Via BD, this charming list of the 12 Weakest Deaths in Science Fiction History. My comments:
12. Shepherd Book (Serenity): Aside from being one of my favorite Firefly characters, his death not not only robs Wash’s of impact, but it just comes off as “we didn’t know what to do with him, we only had one day to shoot with him, let’s make him motivate Mal then shift off this mortal coil.” Yes, I know there’s more to it than that, but I would rather have simply not seen him in the movie at all.
11. Marcus Cole (Babylon 5): Actually, it was a freaking fantastic death, spot on in character, driven by all sorts of foreshadowed motivations (and plot devices (literally a device) that had been pooh-poohed back in season 1). It just turned out to be an utter waste when Claudia Christian decided to leave the series the next season for a fabulously better-paying motion picture career.
10. Pantha (Teen Titans / Infinite Crisis): Yeah, yet another in a series of “hey s/he’s a cool comic book character we haven’t seen for a while, so let’s kill him/her off to how how Evil the new Evil Baddy is.” Feh.
9. Carson Beckett (Stargate): Never watched it.
8. The Lone Gunmen (The Lone Gunmen/X-Files): Never watched ’em. Wait, I think I did watch one episode of their show, but never followed up on it.
7. Trinity (Matrix: Revolutions): Never watched any of them after the first one. Nothing I’ve heard has encouraged me to rectify that situation. A pity, I did like Trinity.
6. Hicks (Aliens 3): Yeah, right along with Newt. Because nothing makes one of the best SF Action Flicks Evah (Aliens) better than having made it all meaningless by killing off the people Ripley had saved.
5. Louanne “Kat” Katraine (Battlestar Galactica): Never that fond of her.
4. Judge Giant (Judge Dredd): Never read anything with him.
3. Cyclops (X-Men 3): Yeah … what’s with that? An off-screen death for one of the seminal characters? Of course, the movie has tons of other problems, too, but … My related runner-up: Phoenix, in X-Men #137, which was a great death that was steadily robbed of all meaning and reality by resurrecting Jean Gray and, over the course of two decades, trampling the X-continuity into a muddy mire.
2. The Sixth Doctor (Doctor Who): Never heard this anecdote. Funny. And, yeah, kind of lame.
1. Captain Kirk (Star Trek: Generations): Never saw it.
HONORABLE MENTION: Boba Fett (Return of the Jedi): Yeah. Galaxy’s most kicking-ass bounty hunter (whom we’ve never seen actually do much of anything), and he gets accidentally kicked into a monster’s maw. Terribly, terribly weak.
Any others I would add? Can’t think of any offhand, though commenters included all the Jedi in Revenge of the Sith, and Tasha Yar (yeah, that’s pretty good, save that she was a lame character to begin with).
I’d note, however, that in the canonical books following the Star Wars movies that Boba manages to get out of the Sarlaac’s gut, beat up a bunch of hangers on at Jabba’s palace and return to being a bad ass with an extra helping of grumpy!
Yeppers, Tasha was a Waste of a character since she did the same thing as Warg (and just like Wesley, yet they finally did something with him by the end that was cool).
OMG….Bobba Fett was just a complete waste.
Yeah, but at the time (and for a few decades or so later), BF bit the big one in the gut of the Sarlacc. What a waste.
I liked Tasha conceptually, but Denise Crosby couldn’t act her way through the character in a paper bag. That might have been the fault of the overall uber-stiffness of the first season of TNG (her later showings were better). Regardless, her death was utterly pointless.
Well, Tasha’s departure was necessary. Her death? Maybe not so much. But it did make her “return” in Yesterday’s Enterprise exceedingly cool, and that led to her new character on the show, which was also pretty cool.
I hated Boba Fett’s death back in ’83. It was so… ignominious! A blind Han Solo bumps the switch located on the back of the jetpack and sends him flying (and flailing???) into the Sarlacc pit? Give me a break.
I’m surprised you never saw Star Trek: Generations, Dave. Had your interest in the series waned by then?
Instead of Pantha (whom I didn’t even recognize, not having collected comics in the 90s), why not Thunderbird from X-Men #95? Introduced two stories earlier as part of the “All-New, All-Different” X-Men, apparently just to shock us with his almost immediate death? Bah.
True The return of Tasha Yar was very well done (The writers finally figured out what to do with her, and the idiot Rick Berman had moved on to ruin other bits of Star Trek by then) as was her daughter (also played by Crosby) being a Romulan…which was all sorts of cool.
Also…
One of these days Dave we will have to walk you through all the Doctors, at least 1 or 3 Whovies per Doctor so he can have a better feeling for each of them…and so you don’t just watch all the Pertwee ones. 🙂
Yeah, I fear my pre- and post-Pertwee/Baker knowledge is pretty limited.