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I’m confused about Starbuck’s role towards the end of the Battlestar Galactica remake.
She disappeared into a wormhole and returned, having found “earth”. Later, she finds her own body on “earth”, suggesting she "died" then came back, only to vanish when talking to Lee in the final episode.
Was she an angel?
I had assumed she was an angel, or maybe something like a Seraph. The latter would make a nice tie-in to the original series.
Of course, it could easily be she was a loose plot thread. We certainly have no shortage of those in modern TV serials.
I believe that Starbuck was a loose plot thread that the writers had a difficult time tying up in a meaningful way.
The problem probably all started when the staff killed Starbuck off, which worked great dramatically until they realized they lost one of the show's most popular characters. Then the writers brought Starbuck back with a great mysterious resurrection, making viewers believe she might be a Cylon. So I'm sure the writers sat around and tried to think up what would top being a Cylon. And unfortunately they couldn't think of anything so they just BSed their way through the last episode.
Update October 2013 - Ronald Moore talks about Starbuck's fate:
I liked the idea, conceptually, that her fate was ambiguous because, conceptually, we were tying her to whatever the power was that didn’t like to be called God and was involved from the inception. From the miniseries on, there’s definitely something else going on in this story, and it’s unknowable. I kind of felt like it should be unknowable. It felt wrong to give it a neat answer on something that was so profound and existential about these people and this situation. They were dealing with something that they had trouble defining, whether it was gods plural, or God singular, or something else out there. Starbuck was in some way representational of that power, or had some connection to it, having been brought back from the dead — literally. I just didn’t feel like I wanted to give it a “Oh, that’s what this means.” It just felt right that that, too, should be mysterious and unknowable. That’s the way I wanted to go. If I called her an angel, does that make everybody happy? That just seemed really unsatisfying. I don’t know what that means. That’s just putting a label on who she is and it doesn’t tell me anything more, really.
I've always figured she was the same thing that Head Six and Head Baltar were. Only visible to everyone and unaware of her own status. And Baltar's line at the end when Six calls their boss "god" seemed to suggest that whatever it was, it wasn't god.
You know it doesn't like to be called that.
So it seems she was the creation of some sort of very powerful godlike entity. I imagined it as something like the ascended from Stargate. Energy being perhaps. And Head Six, Head Baltar, and Starbuck were all probably also similar beings -- only with out awareness of their abilities.
This is of course, total speculation. Which is about all any of us can provide in answer unless some book or interview has provided a solid answer.
Starbuck was originally a human soldier who died in a crash landing of her viper on Earth, after flying there through the eye of the storm. The Starbuck that returns after her disappearance is not Starbuck at all, but an angel of death in Starbuck's form, sent by God to lead the colonists to Earth and ultimately to help bring about the destruction of cylons and humans alike, save for the few settlers of New Earth.
A.K.A. Deus ex machina
I somehow had a theory that she was the child of the lost Cylon, who somehow mysteriously re-appeared. Again, this is just speculation, but that was always my thought.
I had always thought she was the daughter of a Daniel the 7th cylon. So she might have been the first cylon human hybrid. Explaining her resurection / dead body on the cylon homeworld requires about as many blue berry muffins as the Angel theory.
In the BSG universe
If those two sorts of beings are both possible, then why presume that Starbuck was an angel. Why couldn't her nature be the same as the nature of the Lords of Kobol (though no doubt of lesser degree)?
Personally, I see two possibilities:
These two options aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. After watching Caprica, it would not be a huge stretch to take what is learned through V-world and how the Cylons came to be, then extrapolate that the universe that is presented in BSG is just another abstraction layer above V-world.
This would explain the hybrids and their prophecies (perhaps they are hooked into the source code of the universe), and would explain the angels and godlike individuals both in the series and in the backstory.
The key difference between the V-world and the BSG universe would be conscious awareness -- V-world participants have consciousness about their external lives, most of the characters presented in BSG do not, and likely do not have lives outside of the simulation. I would posit that Head Six and Head Baltar have awareness and have existences outside of the simulation, and the being that shall not be named "God" is perhaps the architect of the simulation. Starbuck is something of a glitch, or perhaps had been "installed" by "God", and was sent back after exercising her free will to commit suicide because her role was too important.
This does mean she is literally a Deus Ex Machina entity -- which isn't necessarily a bad thing. I'd hesitate to label anything that can't be understood at face value as "bad writing", not everything can or should be told in a story without abstraction. TV used to be without abstract concepts -- everything was as it was told, and as it has improved as a storytelling media that has begun to melt away and if often incorrectly assumed to be just a result of bad storytelling. I would suggest that her reappearance in season 4 and disappearance at the end of the series is too blatant to be a mistake -- remember, she returned within a few episodes, too few to be a result of fan reaction (plus they filmed her return scene around the same time they filmed her death).
So, take the obvious anomaly that she is to infer something about the universe the story inhabits.
a script is like a movie set. it appears complete and real but its really lots of patchwork to make it appear that way (especially over multiple seasons) and if you would move the camera a bit to the right, you would immediately notice that its pretty much just covering the scenes and otherwise ends apruptly. its no encyclopedia which covers every detail.
this smells like a simple hole in the plot and it makes about as much sense as j.d. from scrubs getting run over by a steamroller and suddenly reappearing next week after his funeral, with some vague references to angels by the janitor.
in the ep where starbuck "died" we saw her ship exploding. no uncertanity, no guessing, just bang, which indicates that they really intended her to die at this point. then there was her magical reappearence and this absolutely unlogical wreck on earth with her body in it, which somehow survived the explosion and got teleported there it seems.
either they became desperate because their ratings were dropping or it was a blatant cliffhanger without any kind of logic, "lost" style, which would even more suck. its also no surprice that the producer claims it was always meant that way. sounds a hell of a lot better than admitting that they made mistakes. george lucas did this all the time when he talked about the starwars movies while there were drastical plot changes all the time during shooting them.
What if Starbuck simply became a Cylon (with the same lack of self-awareness as the sleepers)? The show's tech existed for genetic cloning, so it would be fairly simple for the Cylons to get a DNA sample & make another model...
