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.
