Carolyn Martens

Carolyn Martens runs the Russia desk at MI6 with the unbothered air of someone who has seen every trick twice. She recruits Eve into a hunt for a killer, doles out information like it costs her something, and never explains herself. Family, work, and manipulation blur together in her hands.

Fiona Shaw plays her as pure, dry control — a woman who can deliver devastating lines with the flatness of a weather report. The writing keeps her motives opaque just long enough to be unsettling, and Shaw finds comedy and menace in the same clipped sentence, often the same breath.