The Ten Coolest Sci-Fi Characters

UPDATED
I kind of thought Burns would get on me about the absence of a Babylon 5 representative, and he knows I liked Londo, so we'll expand the list to 12. Why 12? I realized there was no Star Trek: Next Generation character here either. So #11 and #12, below.

12. Worf

I was never a Picard guy. Captain of the Love Boat maybe, but the Enterprise? I was a Kirk guy. This bias was so pronounced that my brother and I openly rooted for the Borg when they captured Picard, and held out hope that Riker's command decision to attack the Borg cube with Picard aboard would end the chrome-dome experiment. Anyway, no Picard. I liked Data, but he tread too much where Bishop (see #8 below) and Asimov had already been. Riker had promise, but kept turning down command assignments to the point where I worried about his guts. Anyway, there was always one character who stood out to me, who was the biggest badass, even with that weird bandolier. Worf. Hey, a Klingon on the bridge! Wow! Once the novelty wore off and we got to explore Klingon culture through the prism of Worf, some of the best Trek episodes of any generation were the result.

11. Londo Mollari

Yeah, I watched Babylon 5. As turned off as I was initially by the crude effects and less seamless vision of the future, I stuck with it at the urgings of a friend. As will happen, I got hooked on the story, which was slow to reveal secrets and quick to endear characters. My favorite of these was bombastic Londo Mollari, ambassador from the Centari. Dissipated relic of a once-great people, Mollari had a tightly circumscribed set of ethics that allowed most anything in the interests of his homeworld, and his personal morality was depraved and hedonistic. What's not to like, right? There was, however, an inner compass that at times enabled him to approach nobility, though in the end he was a conflicted and terribly flawed person.

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So, a bit of a departure from the usual content here. Let's take a look at the ten characters from science fiction that are undeniably the coolest cats to walk whatever planet they're from. Some of you will complain the list is too Star Wars or Star Trek heavy. Yeah? It's my list, ain't it? Make your own.

10. The Terminator

What was more fun back in the day than watching the future Governor of California struggle through basic dialogue while sporting enormous shades? "I'll be back" was right, and T2 was one of the most anticipated films I remember from high school. Of course, since Ahhnold was a big star with a future in politics he couldn't be the villain anymore, but he still got to shoot a lot of people, and hey, isn't that really the point? As an aside, I have to admit that everyone in the theater wanted to kill Sarah Connor.


9. Dr. Who

We watched a lot of PBS as a kid, in part for the great BBC programming like Monty Python and Fawlty Towers. But the best were the bizarre Dr. Who episodes, with time-travelling phone booths and talking robot dogs and all manner of foolishness. The drawback here was that the scantily-clad babes were British, with all the attendant pitfalls there. Our hands-down favorite was the Tom Baker iteration of the Doctor, with his long scarf and man-fro. The guy with the question marks on his collar didn't quite measure up.

8. Diana

Ah, V. We used to rush home to watch it. V is what Independence Day would have been if Jeff Goldblum and Will Smith hadn't been up to implanting the virus. The aliens win, and take over Earth. They look like us, but wait! Lizards with skin-masks! The worst of these was Diana, the sultry, Dynasty-era brunette who put the itch in bitch when it was revealed she was one of the lizard-types. She was no-holds-barred, hell-on-wheels, and the little-known inspiration for the Sarah Palin character now running for Vice President. The $150,000 clothing allowance must be for the plastic skin masks!

7. Obi-Wan Kenobi

Obi-Wan was on screen in Star Wars for about twenty minutes, and he owned all of them. He is the daddy-mac of Jedi, with mad skills. "These aren't the droids you're looking for". It sucks when he dies, but that's the space opera arc, old guy mentor has to go so young hero can spread his wings (see Half-Blood Prince, Harry Potter and the). Of course, "strike me down now, and I shall become more powerful than you can ever imagine" are pretty awesome last words. Alec Guiness was awesome as old-dude Kenobi, but Ewan McGregor does an unbelievable job in channeling the young Jedi Master. His Revenge of the Sith performance is masterful, torn between duty and love and grief. A great tragic figure in American pop culture, Kenobi is the glue to the Star Wars story, and gets far too little credit.


6. James T. Kirk

Kirk is rather uniformly treated as a caricature, a halting-speech cardboard cutout of a starship lothario. This unfortunately misses the complexity and emotional depth of the character. Captain Kirk had the misfortune of having to carry a prime-time TV series in the late 1960's which meant he spent an inordinate amount of time kissing tin-foil draped hotties and punching a variety of ill-intentioned aliens. Roddenberry intended far more. Kirk was everyman, an Iowa farmboy who chased the stars and was always pushing the horizon. City on the Edge of Forever is the ultimate Kirk episode - he finds an enemy he cannot fight and falls in love with a woman he cannot have. To truly understand the depth of James T. Kirk, see the last ten minutes of that episode. "He knows, Doctor. He knows."

5. Bishop

The Aliens franchise has some very strong suits to recommend it (not including Paul Reiser). Sigourney Weaver's Ripley kicks ass, and the monsters themselves were very scary and ahead of their time from an effects standpoint. For me the coolest player is Lance Henriksen's eerie, discomfiting Bishop. An android, Bishop has one of the best scenes in the whole series when he places his hand atop a human crewmate's and moves a knife between their fingers with blinding speed, horrifying and delighting the crew. The point here is that androids are infallible, though Bishop has nicked one of his own fingers, and the viewer is left to wonder...of course, Bishop manages to save the day in the end despite having been torn in half by a pissed-off alien. Weyland Industries made their androids tough.

4. Han Solo

No one ever wanted to be Luke. Everyone wanted to be Han Solo. Heck, there's a Youtube video of a spoof of Counting Crows' "Mr. Jones" called "Dr. Jones" about everybody's favorite archaeologist, and one of the lyrics is "I want to be Han Solo". Everybody wanted to be Han. Cool, reckless, a crack laser shot and smuggler, everything about Han was awesome. He even speaks Wookiee. Even if Luke hadn't been Leia's brother, Han still would have beat out the whiny kid for her heart. Which, given the steel bikini in Return of the Jedi, is no booby prize. (You see what I did there?)

3. Yoda

Put simply, who doesn't like Yoda? The freakish little toad confused all of us when he poked his head out of the swamps of Dagobah to taunt Luke and R2D2 in Empire Strikes Back. What the hell is this little muppet? But the Jedi guru had us with his syntactically-challenged fortune-cookie snippets of wisdom, his gurgling, inebriated cackle, and his satellite-dish ears. Even now we all know that "there is no try, only do". Of course, his epic lightsaber performance against Palpatine in Revenge of the Sith is one of those MVP-for-a-losing-team moments. And yeah, back in the 80's I had a Yoda magic 8 ball, with answers like "cloudly, your future is". You can't beat that.

2. Spock

Conceived in a time when aliens were always evil, the representation of the cultural other that was to be rejected, when American jingoism and xenophobia was at a zenith it would not reach again until the current neoconservative movement, Spock was a bolt from the blue. Nevermind that he doesn't seem very alien with just some pointed ears and a bad brow job. Nimoy's understated depiction and Roddenberry's splendid vision met at precisely the right moment to create an indelibly cool and relevant character. His death scene with Kirk at the conclusion of Wrath of Khan remains one of the all-time heartrending scenes in the genre. Yeah, Trek was about Kirk and "wagon train to the stars" and all that, but Spock was (and is!) its beating heart.

1. Darth Vader

Without a doubt the pinnacle. For anyone around my age, born in the mid-70s, we can actually recall when Darth Vader was the baddest mo-fo to strut around the galaxy, crushing people's throats with his mind and generally being the boss you didn't want to spill your coffee on. It's hard to imagine now, but we actually were surprised when he turned out to be Luke's dad, and we sat stunned as his redemption came full circle in Return of the Jedi. Most people think the title refers to Luke's resumption of the mantle of Jedi, but I think it means Vader's return from the Sith to the Jedi, as evinced by his appearance at the celebratory fire on Endor's moon that night alongside Yoda and Obi Wan. Undeniably the most complex, epic character the genre has ever seen.