Who shot who
This is a look at "who shot who". Inspired by "Who kissed who" at Judith Proctors' site (http://www.hermit.org/Blakes7/whatswhat/Kisses.html), except I don't have screenshots of all the killing. First a few rules (based on me wanting to make this a measure of killingness): - I only counted direct face-to-face (or close to it) kills (so unknown numbers of people on spaceships didn't count). - I also counted kills that were not actually shot with a gun, but it was pretty clear one of our heroes did the killing. - They had to be on screen kills. - They had to be human (or humanoid, or in human shape and treated as sentient by the script - so I counted Vinny the Android, for example)) - If I wasn't sure - they aren't dead (like lots of the people Gan bashes). - I split Travis in half between Blake and Avon - I only counted our heroes - next time through all 52 I'll do the baddies and guests
All the results tabulated by character and episode are available in an Excel spreadsheet (email me offlist if you want a copy).
And the winner is..
No surprise - Avon at 47.5 kills Avon also has the highest per episode kill rate of 0.93.
The ranking by number of kills is: Avon - 47.5 Dayna - 22 Tarrant - 20 Blake - 16.5 Soolin - 11 Jenna - 8 Cally - 5 Vila - 3 Gan - 1
This doesn't seem fair to those who aren't around much (e.g. Soolin), so I tried ranking by kills per episode, but actually nothing changes, except Soolin moves up a few spots:
Avon - 0.93 Dayna - 0.85 Soolin - 0.85 Tarrant - 0.77 Blake - 0.59 Jenna - 0.31 Cally - 0.25 Vila - 0.06 Gan - 0.06
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).
There are some surprises/observations: These results reinforce the kick-ass nature of the women in B7 with Dayna and Soolin doing lots of killing. 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. "Companions for my death" Cally is also rather circumspect in the "shoot first" scale. Avon takes time to get going but makes up for it later. Only one confirmed kill in season 1. So maybe he was telling the truth to Jenna about not being sure about shooting someone (although the story we get later about him killing the visa guy shoots this all apart :-)). Vila kills noone for two whole seasons. Gan would have ranked higher but his implant actually worked.
If we look at series instead of individuals there is a steady increase in killing (as the plots got thinner ;-/): Series 1 - 15 Series 2 - 25 Series 3 - 39 Series 4 - 55
For a total of 134, or 2.6 per episode. Of course many more people are killed in the show as a whole, but I haven't counted up the villans kills yet (or the single show guests). Also - lots of people get killed by the gang in series one and two when they are blowing up various installations - but these are hard to count.
Individual episodes show a wide range of bloodthirstiness. In 16 episodes our heroes kill no-one. In both Gold and Warlord, 10 are shot. Blake (the episode, not the man) is runner up, with nine kills (everyone but Dayna gets someone to kill). The highest single number killed in one episode by one character is six by Blake in Redemption.
Summary: No real surprises, although at 47.5 kills, you could say Avon had it coming to him at the end. Avon kills the most and the most often. It must be all those rescue missions :-p. Dayna and Tarrant follow, with Soolin matching them on a per episode basis. At the other extreme, Vila hardly ever kills. The show gets progressively more blood-thirsty with each series. The episode to episode range is big and often our heroes shoot nobody at all.
- Iain