Top Five: TV Deaths that Hit Where It Counts

5. Special Agent Charlie Francis (Kirk Aceveda)--Fringe
Charlie Francis was Special Agent Olivia Dunham's unfailingly loyal partner and friend throughout Fringe's first season. He had several close brushes with death during that time, and I started to think that he was the "Wedge Antilles" of the show, always in peril but inevitably coming out on top.

I thought that right up until Charlie was killed by a shapeshifting douchebag from an alternate reality, who then added further insult to injury by stealing Charlie's identity and trying to get Dunham alone so that he could kill her too. Olivia eventually shot and killed the shapeshifter, and the deception was uncovered, but she had to deal with some misplaced guilt for killing a man who looked just like her friend (becuase this show dumps grief on Dunham like she's a member of the Mulder family).

4. Lt. Colonel Henry Blake (McLean Stephenson)--M*A*S*H
For the first seasons of the long-running show (the only war during which everybody's hair turned gray), Henry Blake was the commanding officer of the M*A*S*H 4077th. He was an affable though not entirely competent officer, whose skills were best applied to the operating room rather than to matters of logistics or authority. The lovable rogues he commanded were constantly pulling pranks on him, and he took it all in mostly good humor. Despite the occasional dramatic moment, he was nearly entirely a figure of fun, which is why it totally sucked when...

Blake received his orders to fly back stateside, and the guys he commanded gave him a nice going away party. This beloved character was finally getting what everybody in the unit wanted most of all: to fly home to his wife and get out of this shit. He flew off on a helicopter, and everybody was both sad and happy for him. Until, that is, they received word that the helicopter had crashed, killing everybody aboard.

So much for the goofy, lovable Colonel Henry Blake.

What really made the death sting was the eventual revelation that Blake was written off the show (permanently) because McLean Stephenson was trying to get more money out of the producers, who responded by not only firing him, but ensuring he'd never be able to even do a guest appearance in future. Classy, guys.

3. Melissa Scully (Melinda McGraw)--The X-Files
Melissa was the sister of Special Agent Dana Scully (starting to get the idea that being an FBI agent isn't very healthy for the people you care about?), and there was a little tension between them, brought on by her New Age flightiness butting up against Dana's belief in science and discipline. Still, it was always fun when she showed up, and not just because she was kinda hot (this was before Scully transformed into the sexiest woman in the FBI).

She was never a regular, just a sister who showed up every now and then, so what's the worst that could happen to her? Well, I don't know, maybe she could enter Dana's apartment when she wasn't home and get mistakenly shot by double-agent (triple? quintuple?) scumbag Alex Krycek.

Eventually, Mulder and Scully lost every member of their immediate families over the course of the show (including Mulder's long-lost sister: don't get me started on that), but this is the one that hurt the most, since Melissa was in essence an innocent who had no part in all of this conspiracy rubbish.

2. Dolores Landingham (Kathryn Joosten)--The West Wing
Every great man needs a strong woman behind him, the saying goes, and President Josiah Bartlet had two: his wife, and the simple, unassuming personal assitant who had been with him since his college days, Dolores Landingham.

The relationship between Bartlet and Landingham was one of the delights of the show's first season. She was loyal and always attentive to his needs, but wasn't afraid to tell him off when he was being a little shit. There was obviously a great love and affection between them, and Joosten's performance as the character was basically flawless.

So what happened? Well, this lovely little cantankerous woman was killed by a drunk driver, off camera, in the show's second season, soon after buying her first ever car. The unjustness of this event prompted one of Martin Sheen's greatest acting moments of the show, where he rages at God in a cathedral with epic anguish, but I don't think that even that moment was worth this woman's death. It was a truly tragic, meaningless death that still upsets me if I think about it too much.

1. Tara Maclay (Amber Benson)--Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Could anything else take the number-one position but the most hurtful character death in the history of television?

Tara, in case you all forgot, was the woman Willow Rosenberg met at college, who introduced her to a greater world of both witchcraft and lesbianism. The love between these two was palpable, and for all of the Angel/Buffy talk, this was truly the epic love story of Buffy's seven seasons.

So, what happened, because Joss Whedon is a goddamn motherfucker, is that Willow and Tara had a falling out prompted by Willow's increasingly dangerous addiction to magic. After showing Willow suffering in Tara's absence for several episodes, they eventually got back together after Willow proved that she had given the magic up. After one amazing night together...

Tara is shot by titanic asshole Warren Mears, who was hoping to kill Buffy. Tara's blood spatters Willow's face, and she dies nearly instantly, sending Willow into a world-threatening orgy of rage-fueled violence, which none of us watching can really blame her for. Luckily, Xander Harris talks her down with a story about crayons.

Willow eventually hooks up with a super-hot piece of near-jailbait in season 7, but it's not the same, because nobody will ever replace Tara. Fuck you, Joss.