She's Awesome

The Shipping Forecast (7368 words) by dueltastic
Fandom: Foyle's War
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Christopher Foyle/Hilda Pierce
Characters: Hilda Pierce, Christopher Foyle, Sir Alec Meyerson, Major Eric Stafford
Additional Tags: Older Characters, Older Woman, Women Being Awesome, Women In Power, Women in the Military, Female Anti-Hero, Cold War, Espionage, Trope Bingo Round 3, Mind Games, Spies & Secret Agents, Radio, BBC, 1940s
Summary: One of them thinks it's a story about a defector. One of them thinks it's a story about trust. One of them knows the story, all except how it ends.  Set in Season 8, no specific spoilers after Season 3.

And some Hilda squee:

I adore Hilda Pierce.  She's an incredibly unusual character on television: a non-glamorous middle-aged woman in a position of power, a female anti-hero who extracts multiple ethical compromises from the hero of the show, who is treated with respect by the show - she's never made to lose in order to make the hero look good, or made to look foolish because she's at odds with him, or softened to become more likable.  (In fact, she has just about none of the traits commonly used to code women as sympathetic.)  She remains intensely competent, complex, ruthless, and in a state of delicate truce with the hero of the show, based on a healthy and cautious mutual respect.  She starts at the Special Operations Executive during the war, the department of dirty tricks that specializes in "ungentlemanly warfare", and later moves into MI5 at the start of the Cold War.  She does necessary and very dirty jobs, which she's tremendously good at and doesn't apologize for.  She's treated with the same dignity as the hero of the show, despite representing the opposite moral view on whether good people should do bad things - and she's definitely one of the good guys, despite what she does.  They show the difference between her, and the people in her job who don't have her integrity.  Even so, she goes some quite dark places at times, especially in her later appearances; morality around her is not always simple, and not always comfortable.  But basically her role is to quietly and efficiently out-bad-ass everyone around her.

She's a bit of a love-her-or-hate-her character; she gets a lot of respect because the show treats her very well, but she can be a tough sell for some viewers.  She's also somewhere between an occasional recurring character and a series regular, which means she's not really one of the first characters people name on the show, and it's a tiny fandom that doesn't produce a lot of fic, which basically adds up to not a lot of Hilda fic at all, and not much visibility of Hilda fans.  That's a shame, because she's a tremendously unusual and well-done character, and several sorts of subtle and complex and fun.