12) Shepherd Book. I almost mentioned Wash here, since his death in Serenity upset me tremendously — but at least Wash's death made sense in context. Wash gets to die heroically, piloting the ship through a crazy dogfight over a scary planet, then gliding a dead ship to a landing (almost) everyone can walk away from. His death is jarring and shocking, and it feels like we get to love him all over again before saying goodbye.

But Shepherd Book on the other hand — he feels like a throwaway character in the movie, and his death is pretty pointless. He's just there to mouth a few words about spirituality and then get wasted. And his death, unlike Wash, is purely there for plot-hammer purposes. He's Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru — he dies so that Mal can realize that there's no way to hide from the Operative any longer, and he's too mad to keep hiding. It's the plot-device death that lets Mal turn to the camera and (pretty much) say "Now it's personal." He's Mal's girlfriend in a refrigerator. Shepherd Book deserved so, so much more than that.

11) Marcus Cole in Babylon 5. He's madly in love with Susan Ivanova, but never gets anywhere with her. Until finally, he sacrificed his life to save hers, using an alien device to transfer all his life energy to hers. Says actor Jason Carter:

"The irony of it all is that I gave my life in order that someone else might live who then left the show!" Carter laughs, referring to Claudia Christian's decision to quit as Ivanova at the of B5's fourth season. "I mean, what was the point about that then? It kind of makes my heroic act a little pointless, I thought."

Carter actually filmed two versions of the story: one where Cole died, and one where he was cryogenically frozen. And later, we found out the frosty version of Cole's fate was the real version, and creator J. Michael Straczynski wrote a story where Cole gets revived and gets to live on a barren planet with a clone of Ivanova. Aww. (Runner up: I nearly put Boone from Earth: The Final Conflict in this slot.)

10) Pantha. Actually, she can serve as a stand-in for every great comics character who's had a throwaway death in a major crossover. It never fails: some character who used to be popular or star in their own book falls from grace, until he/she turns into cannon fodder. All in the name of showing how bad-ass the latest bad-guy is, like Eclipso killing off the Will Payton version of Starman, or Max Lord shooting Blue Beetle in the head. Or Black Goliath randomly dying off in Civil War. But poor old Pantha may be the worst. One of the most loved New Titans characters in the 1990s, she'd fallen into obscurity by the time Infinite Crisis came around. So she randomly gets in the way of Superboy Prime's backhand. He spends a few panels afterwards staring at her rolling head and trying to insist he didn't really mean to do that. Way to prove you're not stupid, Superboy Prime.

(Oh, and another comic-book runner up: I almost threw Superman in here, because his 1992 "death" was really cheap and weird. He and Doomsday just punch each other a whole lot, and then they're both dead. Except that they're not.)

9) Carson Beckett. Actually, there have been so many deaths on Stargate that left us unsatisfied, from Janet to Martouf to Her-ur (who shoulda been a contender!). But at least none of those other characters were killed by an exploding tumor, which apparently is the cutting edge in space terrorism. Watson has a tumor that was due to explode and kill everyone and Beckett insists on removing it instead of putting Watson in isolation. He gets it out in time, but then it blows up and kills Beckett and the bomb-disposal team. And yes, I know Beckett later comes back, but it's his clone or something.

8) The Lone Gunmen. They were cool enough to get their own short-lived spin-off series, but then they died (or possibly faked their deaths) in an episode that didn't even have Mulder and Scully in it. In the episode "Jump The Shark," the Lone Gunmen return to the show after the end of their own spin-off, only to get locked in a room with a virus bomb.

7) Trinity in the Matrix: Revolutions. Mostly, her death is weak because she gets killed and then keeps talking for another ten minutes. (Thanks to Meredith for the suggestion.)

6) Cpl. Hicks in Aliens 3. He's one of the coolest characters in Aliens, stepping up and taking charge after everything goes rotten. He stands up to the slimy Burke and listens to Ripley when she says they have to wipe out the aliens. But what does that get him in the third movie? An off-screen death at the movie's beginning, with just his name on a computer screen to confirm that he died. (Thanks again to Meredith for this one.)

5) Louanne "Kat" Katraine. She was one of my favorite characters on Battlestar Galactica, maybe because she was the only one who ever really called Starbuck on all her shit. So I was bummed when she got turned into a drug addict, and then it turned out she's an imposter who stole the name Louanne Katraine and is involved in running contraband. She may even have helped the Cylons infiltrate human society prior to the attacks. Even though I usually love Jane Espenson's writing, I really didn't like the episode "The Passage," in which Kat suddenly gets a whole new backstory as a smuggler, before being "redeemed" by sacrificing her life in a radiation field. It felt sort of cheap, as if the show was turning one of its coolest characters into a whole different person before disposing of her.

4) Judge Giant. He was one of the coolest characters in the Judge Dredd universe — until he got shot in the back during a riot in the "Block War" storyline. It was a quick, throwaway cheap death for such a cool character. Writer Alan Grant later apologized, according to Wikipedia: "When we wrote the death of Giant, I thought it was a great idea to kill him off in such a casual, natural (for a judge) way. But when the reader outcry came, I was startled and forced to see things from their point of view."

3) Cyclops in X-Men 3. This was a cheap death, except that it ended up being very expensive — it totally cost the movie my interest and suspension of disbelief. I spent about an hour after Cyclops died assuming they'd faked his death for some reason, and expecting him to pop up at a critical moment. And when I finally accepted that Cyclops had died off screen, at the hands of his true love, who had gone batshit after being hit with a plot hammer, I was so incredulous I could barely pay attention to all the waffling and wailing over whether Rogue was going to get Mutant-begone treatment or not. (Did she? I can't even remember.)

2) The Sixth Doctor. When the BBC fired Colin Baker as the star of Doctor Who, they asked him to come back so they could kill him off and regenerate him into a new actor. Not surprisingly, he said no thanks. In that instance, the classy thing would have been to introduce the new Doctor already settled in the role, and pretend the Colin Baker Doctor had died off-screen. (As a bonus, that approach would have allowed you to write out Bonnie Langford's Mel at the same time.) Instead, they put a curly blond wig onto the new Doctor, Sylvester McCoy, and had him pretend to be the old Doctor for long enough to blur his face. And poor old Colin's Doctor died, not saving the universe, but banging his head on the TARDIS console while the Rani was shooting pew-pew lasers at the time machine.

1) Captain Kirk. Actually, I pretty much want to make Captain Kirk numbers one through 10 on this list, since his death in Star Trek: Generations was the gold standard for disappointing ends. He finally agrees to leave the happy horse-barn paradise to help Captain Picard deal with Malcolm McDowell, who really shouldn't have posed much of a challenge for one Captain, let alone two. Maybe if it was Clockwork Orange Malcolm McDowell (before the treatments) or even Get Crazy Malcolm McDowell. But cranky old Malcolm McDowell? Why why why? McDowell basically beats the crap out of Kirk. It could have been worse. It could have been the original version they shot:

Trek runner up: Trip in the final episode of Enterprise. Why did he have to sacrifice his life when faced with a set of standard-issue thugs? Normally, he would have defeated the low-rent space-crooks with one pinky and some technobabble, but suddenly it becomes a matter of life and death because it's the final episode.

BONUS: I had to add Boba Fett from Star Wars: Return Of The Jedi, becuase as Rickotron and Bonniegrrl pointed out, he totally gets the short end of the lightsaber. He gets built up as this super-cool bounty hunter, and then he just sort of gets knocked into the mouth of the desert beastie. Yuck. And Star Wars runner-up status goes to Mace Windu and all the Jedi who get zapped by Clone Troopers in Revenge Of The Sith.

Every other one of the Doctor's cunning plans, in Doctor Who. The Doctor is always hatching plans that fall completely flat. This is especially true in the original series, where stories had to last 90 minutes or longer. In "The Ark In Space," the Doctor plans to attack the Wirrn while they sleep — but they left a guard behind. And then he plots to stop them by electrifying the bulkheads — but they attack the electricity supply. In "Pyramids Of Mars," he builds a fancy anti-mummy machine, which the mummies wreck. Then he plants explosives on the mummies' spaceship, which fail to explode. In "Parting Of The Ways," he builds fancy Dalek-brain-busting machine... which he doesn't have the gumption to use. The Doctor has a clever scheme to get hold of the Master's laser screwdriver in "Last Of The Time Lords"... and it won't work for him. And so on.

The last battle against the Tripods, in The Pool Of Fire by John Christopher. The humans have a clever plan for attacking the domed cities of the alien Masters: sneak in and pour alcohol into the water supply, incapacitating the Masters so the humans can crack their protective domes. This works most places, but totally fails in the Panama Canal dome. There's a backup plan, which involves primitive airplanes and bombs. This fails too. And then there's a third backup plan, involving hot-air balloons and bombs. This almost fails as well, because the balloons just bounce off the dome — except that Henry lands his balloon on the dome and cradles his bomb against the dome's surface, sacrificing his life to make it blow up.

Pretty much every plan ever on Firefly. Let's rob a train — even though it turns out to be full of Alliance troops. Let's take on some passengers, what could go wrong? Let's crash a fancy society ball. Or better yet, let's team up with Saffron, the woman who double-crossed us last time. It'll be fine this time!

Whenever Sisko tries to get sneaky on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Captain Benjamin Sisko has many fine qualities, but subterfuge is not one of them. When he tries to trick the Romulans into joining the war against the evil Dominion by giving them a fake holo-recording of a meeting where the Dominion discusses invading the Romulans, it totally blows up in his face because Romulan senator Vreenak sees the fake for what it is. (But luckily for Sisko, Garak the "simple tailor" from Cardassia has a back-up plan, that blows up in Vreenak's face: literally. The resulting debris looks like the result of a Dominion attack, and the fake holo-recording looks much more genuine after it's been damaged in the explosion. Similarly, Janeway is always coming up with plans that fail on Star Trek: Voyager, including trying to shut down the evil clown in "The Thaw" and tricking the sentient missile into thinking they're in a minefield so they can shut it down in "Warhead."

In Ursula LeGuin's The Lathe Of Heaven, pretty much every well-intentioned attempt to use George Orr's reality-altering dreams for good purposes fails. Like when Heather tries to fix the problems George's dreams have already caused by inducing more world-warping dreams:

Heather begins to believe his story and seeks him out at his hideaway. Finding him in a state of exhaustion and desperation she says she will hypnotize him ( she learned it in college) and suggests that he dreams that the aliens are not on the moon and that Haber is really a good man who will cure George, not use him. This spontaneous plan backfires when George dreams that the aliens are no longer on the moon. You guessed it. George dreams that they came to the earth itself. Portland is nearly destroyed and civilians are killed by friendly fire as the military overreacts but it turns out that the aliens are peaceful beings without weapons, who are psychic and whose native element is the dream state itself.

Pretty much every escape attempt in The Prisoner. In the 1960s spy-village drama, the man known only as Number Six tries a whole variety of gambits to get away, from stealing a helicopter to getting elected Number Two to smuggling himself in crates to building a boat. He's the Wile E. Coyote of superspy escapees, and he meets with similar luck to Wile E.

That whole plan of sending soldiers into a nuclear reactor and not letting them fire their weapons when they're surrounded by alien monsters, in Aliens. Not to mention blocking off the bulkheads but not paying attention to the ceilings.

The whole trap-the-Predator idea in Predator 2. The feds have been tracking encounters with the Predator2 ever since the first movie, and they have a plan to capture a live specimen using a slaughterhouse that the Predator has been raiding for food. They think they can blind the Predator by blocking out the infrared spectrum of light — but the Predator just switches its helmet over to ultraviolet and wastes them all.

All of Horza's best-laid plans in Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks. Infiltrating the pirates? Abandoning one of them to die (but leaving him the detonator of a nuclear weapon)? Impersonating the pirates' leader? Assuming the injured Idiran soldier who got away won't cause any more trouble? It all works out spectacularly badly.

Altering history turns out to be a flawed plan in the 2002 movie of The Time Machine. Our hero, Alex Hartdegen, wants to save his girlfriend from getting killed by a mugger by going back in time and changing history. But after he finally builds his time machine, he goes back and can't change the past. No matter how many times he changes things, Emma still gets killed.

The dinosaur trap in Planet Of The Dinosaurs. In this fine, wonderful movie, a group of space travelers are at the mercy of a vicious Tyrranosaurus Rex. First, they try to poison the creature by leaving some Allosaur meat outside its lair, laced with poison berries. The plan goes south because the creature attacks from the rear. Their second plan, to coat wooden stakes with the poison and impale the creature on them, fails... until it finally works.

The Iluminati and friends come up with a whole host of plans to stop the Hulk when he comes back from outer space to trash everything, in the comic series World War Hulk. Iron Man comes up with some incredibly fancy battle armor that lasts about five minutes. Mr. Fantastic creates a huge machine that simulates the feeling the Hulk gets from being pacified by the all-powerful Sentry... and the Hulk smashes it right away. Dr. Strange tries to reach the Hulk's friendly alter-ego Bruce... and the Hulk smushes his hands. Oh well.

Lili's gambit on Earth: The Final Conflict: Lili Marquette is among the Taelons, who are attacking Earth, and tries to sabotage the engines on their ship. She sort of succeeds, but Zo'or deals with it by expunging the extra energy out into space.

Stargate is full of failed gambits: Sheppard tries to distract the Super-Wraith with a flare and run to a puddle-jumper in the Atlantis episode "The Defiant One," but the Super-Wraith left the puddle-jumper's shields on. When that fails, he challenges the Super-Wraith to a pointless knife fight and early gets slaughtered. In the SG-1 episode "The Serpent's Lair," the SG-1 crew plants C-4 explosives around a Goa'uld ship, but then Apophis himself shows up and captures them. Meanwhile, Colonel Samuels has a plan to attack Apophis using special warheads... which totally bounce off. Oops.

There are like three attempts to stop the comet in Deep Impact. First, the spaceship Messiah is launched to drill into the comet's surface and plant bombs, which only split it into two still-destructive comet pieces. Then Earth tries to launch a ton of missiles, which only make the comet more pissed off and splodey. The smaller piece of comet hits and creates a mega-tsunami. Just as the much larger piece of comet is about to hit, the Messiah flies into a fissure in the comet piece and blow it up.

Every Terry Gilliam hero ever pretty much makes screwy plans that don't work out that great. Like Sam Lowry in Brazil, who has a plan to erase Jill from the records so they can escape — which doesn't work out that great, because Jill gets erased for real. And James Cole in Twelve Monkeys thinks he can avert the future plague by tracking down Jeffrey Goines and the Army Of The Twelve Monkeys, but they turn out to be a total red herring.

Thanks to Lauren Davis, John Kim and Liz Henry for research help.