for the uninitiated*

*those who don't partake of the MCU television programs.

Jiaying (played by Dichen Lachman in Agents of SHIELD) was an Inhuman with the powers of healing, regeneration, and sustained life and also Daisy Johnson's birth mother. She lived in China, helping with and eventually leading the small, secret community called Afterlife which served as a refuge and rebirth-place for Inhumans. In the 1940s she crossed paths with Daniel Whitehall, who understood that she was special but didn't realize how until he met her again in the 1980s, at which point he tortured her and attempted to murder her in order to gain her regenerative abilities. Slightly prior to this, though, Jiaying had met a human man named Calvin Johnson and given birth to a daughter; after her attempted murder, Calvin - who had been experimenting with drug-induced enhancements to his body - went mad and swore vengeance. Daisy was lost in the crossfire and not found by either Jiaying or Calvin for many years, but Jiaying returned to Afterlife with darkness in her heart. She was still compassionate toward other Inhumans, deeply so, but sought vengeance against the organization that had tried to murder and use her, which she mistakenly believed was SHIELD. She was eventually able to mentor her daughter for a short time, but went mad with grief and attempted to kill her when she refused to turn against SHIELD (which to Daisy had become a family like none she'd ever had before), after which Calvin killed her. For the ease of threading, the writer dances around the eleventh-hour revelation of her antagonism most of the time or just touches on elements thereof.