CHARLIE WAGNER – The Swarm – Leonie Benesch ⁓

Exiled to the Shetland Islands for failing to follow protocol, Charlie is well positioned to observe the strange events happening in the world’s oceans, but she reasons in unconventional ways and her superiors find her conclusions difficult to accept. After Charlie’s best friends go down with a research vessel off the coast of Iceland, she returns to Germany and manages to get the attention of Dr. Johanson, who makes her a part of a scientific mission to study the mysterious creatures behind the oceanic anomalies. Charlie is the first to make direct contact with the alien intelligence, though she does so against orders. She is physically transformed by The Yrr and deposited by the ocean on the island of Spitzbergen, redesigned, and impervious to the cold. As the first season ends, she is lying on a beach at night, staring happily at the sky with bright, newly blue eyes.

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LEANDRIN GUIRALE – The Wheel of Time – Kate Fleetwood

Outwardly a member of the Red Ajah, she is secretly working undercover for The Dark One but her son Alduran makes this complicated. Alduran ages more quickly than she, and has grown old and feeble, so Leandrin ministers to him when she can. Leandrin is a villain of the highest order but a reluctant one. After Nynaeve discovers her secret, she kidnaps the healer and gives her to the sea people. But when Lanfear shows up and decides that Alduran should be put out of his misery, her anguish is real. Lanfear makes a short speech that gives us insight into Leandrin and how Alduran might have come about. “He’s holding you back,” Lanfear tells her. “The last tie to the girl you used to be. The girl who was beaten and starved and forced to marry before she bled. You swore your oaths to the Dark…But there are many paths to walk through the night.” After that, Leandrin travels to Carthein and launches a plot to kill Moirane, but her plans are almost instantly foiled, and it seems she might have wanted them to fail.

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EVA MARKOVIC- The Ark – Tiana Upcheva

Eva is part of The Ark’s civilian complement, but becomes Chief Engineer after catastrophe strikes. The first crisis she faces is the imminent collapse of the ship’s life support systems. The crisis is solved, but her lover dies, and the person responsible for the system failure is found murdered soon after.

Chief of Security Felix Strickland questions her whereabouts at the time of the crime, and Eva, who is not known for her patience, has her best moment. “I don’t have time for this,” she says, locking him in the closet where the body was found. She evacuates the air enough to make her point; then releases Felix and explains: “If I wanted to kill this asshole, this is how I would have done it. It would look like a heart attack. God. And if I did slit his throat, I wouldn’t be stupid enough to throw the knife into a water system that I would have to fix. I am smarter than whoever did this.” Felix doesn’t bother her again.

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DANNY NAVARRO – Wolf Pack – Nevada Jose

There is something mysterious about Danny, and it might be his genetic makeup. His sister Blake is part werewolf, and her lupine nature only manifested after she was bitten. Danny may be part of his sister’s pack because he has the ability to recognize werewolves when they are in human form. (He spots Baron and Kristin Ramsey before anyone else does.) Danny’s mother left shortly after his birth, and has not made an appearance on the show. When the boy is kidnapped from a parking garage, he is returned to his sister by another half-wolf, relatively unharmed and holding a fistful of dark fur. (He might have been ever-so-slightly bitten during his abduction, though that is not made clear.) At the end of the first season, Danny is taken away from his family by Social Services. That might complicate matters if he needs to run with the pack

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CLYTEMNESTRA LOMAX – SurrealEstate – Elena Juatco

It seems like she’s always been there, though she doesn’t show up until the last half of Season Two. With Susan gone, Luke needed what he described as a rainmaker and a closer in the same body, who was also comfortable with the Roman Agency’s target demographic, and he finds Lomax working at her father’s funeral home. She knows what the Roman Agency does, and when Luke offers her a job she jumps at it. “I currently sew dead people’s lips shut and scoop out their guts like a Halloween pumpkin,” she tells him, “so whatever kind of weird you got is a lateral move at best.” Clytenmestra knows when people are lying, because it makes her nose itch. (It also makes it twitch, a la Samantha Stephens.) In her first assignment, she manages to find a home for an agoraphobic quasi-immortal being dispossessed by a determined developer. She likes to be called Lomax. As to why she was named after Agamemnon’s wife, she explains: “My mom’s Greek and my dad’s just mean.”

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PENELOPE – Reginald the Vampire – Georgia Waters

Penelope kills Reginald at the start of things, making it necessary for Maurice to turn him into a vampire. She is a traditional vamp, sired in the Victorian era and is employed in a civil-service-like position by the regional vampire government, which is personified by Angela Hibbard. Despite her pettiness and her clumsiness, Penelope has contrived to make herself indispensable. Waters whose middle name is Scarlett, told Melody McCune of Geek Girl Authority: “Penelope is drawn to power, and…Angela is the woman she’s trying to impress. Similarly, you gravitate toward the bullying, and you’re like, ‘Oh, they’re the powerful one. I’m going to try and impress them all the time.’” In “Hypnos” (Episode 3), when tasked with keeping tabs on Reginald, she and her dinner companion are hypnotized into having an intense (and memorable) food fight, part of which was deemed too intense, and did not make it to air.

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