Commander Thrace?

[callmeonetrack.livejournal.com]

frolicndetour raised an interesting point in our discussion of Kara's promotions the other day. Apparently the writers planned to make her the Pegasus commander at one point. What avenues do you think that would have lead the show down? What would her time as Commander have been like? Would she be more in the vein of Adama or Cain or her own leader entirely? What would change about canon if the only switch was that she was head of Pegasus instead of Lee (with Dee as her XO? Heh.)

ETA: Tomorrow is Friday and because of that happy reason, we will be having a Kara Love meme here! Bring yo' gifs, Bring yo' toasts, get ready to raise a glass to the incomparable Kara "Starbuck" Thrace!

Comments

[callmeonetrack.livejournal.com]

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....

[sugarhaven.livejournal.com]

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.

[sugarhaven.livejournal.com]

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

[callmeonetrack.livejournal.com]

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.)

[sugarhaven.livejournal.com]

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.

[sugarhaven.livejournal.com]

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.

[callmeonetrack.livejournal.com]

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. ;)

[sugarhaven.livejournal.com]

"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.

[callmeonetrack.livejournal.com]

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. :(

[sugarhaven.livejournal.com]

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.

[callmeonetrack.livejournal.com]

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 ;).

[sugarhaven.livejournal.com]

"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.

[callmeonetrack.livejournal.com]

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.

[sugarhaven.livejournal.com]

"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.