Battlestar Galactica: Kara Thrace and Her Special Destiny.

It does sound like a bad cover band.

Kara “Starbuck” Thrace (Katee Sackhoff) took some time to grow on me, but the more time has gone on I am beginning to think that it is just the in-medias-res nature of the mini-series. Many of the people I have encouraged to watch BSG tell me that the mini-series is good, but that it takes a bit to become attached to the characters. I think this is because when BSG starts the characters are whole persons, and as viewers we are not given nice, easy, this-is-who-this-is introductions to them. I felt the first pull of sympathetic understanding when Kara confesses to Lee that she feels responsible for Zack’s death. She jeopardizes loosing her closest friend in order to be honest about the most painful experience of both their lives.

Oh, and did I mention that she is a total badass?

The big question for all of us is: what came back to life at the end of Season Three? In the episode “Malestorm” Kara flew into a storm and her Viper exploded; she died. But in the last moments of Season Three she flies up next to Lee and tells him that she has been to Earth, that she will lead the fleet there. (I am going to talk about this elsewhere, but right now I have to point out that Lee is the last one she speaks to before she dies and the first one she speaks to when she comes back. All of you Kara/Lee nay-sayers just ponder that for a moment.) But is it really Kara?

I refuse to believe, even for a second, that Kara is the last Cylon, even thought that would be the most obvious explanation for her dying but not being dead. In Razor the Hybrid told Kendra that Kara would lead humanity to its doom, but pardon me if I am disinclined to take a gross human/Cylon old dude living in a tub of gel at his word. The fact that she and Anders have not produced a child would maybe indicate that she is a Cylon, but that seems like fairly slim evidence. On the other hand, Tigh (Michael Hogan), Anders (Michael Trucco), Tyrol (Aaron Douglas), and Tory (Rekha Sharma) were part of the Resistance, three of them were the leaders of it, but Kara was a captive during the Occupation. (If you can’t see where I am going, or if you don’t actually know me in person, I think the final Cylon is Laura Roslin (Mary McDonnell).) I just do not think Kara is the last Cylon. It would be too heartbreaking, both for her and for the audience. To suffer as much as she has and then to find out that she is not human; it just strikes me as unnecessarily cruel.

So, I am denying that she could be the last Cylon. Does that mean that she really did not die when her ship exploded? She looked fairly dead. Lee did not even want to send out a search party; he was sure enough that she was gone. The “Leoben” who guides her into the storm, to guide her to the next part of her journey, is not really Leoben (Callum Keith Rennie), and tells her that he never said he was, so maybe she is now something like that. A guide who looks like Kara and has all of Kara’s memories and feelings, but is not the same as the woman who died. Maybe it is like Season Three of Buffy when Angel came back from a hell dimension; she has been given her body back to fulfill her purpose. Maybe it was just plain wrong for her to be dead in the first place.

We will have to play my all time favorite game: wait and see.

The TV Girl