For 14 seasons, Brenda Blethyn’s DCI Vera Stanhope was the rumpled raincoat-clad sentinel of Northumberland’s misty moors, unraveling murders with a thermos of tea and a glare that could curdle milk. But with Vera’s final bow in January 2025, the 79-year-old dame has shed that weathered overcoat like a snake sloughing skin, emerging in a role so audaciously glamorous and viciously ambitious it feels like a fever dream from the pen of a Byatt sister crossed with a Scorsese script. The Velvet Reckoning, the BBC’s ambitious two-era prestige drama premiering December 15 on BBC One and iPlayer, casts Blethyn as matriarch Elowen Voss—a Cornish shipping heiress whose empire of silk routes and smuggling rings spans from the fog-shrouded Edwardian docks of 1912 to the cutthroat boardrooms of 2012. Paired with rising star Jessica Reynolds as her younger self, this century-spanning saga isn’t just a reboot—it’s a resurrection, blending vintage British epic with modern thriller venom, all laced with rags-to-riches lust, revenge, and the slow, seductive burn of a woman clawing her throne one ruthless choice at a time.

Blethyn’s Elowen is no kindly grandmother knitting by the fire; she’s a force of nature wrapped in emerald velvet and pearl chokers, her eyes sharp as smuggler’s daggers. In the 1912 timeline, a 20-something Elowen (Reynolds, channeling a feral Kate Winslet with Cornish grit) inherits a crumbling Penzance trading firm after her father’s suspicious drowning. Armed with nothing but a ledger of debts and a map of illicit sea lanes, she transforms it into Voss Maritime, a behemoth funneling silks from Shanghai to London’s elite while hiding opium runs in the hulls. “I didn’t choose the shadows—they chose me,” Elowen snarls in the pilot, her voice a velvet whip as she beds a rival captain for trade secrets, only to poison his rum when he turns traitor. Reynolds, the 28-year-old breakout from The Salisbury Poisonings, nails the raw hunger: wide-eyed ambition curdling into armored resolve, her Cornish lilt thickening with every betrayal.

Fast-forward a century, and Blethyn’s elder Elowen—now a silver-haired titan in a Mayfair penthouse—watches her legacy teeter. Voss Maritime, rebranded as a “sustainable luxury conglomerate,” faces a hostile takeover from a shadowy Chinese consortium sniffing out the old opium ghosts. Enter Elowen’s granddaughter, a Harvard MBA turned corporate shark, who unearths diaries revealing the founder’s blood-soaked ascent: affairs that toppled dynasties, bribes that buried rivals at sea, and a “red ledger” of debts settled in midnight drownings. The dual timelines collide in hallucinatory montages—1912’s gaslit balls bleeding into 2012’s neon boardrooms—directed with operatic flair by Sarah Gavron (Suffragette). It’s vintage British epic smashed against modern prestige thriller: think Downton Abbey‘s upstairs-downstairs intrigue fused with Succession‘s venomous power plays, all soaked in the salt-sting glamour of Cornwall’s cliffs and the opium haze of forbidden desires.

Fans, starved since Vera’s exit, are already whispering of obsession reignited. Early screenings at BFI London Film Festival drew gasps for Blethyn’s tour de force: a woman whose laugh is a lure, whose tears are tactics. “Brenda doesn’t play Elowen—she inhabits her, like a ghost possessing her own bones,” raved The Guardian‘s critic, awarding five stars. Reynolds, in her first lead, matches the dame beat for beat, her transformation from wide-eyed waif to iron-fisted icon a revelation. Supporting turns elevate the ensemble: Olivia Cooke as the treacherous granddaughter, Tom Burke as the 1912 lover-turned-enemy, and Indira Varma as a 2012 fixer with Voss blood on her ledger. Sheridan-esque twists abound—a mid-season reveal tying Elowen’s first kill to a modern DNA scandal—keeping viewers hooked across the 10-episode arc.

Thematically, The Velvet Reckoning is a silk-wrapped grenade: women’s ambition as both salvation and damnation, empire-building as a cycle of inherited sins. Gavron’s lens lingers on the tactile—velvet gloves stained with ink and blood, a ribbon of Cornish lace unraveling like a noose—while composer Debbie Wiseman’s score swells from sea shanties to synth stabs, mirroring the eras’ clash. Blethyn, chatting with Radio Times, confessed the pull: “Vera was my north star—grounded, grey. Elowen? She’s wildfire in silk. At my age, playing a woman who burns brighter with years? It’s liberation.”

With Vera’s void still echoing, this saga could pull millions back to BBC screens, blending Blethyn’s beloved grit with Reynolds’ fresh fire. As Elowen toasts in the finale, glass raised to a stormy sea: “Empires aren’t built on apologies—they’re woven from the threads we steal.” The Velvet Reckoning isn’t just a reboot; it’s a reckoning. In the game of thrones and tides, Blethyn reigns supreme—velvet-clad, venomous, and utterly unmissable.