TV Badasses #5-6

5.  Gemma Teller Morrow (Katey Sagal)—Sons of Anarchy

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Who She Is: Widow of the founder of the SAMCRO biker gang, mother of the heir apparent, and possible accomplice in the murder of her first husband.  She is not officially “in” the club, but she obviously rules it.

Why She’s a Badass: Because she keeps the rest of the badasses and thugs in the club under tight control, she doesn’t take any shit from anybody, she will absolutely drop the hammer on anybody who fucks with somebody she loves, and she covered up a brutal gang-rape for the good of the club, only revealing her painful secret when she realized it was the only way to bury simmering tensions between her son and his stepfather.

Badass Moment: She has one almost every episode.  It’s hard to pick just one.  We’ll go with the casual murder at the end of last season.

How Does She Go Out?  She hasn’t yet.  Hopefully, she never will.  The club would flounder and be utterly lost without her.

Badass Dialog:  “I’m not sure why you’re carrying a gun, but make sure you’re safe. No serial numbers.”

6.  Ruper Giles (Anthony Stewart Head)—Buffy the Vampire Slayer

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Who He Is: A “Watcher”, responsible for the training and direction of a Slayer.  Much as Gemma is the glue that holds SAMCRO together, Giles is a father-figure to the band of willful teens that represents Sunnydale’s last line of defense against evil.

Why He’s a Badass: He appears to be a foppish Brit, but we slowly learn over the course of seven seasons, that Giles has untapped reserves of badassness.  In his hell-raising (literally) younger days, he summoned a demon.  He knows books, but he also knows how to fight, as evidenced numerous times (even though he is prone to being knocked unconscious).  When he returned to England for most of a season, the show missed his presence terribly, and the “Scooby Gang” fell to pieces.

Badass Moment: At the end of season 5, the “big bad”, or at least the vessel that contains her, is incapacitated.  Giles does not hesitate to do what nobody else will do, and kills the young man so that the entity inside him can never do harm again.

How Does He Go Out?  Giles does what so many mentor characters over the years haven’t done: he survives.  That’s how badass he is.

Badass Dialog: “Things involving a computer fill me with a childlike terror. Now if it were a nice ogre or some such I would be much more in my element.”

TV Badasses #3-4

3. Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner)—Star Trek

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Who He Is: Captain of the USS Enterprise, fighter, lover, diplomat, scholar, and all-around most kick-ass male in the galaxy.

Why He’s a Badass: He can short-circuit robots and omnipotent computers just by giving a rousing speech, woman are constantly coming on to him (far more than he actually beds, in fact), he appears to have his own patented form of martial arts (Kirk-fu), he never gives up no matter how hopeless the situation looks, oh, and:

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He once clubbed a guy with what appears to be a plaster cast of his own penis.

Badass Moment: How to pick just one? Fuck it, we’ll just go with the Corbomite Maneuver. Look it up.

How Does He Go Out? He doesn’t in the show, and we’re not going to get into any fatal wrestling matches with Malcolm McDowell in this post.

Badass Dialog: “This is the Captain of the Enterprise. Our respect for other life forms requires that we give you this… warning. One critical item of information that has never been incorporated into the memory banks of any Earth ship. Since the early years of space exploration, Earth vessels have had incorporated into them a substance known as…corbomite. It is a material and a device which prevents attack on us. If any destructive energy touches our vessel, a reverse reaction of equal strength is created, destroying the attacker. It may interest you to know that since the initial use of corbomite more than two of our centuries ago, no attacking vessel has survived the attempt. Death has… little meaning to us. If it has none to you then attack us now. We grow annoyed at your foolishness.”

4. President Josiah Bartlet (Martin Sheen)—The West Wing

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Who He Is: Controversial two-term President of the United States.

Why He’s a Badass: His principles are inflexible. He can’t stand intolerance in any form. He survived an assassination attempt. He was originally intended to be a recurring character on the show, and almost immediately took over the entire thing through sheer force of charisma.

Badass Moment: There are several tense faceoffs with diplomats, religious leaders, and the press, but my favorite moment is this deeply religious man’s smackdown on God after his beloved personal secretary was killed in a car crash.

How Does He Go Out? His term ends and he passes the torch to Jimmy Smits (possibly for a new West Wing show that never happened).

Badass Dialoge: “You’re a son of a bitch, you know that? She bought her first new car and you hit her with a drunk driver. What? Was that supposed to be funny? ‘You can’t conceive, nor can I, the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God,’ says Graham Greene. I don’t know whose ass he was kissing there, ‘cause I think you’re just vindictive.”

jbboobstein replied to your post: jbboobstein replied to your post: TV Badasses…

look at you with a real blog…….wow.

Yeah.  I feel sort of guilty about abandoning it, just a couple weeks after I re-upped my domain name and posted a blog about how I was filled with a new dedication to it.  Oops.  I don’t think enough people were really reading or interacting with it over on Blogger, so I got demotivated.

I could move it over here to Tumblr, with the domain and everything, I suppose.

TV Badasses #1-2

Back in my Vox blogging days, I did a list of movie badasses, and I started feeling guilty for leaving off the TV badasses, which are even more special because they are rarer, I think.

Anyway, here we go with the first couple. As usual, these are NOT in order of preference, just in the order in which I think of them. Updates will be sporadic.

Enjoy.

1. John Winchester (Jeffrey Dean Morgan)—Supernatural

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Who He Is: A hunter of the supernatural who has raised his two sons Sam and Dean in the family business.

Why He’s a Badass: He is uncompromising in his methods, dedicated to revenge, but still has a heart so goddamn big it’ll break yours.

Badass Moment: He has many in his brief screentime, but screaming for Sam to kill him while the demon he’s been hunting for years is briefly trapped in his body sort of takes the cake.

How Does He Go Out? Selling his soul to that same hated demon so that he can save his son Dean’s life. Remember that thing I said about his big heart? Yeah.

Badass Dialog:
John Winchester: I never used the gun, how would I know it wouldn’t work?
Meg: Oh, I am so not in the mood for this. I’ve just been shot!
John Winchester: Well, then I guess you’re lucky the gun wasn’t real.

2. Number Six (Patrick McGoohan)—The Prisoner

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Who He Is: An ex-government agent who resigned without explanation, and if you’ve only seen the recent, crappy A&E remake, you can be forgiven for thinking he’s a pussy. Because trust me, he isn’t.

Why He’s a Badass: The greatest and most devious minds available try to break his spirit, wear him down, and get him to talk. But he never does. Never. He even drives one of his minders crazy rather than give them an inch.

Badass Moment: It’s hard to choose one, as each of the series’ 17 episodes contains at least one moment where you have to marvel at this man’s ingenuity and hardness. Maybe the episode where he manipulates his own dreams to make it seem as if the current Number Two is a traitor? Sure, we’ll go with that.

How Does He Go Out? The operators of The Village realize they will never break his spirit, so they simply let him go. He wins, utterly.

Badass Dialog: “I will not make any deals with you. I’ve resigned. I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered!  My life is my own.”

Whoops

Posting that photo of Eliza Dushku as Faith makes me want to watch the series all over again from episode 1.

Here’s a Thruthful Thursday for you: I fucking love Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and I truly believe it’s probably one of the top 10 television series ever made.  I ain’t even lying.