Our local weekly newspaper, the Gazette, ran a list last week that I find oddly fascinating — a list of all the homicides in Montgomery County, Maryland in 2010.

There were seventeen, which isn’t bad for a county of just under a million people — neighboring Prince George’s County had more than five times as many, and as for Washington and Baltimore, well…

Of the seventeen victims, fourteen were men, three were women, and none, thank heavens, were children. Ages ranged from 18 to 52, but the distribution wasn’t remotely even — twelve of them were under thirty.

Nine of them were shot. Four were stabbed. The other four, including two of the women, died of “bodily trauma,” apparently meaning they were beaten to death. (The third woman was stabbed to death with a pair of scissors.)

Of the seventeen, one shooting was ruled self-defense, one was deemed an accident (the killer apparently called the cops himself), and the other deaths all appear to be murder, though in some cases that’s not definite. In seven of the fifteen apparent murders, the killers are in custody; in two, the police have a suspect but have not yet put together a strong enough case for a murder charge. In one, the killer is known but at large, and that one’s a bit weird — it was one of the bodily trauma cases, and the 28-year-old suspect is described as 3’11” and 85 pounds. Gotta be a story there.

One thing I find interesting is that in the seven (or eight, if you count the midget) solved murders, at least four involved multiple killers — twelve people have been charged in those four cases.

And most of them were really stupid.

I don’t have any brilliant conclusions, I’m afraid, except to say that looking over these cases, most of them don’t look much like the murders that Hollywood depicts every week on TV. One of them, a 19-year-old girl found in a shallow grave in the woods, might fit reasonably well on “Bones,” but it’s unsolved.

Which is too bad.

They strike without warning, without mercy, appearing out of nowhere and leaving no one alive…

For Christmas, one of my sisters gave me a DVD of the short-lived SF series “Space Rangers.” I hadn’t seen the show since its brief original run in 1993, and I didn’t remember a lot of details — mostly I remembered Marjorie Monaghan as Jo Jo and Linda Hunt as Chennault, and that the show had a pleasantly scruffy feel. The last couple of nights I’ve been watching it while I do my nightly exercises, and I was struck by one story element I had completely forgotten — the banshees. These are mysterious hostile aliens who are attacking helpless transports.

And what struck me about them was a strong feeling of deja vu. I’ve seen this scenario before. What’s more, I’ve seen it as an important story element used to add excitement and intrigue to the first few episodes of a new spacefaring SF TV series.

Twice.

On “Firefly” they were called Reavers. On “Babylon 5” they were called raiders. All in all, though, they’re pretty similar in methodology — they appear out of nowhere, viciously attack lightly-armed transports, wipe out opposition with blood-curdling thoroughness, then vanish again before the more-heavily-armed good guys can get there to help.

Now I find myself wondering why these three series all used such similar devices.

I suppose it’s a cheap way to suck viewers in by showing Our Heroes fighting bloodthirsty monsters, and on “Firefly” they eventually turned out to have an important role in the series overall story arc. On “Babylon 5,” though, they were little more than a minor nuisance, contributing almost nothing to the five-year whole, and I would have thought the Narn-Centauri conflict would have been enough of a hook to draw people in without the raiders.

On “Space Rangers,” of course, the series didn’t last long enough to see how important they were. “Space Rangers” was also so clumsily written that it’s hard to be sure why anything was there. I mean, the first episode involves a whole bunch of backstory stuff (the hero’s old mentor, the alien’s mysterious culture) that viewers don’t yet know or care about — not good writing.

Anyway, I find it curious that all three series used such a similar device, and I wonder why it happened. Are space pirates that essential an element of space opera?