too tough to die

i have a new blonde-chick tv hero (r.i.p. buffy), and her name is starbuck. that's right, i mean the mouthy ace pilot from the sci-fi channel's reimagined battlestar galactica series. lt. kara thrace (played by katee sackhoff) just won't quit, and her tenacity has never ceased to astound me.

first of all, she swaggers and plays poker and smokes cigars and drinks and whores around, just like her counterpart from the original '70s series, who was a man (played by dirk benedict, the bad-boy heartthrob of that show). she has a 5,000-watt grin that lights up the show's persistent gloom and hints at a softer side. but she kicks ass, make no mistake. and she's been put through the wringer.

first, she crash-lands on some godforsaken speck after a skirmish with cylon raiders, dragging herself from the wreckage with a horrible leg wound. she inches through the hostile landscape, finds the crashed cylon raider and figures out how to fly it back to the fleet ... including how to show apollo and co. that it's her inside the enemy ship (with a big "star buck" spelled out on the bottom of the thing, using the galactica equivalent of duct tape). after being laid up in the sick bay for a while, struggling with the arduous recovery from her wounds, she plunges right back into duty when she and apollo are called upon to guard against assassination attempts after the president reconvenes the civilian government's council. still fucked up from the crash, starbuck is using a cane. but when some shit starts in an outdoor bar, and she spots one of the potential assassins with a gun in his briefcase, she goes after him like she has four good legs. their battle for control of the gun is sprawling and savage ... ending with starbuck crawling to the weapon and, literally laid out on her back, bringing it to bear on her target and subduing his ass.

and then last week, on the season finale, starbuck (a closet believer in the gods of kobol -- who'd'a thunk, but also ... kinda figures) flies off in the cylon raider, against cmdr. adama's orders. (it is interesting that we are led to see galactica-boomer's creepy affinity for the raider as further proof she's a cylon, but we're never prompted to suspect starbuck could be a cylon, even though she also has a connection with the thing.) instead, she's following the wishes of the very possibly delusional president, going back to caprica to pick up something called the "arrow of apollo" from a museum, in order to bring it back to the prez, who plans to use it to take the surviving humans to earth. uh, yeah ... anyway, that's not important.

starbuck flies the raider through enemy-occupied space and hordes 'n' hordes of cylons. she lands on caprica, goes into the museum -- pausing only to casually stab herself in the thigh with anti-radiation meds -- and finds the arrow. only to be attacked by yet another version of no. 6, the blonde-bitch model of human-looking toaster who turned dr. baltar against his entire species with her combination of insistent sexuality and random brutality. (boys are stupid, indeed.) 6.v.x beats and beats and beats on starbuck ... just keeps whaling away on her, and starbuck keeps up at least some attempt to beat back. but she is trashed, just completely wasted, a bloody ragdoll. then along come poor stranded helo and caprica-boomer, distracting no. 6 enough to let starbuck lunge at her with a sharp implement and topple them both onto a floor below, stabbing and killing the cylon cunt. starbuck's joy at finding helo is abruptly cut short. she's panting and smiling and bleeding and crying and talking ... and then she sees boomer, and her face contorts. you can tell, in the split second it takes her to reach for helo's weapon, that she's thinking "omg! boomer is a cylon!" in both a seasoned-soldier way and a horrified, she-was-my-friend way. she yanks out the gun; helo struggles to stop her; starbuck screams "she's a cylon!" and shoots, but misses. damn! helo tells her she can't kill boomer b/c boomer is pregnant. (which, to me, is all the more reason to plug her, but whatev.) starbuck is crying and huffing and recoiling and sliding down the wall all at once ... it's unbelieveable the subtle emotions that flit across her face. and then she just wails.

hoo boy. all the fanboys wanna know if adama is going to survive his assassination attempt (duh), but i can't wait for starbuck to get the frak off caprica, helo in tow, and go back to galactica so she can blow boomer out the airlock. soonest!