Keri Russell remains one of television’s best actresses.

The former geopolitical thriller starring Keri Russell was one of the best shows of this century. In FXs The AmericansRussell played a Russian spy in the Washington suburbs during the twilight of the Cold War. The show was about the maneuvers nations make against each other, but it was just as much about the spy game that played out in Russell’s character’s own home. Russell’s Elizabeth Jennings performed on-screen espionage alongside Matthew Rhys’ Philip, but the two ghosts weren’t just monitoring American officials and killing Soviet dissidents. Each was suspicious of the other half of their sham marriage, and they grew apart when Russell’s character realized that Rhys’ was losing his passion for the gruesome work of spying.

It was a role that won Russell several Emmy and Golden Globe nominations – though disappointingly no win – and a host of new fans who admired her ability to portray a principled but murderous spy who also held her own a nuclear family and operated as a bogus travel agent by day. (Women working, right?) When The DiplomatRussell’s next big TV role premiered on Netflix five years later The Americans concluded, the similarities seemed immediately obvious: Here Russell was again in a political drama, working to advance his country’s interests on the global stage. Only this time, instead of a Russian spy, Russell played an American ambassador — not a huge leap, as it’s all about providing chances to see Russell weave in and out of trouble on screen. Fans of The Americans were delighted to have yet another vehicle for one of the best actresses on television to put on a convincing show of trilling and trading outside her home while engaged in a contentious dance with her partner inside it.

The first season of The Diplomat was a restless, entertaining mess. As a document about how foreign policy is conducted, it straddled and sometimes crossed the line between drama and nonsense. But as a chance for Russell to flex some muscles as an actor, it was great. Her character, Ambassador Kate Wyler, was a skilled diplomat who navigated the corridors of power with precision and grace. It was as if the showrunners had replaced her old character’s disguises and weapons with pantsuits and pencils. The show wasn’t particularly concerned with questioning America’s behavior as a superpower, and Kate was easy to root for in a way that Russell’s Americans spy character was not. She was a benefactor in a great work.

The DiplomatThe newly released second season follows Kate as she hunts for the truth surrounding a false flag attack on a British warship. Russell is still a foreign agent, and she’s still in a messy marital relationship, this time with former ambassador Hal Wyler, played by Rufus Sewell. Hal recalls Rhys’s character in The Americans as both a source of stability and a potential undermining force of Russell’s character. Together, Kate and Hal are a diplomatic but dysfunctional power couple who reshape the rest of the world as their own falls apart.

But in this six-episode series, Russell gets to do what she rarely got to do in her most famous role: act like a regular person. Make mistakes on the job. Get outsmarted by smarter players. Show the kind of emotions that Elizabeth Jennings either never had or had forced out of her during a brutal, violent upbringing in the KGB. This is the second series where Russell has tried to save the world. It’s the first one where she almost blows it up—not literally, though her mistakes this season do relates to US nuclear vulnerabilities.

There’s still plenty of state craft and craft this season: Kate moves a key witness around to safe houses and facilitates an interrogation. She confuses and misleads British intelligence officers. She becomes involved in a potentially disastrous (for American-British relations, that is) plan to depose a prime minister. She sets up a surveillance plug against a head of state. But where Season 2 gives Russell room to stretch her wings is how it lets her take a character in directions she couldn’t in either the first season of The Diplomat or one of the six seasons of The Americans where she played a spy. After all, an American ambassador to the United Kingdom has different powers than a Soviet agent in the United States. Elizabeth Jennings had little qualms about, well, anything. She was mission driven and she was a spy and those two facts justified anything. “Do you have children?” a secretary memorably asks her in The Americans‘ third season, when she is dying from poison that Elizabeth has just forced her to ingest. Elizabeth says yes, and the condemned woman asks her why she kills innocent people. “Making the world a better place” Russell’s character tells her. Pressed on how killing this woman would improve the world, she doesn’t give an inch.

Kate has the same North Star in her The Diplomatbut understandably US ambassadors would have a hard time running around murdering people and stuffing limbs into suitcases themselves. Their battlefields are meeting rooms and ornate corridors. The solution to encountering an adversary in the British government is not to execute that person. (Presumably that will get an ambassador recalled.) Limited by both her moral compass and the nature of the job, Kate has to examine an entire global chessboard instead of taking things one mission at a time.

In season 1, Russell’s ambassador character carried herself with roughly the same level of seriousness as her secret agent in The Americans. But the events of season 2 lend themselves to Russell showing a tender side of Kate that feels new. A car bomb that nearly killed her husband at the end of season 1 brings her to an immediate state of vulnerability. She collapses when she learns of an office romance between the CIA agent in her office and her deputy chief of mission at the embassy. (“That’s the sweetest fucking thing I’ve ever heard,” she tells her CIA friend, blessing the potentially difficult workplace relationship.) Kate is also sloppy with her own emotions, displaying undeniable sexual chemistry with Austin Dennison, the British Foreign Secretary. secretary played by David Gyasi. One of the best moments of the season comes when Hal persuades a recalcitrant Dennison to do a favor for the American delegation. He closes the deal by reminding Dennison that he was about to have sex with Hal’s wife, the American ambassador, before Hal himself was blown up on the streets of London. Dennison agrees; some men still have honor. Whether it is ultimately productive for the ambassador to have such a relationship is a question the show explores.

It’s kind of jarring to see Russell play a character that makes such glaring mistakes. She wasn’t an anti-hero in The Americansshe wasn’t much of an i either The Diplomat‘s first season. We’re used to seeing her solve problems, not make them. But the fun of recent episodes isn’t that they’ll help you understand world affairs, nor that the mystery the show creates is all that compelling—instead of the second season of The Diplomat works because it throws the best possible actress of this genre into a different kind of battle than the ones she so commonly waged in her most iconic role. Russell still uses deception and manipulation to achieve her goals in this show, as she did as a Soviet spy, but her current character finds it more difficult. Maybe it’s because everyone knows an ambassador is trying to work them, while people don’t know a good spy is a spy. And when a prime minister or vice president catches her drift, she has to find a solution more complex than feeding them married.