12 Main Character Deaths That Killed Great TV Shows

11. Blake (Blake's 7)

Episode Of "Death": C1 - "Aftermath" (technically D13 - "Blake")

Dispatching your title character halfway into your series' run? Really?

Now, Blake's 7 was hardly Masterpiece Theater - a team of escaped convicts travel the galaxy in an advanced alien spaceship, battling against the tyrannical Federation - but it did have Blake, a universal freedom fighter who risks everything time and again in the fight against injustice.

It's hard to believe the (somewhat more apathetic) Mal from Firefly could have existed without Blake's influence: somewhere between Robin Hood and The A-Team's Hannibal, Blake was the driving force behind the show (after all, they were his six).

Then, at the end of Season 2, Blake vanished and the self-interested Avon took over from him as captain of The Liberator. Now, other characters came and went - over the course of its run, Blake's 7 had 12 main cast members, including various iterations of AI - but Blake was, well, Blake.

More than simply being a knock off of Star Trek or Doctor Who (it was created by Terry Nation, the man behind the Daleks), Blake's 7 was a (space) operatic treatise on loyalty and betrayal, a formula that became markedly less interesting when the one character of undeniable moral integrity disappeared from our screens.

That is, right up until the series finale in which Blake returns. And promptly gets shot by Avon as a presumed traitor. And then everyone gets shot. Except the actual traitor. Bleak, guys; pretty, pretty bleak.