Consider this a word to Damon Lindelof, Ronald D. Moore and any other TV producers who are even considering making a series based on characters who are essentially marooned—in space, on a tropical isle, or otherwise.

Big character deaths may be fun, they may bring viewers, and heck, they may even advance the story.

But for your kind of show, it’s also a little dangerous.

After all, it’s not like you’re the Starship Enterprise. You can’t just dock at your local Starbase and bring aboard a new red shirt, security chief, first officer, or what-have-you to start a new season fresh.

No.

Pretty much by definition, your characters are out there, alone.

Introduction of new characters isn’t impossible, of course, but it is damn hard and can’t be attempted too often. Otherwise, you’ve lost your dramatic integrity and very likely the raison d’etre that caused you to conceive the series concept in the first place.

So if you kill one of them, and you may have just permanently cut your dramatic possibilities in proportion to the cast you started off with.

Just ask the former producers of "Star Trek: Voyager" about this phenomenon, who dealt with it with only mixed results during that series’ seven-year run.

Despite the dangers, Lindelof on "Lost" and Moore on "Battlestar Galactica" cheerfully seem to be killing off their respective dramatis personae.

This is perhaps most startling on "Lost," where regardless that the series has made clear there are but 48 survivors total on the island Lindelof and his cohorts seem to be doing their level best to increase their body count.

The recent murders of Ana Lucia and Libby were surprising, particularly the death of Ana Lucia, who producers emphasized so strongly during the second season and really made viewers get to know so well.

In some sense, the deaths of castaways on "Lost" are more powerful precisely because there are so few of them to start with.

Of course, we viewers don’t really know the full story of what’s going on, on the island among the survivors, the menacing Others and the Dharma Initiative.

In fact, actually, suggestions have been that the entire series isn’t real at all but rather is all a creation of one character in a psychiatric hospital.

"Lost" representatives denied it, but one has to wonder if their deaths were motivated by outside events. It’s interesting that of all the castaways, Michael killed the two who were portrayed by actresses who both were nabbed by Hawaii police for real-life drunk driving charges.

Meanwhile, more death seems certain among the human survivors on "Battlestar Galactica," as well.

Reports indicate that in an episode early in the coming third season of the series, the character of Dualla, played by Kandyse McClure, as well as entire Battlestar Pegasus each meet untimely ends.

For fans, Dualla has grown from simply a presence in Galactica’s CIC to becoming one of the main characters of the series. Killing her will be a major loss and series producers will have to look high and low for a replacement. Of course, let’s hope so many of these main characters on BSG don’t die that the producers are forced to start introducing us to the lives of the cooks in the Galactica galley.

And then there is the Pegasus herself.

In retelling the Pegasus/Cain story from the original "Battlestar Galactica," it was a smart move to change the ending so that the Pegasus remains in the fleet afterwards—that it is not lost as it was in the original. That’s simply because within the confined context of the series, the continued existence of the Pegasus itself offered more characters and storytelling potential. Its destruction, of course, would immediately negate all of those possibilities.

All of this said, of course, that there’s nothing really wrong with big character deaths on any series. It was "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" maven Joss Whedon who said famously that producers should give viewers what they need, not what they want and that viewers need to have their hearts broken on a regular basis—otherwise things just get, well, boring. And on TV, boring is bad.

It’s simply that among such sequestered sets of characters as those on "Lost" or BSG, it’s that much harder to introduce new characters to the viewers and represents a bigger gamble.

Here’s to hoping Lindelof, Moore and their respective teams have tight handles on their own stories so that they know where all this death is taking us.