If You Miss Cristina Yang On 'Grey's Anatomy,' You'll LOVE This New Shondaland Character

For The People may be just getting its sea legs, but if I'm going to pick a favorite of the lawyers in the cast, it has to be Kate Littlejohn. Played by Susannah Flood, Kate is the take-no-prisoners, I’m-really-good-at-my-job badass of the Mother Court. She’s a prosecutor, and she’s not going to let anyone mess with her. She’s Cristina Yang (with similar people skills), Annalise Keating (with less murder), the Olivia Pope (with cheaper suits) all in one. Kate is the MVP on For The People, and her capable demeanor is going to win her plenty of cases, and maybe, eventually, a few friends. Maybe. But who needs friends when you’re at the top of the world?

Kate may come off as tough and a little impatient, but that’s just because she does things by the book. She’s good at her job, and she’s going to conquer the “Mother Court,” as the show calls it, and then the world. Flood plays Kate with a quiet intensity — you know that there’s plenty raging underneath Kate’s surface. Though the show is only two episodes in, here’s why Kate is shaping up to be the most fun-to-watch character on For The People.

She Knows Her Worth

One of Kate’s first big scenes involves her smacking down a lazy coworker. Seth walks into her office to ask a question, and Kate isn’t having it. She asks if it’s something that he could easily look up, and that he should probably go and look up whatever he needs to know because she refuses to be the researcher and secretary for all of the male prosecutors in the office. According to the New York Times, women tend to get saddled with the office grunt work — cleaning, helping, etc. — and Kate knows that Seth is perfectly capable of doing his own work. She doesn’t have to do it for him or set the precedent that his (or any of her other coworker’s) needs are more important that her own. She doesn’t have time for your nonsense, OK?

She Has A Binder System

Binders have been a joke since Mitt Romney said he had “binders full of women” during the 2012 election, but let’s talk about the good old days of binders. Trapper Keepers, even! Featuring your favorite characters, three rings, and plenty of space for you to get organized. While Kate’s binders don’t have *NSYNC on them (which is a shame, because mine did), she still has a methodically organized system for her cases, and this is going to be what sets her apart from the idiots in her office that can’t find that one piece of paper they had one time in their office. Kate has it. Kate has already won her case. Sorry, she’s not sorry.

She Recognizes Game

In “Rahowa,” Kate is stuck working with Seth, and she’s not exactly thrilled about it. He goes against the grain and order of how the law is supposed to work, interrupting a judge at home in order to do what would essentially be an unlawful search. But eventually, Kate and Seth combine their wiles and uncover a much bigger, much further-reaching drug ring and money laundering business. At the end, Kate is thankful for Seth’s help, and she even buys him his own set of binders and highlighters. Maybe it’s not friendship yet, but it’s at least her tolerating him. That seems good for her.

She Helps The Little Guy

Obviously, taking down a doctor that’s trafficking in humans (he hasn’t paid his housekeeper ever, instead telling her that she’s working off the debt he incurred to bring her to America) and laundering money is a win, but Kate and Seth make things that much better by ensuring that the housekeeper gets $5 million from her former employer.

She may be intense, but sometimes, we see glimpses of Kate’s humanity. She’s tough, but she’s not a monster, and she is slowly recognizing that in the real world, you may need a friend or two (provided they do their own googling.) We’ll see where Kate’s journey takes her, but she seems to be the real MVP of For The People.