The ‘Buck Stops Here: Daddy Issues and the Character Assassination of Kara Thrace

This is the golden age of scripted TV. Television has never had as many good shows as it has this decade. And some of those (e.g., The Wire, Band of Brothers, Peep Show) are the best examples of their respective genres that the medium has ever had to offer.

But, at some point in the future, people may look back and wonder why so many characters on other popular shows from this time were little more than cliched assemblages of daddy issues. On Lost, flashbacks have taught us that Jack, Kate, Sawyer, Locke, Ben, and Sun are who they are largely because of what shitty fathers (or father figures) they had. At least three of the leads on Mad Men — Don, Betty, and Pete — are all still prisoners of their upbringing. And then there’s Battlestar Galactica, which is ultimately all about creators and their creations.

Otherwise good shows are at their worst when they waste time telling us why their characters are screwed up, usually through flashbacks or expository backstory. These backstories almost always make characters passive recipients of some harmful acts, rather than active participants in their own lives.

While that may be a starting point from which a character can grow, retroactively establishing victimhood isn’t the same thing as character development. Circumstances are not storytelling.

We all are (or have been) screwed up, for some reason or another. What’s been acted upon us isn’t likely to be unique or interesting or a story in and of itself, regardless of how tragic it is. What matters — what makes us matter — is what we do to overcome what happened to us. There’s your story.

Rather than falling in love with the damage their characters have suffered, writers should focus on how these characters are trying to transcend their issues. Unfortunately, many shows get this backwards.

In a recent Battlestar Galactica, we learned that Starbuck is a mess because her dad abandoned her when she was a little girl — which conveniently ignores how Admiral Adama has always been the best father she could ever have had, anyway. A similar story was told last season, when the same pair of screenwriters showed us how miserable Starbuck was because she had a horrible relationship with her mother. In both cases, the writers made it clear that Starbuck is as broken now as she was when these things originally happened.

She’s spent much of the last two seasons moping, crying, yelling, feeling sorry for herself, and she’s even (in essence) committed suicide. The writers have effectively told us that Starbuck hasn’t grown at all — not in the decades since her father left, not in the years since she left home, and certainly not over the four seasons of the show.

In fact, she’s regressed. The writers have neutralized most of the traits that made Starbuck such a good character in the first place. If anything, they should have swapped the first season’s Starbuck with the one we’re subjected to, now. It would make a lot more narrative sense that Starbuck would, by the show’s finale, grow to be the strong, prickly, funny, occasionally vulnerable, kickass fighter pilot we met over the first year of Battlestar Galactica.

That Starbuck was someone who had clearly already overcome much of her past — which we viewers always assumed was rough, even before her recent spate of “very special” episodes. For her to succumb to it years later is just poor quality control on the part of the writers and producers. Instead of getting us to like or hate Starbuck (or both!),  BSG’s powers that be have decided they wanted us to pity her, which is no substitute for effective storytelling.