The Quest for Caprica

The nine episodes beginning with "Kobol's Last Gleaming, Part I" and ending with "Home, Part II" make up a fairly tightly-knit arc that it doesn't make a great deal of sense to separate them by individual episodes, but rather to spend a blog post devoted to each of the three or four stories that unfold during this time; Starbuck's quest back to Caprica, the FUBAR ground mission on Kobol, the double whammy of Roslin's arrest and Adama's near-death, and finally the Home episodes where everyone reunites on the surface of Kobol.

With that in mind, this particular blog is going to focus on the character of Starbuck (and to a lesser extent, Helo) from the episode "Kobol's Last Gleaming, Part I" through "The Farm." And yeah, I think I already did a post dedicated solely to "The Farm," but I want to revisit it now that I know how the entire series played out.

So here's a quick re-cap of the important things that happened to Starbuck in the first eleven episodes of Season 1.

-She finally 'fessed up about her role in Zak Adama's death, only to be forgiven about 48 hours later.

-She broke her knee, putting her out of the cockpit for a very long time and causing her to miss the big Star Wars episode.

-She hijacked a Cylon Raider, which she learned how to fly. (Curiously, Tyrol couldn't, despite the fact that he probably built the thing in the first place.)

-She got a big lecture on destiny from a Cylon she was torturing.

-She flirted openly with Apollo, but when he repeatedly failed to act, she shacked up with Baltar instead.

Okay, that last one isn't exactly what happened, and you can see the Baltar/Starbuck thing with the benefit of hindsight. But at the beginning of KLG, when she was in bed with someone, we all assumed it was Lee, and the last-second actor swap to Baltar kind of rang a bit hollow.

Kobol's Last Gleaming
A Raptor team finds Kobol, but when a Cylon Baseship appears, Starbuck immediately starts to draft another certified out-of-the-box Kara Thrace original. This, combined with the fact that she frakked Baltar instead of him, royally pisses off Lee. Well, it probably has almost everything to do with the "frakking Baltar" thing and very little to do with the "you went over my head" thing, because this is the only time in the history of the show that he complains about it.

They punch each other, but then Starbuck storms out before the sexual tension reaches the breaking point and causes a hull breach. Roslin summons her and tells her to defy orders and go back to Caprica to get the Arrow of Apollo because scripture told her to.

Starbuck does. She disobeys orders from a man who has looked the other way at least twice; once when she struck a superior officer in the Mini, and once in regards to the whole Zak thing. Bill Adama is the closest thing she has to a father (not that we know the specifics about her parents yet, but it's true nonetheless). She is part of the family. (Ron Moore's Season 4 comment about Adama, Apollo and Starbuck being the Father, Son and Holy Ghost resonates all the way back here, even though Kara's not a ghost yet.)

Why does she betray Adama? Part of it is the same reason she gives for why she slept with Baltar: she's a worlds-class frakup. But there are other factors that help justify it as well. Adama lied about knowing where Earth is (that scene is great). Leoben's whole special-destiny thing is still gnawing at her. And now she knows what only two other people in the fleet know: Roslin is the dying leader foretold in the prophecies of Pythia (yes, two: Roslin herself, and Elosha. Cottle and Apollo don't know about Pythia, and Billy's clearly agnostic at best). Suddenly, Roslin, not Adama, is the fleet's best chance at finding Earth. And Starbuck is going to take it. Frak the consequences.

Starbuck's decision to steal the Raider, and in so doing endanger the team stuck on Kobol's surface, kicks off a political struggle that will get a separate blog post later this week. But she makes it to Caprica no worse for the wear (she looks like the jump gave her a headache, but I'm sure she's had far worse hangovers). Conveniently, the Arrow of Apollo is in the Delphi Museum, and the Cylons never bothered to remove it. (And yet, per "Home, Part I," the Cylons know all about the Tomb anyway... go figure.)

Starbuck gets into a hand-to-hand fight with a Six, and she only survives because of a lucky bit of rebar that manages to impale Six but not harm her at all, even though they both fall on it. That's when Helo and Athena-to-be show up. Starbuck cottons on to the whole "Sharon's a Cylon" thing, but Helo won't let her kill Sharon because she's pregnant.

The Helo's Journey
Helo's been stuck on Caprica ever since the writers decided not to kill him off off-screen in the Mini and instead bring him back for the show. He's been accompanied by Athena-to-be, whom he only recently found out is a) technically not the Boomer he knew from Galactica, b) a Cylon, and c) pregnant by him. That's enough to seriously screw up anyone's worldview, and Helo handles it rather well. By which I means he shoots Sharon in the shoulder, and then he lets her hijack Starbuck's ride.

So now Starbuck and Helo are stuck wandering around on Caprica, but fortunately Starbuck's old apartment is nearby. This set makes a couple of surprise reappearances in Seasons 3 and 4; the mandala painting is present, but when Starbuck plays a tape of her dad, it's Bear McCreary covering Phillip Glass instead of "All Along the Watchtower." Oh well. Now, in general, the "Meanwhile, on Cylon-Occupied Caprica" scenes tend to feel like filler. There aren't that many significant events that take place there, and yet the planet appears at least once in seventeen of the first eighteen episodes of the show. But this scene always felt different. It was our first real glimpse of who Starbuck was.

It's true that we knew about the hotshot Viper jock with the attitude problem. It's true that we knew about Zak. It's true that we knew a little bit about her mother. But going back to Starbuck's house, seeing her paintings, learning that the apartment runs on batteries because she never paid the power bill... even hearing her dad's music, all of these things tell us so much more about the character. It was in this scene that Starbuck stopped being a hypercharged badass maverick and became a real person, at least to me.

These episodes are also rife with irony, as Helo must endure endless ribbing about how he fell in love with a toaster, when Starbuck's about to do the same thing. And that brings us straight to Anders. Re-watching the entire show from start to finish with my family, I found it jarring how many times Helo or Sharon insisted that they were the only two people left on Caprica, only for Anders and fifty-odd resistance members (suddenly bumped up to ninety-odd in The Plan for some reason) to show up out of nowhere.

Once you get past the initial shock and realize that no, they're not revealing all eight extant Cylon models at once, the first Anders scene plays out fairly nicely. His team have spotted some skin-jobs, so they're going to go take them out. Only problem is, it's actually Starbuck and Helo, and whatever else Destiny Girl and Toasterfrakker are, they're not skin-jobs (look in a mirror, Anders).

So they do the whole "shoot at each other" thing until that somehow resolves into a Mexican standoff, and then Helo and Anders manage to convince Starbuck that the resistance is made up of humans and everybody conveniently forgets that Starbuck and Helo haven't proved their identities. Some obvious questions ensue, such as why the resistance let Starbuck and Helo pull out extra guns, and why they never had to answer any difficult questions ("Starbuck, how many times have you been mistaken for a Cylon and nearly killed for it?" "Only two so far, but I'll have two more opportunities later on this season").

Then Starbuck and Anders play Pyramid, which is foreplay for them. One thing leads to another, and before you can ask why Starbuck keeps needing band-aids on her left shoulderblade, they're frakking. (The band-aid thing gets especially hilarious in "Scar," as the episode cuts between two similar scenes of Starbuck with her shirt off.)

And then we have "The Farm," where Starbuck gets abducted and, per the "What the Frak" special, "gets taken to a creepy baby factory where Simon the Cylon steals her ovary." We get more hints about her past (and again from a Cylon) before she finally manages an escape. She leaves Anders to die on Caprica but promises to come back for him one day, even though that Heavy Raider Athena-to-be stole could probably fit him and a couple of others. Oh well.

She re-joins the fleet in the following episode, and we'll be picking that story up on Thursday. For now, look at the way Starbuck's story unfolds; she disobeys orders for a good reason, but ends up finding out horrible truths about Boomer and enduring a terrible ordeal at the Farm. She finds a new love interest, but has to leave him behind on a radioactive rock. Starbuck's past comes up twice; at her apartment, where she plays her father's music, and at the Farm, when Simon asks about her broken fingers. The Cylons she's encountered so far all seem to know things about her that they shouldn't. Leoben and Simon knew about her mother. Sharon knows all about her because she has Boomer's memories. It's a shame that for the rest of the season the only Cylon threat she faces is the airborne variety, because the psychological damage the Cylons were doing to her looked like it was going somewhere. By the time Leoben reappears, it's almost too late.