Starbuck's True Love Is Not Who You'd Expect

Katee Sackhoff knows who the final Cylon is on the bleak space-opera Battlestar Galactica — and she's not telling. Sackoff, pictured here in a photoshoot from the latest Entertainment Weekly, did drop some weird and fascinating hints about BSG's fourth season during a conference call with reporters. The most surprising (and disturbing) revelation was the identity of Starbuck's ideal man. Click through for minor spoilers and more of the EW pictures.

Don't hold your breath for any answers to the questions raised at the end of season three. The show is shooting its fourteenth episode of the season, which may not air until 2009, and Sackhoff says she's "no closer to having any questions answered from last season than I was." She's read the script for episode 15, and there's no resolution to how Starbuck came back from the dead, and what her trip to Earth meant.

By episode 14, the characters are dealing with "more important issues" than what the back-from-the-dead Starbuck is. And we won't see much resolution on the status of her marriage to Sam Anders, who's suddenly an inhuman Cylon. Sackhoff questions whether marriage to a Cylon would even be considered legal.

On the perfect man for Starbuck: Lee and Kara will never be happy together, Sackhoff claims.

I think they're meant to be best friends, to push each other, to have those arguments. I think that's the purpose they serve in each other's lives... If anyone is fitting to her, and anyone she would actually be happy with, it's Leoben... Anders is too weak for her, Lee is too much of a boy scout.. He makes her feel guilty just by being who she is, if there's any person she would ever let her guard down with and be happy with, it would be Leoben.

And yes, she's referring to the psychotic Cylon who held Starbuck prisoner and played freaky mind-games on her involving a little girl, at the start of season three. Love is strange, apparently.

At the start of season four, Starbuck is "extremely fragile, extremely lost," says Sackhoff.

We've never seen Starbuck so alone and so lost... Not only because of the way that people are treating her, but because of the questions that her coming back has raised in her own mind.

Finding Earth is Starbuck's "liberation," and she's willing to sacrifice everything to accomplish that goal. And that may lead her to some very scary actions. Having her father figure, Admiral Adama, doubt her after her miraculous return is the worst thing that can happen to Starbuck.

Loving the Cylons: Says Sackhoff:

Starbuck is starting to feel compassion for the thing she hates the most, because she and everyone else on the show is starting to realize...These are the questions of humanity, and what the show has always asked: If you found out tomorrow that your best friend or your mother or something was a Cylon, would it make your experiences you had with that person or thing less important to you? No, it's the same person, the same experiences, the same emotions, it's just different. It doesn't mean it's less. That's something they're starting to remember.

Female empowerment: Sackhoff also feels great that she's won over so many of the nay-sayers who said Starbuck wouldn't work as a woman.

What made people accept Starbuck as a woman was that she was such an interesting character. Once people let their guard down and their prejudices of what the show was supposed to be, they stopped thinking of the old show.

As for what Sackhoff herself has picked up from Starbuck, she says she'd like to think she's gotten some of the character's "strength and her conviction," not to mention the ability to speak up for herself without apologizing first, the way most women do. Sackhoff also said it's rare to see such a strong female character on television. Starbuck was originally supposed to be 35, but Sackhoff was only 22 when she took the role, making the character unusually tough for her age, at least in television terms.

Realistic science fiction: BSG's biggest influence on the genre, according to Sackhoff, is that it treats science fiction like reality:

We never relied on the science fiction in the show to drive the show, we relied on the drama and the human condition ... That's what we depended on for the show and to move it along. Most science fiction shows rely way too much on the bells and whistles. It's kind of opened doors in science fiction (generally). Science fiction is a setting, it's not a show. It's where something takes place. It should never have been what the show is.

And thanks to BSG, she feels everyone is realizing this "could be done."

The newly revealed Cylons: The actors playing Tigh, Tyrol and the other newly revealed Cylons were pissed off, because they had spent so much time building up those characters, Sackhoff says. "You play for years making choices as a character and then feel those choices would have been different if you'd known." Tigh actor Michael Hogan still hasn't come to terms with the revelation, she said.

Her chosen souvenir: When the show ends, Sackhoff wants to take her flight suit, including her gunbelt and helmet, home and bronze them. Then she'll put them in her bathtub, so anyone who takes a shower at her house will have to look at Starbuck's flight suit.

How Starbuck has evolved:

I think she's finally someone you can depend on, and I don't think she was before. What keeps her going is her desire to love and her desire to have people love her. Her relationships with [Admiral] Adama and Lee have probably kept her alive.

Originally, on the show, people depended on Starbuck because she was good at what she did, not because they trusted her. But now she's developed into one of the most dependable people on the show.

As for Starbuck's turn towards a more spiritual side, Sackhoff says it doesn't affect how she plays the character. "She 's always been religious. It's not that she's changed it's that she's opened up her eyes and allowed something else to come into her life.... It's just another aspect of who she is."

How BSG will end: Some of the show's revelations late in the season will "ruffle some feathers." The show won't have a neat and happy ending, tied up with a bow. Instead, the show, and Starbuck, will have a messy ending, says Sackhoff.

She would be interested in appearing in BSG/Bionic Woman producer David Eick's television version of Children of Men, both because of the cool premise and because she loves working with Eick. What went wrong on Bionic Woman, where she played the psychotic original bionic woman, was that there were "too many cooks" and "too many hands in the pot. You can't agree on what you're trying to make, [so] you get a stew that's full of shit." (At least that's what that last part sounded like to me.)

Send an email to Charlie Jane Anders, the author of this post, at charliejane@io9.com.