all the other moths need light to circle round while you just fly around yourself
The problem I have about writing about Maelstrom is not that Starbuck blows up, though that's tough, and it's not that we don't know what really happened to her when she blew up, and that's tougher. What's hardest is that this episode marks the end of her story, or a part of her story, however you want to think about it, and I can't write about the end without thinking about the whole story. It started two years ago when I watched the mini-series for just a few minutes because I'd heard some good things about the show and there was this blond in half-uniform jogging down the hall of this space ship and suddenly, two and a half hours later, I realized I was still standing in front of the television and I couldn't turn away.
The first time we see her, it's boom boom boom, she's a good soldier, a good daughter to the commander, she's shouting at people to make a hole and they do, because you don't get in Kara Thrace's way unless you really mean it, and then, your chances are 50-50 whether you'll get punched or graced with that huge grin. She wins at cards and smokes cigars and strikes superior officers and does push-ups in the brig. She argues with her brother about their father and the person they both lost, she flies out as the best pilot taking control, confesses her sins because it's the end of the world and she needs forgiveness for so many things, things we don't get to know about for years, things she's not even sure she remembers anymore except it's hard to forget the worst things you think you've done when you're the harshest judge, dealing out the cruelest punishment.
Before she chases a ghost ship down the symbol that's been chasing her all her life, she crashed on a red planet and busted her knee, but before that, she was a pyramid player until she busted the same knee, and that's when she became a flight instructor, and that's when she met the man she thinks she killed all because she loved him and he couldn't fly worth shit, and that's the whole reason she crashed on the planet in the first place, because she was trying to prove herself worthy, she was trying to be forgiven and find a way not to have anything for which to be forgiven in the first place. But she's Starbuck, and her laugh is a beautiful sound, and she can fly a Cylon raider by tearing out its guts and replacing its brain with hers and she flies, glorious and triumphant, home.
She did whatever her commander-father asked, except when he lied to her about Earth, about hope, and then she followed another woman's religious visions and she went back to her real home, to Caprica all yellow and dusty, and she fought with Cylons and met friends she thought were lost and met her future husband then got captured by Cylons who stole her like Scully to harvest her eggs and make a Cylon baby.
But before that, she met her Cylon soul mate, the one who would lead her to her own shadow self, and he told her she was special and she beat the shit out of him but then she prayed for him when he died and he remembered, because he found her again.
And then there was Cain, who Kara wanted to love and serve, but then her father enlisted her for assassination and she was ready to kill Cain because Adama asked, even if it meant dying herself, because that's who she was, dancing on the edge, loyal, strong, fearless, angry. She found another pilot to fight with, and Kat beats her but Kat wouldn't be who she was by then without Starbuck in the first place and they both know it, and so they fight and fight and it works, sort of, as much as anything works at that point.
In the end, Kara and her brother try to be more than just friends but they loved each other in just the wrong way, and they run from each other, to a new planet that's supposed to look like home, and almost does, until Leoben, her Cylon, her guide and her tormentor comes looking for her and builds her another home, where they eat steak and have a daughter and she kills him over and over and he keeps coming back. He tries to teach her, to tell her that this has happened before and it will happen again, but she escapes, only to find the daughter isn't hers and life has been yanked out from under her feet again, and so she becomes a viper pilot again, tries to be married, which mostly means cheating, tries to love her brother in the complete wrong way again, is a leader and a flight instructor and the best damn viper pilot until she can't hold on to all the threads anymore and she spirals around like the mandala, red and yellow and blue in the center, chasing down death because she's finally ready to find grace and see what's on the other side.
You'd think an episode like this, the Starbuck episode of the season where she falls apart will be about her reconciling what happened to her on New Caprica, reconciling being held captive, and the hope she lost when she lost Kasey and the thing is, Kara was always more complicated than that. She was fucked up way before Leoben found her, way before Zak. She wanted her mother's voice to be right because she wanted to believe that she was the problem, not the world that she lived in.
I'm not nearly as horrified as I should be that Starbuck is - or appears to be - dead. I have a hard time separating out what was actually in the episode versus what I wanted to see - is the hand on her eject lever a hint, a red herring, a last minute moment of indecision before the explosion takes her? Was the raider ever there? It's even harder to tell what symbols are there so that I see the Most of it, though, boils down to entertaining speculation: I enjoy wondering if Starbuck's going to come back, or someone like her is going to come back, a Cylon, the Final Five, her ghost, it's intriguing, it's interesting, and of course I want her to come back, because I love Starbuck, so utterly and completely. But in the end, if Starbuck, or the Starbuck we know (and see, once you start hedging, it never stops, anything could happen) is gone, then it was a good ending, one that made sense for the arc of her character and where she'd been, this season especially. The whole story was taking Kara somewhere and then bringing her back to where we first met her, like an elastic, like a boomerang, and she's worked for this ending, she's searched for it inside herself, and finally, she gets to rest.
It was a goodbye, a tying of lose ends, Adama telling her to bring the cat in, and her giving him Aurora, the dawn, the new beginning. It was Lee, her old friend being her friend, being the one Starbuck always needed. I call Lee her brother, because it was never about unrequited love with them, even if their love was unrequited. It was about the two of them having so damn much history they're drawn to each other, they're meant to be CAG and hotshot pilot, friends who have each other's backs, family, and Lee tries to save her but he always knew there would be a time when he couldn't follow her, when he'd have to pull up out of the storm and let her go, and his voice breaks when he tells their father that she's gone and you know that he never, ever was ready for it.
The brilliance of this episode is Starbuck going on what amounts to a journey of self-discovery, reluctantly, like the journey is taking her instead of the other way around. Starbuck watches parts of her life she's already lived and Leoben shows her the way like he was always trying to do and I thought I'd actually spend forever trying to figure out what Leoben inside her head meant, and why she dreamed of him but I found that the answer won't really answer anything, because it makes perfect sense for him to be there, the way it makes perfect sense to Starbuck. Who else could take her to her mother's bedside to watch her die? Who else could let her let herself heal?
That’s bothered me all season, that there was no healing for Starbuck, there was only this path, this relentless move forward. That no one seems to notice what happened to Starbuck, caught up in their own pain. And who could really understand it, when it's not all that different from who she's always been, fearless and angry? She never hated herself but what she loved more were the the things she’s made herself into, like Starbuck, the top gun, the badass cigar-smoking, cheating, drinking viper pilot. There was a Kara who would have kicked ass at Pyramid, a Kara who could have been happily married to Zak, but event after event in her life takes her down a path she doesn't understand, and maybe she does have a special destiny. Maybe the events in her life don’t add up to something in the same way we think, they’re all just avoiding, obscuring the one thing she is meant to be.
And so what do the mandalas mean? They were leading her, all her life, to one moment - her death. And isn't that what destiny is? Life completing itself, like a story, an arc, going up and up and up and finally, curving beautifully before falling all the way back down.