Damn it! I bet myself a C-note you were going to come in with a wrestling or Galactica reference!
Anyway, that’s more of a failure to act; I’m not sure I’d count it. And he was consciously eschewing an immoral act. You’ve named a strategic error, methinks.
How about Londo Molari from** Babylon 5**? I’ve referred to him as a “noble villain”, but I think he is intended to be a sympathetic figure.
Archer and Phlox lied about the existence of a cure to a disease that was killing off an entire population, and interfered with the aliens attempts to find someone more decent to help them.
Janeway killed off a moderately interesting character to restore a fairly dull fellow and an actively obnoxious character back to life.
In the backstory of “Curse of Chalion” Ista, a very decent person
repeatedly drowned a close family friend, unto death - and she at least recognized her action as evil and made atonement repeatedly.
I should have specified “No idiots.”
I DID specify no villains. 
And you wrote killed off when you clearly meant murdered in cold blood. That is a bizarre typo; you may wish to check for malware.
Again, nothing pre-reformation. Do I need to write that down 95 times & nail it on the door? 
Helo in BSG, who had the chance to kill off all the Cylons and essentially end the war, and chose not to.
That’s the main reason I couldn’t bring myself to like that book, although I respected the hell out of it. It’s not that the protagonist was an unlikeable dick with no redeeming qualities - it’s that Mievelle didn’t seem to realize this. He wrote him like a good man making hard choices, while in fact, the character was just an asshole.
Good one.
Obviously Ozymandias - though arrogant, I think his choice to prevent WWIII via a fake alien invasion and the resulting deaths of many probably did weigh on him, but he justified it to save humanity. The other Watchmen wanted to stop his plan to save those who were going to be killed as a direct result, but it was far too late. All except for Rorschach agreed to keep the secret about the real source of the invasion, to play along with it and hopefully avert inevitable war.
I’d say he’s out due to Skald’s third clause. At the beginning of the series, he’s a villain. One with understandable motives, perhaps, but he’s still willing to provoke a war for his own (and his people’s) material gain. When he starts acting heroic, its directly because he wants to atone for his errors from the first two seasons.
Nitpick: there are no “other Watchmen.” There is no organization in the comic book called Watchmen; the title of the series is thematic. There was a “team” called Minutemen during the 40s, and an attempt to make a team called Crimebusters in the 60s, but no Watchmen.
I understand there was a reference to such a team in the movie, but I am not currently prepared to admit to having seen that. Which is odd, but I did enjoy the sigh tof Malin Ackerman’s boobies, so I’ve got some cognitive dissonance going on there.
Yeah, in many ways it’s such an amazing book, and I got really emotionally invested in the story, but upon finishing it I felt depressed and dirty. It will haunt me like books that want to be reread, but I gave my copy away.
You’re quite right - murdered (after chasing him down while he desperately pled for life).
Ista didn’t reform - she was a good, decent person throughout the story even before she did the bad thing (she started with the best of intentions and carried on as things went horribly wrong).
Speaking of Bujold, Miles tacitly ordered the torture of a captive in the first book featuring him.
I can’t by any stretch of the imagination classify either of these men as good guys.
Ok, ok, it was shorthand. 
Make that “Nite Owl, Dr. Manhattan, and Silk Spectre.”
He also
[spoiler]cut that guy’s legs off when he had a seizure during a combat op. Obviously not something he intended, but it was a direct result of his selfish decision to hide his medical condition from his superiors.
Somewhat mitigated by the fact that they grew the guy new legs, but still.[/spoiler]
Batman.
“I won’t kill you. But you might wish you were dead.”
Eh - Jesse Pinkman has genuine virtues. He’s deeply, deeply flawed, of course - but he has a basic sense of empathy, and even of justice. When he was enraged by the death of the child dealerhe wasn’t just deciding to be angry to convince himself he was still a good person. In fact, he spent a lot of that season believing he was “the bad guy.” Jesse’s grief and rage were very real, and spoke well of him.
And Jesse, right before the end of the last season, begged White to turn himself in to the cops, even if it meant they’d both go to prison, rather than commit murder.
Walter White is an unsympathetic ass - a highly intelligent, capable man who chooses to turn himself into a monster. And he chooses to turn a much younger, weaker one into a monster as well, without a second thought. But Jesse himself - in a limited sense, he’s a good man.
Yep. I mean Tigh
killed his beloved wife for unwittingly compromising the resistance
for Christ’s sake. To me it’s not about being ‘‘fucked in the head’’ so much as just really showing how good people can so easily do terrible things in the name of survival. That show is like the ultimate embodiment of ‘‘war is hell.’’
ETA: I can’t really think of Cain as good under any circumstances. At least the Battlestar crew made an effort not to turn into complete monsters.
Back to Buffy, Giles snuffing Glory’s “host” by suffocating him at the end of season 5. Arguably the best thing to do, but he had no idea if that was the only option. It was just the surest and most expedient.
chorpler, I’m confused. How did it not “end up happening”. They flared the sun to feed the attitude jets that were only mounted on 5% of the ring. The extra boost stopped the ring from getting further and further off center. Once it was back centered, they said the jets would keep it that way without the flares, but the people in those sections were already irradiated. Am I just remembering it wrong? This was a choice the Protectors could not make. I don’t have the book here to check.
One thing that mitigate’s Cain’s villainy at least a bit, though, is the difference between Pegasus and Galactica. Galactica was very nearly a decomissioned hulk/museum at the start of the series - manifestly not battle-ready in terms of equipment, training, or crew. (No ammo on board, years since the last jump, skeleton and lackluster crew, etc.) Adama was only barely able to get the ship into a shape where it could sort-of engage the enemy, and right around the time he did that, he made contact with a very large civilian fleet under the command of a woman with an extremely strong moral and legal claim on his support. (After all, Rosslyn was the President of the Colonies.)
Pegasus was no hulk, but a top-of-the-line, fully crewed and equipped battlestar. Even after the damage sustained in the initial attack, she remained a full-fledged warship in the way that Galactica had to struggle to be. Far more heavily armed and armored. These are factors that would have made a more aggressive posture seem far more attractive - even reasonable. And once you’ve decided upon that, it becomes hard to view civilians (especially small numbers of leaderless ones) as anything more than incidental.
None of this is to deny that Cain did horrible, horrible things. Of course she did - that’s why she’s in this thread. But I think there’s enough reasonableness in her goals to put her, just barely, on the “good” side of the ledger.