Kara “Starbuck” Thrace (Battlestar Galactica)

Love her or hate her — and I’ve met plenty of people who feel both ways — there’s no question Starbuck is a compelling character. Dirk Benedict, who played Starbuck on the original Battlestar Galactica series, was beyond angry about what he called the “castration” of the character, but in case you haven’t seen the original BSG lately, Katee Sackhoff’s Starbuck has far bigger balls than Benedict’s. She’s not afraid of a fight, whether it’s with a Cylon, her XO, or a boxing match with her lover. After surviving a crash landing, she figures out how to activate and fly a Cylon raider, which she later uses to successfully fly back to Caprica to locate and retrieve the Arrow of Apollo, which was then used to “open” the Tomb of Athena and show the survivors of the Twelve Colonies the way to Kobol.

My favorite Starbuck moment is in the episode in which they’ve teamed up with Battleship Pegasus and its terrifying, insane, civilian-slaughtering Admiral Cain. After it becomes clear that the crews of Pegasus and Galactica can’t live in harmony, Cain’s got an assassin ready to off Adama and Adama’s got Starbuck ready to off Cain, despite the fact that Cain just made Starbuck her CAG and Cain understands Starbuck in a way no one else does. That Starbuck is prepared to shoot Cain in the head on Adama’s orders, despite not being a cold-blooded killer and despite honestly respecting and appreciating Cain, exemplifies all of the dichotomies of the character — single-minded yet torn in different directions, compliant yet subordinate, spiritual yet practical, afraid of disappointing others and afraid of disappointing herself, yet somehow afraid of nothing.

We’ll forget back-from-death Starbuck. I never did buy that whole ending. On io9, Ronald Moore said of resurrected Starbuck:

She is what you want to think of her. It was left deliberately nebulous and vague. And I think she was a representative of an entity that didn’t like to be called God, but everybody else talked about it in godlike terms. If you want to call her an angel, you could say that.

I don’t want to call her an angel. I want to call her an asshole — and I mean that in the most affectionate way possible. – Joelle