The Honourable Woman Adds Awesome MI6 Lady Boss, We Fall In Love

As intrigued as I was by the first episode of The Honourable Woman, I was even more excited to look it up on IMDb last week and see that I had Janet McTeer to look forward. Fortunately, the show didn't make me wait long to meet her character, Julia Walsh, who first appears in Episode 2; even more fortunately, she's awesome right from the jump. Not that any of us doubted she would be.

We learned in the series premiere that Hugh is about to retire ("be retired" is probably the more accurate way to put it), and that the Samir Meshal murder is the last case he'll be working on. In the second episode, we get to learn more about the MI6 bosses who'll be carrying on after he's gone: Monica Chatwin (who we met last week -- she's the one who has A History with Ephra), and McTeer's Julia Walsh, who's a killer from her very first scene. She rolls into Hugh's office on her sensible kitten heels -- she's already over six feet tall, no need to dominate everyone she comes across -- and a fashion-forward jacket with asymmetrical lapels; checks in on the status of the kidnapping that hasn't been made public; and hears from Hugh that they're actually letting the police handle it. Julia:

Julia -- excuse me, Dame Julia, which means either that her kick-assitude was conferred by birth or that it's been recognized and solemnized by the Crown; either way, it's impossible to disagree -- goes on to spend the episode appraising Monica during a conversation about Samir's "suicide"; pretending to accede to an American colonel's request that she stay out of it (since apparently the Americans did it); then totally going to Hugh, telling him about her meeting with the colonel, telling us that she and Hugh had an affair, and giving Hugh a few minutes with a nice big fat file on Nessa, because (a) she's not staying out of the Meshal matter at all and (b) something is obviously up with Nessa and Dame Julia's not sleeping on it, but (c) why burn bridges she might need later in the career she's still in the process of having when a guy on his way out could do it instead?

Julia could be a real piece of shit and I'd still love her because I love Janet McTeer so much. I have treasured her since Tumbleweeds (and if you can get to the closing scene, when her love interest Jay O. Sanders stops by and sees her and her daughter clowning around the living room with maxi-pads, without crying, you might be a robot). But just like God, McTeer don't make no junk, so of course Dame Julia is a character worthy of her tremendous talent.

In a tiny handful of scenes -- one of which requires her to do nothing more but cock her head as she listens intently to Nessa debate her peers in the House of Lords -- McTeer shows us everything we need to know to situate this character in the story. She's brilliant and wry, calculating and canny, a seasoned political operator who hasn't lost interest in actually solving crimes. And her one-on-one with Hugh, in which their long relationship (professional and otherwise) lets them elide huge swaths of what they're actually talking about, is about as sexy as a discussion can get without actually being about sex. I still don't know exactly where this story is going, but now that I've met Julia, I'm confident she's going to solve everything and mete out the justice the situation demands. And if she gets to loom over a quavering, unworthy male underling in the process, I won't be mad.