Dr. Lucy Bauer (portrayed by Lilli Birdsell) was a major antagonist in Season 4 of Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.. She and her husband Joseph were scientists and members of a privately funded think tank known as Momentum Labs. Their research advanced by leaps and bounds thanks to the knowledge afforded to them by the ancient grimoire known as the Darkhold, through which they engineered a means of creating matter from nothing. However, their work was sabotaged by their colleague Eli Morrow, who wanted the Darkhold for himself. Morrow's act of sabotage resulted in Lucy and her colleagues becoming trapped in a ghostly quantum state, which Lucy went to extreme lengths to undo.
History[]
Work at Momentum[]
Lucy Bauer was a scientist employed under Momentum Labs, a privately funded scientific organization alongside her husband Joseph. During their time with Momentum, the Bauers came upon the Darkhold, an incredibly ancient text that held infinite knowledge pertaining to the mystic arts. Upon opening the book, they discovered that not only did words appear on the pages out of nowhere, but they were even translated for Joseph into German, his first language. Taking the book for themselves, the Bauers used the knowledge it provided to build their new world-changing inventions.
With the knowledge granted to them by the Darkhold, Lucy and her colleagues at Momentum Labs would conceive the idea of constructing a quantum particle generator, a machine that was designed to generate matter from practically nothing. While the concept was logically impossible, Bauer believed that the unique possibilities presented by the Darkhold were the key to achieving all this. She presented the invention to her co-workers, including Hugo, Vincent and Frederick who did not believe it would be possible, only to be amazed when the device was activated and seemingly created a piece of carbon out of nothing but thin air.
However, while the team celebrated their achievements, not everyone was delighted as Eli Morrow confronted Bauer about how such an experiment broke the first law of thermodynamics. To try and reassure Eli about how they had seemingly done the impossible, Lucy confessed that they had indeed had help. Just as Lucy began to explain about finding and reading the Darkhold to Morrow, Joseph arrived and pulled Bauer away before ordering Morrow to not ask any questions about the book, insisting that it was his and not to be used by anyone else.
Betrayal[]
As the Momentum team's experiments advanced and crossed into increasingly more dangerous territory, Eli continued to express his misgivings about the project. Having grown obsessed with hoarding the Darkhold to himself, Joseph hired a street gang called the Fifth Street Locos to assassinate Eli and put a stop to his snooping. The assassination did not go according to plan; Eli's car had been "borrowed" by his nephews Robbie and Gabe Reyes and while the boys did survive the attack, Gabe was left paralyzed and confined to a wheelchair from then on.
Following the failed assassination, Eli became more determined to take the Darkhold from Bauer, attacking him in the lab and beating him into a coma after learning that the book had been hidden. Eli searching for the book in the lab and read through all of the research notes Joseph had left behind. When the other researchers saw what he had done to Joseph, Eli attacked them and forced them into the quantum particle generator which reduced them to an intangible quantum state and transferred them into cubical quantum batteries. When Lucy later returned to the lab, Eli did the same thing to her, but as far as he knew his former colleagues were dead. While Eli was later sent to prison for assault and causing an "accident" at the lab that had claimed the lives of his colleagues, Lucy and the others remained trapped in their quantum states within their storage devices.
Return[]
In 2017, Lucy's quantum storage box was obtained by a gang known as the Aryan Brotherhood, who were working in conjunction with a terrorist group called the Watchdogs towards the goal of Inhuman extermination. Believing that the box contained some sort of weapon, the Brotherhood seized the box, but during transport the box was opened and Lucy emerged, infecting two of the gangsters with her newfound power. Her ghostly touch caused others to go insane from fear as they entered a state of extreme fight-or-flight response, and the two thugs she infected went berserk and killed each other.
Lucy returned to her box which was later delivered to Chen and his Chinatown Crew. As the crate was opened, Bauer infected all those around it, whispering in Chen's ear and causing him to go insane, as Chen saw horrific images and gunned down his own men in a fit of both terrible rage and crippling terror. At this time, a S.H.I.E.L.D. unit arrived at Chen's hideout and managed to subdue Chen and his surviving underlings. Seeing the strength of the unit's leader Melinda May, Lucy infected her as well, causing her to steadily descend into a mental breakdown.
Following her release, Lucy traveled to her old home to search for her husband and try and find answers to what had happened to her. Finding another family living there, she scared a little boy and then attacked the father who was currently residing there, demanding to know why they were in her home. Having been informed that the family had been living there, Lucy realized she had been trapped for several years. She then journeyed to Momentum Labs where she discovered five quantum batteries similar to hers that held her former colleagues. She freed them one by one and they were horrified to discover what had become of them, but Lucy assured them that they would be able to reverse their condition once they recovered the Darkhold.
Reclaiming the Darkhold[]
Lucy would later go searching for her husband Joseph, finding out that he had been left comatose ever since Eli had attacked him. She visited the hospital where Joseph was being kept and tried to wake him up, but he did not respond to her voice. With no other option, Lucy sunk her incorporeal hands into Joseph's head in order to force him to awaken from his coma. While this did wake Joseph, he was also infected with the same fear-inducing affliction as Lucy's previous victims. Joseph informed Lucy that he had put the Darkhold back where they had originally found it, and so she travelled to the basement of the derelict house where she and Joseph had uncovered the book. The book was there as Joseph had said, but Lucy was no longer able to read it due to her intangible state, the pages remaining blank.
Frustrated and angry, Lucy sought a different means of reading the Darkhold. She travelled to South Ridge Penitentiary in order to kidnap Eli Morrow, the man responsible for her current predicament. With Hugo and Vincent in tow, she searched the prison for Eli, infecting the warden, several guards and even inmates with madness. As they searched for Eli, S.H.I.E.L.D. also arrived at the prison, who wanted to take Eli into protective custody. As the agents entered the main cellblock, Lucy locked the hall down and opened the cells, forcing the agents to contend with a mob of violent prisoners.
While Vincent and Hugo battled against Alphonso Mackenzie and Robbie Reyes, both soon being killed in the process, Lucy finally made it to Eli's cell. However, to her great frustration, Eli had already been freed by S.H.I.E.L.D., though she found a photograph of Eli's nephews left in the cell, recognizing one of them as a member of the S.H.I.E.L.D. party currently in the prison. She later caught up to Eli after he had been separated from S.H.I.E.L.D. by rioting prisoners, forcing him to board an EMT van and drive it away under the threat of being driven to madness by her touch.
Final fate[]
Lucy and Eli travelled to the Momentum laboratory in Pasadena where Lucy planned on recreating the experiment that had turned her into a ghost, intent on reversing the process and becoming human again. Unable to read the Darkhold herself, she wanted Eli to read it for her so she could complete the experiment. Knowing that S.H.I.E.L.D. would be searching for them, Lucy moved the experiment to the Roxxon Power Plant where she had Eli build a new quantum particle generator which she believed would restore her body back to normal. While Eli questioned the safety of the test, Lucy revealed that they had moved to this location due to the incredible power it put out, despite being highly unstable. Now concerned, Eli noted that if anything went wrong, thousands of lives would be at risk, but Lucy made it clear that she didn't care about endangering innocents as long as she got what she wanted.
When S.H.I.E.L.D. and Robbie Reyes arrived at the facility, Lucy confronted them. Reyes told Phil Coulson that he could deal with her alone, as he was the only one who could kill her. Lucy mistook Robbie for his brother Gabe, but an angered Robbie hinted that he was in fact the second brother who had survived the hit that would turn him into Ghost Rider as his eyes burned red. Lucy tried to explain that the attack on them was a mistake and was actually intended for Eli and explained that she was going to kill him because of what he had done to her and her friends. After an intense argument, she then attempted to infect Robbie by walking through him, but her infection didn't take and she was physically grabbed by Reyes, a feeling that she had believed was impossible, while Reyes yet again noted that he might not have been clear about who he really was as he was there to make her pay for her actions due to the many deaths she had left in her wake.
Lucy began to explain the true story behind the incident that transformed her and her colleagues: Eli became obsessed with the Darkhold and had attempted to kill her husband so he could take the book for himself. Eli had secretly taken her and her colleagues and locked them individually into the machine that would turn them into the entities that they were now. Although Lucy was indeed telling the truth, Robbie was overcome with anger and vengeful rage. Gripping Lucy's arm tightly, Robbie incinerated her with hellfire while she screamed in agony.