Spoiler Alert!

Some of you may not have seen last Friday’s Battlestar – a minor minor character dies, so stop reading if you haven’t seen your PVR recording yet.

Alisen Down who plays Barolay, dies after her 7 episode arc in such a quick and senseless manner it made me love her for her acting chops. In her final scene , she offhandedly mentions to the blond Six Cylon that she would kill her all over again if given the chance, which understandably enrages Six, who then starts smushing her face into a bulkhead. Barolay recovers from the beating by staggering back, holding her bloody nose and says with a rather surprised “Well… ok…” and falls dead. We’re lead to believe she’s had the bridge of her nose penetrate her skull in the pounding. Sheer minimalist death scene! (She also plays a socially stunted misfit on CTV’s Robson Arms, which makes me like her even more…)

This got me to thinking of other really good minimalistic death scenes:

Woody Harrelson’s character Carson Wells in No Country for Old Men. Knows he’ll be eating a bullet and manages to get one word out in pleading before the trigger is pulled.

THX 1138‘s fellow escapee, the tall hologram actor (played by Richard Quinnell I think…), struggles to get the car he’s chosen to run in to start. With the police approaching his car, he gets it started only to crash his vehicle a short distance from his starting point. If you listen close you can hear a voice over the radio say: “I think I ran over a wookie back there on the expressway.”

Wash lands the Serenity after a major ass kicking and winds up with a Reaver ship’s protruding spire through his chest as a reward.

In a freak elevator accident, Dr Kane (Meshach Taylor) gets cut in half from a speeding cable like a slab of cheese at a yuppie loft party in Damien Omen II.

Richard Chance gets To Live and Die in LA. His drug deal gone bad death scene was abrupt, but someone so corrupt needs to die.