JENNY GREEN – Dead Boy Detectives – Briana Cuoco

From her first moment onscreen, it is clear that Jenny, a goth butcher who rents a room to Crystal, is essential to everything. When Crystal decides to ask her ex-boyfriend for help with a case, Jenny tags along for support, not knowing that David is a demon. David possesses Jenny. and, in possibly the best-ever blend of possession and body-swapping, Crystal leaves her body, enters Jenny, grabs David, and “buries” him. Both Jenny and Crystal return to their own bodies, but Jenny has acquired the ability to see ghosts. It is Jenny who arms Crystal and Niko with butcher knives so they can deal with the witch Esther who is pursuing the Dead Boys. At the end of things Jenny’s shop explodes, leaving her little choice but to join the further adventures of the detectives.

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MINA STARRATT – Wynonna Earp: Vengeance – Karen Knox

Mina was a petty bureaucrat when she was human, but for reasons unknown she cared about Wynonna and Waverly Earp. She was in charge of the group home where 15-year-old Wynonna was sent. Mina’s purpose in Purgatory is to collect three things of personal importance to the Earps, and begins by taking Nicole Haught’s wedding ring. She already has the bracelet referred to previously, but the third charm remains a mystery. Wynonna uses a demon trap to contain Mina (and incidentally Peacemaker) and buries the trap with Doc’s body. What spell Mina was planning to cast has not been revealed, but she is still alive in that box with Wynonna’s gun. Why did Mina make a deal with demons to get a temporary pass from hell? Was the gun what she really wanted all along?

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ASTER CALYX – Beacon 23 – Lena Headey

Her name means “star seed” and it is a pseudonym created for her when she was a child. (Her beacon keeper parents were forced into exile on a planet named Menelaus.) Her mother was killed when that planet was attacked, and she escaped alone, having been abandoned by her father. Aster’s loyalties might lie with the corporation that employs her, or the military, or one of the several artificial intelligences battling for control of things. Her girlfriend Coley says she uses people and cannot be relied upon, but her friendship with the soldier who was like herself, mysteriously drawn to the anomalous space where the Beacon sits, belies that. While waiting for destiny to point her in the right direction, Aster likes to get high on gravity waves by sitting next to the generator that powers the dark matter detector on Beacon 23. She appears in only eleven of the series’ sixteen episodes, but the Beacon is full of her presence, even when she is not there.

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HENRY KAVANAUGH – From – Robert Joy

Many years ago, Henry’s wife and three children disappeared, and he accepted the likelihood of their deaths. Then a woman shows up at his door carrying his son’s lunchbox and tells him his son is alive. As the two of them look into what happened to Henry’s family, they are injured in a traffic accident, and the ambulance taking them to hospital encounters the tree blocking the road that is the entrance to FROM’s ‘town’. Henry is reunited with his son Victor and adapts to his new situation so well that one sometimes doubts that he and Victor have actually been separated for that long. From what Victor said before his father’s arrival, Henry’s family arrived in the town with someone named Christopher, but Henry seems unaware of Christopher and any relationship his wife might have had with him.

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TESS AVERY – Sight Unseen – Dolly Lewis

Tess is a Vancouver police detective who loses her sight during a murder investigation, and because of that allows a suspect to escape with the woman he kidnapped. Without giving a reason, she resigns from the force, teams up with a remote set of eyes through an online app, and rescues the kidnapped woman without any help from her puzzled former partner. She has a brother she regards as a ne’er-do-well, and he’s really only that from a cop’s point of view. She let that suspect escape to protect the public because she couldn’t see who she was shooting at, and when she catches up with the guy, she doesn’t shoot to kill. Avery is the most realistic police detective on television.

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YE WENJIE – Three Body – Wang Ziwen & Chen Jin

Astrophysicist Ye Wenjie is a patient woman. After her father ran afoul of the Cultural Revolution and was killed, she tries to avoid trouble, but it finds her anyway. When the political activities of a reporter she befriends are uncovered, he accuses her instead, and she is imprisoned at a remote observatory in Northern China. A message of alien origin is received and translated, but she is instructed not to reply. Ye Wenjie believes that Earth is headed for ecological disaster, and has no confidence that existing political and scientific institutions will be able to solve it. Secretly, she sends a response to the alien message, urging them to intervene and asking them for help. Ye Wenjie is clever. If the aliens are benevolent, they will help Earth. If they prove hostile, humans will be forced to unite against them.

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** — Three Body Problem and Beacon 23 were released in 2023, but became available too late to make last year’s list.