karathracelives | Commander Thrace?

I don't know what would have to change for Kara to became the Pegasus CO. I guess: Lee resigned from the military, Tigh dead, and Adama/Roslin really stoned. The other option would be Cain being the admiral and making Kara the commander of Galactica.

I love Kara but I don't think that she is a particularly good leader. Her leadership style is very similar to Tigh's (even though she wouldn't like to hear it), because she is unstable and gets her own personal feelings and self-doubts get in the way. I think she got really better as the series progressed and I think she is quite good at leading a small group of pilots or marines into action or planning a mission and then successfully executing it or perhaps even being a CAG. Lastly, I don't think she would ever wanted to be a CO of a ship. She likes to work under someone whom she can trust that they will make the right choices (like Lee and Bill or even Cain but unlike Tigh or Gardner) so she wouldn't have to worry too much about consequences of bad decisions.

It's hard to imagine without the surrounding events as context but...I would imagine they'd planned to give her the ship to command for a certain reason? Or with some objective in mind? It'd be disappointing if they'd planned to do it just to showcase her failing as a leader.

I'm not so sure I'd agree that she'd be all that much like Tigh. She had a lot of scorn for his decisions made under pressure situations and...Scar aside, which I choose to see as a bit of a writing mistake...I don't think we see Kara shirking responsibility or letting personal feelings cloud her work/career until...Scar? Kara is also much better at strategy and seeing failings/holes in potential plans (this is a recurring theme for her from Hand of God to Res Ship), so that might have served her well in commanding an entire battlestar.

So I guess it depends on timing, if Kara had become Peggy commander instead of Fisk---so around the time of Black Market--that would have changed a lot. I imagine they might not have pursued going back to Caprica to rescuse the resistance potentially? OR maybe as Commander she would dispatch a mission to do just that? Would've been intriguing....

Edited 2011-10-06 20:10 (UTC)

I don't think that there's any point in canon, when it would be believable for Kara to become the commander of Pegasus. XO yes, CO no. I can't picture Kara take that job or anybody offer it to her. Maybe if Lee settled on New Caprica and she stayed in the fleet.

I think Kara is excellent at military strategy, planning missions, piloting vipers and thinking out of the box, but that is not all that leadership is about. It is about people and she is not always that good at seeing other people's needs (or caring about them) or persuading people about her plan without yelling or using fists. Command of a battleship requires patience, diplomacy and ability to make compromises, which are all abilities that Kara generally lacks.

I think she's can handle her pilots being killed by cylons but she would really had hard time with some grand and tough decisions. Like Tigh, Kara doesn't want to have the responsibility over other peoples lives and deaths because she's terrified of making the bad choices, which can ultimately make her to hesitate or self-doubt her next decisions, sending her into despair. I think that Lee is also not comfortable with this kind of responsibility but in his professional life he is much more stable and in control and doesn't let his self-doubts or self-pride get in the way nearly as much as Kara.

P.S. I don't want it to sound like I'm completely bashing Kara, because I love the character with all her obvious flaws, but I want to give a few examples when Kara is a bit selfish and gets her personal feelings in the way of her job.

1. passing Zak
2. not accepting Tigh's apology in Mini: he really tried hard to put their differences aside and start with a clean slate
3. Washing out the nuggets in AoC
4. Scar
5. Pegasus: "Your plan sucks". Truth, but diplomacy or sneaky behavior would have been a better option.
6. Not being able to communicate with Garner: more Garner's fault, but her behaviour didn't help.
7. Going back for Sam: Kara is really mean and desperately trying to get the approval for the Caprica rescue mission (not caring about the dangers and insanity of the mission), when it is obvious that it's not about blowing the farms, or rescuing all the people but about her obsessive need to find Sam alive
8. Collaborators: it was all about trying to punish someone else for her own pain
9. Her treatment of Kat in "Passage"
10. Yelling at everyone when she came back from "dead" instead of trying to communicate with them
11. Demeterius

But don't they all? You could come up with a much longer list of Adama and Cain's failures of command I'd bet. ;)

I know I could anyway. (In fact, there's very little that Bill does after New Caprica that I enjoy.)

Edited 2011-10-06 21:53 (UTC)

Well yes, but Cain was an extremely bad commander so not much competition there. And I agree that PapAdama had his bad moments too but Kara is way more extreme.

I think I'm mostly comparing Kara's commanding style to Lee's, which I think is closest to ideal from all the BSG characters (you can't make a list for him), rather than to people like Cain. PapAdama is far from being perfect and he has a temper that gets in his way, but he has way more experience and to a degree learned how to control it (or at least swallow his pride and change his decision later). I agree that Laura and Lee are really good influence on Bill, and if they weren't around, Galactica would be much closer to what Pegasus was under Cain.

I think that Lee had a potential to becoming better leader than Adama cause he is a much better diplomat and politician and listens to people around him, but Bill and Kara might be better at the strictly military stuff like getting in the head of their enemy, making risky plans or rolling the hard six. I think Kara would be bolder with Peggy than Lee and took more risks. She'll probably get away with it and survived (she always does) but I guess I still rather serve under Lee.

Gods know Kara has all the good reasons to be completely messed up but I think that her instability and flipping from extreme to extreme would really get in the way of her job. I think she can be a great instructor (or CAG) one day, but the next day, something happens and she treat's her pilots like a piece of garbage. She might learn to control that but initially I think it wouldn't be easy to work under her.

I could totally make a list for Lee, but it'd be short because we only saw him as a commander for what, six episodes including Razor? And for the bulk of his command (Fat!Apollo pun intended) that we saw he was lazy and selfish and cynical and negative in the face of everyone's hope and planning. His dad calls him out on it and his wife does and so does his CAG.

And I don't think that means Lee was a bad leader in every situation. He shined in Revelations. But he was not necessarily a very good battleship commander honestly.

It's hard to know what Kara would have been like but I think some of the qualities that served her very well in the position would have been her cleverness, strategic thinking, her loyalty to the fleet and the president and her willingness to never leave her people behind.

"She treats her pilots like garbage"? Wow, that seems way harsh to me. What about the caring she shows in Scar when she gives that toast at the end where clearly she remembers ALL of their names, what about her being pissed in Captain's Hand when she finds out those pilots are missing and figuring out the code so they can save them? What about talking Kat down in Final Cut and screaming that they need to get *her* pilot to sickbay? Does she lash out at people and make mistakes? Yeah, but I guess I never felt that it's because she thinks they're garbage and doesn't care about them. :(

And no, it wouldn't be easy to work for her, but...to paraphrase...they all might have been a lot safer with her. ;)

"She treats her pilots like garbage"? Wow, that seems way harsh to me. What about the caring she shows in Scar when she gives that toast at the end where clearly she remembers ALL of their names, what about her being pissed in Captain's Hand when she finds out those pilots are missing and figuring out the code so they can save them? What about talking Kat down in Final Cut and screaming that they need to get *her* pilot to sickbay?

Treating like garbage might have been going too far, but your list basically proved my point. What I was saying that Kara is very moody and emotionally unstable: one day she is the perfect solider and next day she is a wreck. Everybody does that to an extent and people can handle it when she is the hotshot pilot, but it's a bit harder to deal with when she is the CO.

Good point about Fat!Lee, certainly not Lee's best time.

Well...people ARE inconsistent. I mean that's life pretty much. They're all somewhat unstable and lash out at people from time to time, especially Adama! I mean he treats his own son horribly. I guess I don't see Kara as being any worse.

Anyway, I still wish the show had explored that potential idea. A good leader, a bad leader, or somewhere in between, I think it would have been really interesting to see it play out. I certainly would've preferred it to what DID happen with her and Adama's relationship I think. :(

I still wish the show had explored that potential idea.
Absolutely. Me too. Her character is just so multi-layered that the possibilities of how this could go are endless.

Nice talking to you.

Well I didn't think it was very believable for Lee to suddenly become Pegasus commander either honestly, and apparently it was going to be Kara until Jamie Bamber protested, Lol. I would like to know more about the surrounding circumstances and what ideas they had for how it was going to happen.

I do think Kara worked through some/most of her fear of taking responsibility in S1 with AoC/YGHA and Hand of God. She'd been the flight instructor for a while and she took on the CAG's duties (even having early morning briefings with Tigh!) in Captain's Hand anyway... Kara also has a really strong sense of feeling like she knows the right thing to do in situations, so I don't know, the chance to put that in action and carry out her own missions, I could see as really tempting for her.

Plus, I don't particularly think either Adama nor Cain were all that good at caring about their people or seeing their needs very often. Adama could get incredibly stubborn (Dee had to tell him to go put the fleet back together!) And god knows they BOTH yelled and used violence when it suited them. I think you could command without being patient or diplomatic necessarily. But I also don't think Kara is without those traits either or couldn't have grown/changed to develop those qualities a bit more. That's usually what happens when you're presented with responsibility and a new image of yourself. I mean who was the one to tell Lee they had to toe the line under Cain in Res Ship I? Kara.

The factor of who the president would be (Laura? Lee? Someone else?) when Kara was Commander would also be huge, because I think Adama was tempered/balanced by Roslin quite often. I wonder how she'd work with whoever was president of the Fleet.

But yeah, I disagree completely that she couldn't make the tough calls (or that she'd become a total basketcase if she had to make them), I think in her personal life she's afraid to make bad choices, but she's pretty fearless and assured she is making the right calls when it comes to professional actions (for better or worse).

It's probably just a difference in how we see the character. Though I do think the one situation where she would have real trouble making a tough call and might have played out far differently than it did in canon was if Razor was reversed and she'd had to command Lee to stay behind with the nuke. Honestly...that is one call I don't think I can see Kara ever making, not when she saves him at every turn she possibly can and with all her residual Adama-related guilt ;).

Edited 2011-10-06 21:42 (UTC)

"I think you could command without being patient or diplomatic necessary"
You absolutely can, it's called a ruthless dictator. :-)

I can see Kara being a Peggy's CO but I don't think she would be very good at it or happy at that position. But I like your point, that she would likely change and adapt to the new lifestyle so I could have been pleasantly surprised.

I agree with you about the tough choices too. Kara can definitely make them and she seems on the surface to be much better than Lee in dealing with them (like Olympic Carrier or Cain's assassination) but I just have that feeling that subconsciously they are affecting her much more and that she is much less herself in this kind of situation when the fate of humanity depends on her decisions rather than her viper skills.

Well I don't see it as quite so black and white I guess. I liked Cain and just thought she had some serious failings as a commander. I liked Adama (before he got so incredibly myopic in S3) and still thought he was stubborn and impatient and nondiplomatic on many occasions, that did not make him a ruthless dictator however.

I mean all of this of course is just crazy speculation. We can't know how it would've changed things without context, but I don't think Kara being commander would've necessarily been such a terrible thing at all. I imagine she would've changed and adapted and could have been really awesome at it. :) She was a career soldier pretty much.

"I mean all of this of course is just crazy speculation"
Exactly, who knew how would Kara shape up if she didn't had to go through Farm or NC?

I don't think I see it black and white. They are all flawed but I don't think any of them is a dictator. Despite all his faults, I consider Adama a good commander. He tends to make the good decisions 90% of the time (even if not always immediately) without becoming tyrant or loosing the sense of what is right and wrong. Cain is more of a tragic character. She does decisions she truly believes are the best for the survival of people (i.e. her selected few) and her crew really respect her for that. She thinks that there is no other option than to be completely ruthless when fighting the cylons. The problem is that she lost perspective and crossed the line to the area, where you really wonder whether the survival of the human race is worth the cost.

Ron and Dave allude to what they had planned a little bit on the podcast for You Can't Go Home Again - at the end they talk about how much they love the Kara/Adama relationship and that how there was a storyline comming up where they were going to put her in charge of the "thingy" (since the Pegasus was still a spoiler at that point) and how she would be interacting with Adama and challenging him in new ways. I think that would have been really interesting - I guess they tried to do that with Lee and Adama, but the fat!Lee thing ended up swallowing (no pun intended) Lee's command storyline IMO.

It would have been fun to see how her relationship with Adama changed. Season three would have been so different, at least in the beginning; I imagine she couldn't have mustered out, and they couldn't have put her on the self-destructive track after having her rise to such a strong leadership level. No captivity with Leoben. I guess she still would have had to fulfill her destiny, but I imagine it would have played differently.

Though there is the obvious question (which was Jamie's question!) of why not Lee. Maybe he would have taken longer to recover from his gun-shot wound, or Adama would have thought he was needed on Galactica. I think if not for Lee, Kara would be the next logical choice; Adama would never have put Tigh in command voluntarily , I don't think, especially not after what happened once he was shot. (And Tigh wouldn't have really wanted that).

Definitely an AU with a lot of potential. :)

Ooh intriguing. Thanks for sharing more details (I can't listen to the podcasts anymore. Lol.)

Oh Fat Apollo. Your love of noodles totally sabotaged you. ;)

I would have loved to have seen Kara as commander (before she died) and avoid all that Leoben imprisonment stuff. Sigh.

I could see Sacrifice being slightly altered maybe where Kara does help shut down a dangerous situation but Lee still gets hit and injured and he musters out and goes into politics maybe and Kara ends up getting appointed to command Pegasus not long after? Maybe she's the one who goes over to deal with Garner and that somehow leads to good results? Who knows.

(Trying not to be sad about their insistence on turning Kara into a mess at the end of S2. Sigh.)

It would have been fun to see how her relationship with Adama changed. Season three would have been so different, at least in the beginning; I imagine she couldn't have mustered out, and they couldn't have put her on the self-destructive track after having her rise to such a strong leadership level. No captivity with Leoben. I guess she still would have had to fulfill her destiny, but I imagine it would have played differently.

This really fascinates me because not only does this change her relationship with Adama, but with Lee and Sam too. If Kara doesn't muster out where does Sam fit into her life. And if Lee does resign his commission for some reason it's more than logical that he would end up on New Caprica instead.

Also who would be her XO. I'm going to go with Helo because he fits nicely into my "going back for Sam" scenario because of Sharon.

And it totally changes the trajectory of her destiny. Wow.

Ok, so let's say that Lee resigns after his space walk, maybe to oppose Roslin politcally (no this doesn't really matter, but go with me...) and Tigh and Fisk are both taken down in the black market scandal. I can believe that Kara would accept command of Pegasus. I think she would accept command because she could immediately go back to Caprica for the resistance, maybe even try to find survivors on the other colonies. I'm not sure it's the best motivation or course of action, but it falls in line with the nobel, romantic but also erratic Kara Thrace.

I'm not sure where things go next, but I'll probably think about it the rest of the afternoon. ;)

It's so intriguing right? So many options! I would have loved to see what a not-crazy Kara would do with a command position.

I would have enjoyed Kara's promotion to Commander of Pegasus, because it would have provided a very rich source of new material for the show. I think she'd earned a change to prove herself in a command position, but I'd probably see her as an XO before a commander. Maybe Lee's XO? If Lee were not in the picture, I think she could have done an admiral job of commanding the Pegasus, but would she want to? I don't understand how much "command" experience she'd had or how long she'd been CAG and if the duration of that experience would warrant that kind of promotion. But I think I am overthinking this and trying to fit military into fiction. I think she could have made hard calls, but I also think she would have taken more risks than Lee or Adama. On two calls, telling Lee to stay behind and nuke the cylon facility in Razor and jumping the Fleet away when the cylons captured NC, I think Kara might have chosen differently. I always thought Lee's decision to order the nuke strike was unnecessary, so I don't care that much about that one. She could have chosen differently without causing too much harm, IMO. The NC situation seems trickier. I guess I'd see that playing out with Adama making the call instead to Bug Out while Kara would have wanted to stay and fight. That could have been a great dramatic moment.

In short, I do think she was capable, but I think things would probably have not run as smoothly as they did under Lee and Adama, mostly because she has a very different leadership style that may or may not promote unrest and disobedience?? Not sure. I do think she'd have been respected more by the Pegasus crew than Lee was.

One thing I didn't say above is that...even if they had decided to make Kara a terrible commander/ruthless dictator...it still would have been TERRIBLY INTERESTING. LOL. Because she's a dynamic personality and it's a dynamic job and I think her having to confront some personal flaws in a professional setting would have been very interesting.

I find both Lee and Kara both incredibly ill-suited for command positions considering they are roughly all of 27 and 23 (or thereabouts) when the show starts. LOL. I still find it unbelievable that they didn't have senior officers that managed to stay alive to take those positions. But if you throw experience and logic out the window because you're dealing with TV show conventions and you need to give your third and fourth leads screen time, then of course you need them to have some accountability and responsibility so they can be in on the big decisions.

It's really hard to say how it would have went because we don't know how the changed events on the show would have affected her personality and her character growth. Do I think first season Starbuck should be in command of a battlestar? No, but an AU third-season Starbuck...well it might have been very interesting.

At the very least, I can't imagine a Fat Starbuck plotline. LOL. ;)

Everyone's comments are really interesting. I came into the post thinking that Kara would make a pretty bad commander because she's not great at seeing the big picture. For better or worse, she's a pretty focused person. But now that I think about it, I'm not sure that Adama is much better at seeing the big picture.

Most of Kara's perceived failings are shared by people in positions of power, so I guess my instinctive rejection of the notion of Kara as Pegasus CO is that I don't think she'd be fulfilled by the job.

I'd love to read -or write- the Kara Commands Pegasus AU, but at the end of the day, I'm not sure she'd want it.

Heh I think Adama is TERRIBLE at seeing the big picture especially after UBEX. For me, he just got more and more myopic and self-centered.

I imagine Kara would probably hate to give up flying for command, for sure. And for that alone, she probably wouldn't want it.

But canon makes a lot of things happen that we wouldn't expect. I never thought she'd muster out to live on the ground and give up flying to play house. And the whole destiny plotline...well I don't think she wanted that either. :(

It could have been a really interesting storyline, and who's to say the writers wouldn't have found a reason why Lee couldn't be the one to go over? Kara is the second seniormost of the pilots after all, it's not impossible though I don't think it's any more unbelievable than Lee's taking command of the Pegasus - if TCH storyline had had Kara going over without Lee and then having to deal with Garner and end up in charge when he goes off, I'd have bought it.

Though OMG, they're SO YOUNG. I know Katee was like 25 during S2 filming, and Lee and Kara are hardly any older than that - imagine a 27-year-old in charge of a Battlestar! Though that used to happen in actual wartime when senior officers got killed off a lot, too.

And having command would also have given her the resources to go after the Caprican survivors without the need to push quite so hard at Adama and Roslin for it. I always wished we knew how she managed to swing the plan in the end - we never get to see how she convinced them to agree to the rescue mission, though if she was a Battlestar commander in her own right it still has the chance to create some tension in her relationship with Sam, when it comes to her staying in the military and not moving down to New Craprica, AND maybe we'd get to skip the Leoben dollhouse (our girl was messed up already without that).

Commander Thrace?

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