10 James Bond Villains With The Most Sinister Plans

The addictive black comedy-drama Succession shows us that hostile takeovers of a family company is an extremely messy affair. Then there's the sinister seductress Elektra King, who took to dethroning her father - the oil tycoon Sir Robert King - to another level of cunning complexity.

M's old university chum brought it on himself, somewhat, by refusing to pay his daughter's ransom demand, on M's advice no less. Because Elektra is not just your average Bond girl.

She uses the time with her kidnapper Begbie - sorry, Renard - to full femme fatale effect by manipulating the medulla oblongata-challenged anarchist to help murder her father in explosive fashion at MI6 HQ. And just like with every main Bond villain, manipulation is the name of the game throughout here.

Elektra plays a blinder in blindsiding Bond with her womanly wiles, and deceives M with her "victim" act. She utilises Valentin Zukovsky by paying the caviar-loving Russian a cool million dollars to use his nephew's nuclear submarine for smuggling some machinery, but is actually for the denouement to her malignant master plan: to put the other half of the stolen plutonium into the sub's reactor core, causing an instant, catastrophic meltdown (thank you, Dr Christmas Jones, for your expert analysis there), and contaminating the Istanbul-Bosphorus region for generations.

Therefore, the entire oil supply from the Caspian Sea would conveniently be diverted to Elektra's own pipeline in the Mediterranean. She did, after all, say that oil runs in her veins, thicker than blood.