Martha Bullock

Martha Bullock arrives in Deadwood as Seth's new wife, a widow marrying her late sister's husband to raise the boy who remains after that death. She is proper, careful, and unaccustomed to the camp's filth and violence, trying to build a household and a schoolroom in a place that resists both.

Anna Gunn plays her without a trace of the shrinking bride the setup suggests; Martha's stillness reads as discipline, not weakness. The writing lets her be genuinely civilizing without making her a scold, and Gunn finds the steel under the manners, so her scenes with Bullock crackle with unspoken calculation.