3.17 Maelstrom

Well well well. An odd episode in the sense that it probably delivered the most shocking surprise Battlestar Galactica has ever produced, and yet the way it was all set-up meant the apparent demise of Starbuck had an inevitability about it that emptied the eventual ‘surprise’ of any shock value.

Although, for sure, despite Starbuck flying headlong into a cloud storm and exploding I think it’s certain she isn’t gone for good. Quite where she has gone to is another matter, of course. Like that Aurora figurine she came across, Starbuck has potentially been reborn into the next phase of her destiny. And though that’s all very well and good in a poetic, metaphorical sense it doesn’t answer very much in the way of hard and fast reality.

Metaphor played a heavy part here, though. From the ‘maelstrom’ image that Starbuck had been drawing, it was appearing in her dreams, in melted candles and in the storm cloud that eventually consumed her. It wasn’t difficult to surmise that the darkness at the centre of the storm could also be portrayed as the darkness at the centre of Starbuck herself; her destructive nature and guilt over her mother being a swarming blackness at the heart of her that had been pulling her inside out like a black hole.

She faced her inner demons, made her peace with her mother and flew into the eye of the storm. That all works well, metaphorically.

What’s not so clear is what the hell was going on! Leoben had been in her dreams, constantly, and appeared in her extended flight of fantasy as her ship plunged into the eye of the storm. Yet at the end Starbuck knew that he wasn’t even really Leoben, so who the hell was he? And was there ever really a Cylon raider anywhere? It seemed like there wasn’t until close to the end when Apollo apparently got a glimpse of the raider that Starbuck had been pursuing.

That’s deeply confusing.

I have to try and corroborate some level of Cylon involvement in all that transpired, but I get the feeling this part of Starbuck, and the Cylon's destiny, goes back further than either of them. There was mention of that space between life and death, which is crucially what Deanna was in pursuit of when looking for the ‘final five’. Again, I get the impression the ‘final five Cylons’ and the five members of the 13th tribe are perhaps one and the same, and are a link between man and Cylon.

And, naturally, this leads to the idea that Starbuck may be one of these five. That’s perhaps where she has gone. . . How all that works, how a member of the Cylon five could have been a little girl that grew into Starbuck and had no real understanding of herself, well, that’s deeply involved stuff that I can’t really fathom out. I just have to have faith with Battlestar Galactica that it knows what it is doing.

I think it must do. I can’t imagine ‘killing off’ a character like Starbuck was one that was done lightly and without careful consideration. And I liked the way this episode tied in her first encounter with Leoben, and the details of her flat from Season 2, and made it feel like this episode, this fate, had always been coming. I have a feeling that I probably won’t get much of an answer about all of this in the remainder of this season, but perhaps the season will end with some glimpse as to where Starbuck went to next. . . Exciting stuff.

Although if she turns up in the next episode having miraculously survived somehow then I want my frakking money back!