From SFX.Co.UK's 20 Things We Love about Battlestar Galactica

12 Kara “Starbuck” Thrace

“Starbuck can’t be a woman!” wailed the die-hard Galactica fans when the casting of Katee Sackhoff was announced, and even Dirk Benedict, the man who made Starbuck a legend, wasn’t chuffed. But how wrong they were. This Starbuck was a tightly-wound spring of anger, defiance and intelligence – with a smidge of raw spirituality thrown in that paid off in the final episode – whose performance stole our hearts. We reckon she could take the old Starbuck in a fight, too.

9 The Apollo/Starbuck Love Connection

So who did you ship? (That’s “ship” as in “relationship”, in case you don’t know the lingo.) First we had Starbuck and Apollo dancing around each other until you wanted to scream at them to rip off their clothes and do the horizontal foxtrot. Then Starbuck went on to marry Sam Anders and Apollo got hitched to Anastasia Dualla, who loved him way too much seeing as he was still besotted with Starbuck. The angst! The sex! The unfortunate coma! The suicide! Surely the most heart-breaking quartet of ships since ships began.

Starbuck

Katee Sackhoff gender-switched the Battlestar Galactica character played by Dirk Benedict for the original TV series. When BSG rebooted in 2003, Sackhoff quickly overcame skeptics with her tomboy take on Kara “Starbuck” Thrace. The actress took flight as a tough, smart, complicated pilot able to kick ass and soul search with equal conviction.

Among Battlestar Galactica’s stronger players are its actresses, blessed with some of the meatiest roles ever written for women on TV. BSG’s gender politics are euphorically advanced, with Starbuck, Six, President Roslin, and Boomer, not to mention every other female pilot, mechanic, Cylon, and civilian, so fundamentally equal to the men around them that gender parity isn’t something they even have to talk about. (Meanwhile on Twin Peaks, all the non-crazy fully grown women spend their time in abusive love triangles.) At a time when it is, somehow, still acceptable to call a woman a slut for taking birth control, one wishes more than ever that Starbuck were a real person, so she could swagger into Rush Limbaugh’s office and ask him if he would like to try and put something, anything, between her knees. (It would be icing on the fantasy to imagine President Roslin following her in, doing that thing where she smiles out of fury, and then eviscerating him without ever raising her voice.)

The show features several breakout characters, but the highlight must be Kara “Starbuck” Thrace. Everything about this character breaks the stereotypical mould of female roles in sci-fi – the part was played by a man in the seventies version, and is now seen as a role model in the sci-fi medium.

Starbuck was played to perfection by actress Katee Sackhoff, who exuded a presence that, within seconds, could create an unexpected flurry of emotions. She was described by one of the show’s producers; “We saw this whole other side that was all because of Katee: vulnerability, insecurity, desperation. We started freeing ourselves up to explore the weakness of the character, because we knew Katee could express those things without compromising the character’s strength”.