When the beloved sci-fi series Battlestar Galactica aired its three-part finale in 16 years ago, in March of 2009, the series left fans, arguably, with more questions than answers. To this day, BSG remains one of the greatest sci-fi shows of all time, so much so that many fans hardly even remember it was technically a reboot of a 1978 series of the same name. But no matter how great BSG was, and no matter how well it holds up, one question plagues the fans — and also, apparently, plagues Starbuck actress, Katee Sackhoff.
On her podcast, The Sackhoff Show, the actress recently decided to get to the bottom of one of the biggest mysteries in all of Battlestar fandom: “What is Starbuck?” And the person she asked was the man who created the reboot BSG in the first place, writer Ronald D. Moore.
“I get asked one question over and over and over again,” Sackhoff said, speaking to Moore. “And I don’t have an answer for people. And they say why do you not know, and I say, because I never asked: What is Starbuck?”
Sackhoff is referring to the moment in “Daybreak Part 3” in which Kara “Starbuck” Thrace is talking to Lee Adama (Jamie Bamber) on the surface of the real planet Earth (in the distant past), then vanishes. Previously, she had seemingly perished in the episode “Maelstrom” before coming back to life — inexplicably — in the Season 3 finale “Crossroads Part 2.” While there were spiritual hints at Starbuck’s role after she returned, there was never a clear answer on the show as to how and why.
“It was a process of trying to figure that out. I think in the end, I opted to not decide,” Moore responded on the new podcast episode. “Every answer we came up with was unsatisfying to what I thought she was. And what I thought she was was something kind of indefinable. [I] didn’t want her to be an angel. [I] didn’t want her to be a Jesus figure that had died and been resurrected, but was the part of the unknowable that had come to us.”
In the epic conversation, Sackhoff and Moore cover a lot more ground than just BSG, discussing his how he got his career start writing for Star Trek: The Next Generation, difficult dialogue in all sorts of sci-fi, and even Moore talking about cheerfully arguing with George Lucas about Darth Vader for the never-filmed TV series, Star Wars: Underworld.
But, Moore admits that the Starbuck question still haunts him as much as it does Sackhoff.
“I think for some people it is very unsatisfying,” Moore admits, talking to Sackhoff about the “ambiguity” of Starbuck’s return, and her ghostly disappearance. “Looking back on it, I’m not entirely that was the right choice. Maybe I should have given an answer? Because it is this weird, hanging thing from the show that does come up a lot.”
Ultimately, like the ending of BSG itself, Moore still feels torn over the decision but leans toward defending the ambiguity. In fact, as he and Sackhoff point out, there’s a lot in the BSG mythos that doesn’t exactly make logical sense, and that the viewer has to ascribe to some kind of supernatural or spiritual presence. And, like it or hate it, that blend of religious and science fiction themes is part of what made Battlestar Galactica what it was. Even if it didn’t answer all of this questions, the show remained, to the very end, very much itself.
