On Starbuck remaining human — and alive, or
Have You Scriptwriters Completely Lost Your Minds??
postscript appended and reposted 5-6-2007 5:41 p.m.
original post 5-5-2007 11:56 p.m.

I heard a rumor the other day — afterwards seemingly 'confirmed' by reading online posts — that on of my favorite fcitional characters on SyFy's reboot of Battlestar Galactica, Starbuck, is the fifth and final previously unknown Cylon model. The fact that she appears to Apollo at the end of the season finale (or was he hallucinating, like Baltar the mad scientist?) is supposed to make the matter clear. I understand that even Ron Moore has confirmed this (forgive me for bringing it up at this late date, but I only recently saw a tape of the finale, not having functioning cable myself).

Another bombshell in a show loaded with them, you say. Nope: just a bomb, as in dud. In fact, for the first time since the series began, Moore has made a really dumb error (if, indeed, the rumor is true). How unexpected and disappointing that in searching for a final twist for the episode, he should go for a solution so trite, superfluous, and, if you think about it, predictable. He’d practically telegraphed it. Bo-ring …

How much more interesting, though, if poor Starbuck were to return and still remain human, only to be disbelieved. Feared. Spurned.

Consider:

• In the season finale, four of the last five Cylon models are revealed simultaneously. It makes absolute sense for both Tory, the president’s aide and Col. Tigh, the admiral’s XO to be Cylon sleepers: in making those closest to the civilian and military leaders Cylons, the enemy has automatic access to the most useful intelligence and a way to track both leaders. The Cylons know every move nearly as soon as the human leaders make it. Same reasoning applies to the chief engineer, Tyrol: he has a key position.

• If you want to undermine the faith and trust the president and admiral have for those around them and make them doubt all their relationships, sow fear and dissent, etc., then revealing the leaders’ right hands — one of them the admiral’s oldest and dearest comrade — as Cylons is more than enough to do the job. Making the woman he loved like a daughter and depended on as a top pilot a Cylon, too, is superfluous, overkill. It adds nothing more to either Adama’s fears or to the story line.

• If Starbuck is supposed to be a Cylon, why did the Cylons have to remove genetic material from her while she was captive at the baby factory on Caprica? They wouldn’t need it if they’d made her — and already had multiple copies of her. Taking her ovary only makes sense if she’s human.

• If Starbuck is a Cylon, what’s the rationale for making Anders one? There’s no strategic advantage to that — but it is good strategy to make him one if she’s not, especially if there’s something very special about an all-too-human Starbuck and they need a way to keep tabs on her.

• If Starbuck is really a Cylon, what’s the point of them messing with her on New Caprica and sending Leoben to scam her about the child being hers? That only makes sense if Starbuck is human and meant to be something spectacular — and the Cylons are desperate to co-opt her, demoralize her, control her, use her because of it.

Yes, the plot lines definitely need to shake up viewers’ expectations to keep the series interesting — but not simply for the sake of surprise. In advancing the plot, the writers also have to give viewers something they can hold on to as well as characters they can care about without sabotaging those characters. Starbuck is a deeply flawed person with a self-destructive streak — but also a clever, funny, joyous, seemingly fearless spirit who’s also a brilliant pilot and a fierce, matchless warrior as a human, which is part of why we love her. And for the viewers, there has to be at least one human character who can go toe to toe with the Cylons and make them blink for a change. How deliciously ironic that that person should be the deeply screwed up Starbuck, given how much the Cylons despise self-doubting, unstable, unpredictable characters with messy emotions like hers. Which is perhaps the biggest reason we love her, that and her ability to kick Cylon butt.

Take that away by making her a Cylon, and you’ve told humanity that even at its best, it can never defeat the Cylons on its own: rather, it will need Cylon defectors because it is too weak to do the job alone. Depressing. Worse, you’ve also established that the Cylons have the means to follow the colonists all the way back to Earth and will undoubtedly do so. Then you’ve really taken away the viewers’ reason to care about what happens. While there was doubt, there was hope; kill the doubt by making Starbuck a Cylon, and you’ve killed hope (and with it, a significant portion of the viewership). Bad move. Idiot move, in fact.

But it’s too late: we (and Lee) saw Starbuck die. Or did we? How else can she return if she’s not a Cylon? As a hallucination? Nah, that’s a cop-out, and overused if Moore resorts to that.

True, we (and Lee) saw Starbuck’s ship explode as it dropped further and further down into the gas giant’s gravity well. But does that mean she died there? How much more interesting if she had a last-minute change of heart out of fear or survival instinct, as do many would-be suicides, and ejected just before her craft exploded, was rendered unconscious by the blast as she shot free of the debris — and was retrieved by a stealthed Cylon craft that had been waiting just inside the gas giant’s atmosphere for just such an occasion, having trailed Starbuck this far.

And why track Starbuck to the gas giant? Why prevent her suicide? Because the Cylons know something really big about her, know of a lost prophecy about her that not even her human mother or the president’s oracle, for all her knowledge of scripture, knew: that Kara would be the one who would discover where Earth was. Given that, the Cylons wouldn’t be content with the human petting zoo they had on New Caprica. They’d want to control her — or at least stay very, very close to her — so that they could ultimately control the totality of humanity. Because they saw their own future reborn on old Earth.

Starbuck is ornery, however, and can be maddeningly elusive even when the Cylons have imprisoned her. Thus, their need to monitor Starbuck and put Anders in her path on Caprica, eventually in her arms and in her life. They know that having fallen for him, she’ll return for him. She’ll keep him close.

But not every human-looking Cylon wants Starbuck to lead them to Earth. Some merely wish her to discover the location and surrender the information. At least one Six would rather reserve even that honor for herself: the one who fought her for the Arrow of Apollo and lost. All of which means the Cylons need leverage if they want to control Starbuck. Having tried and failed to create human hybrids on Caprica, even with Starbuck’s genetic material, they then try to clone her. And fail again. But she escapes, which is why they resort to outright fraud with the child on New Caprica later on.

Once Starbuck escapes Caprica with the arrow, the Cylons have to let the prophecy play out. Especially now that Anders is by her side on Galactica. Nice move: another monitor close at hand.

How much more interesting, then, that the Cylons track her and are there to rescue her from the gas giant and certain death because they know from the prophecy that her near-death experience will trigger the events that lead Starbuck to learn Earth’s location. This is information they must have at any cost.

When she wakes and finds she’s recovering on a Cylon base star, Kara herself thinks she’s a Cylon and despairs for a moment, trying to think of other ways to kill herself. She’s stopped and quickly disabused by a sympathetic Boomer model, who is fascinated by the prophecy and reveals it to Starbuck in an attempt to keep Kara from harming herself further. The Boomer even tells her about Anders and the failed attempt to clone her. But she also warns Starbuck bluntly that if she doesn’t cooperate by telling the Cylons what she knows about Earth, they’ll force the information from her. She also points out that should Starbuck manage to escape and return to Galactica, nobody will believe that she’s not a Cylon.

“We don’t need you to actually be one of us,” the Boomer notes. “We just need them to think you are. That’s enough.” Starbuck shocks and disturbs the Boomer by suddenly laughing out loud. “You can’t kill me,” she retorts, grinning. “You can’t afford to let me die, and there’s nothing you can do about it. And I’ll never tell you anything — I’d rather die first. This is great!” She laughs again, beside herself.

“We’ll see about that,” replies an angry Six who’s been eavesdropping.

How much more interesting, then, that at that moment, Starbuck doesn’t care that she’ll be suspected once she returns: she has something the Cylons want and humanity needs. Dream, vision, hallucination, or just her subconscious having worked out all the clues and connected the dots — it doesn’t matter to her how she knows where Earth is. She just can’t wait to tell Lee and his father and see the shock on their faces when she turns up alive. She refuses to believe that there won’t be some way short of autopsy to prove she’s not Cylon, that they won’t eventually believe her. And she figures that telling them about Anders should buy her some slack.

How much more interesting that Starbuck decides to return to Earth anyway and manages, once again, to escape her confinement and steal one of several colonial flyers that the Cylons still have around (no, the Cylons don’t make that easy: they’d rather she didn’t escape this time). How much more interesting that once she escapes, the Cylons choose that moment to develop a line of Kara counterfeits they can use in the future to further mess with the colonists. Not copies: they can’t clone her, due to some unforeseen abnormalities in her DNA, but they can sure make more Cylons that at least look like her.

Consider: from the start, we’re told that there are only x-number of human-looking Cylon models, and it’s repeated so often that we believe it. Yet this number is purely arbitrary, as any number probably would be. Having created that many models, there’s no reason the Cylons couldn’t create yet another, especially if there’s some strategic advantage. The Kara line would all be genetically identical to each other, but not quite identical to the original, given Starbuck’s dicey DNA and one particularly funky marker ... except that they tried to copy her and failed, spectacularly. As Starbuck herself will recall at a later opportune moment and point out to the admiral, there’s something unique about her that makes the Cylons crazy and makes her absolutely identifiable.

“How do I know that’s true?” counters the Old Man. “Until one of your cheap knock-offs turns up and we can compare your DNA to hers, you have no proof. All I know is that you’re the same Starbuck I knew before — we have your DNA on record. Still doesn’t mean you’re not a Cylon.” Adama, who’s grieved the loss of her mightily, wants to believe her but can’t afford to. Yet he can’t really afford not to, either, in the short term: what if she does know where Earth is? If she’s Cylon, she could be leading the enemy to what remains of humanity; but if she’s human, that means there’s hope ...

“You’ll know,” Starbuck replies, smiling disarmingly at the father figure she loves so much. “You always figure it out.”

They all so want to believe her, even the recalcitrant, ambivalent Lee, who still has feelings for her and therefore will be the last to be persuaded (yet another issue for him and his dad to fight about). They need to believe her: she’s their girl, their touchstone, their flawed, damaged, infuriating, vulnerable star, the one they all pin their hopes on. And so do we.

Which brings me back to my point: we all need Starbuck to be human. We need that hope. Remove that from the story line, and you’ve killed any reason for us to keep on watching Galactica. The sorry unraveling begins there.

As TV Guide would say: don’t jump the shark on this one, Ron. Not unless you’re ready to write off the rest of the series. Then again, if you do as advised and leave her human, that means there’s still one more Cylon model to be discovered … What fun.

ps — In the Starbuck-is-still-human scenario, I'm betting that the 12th Cylon model turns out to be Dualla. Makes sense for the communications officer to be one, too — and what else could freak out Lee more than having married a toaster? Whoopee! The foreshadowing is already there, BTW, in the cool, calculated, amoral approach to sex that Dee has before she finally hooks up with Apollo, not unlike a certain Six has before Caprica falls ...

pps — Kara, like all the other lead female characters, really needs to evolve. Having been through the ordeals of season 3, we need her to keep the best of her strengths, like her joyous abandon in flying to beat everyone else, her take-no-prisoners attitude, and her willingness to challenge hypocrisy and be skeptical about the conventional wisdom. But she also needs to have learned to put thriving on equal terms with surviving (just surviving isn't enough if you REALLY want to beat the Cylons) and to have tempered that willingness to challenge with the wisdom to choose better just which fights to pick and which ones to drop, making that willingness to challenge status quo, authority, naivete, etc., much less of a knee-jerk reaction on her part and a more well-considered action instead. Kara needs to grow up, even if that means outgrowing both Lee and Anders for a while, because the fleet needs her to be a rational adult without losing that happy spontaneity, intuition, and street-smart sense we love in her. And if Moore lets her stay human as advised above while letting her grow up a bit, she's going to be all the more interesting.

For heaven's sake, give us a strong, adult, radiant Starbuck that we can believe in, instead of turning her into either a stupid, depressed suicide or a mystical figure! She can fulfill that prophecy credibly by retaining those best qualities that we love, not by losing them. Show that she can learn to cope, adapt, and maybe Apollo can take a few pointers from her for a change.