I think the Gandalf metaphor Audra and others have been using makes the most sense for explaining Starbuck. Just like Gandalf, Starbuck died before her mission was accomplished so she was sent back so she could finish.
You could even go so far as to say that BSG explains it more than the LOTR movies did (I can’t recall how well the books did).
Behold, my theory about the THIRD Kara Thrace - aka The Farmbuck Theory!
There were three Kara Thraces:
1: the one who lives through the series and then dies in Maelstrom
2: the resurrected angel (and her Viper) who eventually disappears in the field
3: the one the Cylons made and ended up crashed on Erf! I call her Farmbuck.
Okay, follow me on this third one. Let’s assume the Cylons, led by Simon, harvested her eggs/genetic material from the episode The Farm. Let’s then assume they made a biological copy of her body. Maybe it was even ‘alive’ to a certain extent. This would have been quite the achievement. They also then made a copy of her Viper and flight suit, dog tags, etc. for Farmbuck to wear - or maybe they used parts from a dead Colonial pilot. This wouldn’t be that hard for the tech-savvy Cylons to do. So then they send out Farmbuck to fly her Viper and maybe find Erf. The Hybrids know that Kara is the “harbinger of death,” aka she’s special, and maybe she knows the way to Erf. They have a mindset that one copy of a person is as good as another, so they assume that a copied Kara would be a valuable asset.
So they send her out, and she does an FTL jump, and she’s never seen again. She ends up jumping to Erf and dies in a crash-landing. Now, WHY would that happen? Call it divine intervention. Let’s say the Hand of God caused her to jump to Erf, so that she could be discovered by the Resurrected Starbuck, which sets into motion the rest of season 4.5. Since the Cylons never recovered Farmbuck, they never bothered making another, or they didn’t have the resources to do it again.
My little theory explains how we could see Starbuck’s Viper implode in Maelstrom, then see her wrecked Viper on Erf - they weren’t the same ship, or the same Starbuck. It also ties back into the Farm storyline. You’re still left with the idea of divine intervention, and that Resurrected Starbuck was an “angel” or Gandalf or a Messenger of God.
Whaddaya think?
I get RDM’s decision to leave Kara’s nature ambiguous. It’s a brilliant narrative move, because instead of tying everything into a neat little bow and ending things there, he leaves it in such a way that conversations and theories can be debated and argued about for weeks/months/years to come, leaving his creation vibrant and relevant long after it is finished.
Having said that though, I think it was a rather glaring omission to leave out any explanation of how Starbuck got from the Maelstrom to Earth 1.0.
LOL–does anything else matter? I have a serious crush on Katee…
Alas, they wouldn’t have been able to make a biological copy of her body from her egg cells. Egg cells only have half of the necessary chromosomes. I suppose they could use the non-egg cells from her ovaries, but then why take an ovary, specifically, unless you’re interested in the egg cells? They’d probably have had better luck (and easier harvesting, too!) using cells swabbed from the inside of her cheek, or stem cells drawn out of her bone marrow.
Yeah, that’s the thing. You can accept the idea that Starbuck 2.0 is an “Angel” or whatever, which then means Starbuck 1.0 is dead, yet there’s still the unanswered questions. We see her death onscreen (her Viper explodes), but then we find Charbuck and a crashed Viper (so furthermore it seems unlikely that it’s even the same Viper, since her death was her Viper exploding).
The “she’s an Angel sent back by God” explanation would explain it if we just had this:
Starbuck and Original Viper explode in Gas Giant --> Angel Starbuck and Pristine Viper appear
but when you add in Charbuck and Crashed Viper you have three different copies of Starbuck that seem disconnected. Thus, even if you buy that 2.0 is an Angel, and you draw a line then an have Starbuck 1.0 die and be resurrected by God/Whatever as Starbuck 2.0, there’s that nagging piece that doesn’t fit.
And that’s why it’s unsatisfying. Myself I could accept the explanation of the Head Characters, when you retcon that explanation back onto the prior events it fits. For Starbuck, you’ve put together a puzzle that you think fits until you notice one of the pieces is still sitting on the side. If you try then to fit that piece in, now you have three pieces that are all unconnected and don’t flow together. Narrative wise that isn’t satisfying.
Ooh, I really, really like that idea.
That reminds me of something a professor of mine mentioned about the Noah story in Genesis. Noah releases a raven first, then the dove. My professor’s explanation was that the raven, a carrion bird, was Noah’s way of saying, “Frak you, God! Look what you left us with: a world full of death. Yeah, great plan you had there.” Kara kind of serves as a combination of the two: she leads humanity to Earth 1, the dead world, then to Earth 2, the new world.
I think it’s easier if you work from the question of why Kara was supposed to die in the first place. My feeling is that she wouldn’t accept that she was different, had a special destiny, without really strange things happening to her, such as finding her own body. She believed in the gods from the start, but I don’t think she believed that she had an active role to play in this scheme until she died, and I don’t think she would have believed she had any role left to play after the disaster of Earth 1 if she hadn’t found something there to push her into even weirder territory.
Also, I think it had to do with her relationship with Sam; I doubt old Starbuck would have ever really accepted Sam’s Cylon-hood, which turned out to be key, since she had to rely on him once he became hybridized. If she didn’t have that nagging suspicion that she might be a Cylon, too, that maybe that’s why she resurrected, I don’t think she ever would have crossed that line of salt. She learned what it feels like to be lost and confused about one’s own nature firsthand, which allowed her to accept that in others as well.
Hope no one is offended by this … I’m not a religious person. But my parents raised me as one, so I remember most of the basics. My take on Kara was a mesianic figure. You know … she died … rose from the dead … did a few more good deeds … then ascended into heaven. Again, anyone deeply religious, I mean no offense.
My thoughts exactly. And, in addition to Charbuck on Earth 1.0, there was still what looked like a Heavy Raider in one of the final shots before Starbuck’s viper exploded. In my opinion, both of these could have been omitted and the story would have made a lot more sense.
Off-topic question: What distro do you use, Keith Z-G?
I was having a discussion about the finale with a friend, who’s just watched it and hated it, and it sparked some thoughts on Starbuck, what I wish she was, and what the hell was with all the notes. It’s all pretty scattered thoughts, but here it is.
In retrospect, here’s what Starbuck did after she died and came back that mattered in the grand scheme of things:-
- Found Earth 1
- Found the secret about the notes to the special song
- And thus, found earth 2
On 1. In retrospect, Earth one seems to be a device to a. bring back memories for the final fives and give some evidence to the FF backstory, and b. bring the rebel cylons and the humans to a truce, and c. bring the humans (and cylons) to rock bottom, and push them into the finale. Now, Starbuck (well, technically, the VIPER she took back with her, which is still a ?? as to what/who/how it came to be, is the actual ‘harbinger’ of the coordinates to it, so I’m separating the two.) was the one who found the key to solving the ‘mystery’, but one could argue that the FFs, who was attracted to the viper in that scene, might have been able to solve it as well, in time.
2+3 Now, the notes. Starbuck again was the one to solve the puzzle here, but the actual song and information of the notes was already in the FF minds as well as Hera. Again, I don’t think it was absolutely necessary for Starbuck to be the one that cracked it, even though she did have a history with the notes.
What’s interesting is that the FFs knew the song as a lullaby, or something from childhood. Which means that on some weird level the FF cylons have the address to this Earth for years. Why didn’t they figure it out 2000 years ago to find this place, when they were at war with their metal cylons? (I know, they don’t have FTL drives. But, still. It’s strange to think that they’ve had this info for all this time, and not know it.)
This is the part where I find myself wishing that Starbuck never died in the first place. Wouldn’t it have been great if Starbuck didn’t have a special destiny, and was just a normal awesome person (human)? Because then, it would mean that it was kind of a ‘destiny’ for humans and cylons to co-exist together. That, the cylons had all the information (well, and that darn mystical VIPER, of which, yikes.) to a perfect world, but it took a normal non special destiny human mind to crack the code and figure it out. It would have been a nice kind of imagery, no? Or maybe it’s just cheesy ol’ me.
If only Starbuck wasn’t Starbuck 2.0 and had that damn ‘special destiny’. The more I think about it, the more I wish they didn’t kill her off is that weird pseudo suicide bit at the end of season 3, and just have her figure it out as a human instead of figuring out all the puzzles as some spiritual hhuuuhaaa back from the dead special destiny unexplainable thing. It was… all kind of unnecessary.
But anyway. To be back on topic with the thread, I was pretty ok with how they left things with Starbuck, even though it was kind of a cop out too. But I would have been much angrier if they did say, yes, Starbuck is Jesus, or an angel, or something of that sort, stated as a fact.
When I saw Starbuck disappear, I immediately thought of Shelly Godfrey. Remember? When Head 6 disappeared from Baltar’s head, then this mysterious 6 (Shelly Godfrey) shows up trying to frame Baltar, then Head 6 reappears and Shelly Godfrey disappears and is never seen again. I think Adama makes some comment along the lines of, “Was she ever really here?”.
So anyway, now I think the Shelly Godfrey actually was Head 6, and that the angels can manifest in a way that will allow everyone to see them. And that’s what I think Starbuck was.
What’s not explained (and I’m kind of okay about it) is how did her Dad (or adoptive Dad like Joseph?) know about the song?
Maybe Kara’s parents were visited by the Angel Bob and/or the Angel Jimi, who sang it to 'em.
Edit: I guess they’d be Head Bob and/or Head Jimi, in the BSG universe.
Or Bob got a visit from Head Starbuck.
I really like that theory! Maybe that’s what RDM intended as opposed to her being an angel with direct knowledge of God like Head Baltar and Head Six.
I really like that theory too, but I think I saw a Shelly Godfrey like 6 in the preview of The Plan. So maybe she’s a real Cylon, or you could be correct. Hopefully, we’ll know more after the movie in the fall…
You guys can’t be serious! How can she be an angel? She’s too damn aggressive. Besides, an angel who occasionally enjoys taking a dump in the men’s room? Yeah, right! I believe the writers kind of lost themselves into the script. Personally, I liked the show a lot; too bad they turned it into a lame supernatural crap. First the Matrix, now Battlestar Gallactica…
Actually sgchr, there’s quite a lot written about angels throughout history. Until now, they were not white fluffy things with halo’s & harps. Angels are/were God’s warriors. They are brutal & ruthless in carrying out their mission. They fought Satan & his followers during the fall. They have not been quite as ahem “angelic” as they are currently portrayed.
Welcome aboard, sgchr!
Minor point: the Battlestar’s bathrooms are unisex.
Yeah, I’ve heard references to Dark Angels before… But that doesn’t really fit Kara. She was more of a Frakked Up Angel…