Kara Thrace (Angel)

Kara Thrace is a Messenger being imprinted with the memories of Kara Thrace, a Colonial Officer who perished after being lured into a storm.
==Biography==
In the cliffhanger Season 3 finale, "Crossroads, Part II", Starbuck reappears in the same Viper that she was flying at the time she disappeared and is discovered by Apollo, appearing to be alive and well, but the reason for her sudden resurrection has yet to be revealed. She tells Apollo not to "freak out" it is really her and she has been to Earth, and will show them the way.
Earth Earth (TOS) Earth Cylon Earth (second)
Kara returns in Season 4 believing she had only been absent for six hours, but Anders informs her she was really gone for two months. The crew is wary of her return except for Lee, who greets her with an enthusiastic and long hug, and is so grateful for her return he is willing to overlook the possibility she is a Cylon, and he may be willing to accept her even as a Cylon. This becomes evident in Lee's questioning of his father whether if it had been his son, Lee's brother, who returned, would it have made a difference whether he was Cylon or human. She experiences frustration upon her return to Galactica, as no one believes it is really her, and because of President Roslin's refusal to be guided by what she believes is a Cylon trick. The crew continues on the course Roslin had previously decided upon and move further away from the area Kara believes is Earth's true location. She attempts to encourage Adama to follow her suggestions, but when he refuses, she fears his being romantically linked to Roslin has unjustly influenced him. Feeling hopeless and fearing as they make more jumps farther away she will lose the "feeling" of Earth's location, she becomes desperate and holds President Roslin at gunpoint.
During her standoff with the President, she tries to reason and appeal to the President's emotions. She hands the gun to Roslin and insists she shoot her if she really believes she is a Cylon, to which Roslin responds to by saying "They made you perfect, didn't they?" Roslin fires the gun, but misses Starbuck and hits a framed portrait of herself and Adama.
Starbuck is thrown into the brig and has a hostile confrontation with Adama, who angrily says, "You are so stupid you couldn't wait. You just lost your best ally. Now who is going to save you?" She responds, "Well, it certainly isn't you," and says she will fight to show them Earth's location until her death. She also accuses him of playing "wet nurse" to the president, to which he responds by throwing her to the floor and leaving her crying.
Later, after Adama attempts to have a conversation with Roslin, which turns into a psychological sparring argument, he rethinks his decision and allows Kara to secretly look for Earth on a barge called Demetrius.
===Aboard Demetrius - Looking for Earth===
After taking command of Demetrius to find a way to Earth, Starbuck finds herself at odds with the crew when her orders cause them to doubt her command ability. With only two days remaining until the ship must return to the Fleet, her command is further compromised by her refusal to explain her actions and her decision to bring the Cylon Leoben aboard after having found him in a damaged Cylon Heavy Raider. Eventually, she finds herself torn between following Leoben's advice to forge an alliance with the fragmented Cylons, or distrusting him because of what that risk entails. The tension with the crew leads to a mutiny, after which Kara acknowledges her errors and instead takes a small crew with her in a Raptor to visit the base ship. There, she meets with the base star's hybrid and is told, "You are the harbinger of death, Kara Thrace. You will lead them all to their end." This echoes the warning given by the first hybrid to Kendra Shaw at the conclusion of Razor.
===Earth===
In "Sometimes a Great Notion", Starbuck and Leoben look for the Colonial beacon which led them to Earth. They find wreckage of a Viper with Starbuck's tail number and what appears to be her charred corpse. Both Kara and Leoben are shocked by this discovery and do not understand what it means. After removing the dog tags and wedding ring, Kara asks "If that's me lying there, then what am I?". He responds by backing away, as if recoiling from the realization that she is indeed the "Harbinger of Death." She returns to the wrecked Viper and, after carefully wrapping the remains in a parachute shawl, she incinerates the body on a funeral pyre.
===Mutiny===
In "The Oath", Captain Thrace discovers civilians and a few mutinous Marines and crewmen arming themselves for battle. She rushes back to her quarters to prepare for battle, grabbing her sidearms and ammunition. Kara then finds Lieutenant Margaret "Racetrack" Edmondson, Charlie Conner, and a few others preparing to execute Lee Adama. She kills a Marine holding Adama and wounds Lieutenant Hamish "Skulls" McCall. Along with Lee Adama, Kara runs into several other loyal Colonials including President Roslin, Admiral Adama, and Colonel Tigh. While searching for Adama, Kara and Lee free loyalists found in the brig which includes Anders, who is then shot by a mutinous marine upon leaving. Kara, refusing to leave his side, pressures Lee and those who escaped to leave her in order for them to search for Adama.
===The song===
In the episode "Someone to Watch Over Me", Starbuck encounters a pianist in Joe's Bar who is trying to compose a new song. At first she becomes annoyed by his repetitious playing, stating he reminds her of her father when he did nothing but play the piano and she mentions how her father left her and her mother to pursue it as a career. Over the course of the episode, Starbuck befriends the pianist and ends up working with him to try to finish his song.
Toward the end, the piano player writes down the notes Starbuck hums out on a sheet of paper. The pattern reminds Starbuck of a drawing of colored dots the Cylon-Human child, Hera Agathon had given to her earlier. She lines the child's drawing up with the notes the composer had drawn and they match exactly.
When Starbuck and the pianist play the notes, the song is instantly recognized by Saul Tigh and Tory Foster – who are sitting at a nearby table with Ellen Tigh – as the song ("All Along the Watchtower") they heard in their heads when they learned they were the final Cylons. Ellen, of course, remembers it from Earth. A bewildered Saul asks Starbuck where she heard the song. Starbuck responds she played it as a kid and begins to mention her father, but stops short when she realizes the piano player, her father, was either a figment of her imagination or a vision.
In the episode "Daybreak, Part I" Starbuck tries to get answers from Anders about the song, even turning notes into numbers to see if there is a mathematical solution.
In "Daybreak, Part II", after getting the coordinates from Anders for the Cylon Colony, Starbuck joins in on the rescue mission for Hera. After saving Hera, and as the Colony is being destroyed, Starbuck is ordered by Admiral Adama to jump the Galactica away to safety. Although she has no coordinates, Adama tells her to make a blind jump to anywhere. Recalling the musical notes and the numbers she extrapolated from it, she inputs them into the computer; the resulting jump puts Galactica near a habitable planet the fleet decides to settle on. It is revealed this new planet is our world, some 150,000 years ago; Admiral Adama names it "Earth", believing it better matched the dream the fleet had been seeking than did the original Earth (which had been found destroyed by nuclear war).
Once settled on the world, Kara says a final goodbye to Admiral Adama and tells Lee she's leaving - her "job is done", having indeed led the human race to their end (the end of their journey) - and will not be coming back. Kara then disappears into thin air and is not seen again. Seeing her gone, Lee tells her ghost she "won't be forgotten", echoing a moment from the Daybreak episodes. What really happened to Kara is left ambiguous. According to Katee Sackhoff, "So when she at the end was saying goodbye to [Anders], I think that she was saying goodbye to their bodily forms," she said. "I think she knew, especially if he says, 'I'll see you on the other side,' I think she's with him. I think they're both dead, but I think she's with him. That was a decision that we made, because I selfishly wanted her at peace, and the only way to do that was to have her with someone at the end, or to be with the person she wanted to be with. I don't know. That's kind of where I think she is. She's with Anders playing pyramid in the sky somewhere." 
==Sources==
Category:TNS characters