Most Intelligent: 4-5

#5: Daniel Faraday, Lost
Faraday is a physicist from the University of Oxford who has been given a buttload of grant money to screw with time travel. I'm still not exactly sure what he did on that show, but I know it had something to do with electromagnetic energy. Basically, without him, there are no seasons 4, 5, and 6 unless they found a way to do them sans time travel.

Weakness: He couldn't save her.

#4: River Tam, Firefly

River, extremely gifted intellectually from a very young age, consistently has both a strong thirst for knowledge and a love for and intuitive grasp of dance. By the time she was 14 years old, she had grown “bored” with her studies and was already in the graduate program for physics.

It was at this point that she was sent to a government learning facility known as "The Academy". While her parents and Simon believed the Academy was a private school meant to nurture the gifts of talented children, it was in fact a cover for a government experiment in creating assassins. While in the hands of the Alliance doctors and scientists, River was secretly and extensively experimented on, including surgery that damaged her amygdala. According to Simon, the Alliance attempted to isolate River from her family, though she managed to send a call for help by putting a coded message in a letter to her brother. Simon decoded the message and set out to rescue his then 16-year-old sister, despite his parents' insistence that he was being paranoid. Simon exhausted his personal fortune and sacrificed a promising career in medicine, but eventually located and freed River with the help of anti-governmental groups.


The R. Tam sessions depict her descent into insanity, and also portray hints of her psychic abilities. She references the "G-23 Paxilon Hydrochlorate", which would later be a plot point in the film Serenity, and mentions the Academy's first subject “dying on the table”, something she could not have learned through conventional means. The first session clip indicates she has strong “intuitive” abilities and can easily understand complex subjects.

Weakness: She struggles with insanity.

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