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BACKGROUND

Kara had intended to be a professional Pyramid ball player until her knee gave out. She eventually joined the military, where she found more acceptance than she, an abused child, had felt at home. Although Kara's mother had served in the Marines in the First Cylon War, Kara was the first person in the family to become an officer. Kara's mother was not content with her daughter's military record, however, claiming she is not disciplined enough, and that she is wasting her natural talent for flying.

As a Flight Instructor at the Colonial Flight School, she met and became romantically involved with one of her students, Zak Adama. Although Zak told her that he did not want any special treatment from her, Kara passed him even though he failed Basic Flight she could not bring herself to crush his dreams.

Her leniency cost Zak his life when he was killed in his first Viper mission. After his death, Starbuck met his father, Commander Adama. He realized that Starbuck and Zak had been engaged and brought her under his command as a Lieutenant. Zak's death, however, created a wedge between Commander Adama and his other son, Lee "Apollo" Adama, who blames his father for Zak's death. After the funeral, Lee broke off all contact with his father and Starbuck.

Starbuck has a natural talent for flying and is considered Galactica's best pilot, although she is also known for being an avid card player and drinker. Commander Adama loves Kara despite her flaws and considers her something of a surrogate daughter. However, Starbuck and Colonel Tigh share a mutual sense of loathing.

AFTER THE ATTACK In a card game prior to Galactica's decommissioning ceremony, Starbuck alludes to Tigh's troubled relationship with his wife. Infuriated, he flips the table over, and she punches him in the face. He sends her to the brig, promising that her career is over. However, Commander Adama tells Tigh that he is probably overreacting: while he agrees to leave Kara in the brig until after the ceremony, Adama says there is no need to ruin Kara's career over the incident. Following the Cylons' attack on the Twelve Colonies, Starbuck is released to join the battle.

Starbuck keeps her secret about Zak buried inside until after the Cylon attack on the Twelve Colonies. Soon after, when Starbuck fears she and the rest of humanity might be wiped out by the Cylons, she confesses her mistake to Lee. He is devastated and would later confront her about it when she is chosen to train new Viper pilots aboard Galactica after several pilots are killed in a freak accident. Starbuck, blinded by guilt, washes all the pilots out for minor flaws. She then admits her secret to Commander Adama who is furious and heartbroken; he orders her to reinstate the trainees.

On the next training mission, Starbuck and the trainees are ambushed by a small group of Raiders. Starbuck engages the Raiders on her own to cover the trainees' escape. With her Viper heavily damaged, she plummets toward the surface of a nearby desert moon, and is forced to eject and take her chances on the surface.

Starbuck is declared "missing in action", and Commander Adama orders a search and rescue operation which strains the Galactica's crew and combat resources. On the surface, Starbuck struggles with a broken knee and near asphyxiation as her oxygen runs out. She discovers a downed Raider and is able to pilot it back to the fleet.

Depressed by her injuries, she initially needs incentive to work on rehabilitation and is soon rubbing people the wrong way again. Even after she is able to move around without a cane, the injury sidelines her from flight for many episodes; when given tactical charge of a mission in one episode, she can not fly the critical role because her knee still can't handle the G-force.

Despite her often crude exterior, Starbuck has a deep-seated faith in the gods. As a result, President Laura Roslin asks her to carry out a dangerous mission: return to Caprica and retrieve the Arrow of Apollo, a religious artifact that supposedly points the way to Earth. She takes the Cylon Raider she had captured, leading Adama to declare that Roslin had suborned mutiny; he sends a detachment of Marines to terminate her presidency.

During her time on Caprica, Starbuck encounters Number Six (who beats her soundly); meets up with Karl Agathon and the Sharon Valerii copy pregnant with his child; and meets a fellow pyramid player named Samuel Anders. He leads a resistance group that had been waging guerrilla war against the Cylons. At one point Starbuck is injured in battle, captured, and wakes up in a Cylon "farm" as part of their experiments to create human/Cylon hybrids. Without her knowledge, one of her ovaries is surgically removed before she escapes, a fact discovered only much later. Starbuck escapes, and plans to return to the fleet; she promises to return to rescue the Caprican resistance group and Anders, with whom she develops a romantic relationship.

Soon after returning from the planet Kobol, the Battlestar Pegasus, commanded by Admiral Cain, is discovered. Admiral Cain promotes Starbuck to Captain and CAG (Commander, Air Group) of the Pegasus.

After the fleet leadership denies her request to return to rescue the Caprican resistance fighters, Starbuck is depressed and guilt-stricken: she has broken her word, failed her duty, and assumes the man she is "hung up on" is either dead, or will be soon. As Pegasus CAG, she also feels responsible for the pilots who have died on her watch, or died because she has not yet killed the Cylon's "top gun", "Scar". She recklessly maneuvers to take out Scar, but at the last moment pulls away, setting up the kill for Louanne "Kat" Katraine and giving up her own status as "Top Gun". Although this marks the beginning of a new resolve and the end of her self-destructive depressive behaviours, tensions between her and Apollo flare up again after she shoots him in friendly fire incident during a hostage stand-off.

After Lee Adama's promotion to Commander of the Battlestar Pegasus, Starbuck transfers back to the Galactica and assumes the role of its CAG.

NEW CAPRICA The complications of Starbuck and Lee's relationship was furthered when a drunken night on the newly found planet named New Caprica ended with Starbuck and Lee having a one-night stand where they both expressed their love for one another. But when Lee wakes up alone the next morning, he soon discovered that Kara had proposed to and married Anders. Lee soon marries Petty Officer Anastasia Dualla while Starbuck moves to planetside with Anders.

At some point during her time on New Caprica, she and Tigh were able to put their differences behind them, even greeting each other fondly following Tigh's demobilization and arrival at the colony. Her relationship with Lee, however, worsened to the point that he had little interest in speaking to her, or to help her.

After the Cylon invasion of New Caprica, she is imprisoned inside a house, where a Leoben model tries to convince her that they are destined to be lovers. For four months Starbuck denies his advances, killing him several times despite knowing he would be back. Then she is presented with a young girl named Kacey that Leoben claims is their daughter, created with the ovary that was removed when she was in the egg farm. Initially she refuses to believe it and wants nothing to do with the girl, but when Kacey is badly injured in a fall down a staircase, she calls on Leoben for help and seems to grow more attached to both of them.

In the episode "Exodus" Part 2, it is revealed that Kacey is not Starbuck's child; the Cylons had abducted her. Kacey and her real mother are reunited on the Galactica's flight deck after the flight from New Caprica. Starbuck is left there alone on the flight deck, stunned and in disbelief.

BACK WITH THE FLEET After her situation on New Caprica and the truth about Kacey, she becomes distraught and destructive toward herself and the rest of the crew, almost killing herself in a Viper training exercise. After being removed from flight status by Major Adama, she takes up residence in the pilot's mess along with Colonel Tigh, drinking and lowering the morale of Galactica's pilots by attempting to draw divisions between New Capricans and those who stayed with the fleet. Admiral Adama gives her an ultimatum; either straighten up and act like an officer, or 'get the hell off his ship' and find another ship to live on. Starbuck changes her attitude after Admiral Adama literally knocks her on her rear after she thumbs her nose at him.

Starbuck's relationship with Lee Adama takes another dramatic turn after she challenges him to a brutal and emotional sparring contest aboard Galactica. Their intense feelings for each other soon lead to an affair that draws resentment from their respective spouses. However, when Lee asks Starbuck to divorce Sam, she refuses due to her strong religious beliefs on the sacrament of marriage. Lee argues that she is breaking her vows just by being with him, but Starbuck states that she's merely bending the rules. Lee then decides that he can no longer cheat while still married to Dualla. Later, Lee and Anders begin to voice their dislike for each other just as Starbuck's Raptor is shot down by the Cylons and she is reported missing. Anders vows to find her, but their position is outnumbered; Lee orders Anders at gunpoint to stay put and help defend their outnumbered position. Anders remains defiant.

Starbuck suffers severe hand burns in the crash and is rescued by Dualla. After they escape the doomed algae planet, Starbuck makes one final effort to have a relationship with Lee; this time offering to leave Anders if he will leave Dualla. Lee chooses to try and make his own marriage work instead.

Kara's experiences with Leoben, as well as her troubled childhood, eventually come back to haunt her. She has nightmares involving both Leoben and the mandala that is supposedly connected to her "destiny". She asks an oracle about her dreams and is told that Leoben understands her better than she understands herself, and that he will show her her "destiny".

During a patrol over a gas giant where the fleet was refueling, she sees a Cylon Raider and pursues it into a storm system which resembles her mandala. She is forced to abandon pursuit when her Viper is at risk of implosion from the pressure. Although she felt several impacts during her pursuit, Chief Tyrol finds no damage to her Viper and gun cam footage showed no evidence of any Raider, leading many to believe that Kara had been hallucinating.

Adama is concerned that Kara might have burned out, but he leaves the decision to ground her up to Apollo as CAG. Apollo decides to give her another chance, and offers to fly as her wingman on her next patrol. During the patrol, Starbuck sees another Raider and again pursues. Her Viper is hit by debris and she is knocked out. She experiences a conversation with an avatar with the appearance of Leoben set in her apartment on Caprica. The avatar forces Kara to confront her past, the abuse she received from her mother and the guilt she feels for leaving her mother to die alone. The avatar comments that Kara had been running from her past just she had been running away from death for her entire life, and implied that eventually she would have to confront her fears and her "destiny". Moments before regaining consciousness in her Viper, Kara realizes that the person she is speaking to is not the Cylon Leoben Conoy, and states, "You're not Leoben." The avatar grins and says, "Never said I was." She awakens in her Viper cockpit as Apollo is calling for her to break off and ascend, or the atmospheric pressure will kill her. Starbuck keeps flying into the storm, and tells Lee to leave her. She is encompassed by a white light and a certain calmness. Apollo witnesses her Viper exploding, with no sign that she survived.

When the fleet later finds itself in another nebula, after losing power and regaining it, Apollo answers the call and goes off to chase yet another unidentified bogey. The pristine Viper Mark II that comes alongside is flown by Starbuck herself. A shocked and confused Apollo listens to the apparently-resurrected Kara Thrace, who tells him that she has been to Earth and she has returned to take the Fleet to it.

After the battle at the nebula, she returns to Galactica where everyone is astounded to see her alive. While everyone believed her dead for over two months, only several hours have passed for her. She has returned with recon photography of Earth, but no navigational data or knowledge of how she got there. Almost everyone thinks she maybe a Cylon or a Cylon trap, and thus don't believe her. As the Fleet jumps further away from the Ionian Nebula, she experiences headaches and says that she is losing the intuitive feeling of the way to Earth. Desperate to lead the Colonials there, she breaks into Adama's quarters and confronts Roslin at gun point.

Kara is eventually subdued by Marines and imprisoned in the brig. Although not sure what to make of her claims, Admiral Adama releases her later, and gives her command of the Demetrius, and a crew including Karl Agathon and Samuel Anders, telling her to try to find Earth. During the long mission Thrace irritates her crew by frequent, unexplained course changes and rarely leaving her quarters, where she holes herself up to study star charts. When her husband confronts her about her command style and their marriage, she tells him that she is not the same person he married and tries to throw him out of her cabin. However, when Anders holds her, she tells him that he wants to have sex in order to feel something. Afterwards, she says that she feels distanced from her body and the events around her.

Later, when a Leoben Conoy copy comes aboard the Demetrius with the offer of an alliance with the Cylons, a power struggle among the crew breaks out when Thrace orders to jump to his baseship. After standing down, Thrace decides to accompany Conoy with a small team. On his baseship she meets the Cylon Hybrid, who repeats the first Hybrid's prophecy and gives her her next task: join the Cylons to unbox Number Three to learn what she knows of the Final Five.

After the unboxing, Kara reacts with shock and disbelief when she learns that her husband is a Cylon. She investigates the Viper she returned in and notices that it receives a strange signal, giving her a direct bearing to Earth. Her discovery stops the imminent execution of Colonel Tigh and leads to a truce with the Cylon rebels. After arriving at Earth, Thrace is part of the first group on the surface, but finds only a destroyed city.


Disclaimer: I am neither Kara Thrace nor Katee Sackhoff. Kara Thrace is the sole property of her creator Ron Moore and Universal Studios, and I'm very thankful he allows us fans to play in his sandbox.

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