From: Iain Walker iainwalker@home.com
First a few rules (based on me wanting to make this a measure of killingness):
These are pretty much the same rules I used when compiling bodycounts for the Sevencyclopaedia, (on Judith's site, under 'Death') which gives completely different tallies for each and every character.
And the winner is.. No surprise - Avon at 47.5 kills Avon also has the highest per episode kill rate of 0.93.
I only got 36 kills for Avon (with full credit for Travis), and reckoned Soolin the most lethal with at least 15 kills (the only character to garner more than one fatality per episode).
The ranking by number of kills is: Cally - 5
Huh? I could only find three - Sherm, another of Bayban's men and a Link on Terminal. (Credit for Molok goes to Jenna, who did the actual button-pushing).
So the cast divides neatly into kill at the drop of a hat (A,D,S, T and B) and the softies (J, C, V and G).
On that at least we agree.
There are some surprises/observations: However, Soolin the hired gun gets 8 of her kills in just two episodes (Warlord and Gold) - the rest of time she just isn't a killer.
Four Space Rats in Stardrive.
"Companions for my death" Cally is also rather circumspect in the "shoot first" scale.
But she would have killed Travis in Seek-Locate-Destroy if Blake had let her. She also threatened to kill Bayban, but that just put her somewhere in the middle of the queue.
Vila kills noone for two whole seasons.
I made it one acolyte on Cygnus Alpha (1st Season) and a guard on Mecros 2 (4th Season), so yup, two whole seasons without a kill.
Gan would have ranked higher but his implant actually worked.
I don't have any confirmed fatalities for Gan at all.
Individual episodes show a wide range of bloodthirstiness. In 16 episodes our heroes kill no-one.
Only Duel and Sarcophagus can claim to be deathless episodes, and then only tentatively. (Travis' mutoid died but was restored to life, and the undead alien was already dead so couldn't be killed as such).
I'm not particularly surprised that there are discrepancies between your tallies and mine, since there are problems in deciding who got killed, if they actually did killed, and who killed them. Who killed Cato, for example - Avon, or Pella? Do we credit Orac for killing Hannah, or the malign alien force that had taken Orac over? I'd suggest we swop notes but I don't have Excel.
One thing to remember is that the deadliest character of all was probably Servalan. She did after all wipe out an entire planet...
Neil