Farscape's Aeryn just totally rocked. She had a dark past (she had been an assassin for a militaristic society who had done really bad things in the name of promotion). She got labelled as "contaminated" and outcast from her society. As she lived apart from it, she began to realize just how twisted the value-system was in the society she had lived. (I love the confrontation she had with her commanding officer at the end of Season 1 where she tells him that he had cost "everything" only for her to realize that everything she'd had "hadn't been worth a damn." Aeryn could be sarcastic, cold, wrong, heroic, and utterly heartbreaking. She really is one of the great heroines as far as I'm concerned.