When Battlestar Galactica ended in 2009, there was a major question lingering: what was Kara “Starbuck” Thrace? At the start of the dark TV reboot, which can be streamed with a Prime Video subscription, that was an easy enough answer: Katee Sackhoff’s character was a human pilot for the Colonial fleet. But Battlestar’s final season made it abundantly clear she’d become something more, yet never provided a definitive answer for this mystery. Show creator Ronald D. Moore finally opened up about why he left this ending so open ended, while speaking with Sackhoff herself.
It was clear something was amiss in the final moments of the Battlestar Galactica Season 3 finale when Kara, who was thought to have died in “Maelstrom,” suddenly reemerged in a brand-new Viper and knew the location of Earth (the first one). But then in Season 4’s “Sometimes a Great Notion,” Kara discovered her own corpse on the planet where the Thirteenth Tribe once resided. During his visit to The Sackhoff Show, Moore talked about how they’d planted the seeds for Kara to have a greater destiny through her interactions with Leoben, as well as how the “concept of God” was baked into the show stretching back to when it launched with the miniseries. He then explained:
Long story short, at the end, I was faced with the challenge of, ‘How do you define the indefinable?’ And we debated it a lot. We had a lot of chat in the writers room towards that last season. ‘What is Starbuck? Is she Gabriel? Is she Jesus? Ok, that’s a little too easy. Is she an angel? Is she other analogies we pulled from other religious traditions and theologies on Earth?’ And none of them felt right.
While Head Six and Head Baltar were eventually revealed to be angels sent by God, the Starbuck we followed along with in Season 4 was apparently something else entirely, yet undefinable. Somehow she was a corporeal being, and yet there was her body in the Viper wreckage on that radioactive landscape. Things got even weirder when Kara learned how to play “All Along the Watchtower,” the same song that Tory, Anders, Tigh and Tyrol heard in their heads when they discovered they were four of the Final Five. Oh, and let’s not forget how she just disappeared while talking with Lee Adama on our Earth.
And yet, whatever explanation Ronald D. Moore and the writers came up with just wasn’t good enough in their minds. So instead, they decided to just leave it unresolved, which made him think of one of HBO’s most popular shows while he was talking with Katie Sackhoff. In his words:
Every time we gave it a name and every time said, ‘This is what she is,’ I felt like the mystery was gone and the special quality was gone, and I decided at the end I’m just not going to say which is, and we’re just going to leave the audience with that… The Sopranos ending is somewhat similar. You just don’t answer certain questions. You let the audience wonder, and that’s going to be really unsatisfying to some people.
When Sackhoff further questioned Moore on if it’s the ambiguity that’s been unsatisfying for these people more than a decade and a half after the three-part “Daybreak” aired, he acknowledged that’s probably the case, which is why the actress is asked by Battlestar fans so frequently about this topic. As he put it:
I think for some people it is very unsatisfying, and I think that’s why you get the question a lot, because people want that answer. And I think looking back on it, I’m not entirely sure that was the right choice. Maybe I should have given it an answer. Because it is this weird hanging thing from the show that does come up a lot. I’ve gone back and forth in my mind over the last few years about, ‘Is that good? Do I like that I am enjoying the fact that people still think about it and are still wrestling with it and jut want to know?’ Or am I just like, ‘Fuck, why didn’t I just answer that question? Just give it to them so it’s not just sticking around?
Moore added that ultimately, he still feels “glad” that he didn’t provide a definitive answer, noting that he likes the moment when Kara disappears on Lee. So while Battlestar Galactica will continue to collect fans and draw old ones back to rewatch the series, don’t ever expect an answer to the mystery of Kara Thrace’s existence in Season 4. That’s something you’ll just have to craft your own head canon for or leave it alone.
As of last July, Peacock axed its plans to launch a new Battlestar Galactica series set in the same continuity as the 2004 series. There’s also been a Battlestar Galactica movie in development that, as of 2020, was being written by Simon Kinberg, but there’s been no update on its status for a long time. As for Ronald D. Moore, you can see his writing skills being put to good use on Outlander and For All Mankind, which can be respectively streamed on Starz and with an Apple TV+ subscription.
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