers and stealing their drugs and money.
• Action Girl: Despite several characters (including Kilgrave) having superpowers that vastly outclass her, Trish manages to be useful to Jessica and other characters through her other traits, such as guile, fame, and money. She's also a practitioner of Krav Maga.
• Adaptation Dye-Job: Trish has Rachael Taylor's natural blonde color. However, she wore a red wig in the It's Patsy days, much to her annoyance. She has to don one to perform at a kid's birthday party in Season 2 as a favor for a Metro-General staffer. She also has her actress' green eyes instead of her comic book counterpart's blue eyes.
• Adaptational Villainy: Her comic counterpart is a moral superhero, while Trish as her vigilante alter ego ends up becoming murderous in her methods.
• Adaptation Name Change: Played with. While she's referred to as "Trish" — instead of "Patsy" as in comics — the latter was her Stage Name as a kid. Her birth name, Patricia, remains the same.
• Adaptational Angst Upgrade: Her childhood here is far worse than in the comics as both her parents were incredibly abusive towards her.
• Adaptation Origin Connection: While Patsy Walker and Jessica Jones do have a bit of history, their backstories were never this heavily entwined to the point that they knew each other from childhood, and they were most certainly not adoptive sisters.
• Addiction Displacement: She used to be addicted to alcohol and drugs, which she replaced with Simpson's inhaler, and then finally superheroics.
• Addled Addict: She takes a whiff of Simpson's inhaler in Season 2. She enjoys the perks, but the side effects get worse and worse until she can no longer function and almost dies.
• Attention Whore: While Trish has already acclaimed fame as a national TV and radio star, she seeks attention as a hero. In Season 3, she actively shows herself on camera in her disguise multiple times, which severely puts a dent in Jessica's relationship with the police and takes away Detective Costa's resources to handle Sallinger.
• Ax-Crazy: She starts to go on a murdering spree after killing Gregory Sallinger.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: Trish's brief experience with Simpson's super-empowering pills nearly kills her. Following his death, she starts using his inhaler which has a similar but weaker effect. Her powers fully manifest and she begins beating suspects to death. The series ends with her going to the Raft.
• Big Bad Ensemble: With Gregory Sallinger for Season 3 of Jessica Jones. While Gregory serves as the Arc Villain for the first half, the second half features Trish Walker killing criminals and becomes another threat that Jessica has to face, along with Sallinger. Trish eventually becomes the sole Big Bad of Season 3 after she kills Sallinger.
• Big Bad Slippage: Trish starts out season three slowly mending her relationship with Jessica while moonlighting as a vigilante. After Sallinger kills her mother her sanity begins to degrade, going on to become a Serial Killer as she murders criminals. Her murder of Sallinger once he's already been apprehended cement her spot as the main antagonist.
• Black-and-White Insanity: Trish's oversimplified moral code eventually reaches this. She winds up brutalizing and outright killing people she considers "bad" which ends up taking a massive toll on her sanity to the point where she starts attacking and trying to kill people who aren't evil whatsoever, like Jessica and Kith Lyonne.
• Black-and-White Morality: In contrast to the cynical Jessica, Trish has a much simpler idea of right and wrong and genuinely believes that she knows which is which, something that she is called out on repeatedly by Jessica and the various other Grey and Gray characters. This is taken to its natural conclusion by the end of Season 2, shooting Jessica's mother without hesitation and becoming an Unscrupulous Hero.
• Blatant Lies: When Malcolm finds out she's using Simpson's inhaler, Trish claims it is perfectly safe despite admitting she has no idea what it actually does, only that it makes her feel good and does not see it as an addiction. Malcolm doesn't buy a word of it.
• Blue Is Heroic: Played straight, then subverted. She wears a dark blue bomber jacket, beanie, and mask when she becomes a vigilante and does manage to expose a number of criminals. However, her repeated failures to help Jessica catch a Serial Killer, her mother getting murdered by said killer, and her dormant narcissism end up turning her into a Knight Templar who brutalizes and outright murders wrongdoers. She also switches to a black bomber jacket and beanie afterwards, further moving away from this trope.
• Cain and Abel: Eventually, she and Jessica becomes this by the end of Season 3 with her being Cain as she tries to kill her adoptive sister and best friend.
• Celebrity Masquerade: In Season 3, she maintains her public persona as a TV and radio star while being a masked vigilante who helps Jessica in her investigations.
• Celebrity Paradox: Jessica references Grey's Anatomy in one episode. Trish's actress Rachael Taylor played Lucy Fields in eight episodes of the show.
• Chronic Hero Syndrome: She becomes obsessed with being a hero, and eventually needs to escalate to the point of killing whoever she believes deserves it.
• Combat Parkour: Because of her newfound superhuman agility, Trish often employs acrobatics in hand-to-hand combat.
• Composite Character:
  • This iteration of the character seems to blend the "former child star" aspect of mainstream Patsy, the "media personality" aspect of Ultimate Patsy, and being Jessica's blond-haired best friend in place of Carol Danvers.^note  She is also a composite character of Jessica's unnamed adoptive sister.
  • While she does become Hellcat in Season 3, This version of Trish actually draws more similarities from Yuri Watanabe/Wraith, being an ally to a superhero before turning against them upon losing faith in the system and becoming a murderous vigilante dispatching her own twisted sense of justice.
• Crazy-Prepared: She's turned her apartment into a fortress, with a reinforced front door and windows, security cameras, and a panic room.
• Cruel to Be Kind: Trish shoots and kills Jessica's mother because the police were after her mother and would have killed them both otherwise. Jessica has a hard time even looking at Trish afterward.
• Comic-Book Movies Don't Use Codenames: She's never referred to as "Hellcat" in-universe, just as "the masked vigilante" and later "the masked killer".
• Dark Action Girl: Trish becomes this after she killed Gregory Sallinger to avenge her mother.
• Decomposite Character: Claire gets Hellcat's clawed gauntlets in Iron Fist, implying that it's going to be her rather than Trish who ultimately takes the role. However, Trish gradually slips into the Hellcat persona in Season 2 as she gets high off Simpson's inhaler, and at one point uses her fingernails to claw at the face of one of the homophobes that attacked Malcolm outside a gay bar. By the end of the season, she has obtained superhuman reflexes as a result of the operation performed on her by Dr. Malus.
• Defrosting Ice Queen: Trish was not very welcoming or nice towards Jessica when her mother first adopted her, but she started to defrost after Jessica defended her against her mother.
• Deuteragonist: Of Jessica Jones. She has the most screentime after the titular character, has the second most appearances (as she was only absent in one episode), and is overall the second most-significant character in the entire series.
• Disappeared Dad: No mention is made of her father. Her mother's treatment of her implies that her childhood starlet career was their primary financial source.
  • Subverted in Season 3, when she finally tells the story of why her father was gone — apparently he was even more abusive than her mother, but that her mother 'took all the beatings' for her and Trish, but was too proud to inform the authorities. Taking matters into her own hands, Trish covered herself in her mother's blood, ran to a neighbor, and told them her father had just beaten her.
• Distaff Counterpart: By Season 3, Trish has become one to Davos, being a Defender's adopted sibling and closest friend before going against them once they develop powers and become murderous vigilantes.
• Dude Magnet: She has attracted the likes of Will Simpson, Malcolm Ducasse, and Griffin Sinclair.
• Easily Forgiven: She's very quick to forgive Simpson for trying to kill her, even becoming lovers with him. Jessica does take concern over this.
• Embarrassing Nickname: Trish hates being called Patsy since she doesn't like being reminded of her abusive childhood. Especially when it gets used by sleazy guys when sexually harassing her.
• Empowered Badass Normal:
  • When Simpson beats the tar out of an injured Jessica, Trish takes the same Super Serum he did and thoroughly kicks his ass. It's Jessica who beats him, though.
  • In Season 2, her jealousy of Jessica's superpowers comes to a head after she runs out of Simpson's inhaler, and she has Karl Malus perform the same procedure he used to give Jessica and her mother powers. Jessica tries to interrupt it and it nearly kills Trish, but the end of the final episode reveals she has started developing superpowers.
• Evil All Along: Jessica concludes that neither losing Dorothy nor getting her superpowers made Trish a Knight Templar. She always had it inside of her because Dorothy beat it into her and she first witnessed it when she shot and killed Jessica's mom.
• Evil Counterpart:
  • She becomes one for Jessica Jones after developing superpowers. Both are female vigilantes in New York City who fight crime to make their home a better place, but since Jessica's experience gives her a Grey-and-Gray Morality view of things, allowing Jessica to develop restraints to keep her from losing her moral compass such as not killing criminals unless it is completely necessary, Trish's naivety causes her to have a Black-and-White Morality view, and quickly believes that Murder Is the Best Solution when dealing with criminals.
  • She has also become one for Matt Murdock. Both have similar fighting styles, powers, and reflexes, and both take up vigilante crime-fighting while having a Secret Identity. However Matt Murdock has a much stronger moral code and Morality Chains that prevents him from becoming no better than the people he's fighting, while Trish would sacrifices hers for a more lethal approach, eventually driving her friends away and becoming the bad guy.
• Face–Heel Turn: Has one in Season 3 after going too far and killing three criminals. She eventually attacks and threatens numerous people while she carries out her own twisted definition of justice.
• Fallen Heroine: She gradually Jumps Off The Slippery Slope in Season 3, committing multiple murders and eventually trying to kill Jessica herself.
• Fallen-on-Hard-Times Job: She works as a host for a vapid fashion infomercial show in Season 3 and clearly despises it, but after her on-air meltdown on her radio show in Season 2, it was likely the only real shot she had at still having anything resembling a career.
• Fangirl: Just look at her face when Matt appears to help Jessica protect her from Murakami. Starstruck doesn't begin to do it justice.
• Fatal Flaw:
  • Her ruthless pursuit of power and validation. Trish is incredibly obsessed with becoming a superhero, as heroism makes her feel validated. This unhealthy obsession makes her incredibly reckless and impulsive, jeopardizing the people around her.
  • Trish also tends to have rather simplistic morals. Unlike Jessica and other characters, Trish doesn't account for any moral complexities or grey areas in other people as to her there's only good and evil and right and wrong. This ends up reaching its natural conclusion in Season 3, where she ends up killing people just because she perceives them as bad.
• Fate Worse than Death: Due to her vigilante killing spree she ultimately ends up imprisoned in the Raft for the rest of her life.
• Final Boss: In Season 3, after killing Sallinger she becomes the main antagonist in the final episode. Her masked vigilantism has become murderous and Jessica decides she has to either convince her to turn herself in or take her down herself.
• Foil:
  • To Matt Murdock. Both are willing to disappoint/disregard their closest friends in their need to play the hero, and while exhibiting no sense of self-preservation. Both are also adrenaline junkies, although Matt has a slightly (if not considerably) stronger sense of justice than Trish. Likewise, while the very much normal Foggy is constantly trying to talk down his pal with heightened senses, it's the gifted Jessica who is constantly trying to talk down her 'normal' sister.
  • To Karen Page. Both are blonde, idealistic reporters with troubled pasts who are also the most prominent advocates of their superhero friend (boyfriend in Karen's case). But whereas Karen constantly warns Matt to be cautious so he doesn't get killed or exposed, Trish has always wanted Jessica to do more with her powers and is surprised that she doesn't want to be a superhero. Trish and Karen are also both people who have experienced extreme degrees of powerlessness. The difference is that Karen, who only recently entered a world containing superheroes, seeks a mundane type of power: investigative journalism. At the same time, Trish grew up living in Jessica’s shadow and longed for the extreme: superpowers.
• Foolish Sibling, Responsible Sibling: At first, Trish is the responsible sibling to Jessica's foolish sibling as Jessica's an alcoholic who has a poor temper and tends to quickly resort to violence while she's much more sociable and charismatic. However, this slowly gets reversed in the following seasons as Trish becomes more reckless due to gaining superpowers and her obsession to getting them beforehand while Jessica becomes more careful and patient due to her experiences with more dangerous adversaries.
• Former Child Star: Though she initially seems to be better adjusted to the world than some other examples of this trope. This is primarily due to Jessica's influence, as she was full-blown this trope in the flashback when she was under her mother's thumb.
• Fragile Speedster: Despite being more agile than Jessica thanks to her superpowers, Jessica is still far stronger than her and can easily throw her around and knock her out with one clean punch.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: Season 3 explores this in-depth. In the very beginning, she was a child of a single mom struggling to make ends meet. Through her childhood, she built up to celebrity status. She continues this until she finally gains superpowers. She falls down the slippery slope, beating suspects to death, and eventually going to super-villain prison.
• Good Feels Good: Deconstructed, and in a pretty cynical way. Trish genuinely wants to help people, but mostly not out of any real altruism, but because it makes her feel special and loved. Her forceful upbringing as a child celebrity by her mother Dorothy played a big part in this.
• Graceful Loser: After Jessica stops her in the Season 3 finale and she is arrested, Trish finally understands that her crazed revenge spree was wrong. She willingly accepts her sentencing to The Raft and gives Jessica an accepting smile when she is hauled off.
• Green-Eyed Monster: She'll never admit it, but she's very jealous of Jessica for having superpowers because she wants to be a hero. That's why she can't understand why Jessica doesn't want to be a hero and constantly encourages her to be one. Eventually, her jealousy gets the better of her and she spends all of Season 2 trying to get superpowers and eventually succeeds.
• Hair of Gold, Heart of Gold: To the point that she wanted to have Jessica's powers in order to be a proper hero, something her adoptive sister avoids. Subverted when her desire for powers begins to show that she's not nearly as altruistic or considerate as she insists she is.
• Hard Work Hardly Works: Despite spending months with training and honing her new abilities, she is still no match for Jessica whatsoever.
• Hates Being Touched: Due to being abused by her mother. At one point, Trish throws a fan who unwisely touches her shoulder to get an autograph.
• Headphones Equal Isolation: In the season one finale, she wears headphones and plays a song at max volume to prevent Kilgrave from commanding her, as his commands would require whoever he's trying to command be able to hear them.
• Healing Factor: She gains this as one of the temporary powers she gets from using Simpson's inhaler.
• Heel Realization: It takes a beating from Jessica, an arrest, and being sentenced to imprisonment on The Raft, but at the end of the third season, Trish understands that her murder of several criminals and fighting the law has made her one of the bad guys. When Costa reads her the list of charges she's facing, the final reading of the attempted murder charge against her own sister really hammers home the realization.
• Heroic Rematch: When Trish first meets Simpson, it's during a moment where he beats her in a fight and almost kills her, only to be saved by Jessica. Later on, an empowered Simpson is trying to kill Jessica, but Trish takes his Super Serum and fights him, but is unable to beat him.
• I Did What I Had to Do: How she sees killing Jessica's mother Alisa. Unfortunately, this only further strains her already poor relationship with Jessica as murderous psychopath or not, Alisa was still Jessica's mother.
• I Just Want to Be Special: When Jessica expresses her lack of desire to be a superhero, Trish can't believe she doesn't want that responsibility, and openly wishes she had powers too. To the point that she takes, and then gets hooked on, Simpson's inhaler, trying to get powers. As pointed out by Jessica's mom, the only reason why Trish is so desperate to capture Karl Malus is that she wants him to give her powers. Furthermore, not only is Alisa correct in making this call, but Trish's desperation for powers causes her to take increasingly unsavory actions to get them. This involves manipulating Malcolm's desire to protect Jessica, and his affection for her, to get him to help her track Dr. Malus down. Then she knocks out, ties up, and stuffs Malcolm in the trunk of her car when he tries to bring Dr. Malus in. Then finally, she kidnaps Dr. Malus and threatens to shoot Malcolm if he tries to stop her. She, eventually, even admits she wants to be special, stating "Haven't you ever felt powerless?"
• The Idealist: Such that, after a passionate speech, Simpson says that all she needs is "a flag and a horse." She's constantly pushing Jess to be the hero she sees her as. Season 2 casts some doubt on this, as while she claims she wants to do the right thing and help people, the moment she confronts Karl Malus, someone she's been intent on stopping as part of IGH, she instead uses him as a way to get herself superpowers and after the process nearly kills her, she accuses Jess of ruining everything and calls her a coward for not using her powers for heroism.
• Improbable Aiming Skills: She manages to shoot Alisa Jones in the head with a revolver while she was sitting in a moving ferris wheel carriage. It's implied that her newly-gained Super-Reflexes has something to do with this.
• Innate Night Vision: One of the powers she develops in Season 3 is the ability to see in the dark, efficient enough that she no longer even bothers with switching the light on in her apartment to read. It's her one advantage over Jessica when they ultimately come to blows, as her agility otherwise can't match Jessica's strength.
• Instantly Proven Wrong: She rants to Jessica about how she's superior hero material and then winds up declaring that she's unstoppable. Jessica, who had recently just lost her spleen, promptly knocks her down to the ground with a single punch.

  Jessica: So, I've learned something recently. Something you should know. No one's unstoppable.

• In the Hood: She wears a hoodie to disguise herself as Jessica to fool Kilgrave in the season one finale.
• It's All About Me: In Season 2, her developing insecurities and constant usage of Simpson's inhaler result in her attempting to desperately acquire powers for herself while using those around her and disregarding their viewpoints. After waking up and learning from Jessica that Dr. Malus (who she kidnapped so he could give her powers) was dead, her first response was regret that the experiment had failed.
• Jumping Off the Slippery Slope: After getting powers, she starts committing morally questionable acts, starting with killing Jessica's mother Alisa which strains their relationship. The murders she commits were justified or at least understandable to an extent, but she becomes a full-on villain when she tries to kill people who aren't evil like Kith Lyonne and even Jessica herself out of her twisted definition of justice.
• Knight Templar: She fully becomes this once Sallinger kills her mother, killing him and other wrongdoers like dirty cops and arsonists under the belief that she's being a hero because she's ridding the world of these scum when in reality, she's becoming unhinged and is venting her anger out on these people.
• Leeroy Jenkins: Once she gets her powers and becomes the superhero she always wanted to be, she frequently opts for the most aggressive and straightforward approach, much to Jessica's chagrin. This ends up being deconstructed as the consequences of her recklessness takes a toll on her mental state and she starts taking more and more aggressive approaches that make her more villainous than heroic.
• Mistaken for Gay: When Jessica is about Dorothy that Trish now has superpowers thanks to Karl Malus' experiments, Dorothy thinks they're about to tell her they're a couple. She seems rather unbothered by it except that believing that Trish can do better than her.
• Morality Pet: For Jessica. Early on we see their bond and Trish helps her become more heroic. Even Kilgrave is aware that Jessica doesn't seem to love anyone but Trish, which is why he intended to leave New York together with Trish and make her his plaything, to torture Jessica.
• My God, What Have I Done?: At the very end of Season 3, when she finally realizes that all her extreme vigilantism and murdering has made her the "bad guy".
• Mythology Gag:
  • When presenting Jessica with a prototype Jewel costume, she briefly dons the blue mask it comes with, reminiscent of her Hellcat persona◊ in the comics. Trish wore a red wig for her "Patsy Walker" role. In the comics, Patsy has red hair.
  • After getting powers of her own in Season 3, Trish tries on several super outfits of her own. One of them is a complete replica of the Hellcat costume, sash and all. Her reaction is an emphatic "hell no".
• Narcissist: In Season 3, Trish fully develops into one.
  • Trish fully believes that she has the high ground and makes the world better by killing criminals, viewing herself as a hero.
  • Having gained the powers she always wanted, she seeks "justice" by fighting crime, but is upset that she does not get the gratification of recognition by the public. It's telling that whenever she seemingly does a good deed and is thanked for it, she responds with a "You're welcome."
  • Despite Jessica managing to gather the evidence to lock Sallinger in prison forever, Trish chooses to get Revenge Before Reason and brutally murders him in cold blood.
• Never Be Hurt Again: She puts on a strong front, but Trish is clearly shaken by years of living with Dorothy, the attempt on her life by a superpowered Simpson, and the constant threat of Kilgrave. To the point that she becomes obsessed with getting superpowers, even telling Dr. Malus that she feels "powerless."
• Never My Fault:
  • Throughout Season 2, Trish constantly manipulates people in her quest for powers, and never outright takes responsibility for them, and when confronted with her actions either downplays her role or gives a weak apology. Even her mother calls her on it.
  • Again in Season 3, Trish tries to reconcile with Jessica, and in a letter that she intended to send to Jessica she eventually thinks that she perhaps was wrong to kill Jessica's mother... only to delete the part she just wrote and instead insisting that she saved the world from a mass murderer.
  • After going on a killing spree, her presence causes Erik to bleed from his eyes, she's immediately blames his own guilt for it.
• Nice Character, Mean Actor: As "Patsy" sings about wanting to be everyone's friend, Trish sneers at attending her sister's convalescence for publicity reasons.
  • Lampshaded when she's forced to headline a Metro-General staff member's kid's birthday party as Patsy to get the employee to give her Metro-General files on Jessica's hospital stay, and curses in earshot of kids, prompting one of the adults to say, "Patsy's kinda mean..."
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero!: After seeing Kilgrave command his parents to kill themselves, she attempts to shoot him but this ends up breaking the soundproof cell he's being held in and gives him the opportunity to escape. He even attempted to kill Trish herself by commanding her to shoot herself, but fortunately her revolver had run out of ammo.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: It's Patsy was more like a Hannah Montana ripoff, though the dating is a bit off. And Trish's mother is a frightening Dina Lohan figure, who spends her days counting her cash and brainstorming new ways to pimp out her family.
• No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: When she goes on a vengeful vigilante crusade after Sallinger kills her mother, she inflicts very brutal beatdowns on wrongdoers that almost always ends with them being beaten to death. Sallinger ends up being her last victim before Jessica manages to stop her.
• Not Wearing Tights: Once she becomes a vigilante. Although it's not fully Movie Superheroes Wear Black given Trish's makeshift costume still has Hellcat's blue and yellow colors.
• Old Shame: Her past as a child star, especially the "Patsy" persona, as she got raped by a movie director and started her descent to drug abuse and alcohol addiction in her later years. She's incredibly uncomfortable when she has to perform as Patsy again at a kid's birthday party to get Jessica's medical files.
• One-Hit Wonder: In-Universe. Her movie career never did pan out, with Snatch and Grab being her only box office success.
• Only Friend: Before Malcolm became Jessica's friend and assistant, Trish was Jessica's one and only friend, and Trish really was the only family she had.
• The Paragon: In Season 1. Trish has Karen Page's levels of idealism, and always keeps it no matter what happens to her. Her idealism and goodness are so infectious that it's what drives Simpson insane and what helps Jessica overcome her apathy and cynicism and ultimately defeat Kilgrave. This trope becomes deconstructed and subverted to Hell and back in the following two seasons.
• Pay Evil unto Evil: All three characters that she ends up killing in Season 3 of Jessica Jones are written to be as loathsome as possible, to make it clear that her moral compass is more or less on par with The Punisher.
• Phrase Catcher: "It's Patsy" from her child star days.
• Primary-Color Champion: Her outfit as the masked vigilante is a dark blue bomber jacket, mask, and beanie while wearing a yellow t-shirt underneath. It's later subverted when she turns into a Knight Templar and starts wearing a black bomber jacket and beanie to signify her Face–Heel Turn.
• Properly Paranoid: She knows what Kilgrave can do. So she's set up a safe house and learned Krav Maga.
• Put on a Prison Bus: Season 3 ends with her being transported to The Raft via a helicopter.
• Rage Quit: Her addiction to Simpson's inhaler in Season 2 leads her to get increasingly aggravated until she blows up in the middle of a radio interview, quits the show, and storms out of the studio.
• Real Life Superpowers: Trish is beautiful, wealthy, famous, charismatic, extremely clever, a great fighter. She's halfway to being her own superhero. Oh wait...
• Recovered Addict: Was addicted to pills for a spell. In the present, she very consciously does not drink alcohol, and only keeps liquor around for Jessica. Until she gets addicted to Simpson's power-inducing inhaler and things go from bad to worse.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: She's the levelheaded Blue Oni to Jessica's hot-tempered Red Oni. It gets reverse in Season 3 after Trish gets her powers.
• Related in the Adaptation: Despite having literally no connection to Jessica in the comics, she's her adoptive sister in the TV show.
• Relationship Upgrade: Trish hooks up with Malcolm midway through Season 2 after calling things off with Griffin. Then it gets deconstructed in that it starts because of their sexual urges. Trish instigates it when she takes another dose of Simpson's drug inhaler and sleeps with Malcolm on impulse. As time goes by, it's clear that they've been overcome by their negative traits and current issues (Malcolm having traded his drug addiction for sex; Trish's addiction to Simpson's drug inhaler, and insecurity about having no powers). Even Malcolm realizes this and how toxic their relationship is but initially can't bring himself to resist. The final straw is when Trish manipulates Malcolm into finding Dr. Malus so she can use him to get superpowers, knocks Malcolm out and tosses him in the trunk of her car, and threatens him with a gun when he breaks out.
• Revenge Before Reason: Jessica had already captured and exposed Gregory Sallinger and he was on his way to be tried for his crimes, but Trish decides to barge in and brutally murder him anyways out of vengeance for killing her mother.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: She devolves into violent, murderous rage after Sallinger brutally kills her mother. She ends up killing or at the very least brutally beating several people up and eventually manages to succeed in killing Sallinger after he's already been exposed by Jessica and apprehended by the police. She eventually tries killing Jeri for representing Sallinger as a lawyer and eventually tries to kill Jessica for getting in her way and eventually outing her Secret Identity.
• Sanity Slippage: Trish grows progressively more erratic and unstable over the course of Season 2 as she abuses Will Simpson's inhaler, culminating in an on-air meltdown and Rage Quit as she turns to Dr. Malus to receive superpowers, and ends the season by shooting Alisa in cold blood. At the start of Season 3, she appears to be more composed at first, but quickly shows herself to be no less disordered, and she spends the season going further and further off the deep end as she becomes a murderous vigilante.
• Secret Identity: Due to how being a celebrity means she'll be immediately be recognized by potential witnesses, Trish has to cover her face and head when being a vigilante. This all comes crashing down when Jessica outs her identity by the end of Season 3 because she's committed too many crimes to be a hero and has to be stopped.
• Serial-Killer Killer: Deconstructed. She goes after serial killers and other scumbags like domestic abusers and arsonists, but she grows more and more murderous and psychotic the more she does it. After all, killing people affects someone's mental state negatively in many ways.
• She Who Fights Monsters: In Season 3, Trish goes too far in bringing criminals to justice, starting with accidentally killing two. However, she eventually comes to think that by killing bad people, she is making the world better, and permanently goes off the deep end when she beats Sallinger to death.
• Sibling Team: Trish helps Jessica out whenever she is needed, like when they tried catching Kilgrave or locating IGH. In Season 3, she teams up with Jessica to catch Gregory Sallinger. However, Trish's acts of vigilantism eventually force Jessica to arrest Trish.
• Sibling Yin-Yang: Trish serves as a foil to Jessica. While Trish is blonde, feminine, idealistic, and very energetic, Jess is raven-haired, tomboy, pessimistic, calmer, and more reserved. Jessica didn't ask for powers and doesn't want to be a hero, while Trish actively wants powers to become a hero. And while Jessica is ultimately a selfless Jerk with a Heart of Gold, Trish turns out to have a very narcissistic nature. Jessica also was able to handle the trauma she endured without losing her way, while Trish completely snaps and willingly goes the extra mile to kill the people she deems evil.
• Sleek High-Rise Apartment: She lives in a nice apartment in Tribeca. Following Jessica's experience with Kilgrave, Trish turns the place into a fortress, outfitting the place with bulletproof windows and a steel-reinforced front door with a security camera system, and converting Jessica's old bedroom into a private gym where she practices krav maga lessons.
• Super-Reflexes: One of the first few hints that Karl Malus' experiment has successfully given her superpowers is when she manages to catch her phone with her foot when she drops it after someone bumps into her.
• Super-Toughness: Malus' experiments grants her a low level variant of this. She can survive falling from heights as she can absorb the shock of landing and while other people get seriously injured or killed by Jessica's punches, Trish only gets knocked out by them.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
  • Trish has trained extensively to become a formidable combatant but when she comes up against a Kilgrave-controlled Simpson, an individual with considerable military training and superior strength, she finds herself easily overpowered during their confrontation and is nearly strangled to death.
  • In Season 2, Simpson's inhaler eventually runs out on her and she goes through a period of withdrawal symptoms.
• Sympathy for the Devil:
  • She believes that Will Simpson was a good guy before being involved in the military program. Jessica, on the other hand, disagrees.
  • Subverted when it comes to Alisa Jones, however, who Trish dismisses and practically demonizes despite the situation being obviously very complicated and painful for Jessica. She also shows no remorse for killing her and has the audacity to believe this is something she and Jessica can just hash out over coffee.
• Time-Shifted Actor: Rachael Taylor plays Trish as an adult while Audrey Grace Marshall plays her as a child and Catherine Blades plays her as a teenager.
• Tomboy and Girly Girl: The Girly Girl to Jessica's tomboy. She wears bright clothing and is far more primmer than Jessica. Granted, the same could be said of the Hulk.
• Took a Level in Badass: She was a victim in the past, but by the time we meet her she's become proficient in Krav Maga, a form of martial arts that the world's most elite special forces are trained in.
• Took a Level in Jerkass: Season 2 sees Trish spiraling after continuous use of the combat enhancement inhaler culminating in her threatening and manipulating those around her all in an effort to gain powers. And she only gets worse in Season 3.
• Two First Names: Her surname "Walker" can also be used as a given name. The trope also applies to her actress.
• Ungrateful Bitch: When Jessica saves her from Karl Malus' experiment, she doesn't thank Jessica for doing so, instead calling her a coward and berating her for not killing her psychopathic mother, claiming that she is the one who deserves superpowers.
• Vigilante Man: Turns into one in Season 3. She is the one who kills Jessica's mother, Alisa, at the end of Season 2 and in Season 3 eventually goes so far as to murder the people she thinks are evil.
• The Voice: She has a voice-only role in Luke Cage, discussing Luke on her show after he reveals himself to the public.
• Weak, but Skilled:
  • Trish does not have superpowers but has been training in Krav Maga. She's able to easily flip Jessica onto the ground.
  • Also becomes this in Season 3 after gaining superpowers. She still lacks super strength and can't hope to win against Jessica in a straight fight, but her enhanced agility and Super-Reflexes combined with her training allow her to fight efficiently, and her Innate Night Vision means she can easily use the dark to her advantage while not being bothered by it. When facing Jessica in later episodes, her primary strategy is to shut off the lights to give herself an edge.
• Weight Woe: Projected. It is so far unknown whether Dorothy forcing Trish to throw up when she believed her daughter had eaten too much resulted in actual bulimia since the flashback shows Trish resisting.
• We Used to Be Friends: Jessica disowns her after the Season 2 finale for shooting her mother. They reconcile in Season 3, but eventually, fall apart again.
• Wife-Basher Basher: Because her rough childhood, Trish has a special hatred for these domestic abusers. While hiding out in a hotel following her thwarted attempt to kill Gregory Sallinger after he killed her mother, she beats the hell out of the guy in the next room after hearing him loudly beat his girlfriend. Later on, she beats the hell out of Demetri Patseras who used to abuse his wife before they got separated and divorced after Jeri tells her about him.
• Wrong Genre Savvy: She goes about assuming all the events in Season 3 are culminating in her Superhero Origin Story. She ends up hindering Jessica's efforts and even after murdering Sallinger, she still thinks she can continue leading a double life, and that Jessica will eventually back off. It's not until after she is arrested and the list of her crimes is read to her that reality sinks in and she realizes she has become "the bad guy."
• You Killed My Mother: Once Gregory Sallinger offs Dorothy, Trish first attacks him, and then downright murders him.

Jeryn "Jeri" Hogarth

"The real world is not about happy endings. It's about taking the life you have, and fighting like hell to keep it."

Species: Human

Citizenship: American

Affiliation(s): Rand Enterprises (formerly); Hogarth, Chao & Benowitz (formerly); Hogarth and Associates

Portrayed By: Carrie-Anne Moss

Voiced By: Maureen Herman (Latin-America Chilean Spanish dub), Melise Maia (Brazilian Portuguese dub)

Appearances: Jessica Jones | Daredevil | Iron Fist | The Defenders

"My firm is going to need a very resourceful attorney, someone like you, who's not afraid to take on riskier, non-traditional cases."

A former intern from the legal department of Rand Enterprises, now a managing partner at Hogarth, Chao & Benowitz LLP and recurring client of Alias Investigations.

• Adaptational Attractiveness: Carrie-Anne Moss is more of a looker than Jeri's comic counterpart, a schlubby middle-aged man.
• Adaptational Jerkass: Though he could be a jerk, Jeryn Hogarth was a relatively Nice Guy who looked out for Danny, was loyal to him and his friends, and was a highly moral figure. Jeri, on the other hand, starts Jessica Jones considerably less moral than her comic counterpart, cheats on her wife, engages in criminal behavior and betrays Jessica to Kilgrave without Kilgrave using his powers on her, resulting in three people's deaths. Wendy's death shakes her considerably, though, and also kickstarts her Character Development, so by the time of Iron Fist, she's more like Jeryn.
• Adaptational Sexuality: Played with. Jeryn's a straight male in the comics, while Jeri is lesbian here. Ultimately, they're both characters attracted to women.
• Age-Gap Romance: She's visibly much older than her mistress Pam.
• Admiring the Abomination: When faced with a room full of people detailing their horrifying encounters with Kilgrave, she's more impressed than anything.
• Amoral Attorney: Jeri is the kind of lawyer who manipulates juries into thinking “beyond a reasonable doubt” means you need thirty witnesses or a video of the defendant doing it. She is willing to hire a clearly unstable Jessica Jones as a PI (even wants to bring her in-house); why would anyone be surprised that she'd try and take advantage of Kilgrave's powers? Even Pam ends up disgusted with her.
• Armed with Pepper Spray: When Danny Rand tries to approach her in public to ask for her help in proving his identity, she pulls out her pepper spray and tells Danny to step away from her before Danny successfully convinces her that he's the real Danny Rand.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: She wanted to use Kilgrave's powers to win her divorce battle against Wendy… and gets that when Kilgrave uses her powers to enthrall Wendy into killing her which then leads to Pam killing Wendy to save her. In the aftermath, the court case is dismissed but Jeri loses both her ex-wife and the girl she wanted to be her second wife due to Pam not wanting anything to do with her after the ordeal.
• The Cameo: Her appearance in the Season 2 finale of Daredevil (2015) to hire Foggy Nelson.
• Celebrity Paradox: Star Wars is mentioned several times across the MCU. Jeri's actress Carrie-Anne Moss plays Indara in The Acolyte.
• Characterization Marches On: Her appearance in the first season of Jessica Jones was that of a Jerkass Amoral Attorney and borderline villain with what she tried to do with Kilgrave. From Daredevil and Iron Fist onwards, she's portrayed as a somewhat gruff, but well-meaning woman firmly on the side of good. It's implied that the entire situation with Kilgrave made Jeri reconsider her life choices.
• The Chessmaster: In Season 2, after Jeri was tricked by a conman and his girlfriend, Jeri tracks them down and buys an untraceable gun from Turk. Then she tells the girl that he tricked her, that her boyfriend supposedly cheated on her, manipulates her into killing him with the gun and then calls the cops so they can arrest her.
• Comically Small Bribe: She called her boss Wendell's secretary a "hatchet-faced bitch" back when she was still an intern at Rand Enterprises... while her boss' young son Danny was standing right there. She gave him five bucks to stay quiet about it despite the fact that Danny is already obscenely wealthy due to being Wendell Rand's son. Funnily enough, Danny accepted it and the two became friends.
• Complexity Addiction: Doubles with It's All About Me. When Jeri tries to win back her first love, Kith Lyonne, who's now married, the lengths Jeri goes to win her back and sink her marriage to Peter ultimately drive him to suicide by revealing his embezzling scheme. And when Jeri siccs Trish on a former benefactor suing Kith, Kith realizes Jeri's actions were all self-serving from the start and wants nothing to do with her. Considering Kith and Peter had an open marriage and Peter had nothing but respect for Jeri, Jeri could have done none of the above and Kith would have been happy to stay in her life as a Friend with Benefits and be by her side in her final days.
• Consistent Clothing Style: She always wears black, which befits her ruthlessness, ambition, and serious attitude.
• Death of a Thousand Cuts: What Kilgrave orders Wendy to do to her. Wendy only makes it to 30 cuts before Pam takes her out in self-defense.
• Despair Event Horizon. Almost. It almost broke Jeri. Building her wealth, firm and reputation from nothing but her wits, at the start of Season 2 Jeri gets a brutal wake-up call when she learns that she is suffering from incurable ALS and has at most eight more years to live. She slowly is about to lose control of her body and her firm from her other name partners and resorts to drugs and prostitutes, until she hears from IGH and their miraculous treatments that saved, amongst others, Jessica's life when her family had an accident. When Jeri is sheltering a former IGH employee (with whom she eventually starts a sexual relationship), while Jessica is supposed to get some leverage on Jeri's partners, Jeri learns of a healer, who could heal even the worst injuries and diseases, and Jeri bails him out of jail and makes him heal her. Feeling now better and having a new perspective on life, it all comes crashing down when Jessica tells Jeri that her so-called healer is a conman and Jeri was tricked. When Jeri gets home, her apartment robbed of everything valuable and the conman and his girlfriend now gone, Jeri breaks down on her knees and starts crying. She eventually recovers after getting her revenge on the people that tricked her, and takes away a good amount of money from her partners as severage, leaving the firm with all her clients and 62% of her partners' business.
• Did Not Get the Girl: She spends most of Season 3 trying to win her Old Flame Kith Lyonne back. However, her manipulative nature ends up causing Kith a myriad of problems that end up driving her away and eventually cutting off all ties with her by the end of the season.
• Disabled in the Adaptation: She gets diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease, which her comic counterpart never had.
• Disproportionate Retribution: While they did screw her over pretty badly, Jeri manipulating Inez into killing Shane and then calling the cops on her was pretty extreme, especially since she could have just have them arrested.
• Dying Alone: It's her fear of this that causes her to reach out to Kith in Season 3. When her selfish actions inevitably drive Kith away, Kith flat out tells her that this is what's going to happen.
• Entitled to Have You: This is more or less how she feels about Kith in Season 3. She breaks up Kith's family using the excuse that her husband is a liar and a thief to justify it. When Kith makes it clear Jeri's actions weren't out of love and wants nothing to do with her, Jeri doesn't give up. She admits to cheating on her with Wendy when they were in school because she wasn't ready to come out or commit back then, but expects Kith to drop everything and run back to her now that she is ready, and because she is dying. She later uses Demetri, a business rival Kith has beef with to try and get back into her life. Only for Kith to uses this to her advantage and then leave her during the season finale, making it clear that she won't be there for her when she dies of her disease because of her selfish actions.
• Evil Is Not a Toy: She attempts to use Kilgrave's power first through his fetus and then through the man himself. The lesson is learned when Kilgrave almost has her murdered by her wife.
  • On the giving end of this when Inez and Shane tricked her into believing she had been cured of ALS, and then ransacked her apartment. It ends with her tricking Inez into killing Shane, and then calling the cops on her.
• Embarrassing Nickname: Danny called her "J-Money" when she worked on Rand Enterprise's legal team.
• Everyone Has Standards: Jeri does some pretty amoral stuff during Jessica Jones without much remorse (at least until she realizes what a mistake it was to deal with Kilgrave), but even she and her partners despise district attorney Samantha Reyes' anti-vigilante stance, having warmed up greatly to Jessica. She also wasn't one to trust Harold Meachum when she interned at Rand.
  • This gets dropped completely when, in Season 3, she breaks up a marriage, causes a man’s death and, in a bid to get out of the bad PR from it defends a provable serial killer and begins a smear campaign against powered vigilantes.
• Executive Excess: Downplayed (at first); despite being the deathly-serious head of a law firm, she does seem to spend an inordinate amount of time screwing her secretary, eventually resulting in trouble when Jeri's wife finds out. In the second season, though, a sudden diagnosis of ALS and an attempted takeover of the firm results in her going off the deep end of hedonism and indulging heavily in drugs and prostitutes.
• Fatal Flaw: Jeri has three glaring ones that always eventually get the better of her, drive everyone away, and create enemies:
  • Selfishness. While Jeri is capable of caring about others, her main concern will always be her wants and needs and that she'll prevail in the end.
  • Ruthless ambition. Jeri often resorts to shady and unconventional means to achieve her goals to the detriment of others. This winds up souring and at times outright destroying her relationships with others.
  • Her manipulative nature. Jeri just can't help but manipulate others whenever she has the opportunity to do so and if it means she can get what she wants or needs by doing so. She's lost the trust of many of her allies because of how much her tendency to manipulate destroys her credibility.
• Gender Flip: Her comic book version, Jeryn Hogarth, was male.
• Handicapped Badass: She's still a skilled manipulator and lawyer even with ALS.
• Heel–Face Revolving Door: Jeri is capable of being a powerful force for good, a selfish schemer trying to get what she wants through any means, or a solid icon of responsible pragmatism. Which of the three she'll be at any given time is anyone's guess.
• Hidden Depths: Jeri would obviously rather die than admit that she actually does care about Jessica as a good friend. She also comes close to tears when she learns Danny Rand is still alive and for more than a decade, without anyone knowing, made sure the Rand family graves were tended and had flowers.
• Intergenerational Friendship: She's clearly much older than Jessica Jones and Danny Rand.
• It's All About Me: Jeri's primary concern will always be to make sure she comes out on top. Not even people she actually cares for are safe from being sold down the river.
  • After her scheme to win back her ex, Kith, ends up Gone Horribly Wrong in season 3, she becomes The Atoner in a way that still maks it All About Her. Having gone vigilante to expose Kith's husband's embezzlement, she runs hard in the other direction, defending a serial killer from a vigilante in order to save her law firm's reputation.
• Jerkass: One of the most unpleasant people in her initial series.
• Jerkass Has a Point: When Harold Meachum comes out of hiding and greets her, she quickly and rightfully points out that by Faking the Dead, he's committing fraud.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold:
  • Hires on Marci Stahl after the FBI arrests most of Landman & Zack for aiding and abetting Wilson Fisk. And later hires on Foggy Nelson.
  • She later helps Danny's case to prove his identity pro bono out of respect for his father, and gives him money to buy him new clothes, though on the condition that if they are successful, he put her law firm on permanent retainer with Rand Enterprises. She was also the one paying for his parents' graves' upkeep all these years.
• Just Think of the Potential!: Her reaction to Kilgrave when Jessica begins to enlighten her about his powers. It's also Foreshadowing: Jeri thinks she can control the danger posed by Kilgrave, and attempts to use him for her own ends.
• Karmic Shunning: She spends most of Season 3 trying to win her Old Flame Kith Lyonne. However, she ends up driving her away because of her plot to destroy her open marriage that resulted in her husband committing suicide.
• Last-Name Basis: Jessica always calls her Hogarth, while everyone else sticks with Jeri.
• Love Is a Weakness: At the end of Season 3 after Kith leaves her good, Jeri promises her she will never let herself become like this again. Especially, once it became clear that Kith was never going to go back to her and was using her to get rid of Demetri, a hated business rival.
• Manipulative Bitch: Is she ever. Whenever Jeri really needs to get something done, there's no one she will lie, deceive, or trick anyone to do so. The most terrifying example is when she tricks Inez Green into killing her boyfriend Shane Ryback after they scammed her and robbed her apartment. She did it by giving her fake evidence of him cheating on her and giving her a gun before calling the police.
• My God, What Have I Done?: As a result of her trying to use Kilgrave for her own ends, she's nearly murdered and Wendy ends up dead, killed by Pam in an effort to protect Jeri. Jeri's left bleeding from several wounds and staring at her wife's corpse, horrified at what she's caused.
• Not So Stoic: When we first meet Jeri in Jessica Jones Season 2, we see that she's been essentially masking at work that she still feels terrible over Wendy's death.
• One Degree of Separation: Whereas Claire just happens to run into each Defender, Jeri has direct professional ties to all of them.
  • To Luke: Her firm defends Luke.
  • To Jessica: She is a professional acquaintance and recurring client of Jessica's.
  • To Danny: She used to work for Danny's father and is now Danny's lawyer.
  • To Matt: She now employs Foggy, Matt's friend and formerly his law partner at Nelson & Murdock
• Pet the Dog:
  • Jeri personally offers to make Foggy a partner at her firm after being impressed by his showing at Frank Castle's trial.
  • She has been taking care of the Rand family's graves and caring for their estate for 15 years, and she even agrees to help Danny pro-bono out of respect for his father.
• Prefers Proper Names: Unlike other characters, she calls Foggy by his real name Franklin likely out of professionalism.
• Pyrrhic Victory: The divorce ends in her favor, but Wendy is killed, Pam is arrested for the murder and refuses to have anything more to do with Jeri. Jeri realizes the mistakes she's made and turns over a new leaf. (Sort of.)
• Rags to Riches: Grew up dirt poor in a trailer with three other siblings (and was bullied mercilessly for it as a child), and worked her way up into her life as a high-powered and wildly successful attorney.
• Spanner in the Works: She thinks Kilgrave's powers could be used to help her win her divorce fight, so she sabotages the failsafe that was the only means they had to stop Kilgrave from hurting his parents. This leads to the death of Kilgrave's mother and Kilgrave escaping to cause further misery, including Hogarth's own hopes ending disastrously.
• Token Evil Teammate: As the resident Amoral Attorney. Even Pam calls her a ruthless shark.
  • She convinces a junkie to kill her boyfriend, because they took advantage of her ALS to con her.
• Tsundere: She cares about Jessica, but she would rather die then ever admit it. She usually hides behind looking out for the interest of her company when trying to control Jess, even though it’s doubtful there would be any fallout in their direction.
• Took a Level in Kindness: After the entire ordeal with Kilgrave, Jeri seems to have greatly cleaned up her act, hiring on Foggy with the explicit promise of making him a name partner at HC&B, and helping Danny recover his identity and his ownership of Rand Enterprises. Although the latter goes back to her having reason to be loyal to Danny's father, who gave her her first job, so it makes sense she would show a kinder face with Danny than with Jessica.
  • Took a Level in Jerkass: Walks this back after getting her ALS diagnosis. She apparently decides that, if she's going to slowly die of a debilitating disease with no hope for a cure, then an It's All About Me attitude is fully justified.
• Twofer Token Minority: Jeri is a lesbian who becomes disabled due to being diagnosed with ALS in Season 2.
• Verbal Tic: Jeri tends to answer "It's complicated" if she's being untruthful or dodgy.
• Your Days Are Numbered: She gets diagnosed with ALS in Jessica Jones Season 2 and spends most of the season hopelessly trying to find a cure for it.
• You See, I'm Dying: She is diagnosed with ALS in Season 2.

Erik Gelden

"Something always happens. Everything is terrible. Optimism is a lie. Expect the worst."

Species: Enhanced human

Citizenship: American

Portrayed By: Benjamin Walker

Appearances: Jessica Jones

"I just... I sense it. The darkness in people. The shit they've done, are doing, or will do. The worst ones, they have no guilt. What I see, I feel... is a void, a lack of humanity. And the closer they are, the sharper the needle in the back of my eye."

A man with the ability to tell whether someone is evil.

• Adaptational Heroism: In the comics, Gelden is known as the villainous Mind-Wave, but he's more or less one of the good guys here.
• Allergic to Evil: His superpower. He gets headaches when being around evil people. The more evil they are, the worst the headache, with the very worst people causing him to bleed from his eyes if they touch him.
• Adaptational Superpower Change: He goes from having a slew of psionic powers to only having the ability to Detect Evil which manifests itself in headaches and sometimes bleeding from the orifices if a person is too evil.
• Adaptational Wimp: In the comics, he has psionic powers like mind control, telepathy, and extrasensory perception which are enhanced by his high-tech helmet and can pilot a heavily armored and armed vehicle called the Think Tank with his powers. In here, he has none of that as his superpower is the ability to Detect Evil instead and is otherwise a normal human.
• And There Was Much Rejoicing: After Trish kills Carl Nussbaumer, he finds himself laughing uncontrollably. Turns out, evil people dying gives him euphoria as he can feel their darkness leaving the world.
• Ascended Extra: He was a minor Daredevil villain in the comics. Here, he becomes a a prominent character in Jessica Jones' cast.
• Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other: His relationship with his sister is this in spades. Though they constantly fight, they still care about each other a lot and Erik would risk his life to protect her.
• Big Brother Instinct: Despite their incredibly strained relationship and constant arguing, he's very protective of his sister Brianna and clearly cares about her a lot. In fact, the first time he decided to use his powers for good was to expose their father sexually abusing her. Unfortunately, that lead to their mother committing suicide which caused their strained relationship.
• Blackmail: He uses his power to find people who have done something badly wrong, then pretends to know what it is to make them pay him off.
• Blackmail Backfire: One of his intended victims turns out to be an Evil Genius who quickly tracks him down and tries to kill him.
• Blessed with Suck: How he views his abilities, given that they manifest as physical pain.
• Broken Pedestal: He loved and respected his father until he discovered he was molesting Erik's little sister.
• Canon Foreigner: He has no direct counterpart in the comics, though he was loosely inspired by the villain Mind-Wave.
• Celebrity Paradox: The Lord of the Rings was referenced a few times in the MCU. Gelden's actor Benjamin Walker played Gil-galad in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.
• Comic-Book Movies Don't Use Codenames: Never referred to as "Mind-Wave" here. Justified since he's not using an alter ego for heroics or otherwise.
• The Cynic: He believes that nothing you do truly matters.
• Cynicism Catalyst: He discovered his father was molesting his little sister Brianna and forced him to admit it, result in his father's incarceration. Unfortunately, after his father was arrested, Gelden's mother committed suicide by overdosing on pills. This caused Gelden and Brianna to have a falling out over Gelden exposing the truth which she felt wasn't his to expose, followed by Brianna gradually becoming a drug-addicted, severely mentally ill prostitute. Since then, Gelden swore to never use his powers for good.
• Deadpan Snarker: Being as cynical and hardened as Jessica, he naturally has the wits that go along with it.

Erik Gelden: I feel your sick, evil... the void, the hole of black shit. You're barely human.
Gregory Sallinger: You're a cheater.
Erik Gelden: Surprise.

• Detect Evil: His superpower is the ability to sense if someone is evil or not through getting headaches in their proximity. If someone is too evil, he starts bleeding from his eyes and he states that if he were to go to prison, he would die because he would be surrounded by the most evil beings on a daily basis.
• Did Not Get the Girl: By the end of Season 3, he and Jessica don't end up together as she thinks that she can't trust him yet.
• Everyone Has Standards: When Jessica asks him what he'd have done if he'd known one of his blackmail victims was producing child porn, he says that he'd have squeezed them for even more money... and then turned them in.
• Fate Worse than Death: Prison. When Sallinger turned out to be smart enough to sneak away from a murder charge, Jessica hoped to pin a kidnapping charge on him against Erik. Problem was, Erik would have to confess to blackmail schemes for it to stick. But Erik experiences pain just being near bad people. Trapping him in prison with hundreds of them? Forget Fate Worse than Death... that might be And I Must Scream.
• Good Feels Good: Played somewhat straight: being near someone like Jessica is enough to assuage his constant pain... giving a woman an orgasm gives him the opposite of a migraine. Also subverted: the death of someone like Sallinger clearly gives him a a euphoric experience.
• Headache of Doom: Whenever he's in the presence of someone evil, his powers start manifesting this way. When someone is too evil, it gets worse as he also starts bleeding from his eyes.
• The Hedonist: He tries to drown out his headaches through sex, drinking and gambling.
• Hell-Bent for Leather: Much like Jessica, he's almost always wearing a black leather jacket.
• Inexplicably Awesome: We never find out how he got his powers, only that he's not always had them.
• In Name Only: He has absolutely nothing in common with his comic book counterpart and is practically a different character altogether.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: He's cynical, sarcastic, and self-serving, but is actually a caring person underneath, as shown by his protectiveness of his sister and his relationship with Jessica.
• Love Interest: He becomes this for Jessica Jones in the third season of her show after her Offscreen Breakup with Oscar.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: He first used his powers to expose his father's sexual abuse of her sister. This resulted in his mother committing suicide via drug overdose and his sister falling out with him as she believed that it wasn't his truth to expose. Since then, he stopped using his powers to help others.
• Not Quite the Right Thing: He sees exposing his father's sexual abuse of his sister as this, as it caused his mother to kill herself and his sister to hate him to this day.
• Perma-Stubble: He has a five o'clock shadow befitting his hardboiled personality.
• Power Stereotype Flip: He can objectively tell the good people from the bad, but is a cynic who thinks the difference is largely irrelevant.
• Recruiting the Criminal: His final appearance implies a future working with Detective Costa, using his powers to root out bad guys.
• Spear Counterpart: His cynicism, alcoholism, sarcastic streak, and penchant for wearing leather jackets make him quite reminiscent of a male Jessica Jones.
• Supreme Chef: He can cook an extremely good burger.
• Tall, Dark, and Snarky: He's 6'2"/188 cm, has dark brown hair, and a sarcastic streak that rivals that of Jessica's.
• With Great Power Comes Great Perks: He mainly uses his powers to detect unapprehended wrongdoers like corrupt cops, embezzlers, and child pornographers and blackmail them.

Mercedes Kelly "Misty" Knight

"Your ass might be bulletproof, but Harlem ain't."

Species: Human (cybernetically enhanced)

Citizenship: American

Affiliation(s): NYPD

Portrayed By: Simone Missick

Voiced By: Jessica Toledo (Latin-America Chilean Spanish dub), Carol Crespo (Brazilian Portuguese dub)

Appearances: Luke Cage | The Defenders | Iron Fist

"I apply foot to ass. And match lead for lead. I put murderers in handcuffs. I don't just seek justice, I stalk it."

A tough-as-nails detective at the New York City Police Department's 29th Precinct and close ally of Luke's.

• Academic Athlete: She went to Temple University on a basketball scholarship.
• Action Girl: Being a detective, Misty is naturally this.
• Adaptational Backstory Change: In the comics, she lost her right arm to a bomb she couldn't disarm. In The Defenders, Bakuto slices it off with his katana.
• Adaptation Origin Connection: In the comics, she gets her robot arm by Stark Industries. In the MCU, she gets the arm by Rand Enterprises, the company of Danny Rand.
• Adaptation Relationship Overhaul: A minor one. In the comics and the MCU, she works close with Luke Cage and Danny Rand (a.k.a. the Heroes for Hire in the comics). But while she is a major love interest to Danny in the comics, she has no romantic ties to him in the MCU and is more connected to Luke here.
• Adaptational Romance Downgrade: Unlike in the comics, she and Danny Rand don't get romantically involved as in here, Danny's main love interest is Colleen Wing instead.
• Afro Asskicker: Marvel's pre-eminent example, especially since Luke Cage doesn't have one in the MCU.
• An Arm and a Leg: She comes very close to losing her right arm after getting shot by Diamondback, thanks to Luke's amateurish first aid, but Claire is able to save it. Unfortunately, this only buys her a few more months with said arm, as Bakuto slices it off in Midland Circle, ironically while Misty is moving to save Claire from being decapitated by Bakuto.
• Artificial Limbs: As a natural extension of the above, she gets a shiny robotic right arm courtesy of Danny Rand's company.
• Artificial Limbs Are Stronger: Her prosthetic right arm grants her a small degree of Super-Strength, allowing her to send bigger opponents back with her punches.
• Awesomeness by Analysis: Is able to recreate entire crime scenes in her head by looking at the photographs. It takes a hit after she loses her arm, but after some help from Colleen it comes back.
• Break the Badass: Being so thoroughly at Diamondback's mercy does a real number on her, even driving her to assault Claire during an interrogation.
• Butt-Monkey: She's the victim of a lot of mockery from other cops when she decides to go back into work.
• By-the-Book Cop: At first she's obedient to the book, until Scarfe dies. Afterwards she mostly disregards the rules.
• Character Development: Luke Cage Season 2 has her overcoming the trauma of losing her arm, and becoming less of a Cowboy Cop.
• Chronic Hero Syndrome: She quits being a cop partway through Luke Cage season 2, but all the other cops predict she'd be back within a week at least. She's back within 24 hours, following Ridenhour's death.
• Cowboy Cop: Turns into one after Scarfe is killed. It gets her into trouble with Inspector Ridley.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Her first encounter with Diamondback (without powers or suit) had him effortlessly defeat her in fist fight and nearly killing her, giving her PTSD. She takes on him again with a gun in her hand, only for him to shoot her down with his Quick Draw skills. If not for Luke's timely arrival he would have shot her dead right there.
• Cyborg: She loses her right arm after Bakuto slices it off in The Defenders and gets a cybernetic one in Season 2 of Luke Cage.
• Cynicism Catalyst: Scarfe getting killed and turning out to have been corrupt, causes her to lose her faith in the system, leading to a number of impulsive and renegade decisions.
• Damn You, Muscle Memory!: During a bar-brawl prior to getting fitted for her new robotic arm, she tries to punch someone with the arm she no longer has.
• Deuteragonist: Of Luke Cage, having the most focus after the titular character.
• Death by Origin Story: Misty was inspired to become a cop after a childhood incident where her cousin was beaten, gang-raped and murdered by a group of local street punks.
• Determinator: When it comes to justice and doing what's right.
• Empowered Badass Normal: The prosthetic arm Danny gives her not only replaces the arm she lost to Bakuto, but also grants her a small degree of Super-Strength.
• Don't You Dare Pity Me!: She hates the idea of people pitying her for the loss of her right arm. Claire has to explain to her that it's not pity, but gratitude.
• Expecting Someone Taller: When she finally meets Jessica in The Defenders, she comments that she expected Jessica to be a lot bigger, given her reputation within the NYPD.
• Failure Hero: She's a great investigator, but not so good at other parts of being a cop, often letting her emotions get the better of her and losing convictions because of it.
• Fair Cop: Her introduction in Luke Cage has her scoping out Cottonmouth's club wearing a very tight dress. Then she has sex with Luke.
• Female Gaze: In Iron Fist Season 2, Misty repeatedly eyes up and expresses interest in Ward Meachum, much to Colleen's disgust.
• Foil: To Jessica Jones. Both are skilled but cynical detectives, have trouble cooperating with others in their pursuit for justice, experienced moments of feeling powerless, and had a sexual relationship with Luke Cage before settling down as friends. However, Jessica is a self-employed Private Detective, while Misty works for the police.
• Foregone Conclusion: For everyone familiar with her in the comics, it was only a matter of time before she lost her right arm.
• Friend on the Force: Of sorts. Her relationship with Luke is fairly rocky across the first season of his show, but she is a friend more often than not. In Season 2, she's definitely there.
• Hidden Buxom: Zigzagged. She's introduced in a revealing low-cut dress that she makes clear she knows shows off her large chest, but this was to deliberately attract attention as part of undercover work at a club. During her day job and in all other instances, she dresses conservatively and usually pairs a collared top with a stylish jacket. Still, even in these shirts and especially during her sex scene it is made clear that she has by far the largest boobs of any female in the Netflix shows, which considering Rosario Dawson is also part of it, that saying something.
• Horrible Judge of Character: She has complete and utter faith in Scarfe, and doesn't believe he's a Dirty Cop until it's too late to save him. She also jumps to the worst conclusions as far as Luke is concerned, and only accepts him as a good guy after she learns who Willis Stryker is.
• Handicapped Badass: Even after losing her right arm, she's still more than capable of holding her own in fights.
• Iconic Attribute Adoption Moment: After losing her right arm in The Defenders, she finally receives a prosthetic arm early on in Season 2 of Luke Cage.
• Locked Out of the Loop: Much to her consternation, Misty ends up like this during the Hand case, despite her efforts to serve as their Friend on the Force. Because of the high stakes involving the Hand, Luke tries to keep Misty at arms length to keep her from being a target.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: Her ability to recreate scenes from photos. Other cops repeatedly call it eerie; Lieutenant Perez calls her a "curandero" (witch doctor) when they're in Scarfe's apartment. Misty herself thinks it's just a "trick" that anybody can do if they know how, likening it to a specific way of looking at a picture. The viewer is left to decide for themselves if the photo recreation is a dramatization of her own reasonable deductions, or if she's some kind of latent/in-denial post cognitive.
• Mythology Gag:
  • She comes close to losing an arm but it doesn't happen. Ain't so lucky in The Defenders, however, where she loses it for real at the hands of Bakuto.
  • Her last scene in Luke Cage Season 1 has her wearing an outfit that invokes her red comics outfit.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero!: Her refusal to trust the system after Scarfe's death and Cottonmouth's release leads to her hiding Candace herself instead of placing her into police protection. This gets Candace killed and allows Mariah to walk free. Inspector Ridley calls her out on it, hard.
• Plug 'n' Play Prosthetics: After losing an arm in the season finale of The Defenders, Misty spends the first few episodes of the second season of Luke Cage coping with this loss. She finally accepts an offer from Danny Rand for a high-tech prosthetic replacement, and becomes proficient enough to use it naturally one episode later.
• Police Brutality: Downplayed. A night of getting shot at, threatened, and knocked unconscious by Diamondback, after dealing with the revelation of Scarfe being crooked, and no one wanting to cooperate with her, causes Misty to snap and get physical with Claire during questioning for being uncooperative about Luke's whereabouts. Inspector Ridley pulls her away, relieves her of duty and puts her in therapy.
• Promoted to Love Interest: Inverted with Danny Rand as her role as Danny's main romantic partner is given to Coleen in the MCU. She and Danny have no romantic ties here.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: Serves this role to the Defenders, being the only cop willing to help the heroes out, even though they have to keep her out of the loop to prevent her from being in danger.
• Secret Secret-Keeper: Near the end of The Defenders, it's heavily implied that she has figured out that Matt Murdock is Daredevil.
• Sherlock Scan: Misty has an intuitive ability to replay a crime scene in her head just by looking at evidence or photos.
• Super-Strength: Her prosthetic arm grants her a low level variant of it, as with it she's able to effortlessly crush metal plating and send bigger men back several feet with her punches.
• Twofer Token Minority: Black and an amputee.
• Vitriolic Best Buds: With Scarfe and Bailey. They bicker constantly (helped no little by Scarfe being on Cottonmouth's payroll most of that time), but at the end they care for each other.
• You Are in Command Now: She gets left in charge of the 29th Precinct's detectives after Captain Ridenhour's death.
• You Go, Girl!: When she needs information about Chico from a petty felon who plays basketball, Misty challenges him to a game of Horse. After she sinks the first shot, she calls him over and reveals that she used to be one of the legendary players whose initials are carved nearby. We never see how the match ends, but Misty got the information she needed, implying that she won. While wearing a suit and heels, no less.

Colleen Wing / Iron Fist

"Nobody is born a hero. And it's a difficult thing to become."

Species: Enhanced human

Citizenship: Japanese-American

Affiliation(s): Hand (formerly), Chikara Dojo, Bayard Community Center

Portrayed By: Jessica Henwick

Voiced By: Gigliola Mariangel (Latin-America Chilean Spanish dub), Erika Menezes (Brazilian Portuguese dub)

Appearances: Iron Fist | The Defenders | Luke Cage

"I can't believe I'm admitting this, but all I want is something stable. Something I can hold on to."

A martial arts expert running Chikara dojo from Chinatown, while also being Danny Rand's lover and partner in crimefighting.

• Action Girl: Comes with being a martial arts expert.
• Adaptational Badass: She becomes the Iron Fist in this adaptation. In the comics, she receives some powers from Danny that allows her to control and channel her chi but never reached a level of power like his.
• Adaptational Modesty: In the comics, she wore a Spy Catsuit that showcase her cleavage at times. In here, she never wears that catsuit and dresses more modestly.
• Affirmative-Action Legacy: She inherits the title of Iron Fist (and the powers attached) from Danny while he's off tying some loose ends with Ward in Asia, though he seemingly regains his powers as well as some point prior. It's also suggested Colleen's ancestor was the first female Iron Fist, and that's how she came to become one herself.
• Ancestral Weapon: Her katana has been passed down her family for generations.
• Anti-Hero: She believes in the honor of the Bushido and serving the community by helping people, but she's also shown to have Matt Murdock levels of bloodthirst. She is all too willing to kill Harold Meachum on Danny's behalf if it meant it would preserve the stability of his chi.
• Adaptation Dye-Job: Jessica Henwick keeps her natural dark hair for the role, despite Colleen being a redhead in the comics.
• Adaptational Villainy: Zig-zagged. She is initially with the Hand, thinking that Bakuto was part of a good faction, but she eventually sees what they really are.
• Badass Bookworm: Skilled martial arts fighter, deadly with a katana, and her greatest wish if she had a million dollars? Go to the British Library and read every book in there.
• Battle Couple: With Danny in the second half of the first season of Iron Fist, in The Defenders, and the most of the second season of Iron Fist.
• Blood Knight: She started Fight Clubbing to make ends meet despite seeing it as dishonorable and a necessity, but then discovered she really, really enjoyed beating strangers to a bloody mess.
• Braids of Action: She uses this hairstyle in the final episode as the new Iron Fist.
• Broken Pedestal: She genuinely loved and respected Bakuto more than anyone, as he was both the man who essentially saved her and was her sensei. To learn that he was a lunatic who craved immortality and would sacrifice and betray anyone for that goal cut her deep.
• Celebrity Paradox:
  • Star Wars has been referenced several times throughout the MCU. Jessica Henwick played Jessika Pava in the The Force Awakens.
  • Luke Cage (2016) confirms that Game of Thrones exists in the MCU. Henwick played one of the Sand Snakes in the series and Colleen briefly appears in the season where the show was referenced.
• Composite Character: Colleen in the comics never was a wielder of the Iron Fist.
• Conflicting Loyalty: She gets torn between her feelings for Danny and her loyalty to her mentor Bakuto. She ultimately chooses Danny when she realizes what kind of person Bakuto really is.
• Cool Sword: Her weapon of choice is a katana that her grandfather Kenji passed down to her. In the final episode, she uses her new abilities as the Iron Fist to empower her katana and make it glow.
• Defector from Decadence: She turns her back on the Hand after learning just how evil they are.
• Despair Event Horizon: Crosses it after Bakuto tries to kill her, to the point that she attempts to provoke Danny into killing her. Fortunately, said Iron Fist happens to be her LoveInterest, and manages to pull her back.
• Drill Sergeant Nasty: A martial arts variant, when she's teaching others. Colleen intentionally distances herself emotionally from her students, and pushes them extremely hard so that they can fight to the best of their ability. She admits to Danny in Season 2 of Iron Fist that she shut down the dojo because she felt responsible for all of the Hand students that she had trained and that training Danny after Davos takes the Iron Fist and breaks his leg would mean uncomfortably distancing herself from him as well.
• Early-Bird Cameo: Claire takes a slip for lessons from her at the end of Luke Cage Season 1.
• Empowered Badass Normal: She takes the Iron Fist from Davos at the end of the second season.
• Fake Guest Star: While The Defenders keeps insisting that the titular group is a foursome, Colleen is the fifth member of the team in all but name. She's every bit as martially capable as the four leads, refuses to wait around in the safety of the precinct with the other heroes' loved ones, and it's she who comes up with the plan to blow up Midland Circle. The only reason she lacks top billing is because she's technically just a love interest and never headlined her own show, but as a former member of The Hand, she has a much more personal stake in the matter than Luke and Jessica.
• Heel–Face Door-Slam: After revealing herself to be part of the Hand, which Danny has been raised to fight, she helps Danny escape from them, but Danny rejects her. Then Bakuto tries to kill her for betraying the Hand. The slam is so hard that she tries to goad Danny into killing her. Fortunately, Danny is in a more forgiving mood at this point.
• Heroic BSoD: Suffers a bad one when she learns that Bakuto is going to drain her blood, and the Hand really is as evil as Danny and Claire have been telling her. To the point that she attempts to goad Danny into killing her.
• Hypocrite: Colleen participates in cage fights for money, and this is right after telling Daryl not to do this. When a YouTube surfaces of her fighting, she has to uneasily admit to her hypocrisy.
• If You Kill Him, You Will Be Just Like Him!: She refuses to finish off Bakuto after their duel using this reasoning. After his resurgence in The Defenders, she doesn't hold this sentiment anymore and actually kills him this time.
• In Love with the Mark: Though the relationship between Danny and Colleen formed independently of the Hand, it is still used by Bakuto's faction to bring Danny to their side. However, Colleen truly falls in love with Danny and turns against the Hand after seeing how evil they truly are.
• Katanas Are Just Better: She uses a katana, often as much sheathed as a blunt object as it is unsheathed as a sword. As Iron Fist, she gets to channel her chi into the katana.
• Legacy Character: She is the latest in a long line of Iron Fists.
• Light Is Good: After she gets her powers, her first turns bright white when activated.
• Love Redeems: A rather strange example of the trope. She was originally used by the Hand to convince Danny to join them while being convinced it was a benevolent organization, though the relationship formed independently of the Hand. It's the relationship that she develops with Danny that helps her realize the true nature of the Hand and causes her to defect from them.
• Magical Weapon: After taking the Iron Fist from Davos, she uses it to empower her katana.
• Master Swordsman: She's a master of the katana, having been trained by her grandfather in the ways of the Bushido.
• Martial Artists Are Always Barefoot: Not to the same extent as Danny, but she does go barefoot a lot. Justified as she owns a dojo and is a martial arts traditionalist.
• Missing Mom: Her mother left her when she was young and eventually died of an illness.
• No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: She gives one to a massive opponent after taking him down in a cage match.
• Omniglot: Besides English, she speaks Japanese and Mandarin. Well she did speak Mandarin, but not since she was a child. When Danny uses that language she is unable to converse with him.
• One-Woman Army: She's capable of taking on many of Ward's henchmen, Hand ninjas, and Davos' disciple on her own and prevail.
• Power Glows: While Danny and Davos's fists glow yellow and red (respectively) when activated, Colleen's turns white.
• Pragmatic Hero: She proposes stopping the Hand by blowing the entire Midland Circle building to hell using the C4 its designer had collected with the same intent of destroying the building.
• Pressure Point: She learns how to do these from Danny Rand and later uses it in a cage match to take down a much larger opponent.
• Promoted to Love Interest: She's Danny Rand's love interest in the MCU, a role usually filled by Misty Knight in the comics.
• A Pupil of Mine Until He Turned to Evil: Not her personally, but every student of hers she sent to the Hand compound turned into fanatical agents of the organization who wouldn't hesitate to kill her on behalf of Bakuto.
• Raised by Grandparents: Her father sent her to live with her grandparents in Japan after her mother passed away.
• Red Baron: While stepping into the cage while Fight Clubbing, the announcer calls Colleen the Daughter of the Dragon.
• Suicide by Cop: Attempts to goad Danny into killing her after the Hand attempts to have her killed, saying that the Iron Fist meant to destroy the Hand and she's a member of the Hand. Danny refuses.
• Surpassed the Teacher: She proves to be a better swordsman than Bakuto, managing to defeat him in two duels. She ends up killing him for good in the second one.
• Tainted Veins: She gets dark veins over her body when she gets hit by a Hand ninja's poisoned blade.
• Thou Shalt Not Kill: Zigzagged. One the one hand, Colleen's grandfather raised her on the Bushido code, which left her with a strong sense of never harming anyone for personal reasons, but she admits that she really wants to kill Bakuto for revenge, and is thankful that Davos does it instead out of fear that it would have eaten her up afterwards. On the other hand, she's fully willing to kill Harold Meachum out of fear that Danny killing him would corrupt his chi. In The Defenders, she's the one who comes up with the plan to blow up Midland Circle to kill the leaders of the Hand. Later, while planting the C4, she ends up killing not only a random Hand henchman to save Claire and Misty, but finally kills Bakuto by decapitating him. So Colleen will kill, it just hasto be in self-defense.
• Violently Protective Girlfriend: Colleen is worried that Danny's chi will be corrupted if he kills Harold Meachum in revenge, so she says that she will do it for him. In a more benign form, she's often seen standing up for Danny in conversations when they turn into a "Reason You Suck" Speech at his expense and often is the one to spew threats at enemies in his defense.

  Madame Gao: [to Danny] Why should I help you?
  Colleen Wing: Because if you don't, I'll cut off your head and feed it to the rats.
  Madame Gao: That sounds unpleasant.

• Waif-Fu: Colleen's first major one-on-one in the cage is versus a huge underground cage fighter... and she can't take him directly. She had to use his power against him and go after pressure points to win.
• Warrior Therapist: Helps Misty recover from losing her arm in Luke Cage Season 2, mainly by aggravating her.
• Wrecked Weapon: Her katana is broken and reduced in size during her climactic clash with Bakuto, though it's still fully capable of stabbing Bakuto through the gut. Though it was repaired sometime in between Iron Fist and Defenders.
• Younger Mentor, Older Disciple: She's trained Claire, Misty, and Danny, who are all visibly older than her. Their training under her is shown to be effective, as Claire went from being an Action Survivor to a full-on Action Girl, Misty regained her confidence and was able to defend herself while only having one arm, and Danny became skilled enough to take on a newly-empowered Davos without the Iron Fist.