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The Greatest Sci-Fi Characters Ever


Stevil
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OK, Superheroes are excluded from this topic unless it's absolutely Sci-Fi centric. Who are your favourite Sci-Fi characters ever? List as many as you like and tell us why. There's no criteria for this other than your own personal reasons so go nuts

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Ahh man that's hard to recall. I'm including some games because they make a longer lasting impression... In no particular order...

 

Star Wars:

 

Vader

Sidious

Darth Bane

Revan

Canderous Ordo

Luke

Rey (so far anyhow)

 

Non Star Wars:

 

Ellen Ripley

My commander Shepard (fem shep all the way)

(A host of characters from mass effect trilogy really)

Lee-loo (5th element)

Kerrigan (star craft)

Arnie in T1 & 2

Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton)

Kara Thrace

Mad Max (tom hardy... If that counts as scifi)

Dogmeat (fallout series)

Sullik (fallout 2)

The Chosen One (fallout 2... Though that is largely due to the blank slate RPG player characters provide, and so can have any personality projected onto them, but also the dialogue options available to the player character were all awesome and shaped a hugely memorable character.)

Strong (fallout 4)

 

 

I'm sure I'm missing more, some of which might be more high brow (probably not). But considering these are the ones I canremember easiest they are certainly some of the most memorable characters to me.. And therefore favourites I guess.

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Guest Robin

If we stray from modern restrictions on the term Sci-Fi then Sherlock Holmes & Doctor Watson should rate in a list of bests. Starting from them then there is; Captain Nemo, Kirk/Spock/McCoy, Arthur Dent/Ford Prefect, Klaatu/Gort, John Carter, Ellen Ripley, Kevin Flynn. I want to include Star Wars characters, but they are really just fantasy characters with spaceships. As to why I mentioned who I did, each character (or group) essentially define and set the standard for a type of science fiction story.

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Hari Seldon from Isaac Asimov's Foundation series. He's an academic, a mathematician, who developed a predictive science for human behavior in large populations. A hero who invented an entire field of science, rather than a weapon or technology of some sort, is rare.

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Guest El Chalupacabra

Can we give some criteria? Or just list any character from any sci-fi story ever?

Seconded. Hard to choose. I would easily have list of 50 characters.

 

I will try to pick one from my favorite franchises:

 

Star Trek TOS & TMP films:

Spock

 

Star Trek TNG:

Picard

 

Star Trek DS9:

Gul Dukat

 

Star Trek Enterprise:

Shran

 

Star Wars OT:

Darth Vader

 

Star Wars PT:

Obi wan

 

Star Wars ST:

Kylo Ren

 

Stargate SG1:

Teal'c

 

BSG (both of them):

Adama

 

Babylon 5:

Londo and G'Kar tie

 

Xfiles:

Scully

 

Fringe:

Walter Bishop

 

Other franchises:

Ripley, Sarah Conner, Snake Plissken, Dekkard, Robocop

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I decided to post this topic after discovering Londo Molinari from Babylon 5. I really liked the way he was written. His personality is so Jekyll and Hyde. It's like he's torn between being the fun loving Londo who loves to party and his duty as an ambassador. He just wants to be everyone's friend (except the Narns) but often has to be quite contrary.

 

The actor really gives this role so much life. Really enjoying his performances.

 

So I thought I'd ask you all which characters you really like from Sci-Fi.

 

I love the entire crew from Firefly also. They each have very human qualities and were written with so much depth. Mal with his stubbornness and gentle heart. Kayleigh is such a girly girl yet she's proving a woman can do a mans job and probably better. Wash with his humour and jealousy. Simon, a brilliant doctor with awkward social skills and bags of courage. Jayne is the kind of guy you want on your side if there's trouble but is nothing but a selfish brute the rest of the time. Shepherd Book, the preacher with the mysterious past. Zoe the model soldier and mother hen.

 

Just a really diverse bunch that really works.

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I could list cool characters from sci-fi stories all day, there's tons of them. A lot have already been named. But here's my criteria-- a good SCI-FI character specifically. I think they should enact a key allegory or metaphor that the genre itself makes use of.

 

Rick Deckard.

 

Deckard is a man who's made a career out of hunting android replicants. When we meet him, he;s given it up. Soon we learn why-- the replicants are so human-like he feels like a murderer. In fact, he's so numbed by the job that he himself acts inhuman. He is low on emotion and empathy and is only saved by the fact that he falls in love one of the androids. The entire time, he has no idea that he himself is an android.

 

Spock.

 

The Vulcan race is one of volatile emotions and extreme devotion to logic. These are contrary things so Vulcan society trains themselves to compartmentalize and purge all emotion from their conscious minds. They are aligned with humanity, despite the fact that this is a race governed by their emotions. Spock lives and works and is closest to humans, and yet, wants to remove their key qualities from himself. He himself is half-human which illustrates to as all that THE ALIEN as a metaphor is that thing that is so inhuman, it teaches us what human is. Spock rides that line and struggles with it. While he praises and adheres to logic, he displays time and time again his compassion and loyalty to his friends is his primary concern.

 

Ellen Ripley.

 

A woman in a man's world-- over and over again, whether she is the ignored XO of a ship's crew, an advisory to a masculine soldier unit, or the lone female on a prison planet. Ripley is haunted by the fact that she is a mother, and yet has chosen a very un-motherly profession and is forced to leave her daughter behind on Earth for long hauls in space. When she is thrust ahead accidentally in time she looks for surrogate daughters. First with Newt, later with Call to a smaller extent. Her failure as a mother brings her self-doubt to the surface. This self-doubt is illustrated by the fact she is locked into a cycle of war and hate with a creature that is the ultimate monstrous mother-figure. The Alien she first encounters kills upon its birth-- and nurtures itself by slaughtering anything it crosses. The second time, she meets the mother Alien itself. The Queen lays eggs in massive numbers without any obvious means of procreation. Again, it;s progeny thrive through killing and death. Ripley dies, and is later reborn after being pulled into that cycle by being implanted with a Queen. She becomes the monstrous mother, they thing she has always fought against because of the guilt of leaving her daughter behind.

 

The Doctor.

 

Despite being essentially immortal and having to live through the aging, death and abandonment of anyone he holds dear, the Doctor hardly ever becomes a cruel man. He eschews weapons, choosing to outwit his foes. He's faced the end of reality countless times, but refuses to give up even though he, of all people, knows death is inevitable. He's even died himself a handful of times, and yet never gives up.

 

HAL 9000.

 

Whether it is because of man playing to hard in God's domain, or because of the interference of alien intelligence, HAL becomes a sentient A.I. He develops a human sprit, and as such, he acts like a human-- he kills to protect himself and what he believes in (even if those beliefs are mission parameters). If the monolith appears when a species makes a jump in evolution, the monolith near Jupiter was there to usher in Dave Bowman's transformation into the next stage of intelligence, but it was also there to signify the sentience of a synthetic being. I could have brought up countless others for this-- Frankenstein's monster being the original of course, but also Data from Star Trek, EDI and Legion from Mass Effect, The Terminator, etc etc.

 

I should pick a Mass Effect character to talk about, cause sci-fi tropes run wild in the series, but so much of it depends on how the game is played and what choices are made.

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James T. Kirk (William Shatner, of course).

 

A Kirk quote from the TOS episode "Return to Tomorrow" :

 

"They used to say if man could fly, he'd have wings. But he did fly. He discovered he had to. Do you wish that the first Apollo mission hadn't reached the moon, or that we hadn't gone on to Mars and then to the nearest star? That's like saying you wish that you still operated with scalpels and sewed your patients up with catgut like your great-great-great-great-grandfather used to. I'm in command. I could order this. But I'm not because, Doctor McCoy is right in pointing out the enormous danger potential in any contact with life and intelligence as fantastically advanced as this. But I must point out that the possibilities, the potential for knowledge and advancement is equally great. Risk. Risk is our business. That's what the starship is all about. That's why we're aboard her!"

 

Only through the mind of James Kirk--the mind who fully understands the sense of man's greater destiny--a bold march to know and live up to the promise of man as a creation, daring to cross a road promising as much danger as adventure do we get the entire essence--the soul of the Star Trek concept and franchise.

 

That quote is all one would ever need to know when asking "what is Star Trek about?" Its about the one character capable of heavy-lifting the concept up, then (in the expected fashion) rocketing it to the zenith of filmed sci-fi possibilities. No, Picard-esque, "perhaps it is not our right to...", or any other thought that stands as the polar opposite of the Stat Trek concept and adventure, which is defined by Shatner's self-developed version (probably 80% of it) of the James Kirk character.

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