Galactica's third season has been pretty uneven compared to the first two. The occupation of (and escape from) New Caprica worked better than I'd anticipated, and restored my opinion of the show after a string of somewhat mediocre episodes leading to the second season finale. But most of the episodes since have been far below their earlier standard - even when the overall concepts have been strong, the way they're handled disappoints.

That having been said, it's about time they killed off another major character. They've been hinting as early as the middle of last year that the pilots' days are all numbered - it's dangerous work, and the casualty (and burnout) rate's really high. Apollo and Starbuck probably only made it this far because they were each off of flight duty for well over a year.

To kill off one of the main (flawed) heros in the story (via suicide no less) with plot development and backstory which takes place over a single episode - that's just bad writing.

Except it didn't take place over a single episode. We learned during the first couple of episodes of the second season that Starbuck had been badly abused as a child - each of her fingers had been broken. Now we've learned how that happened. We've also known for several episodes that the pattern we saw painted on Starbuck's apartment wall during the start of the second season was mirrored in the temple left behind by the 13th tribe on a distant world. So clearly Starbuck knew there was something unusual about her - as Leoben had insisted as early as the 1st season.

During the second season episode "Scar" they made it pretty clear that the pilots heads were being scrambled by constant combat duty, and that all of them were living on borrowed time. Since then Starbuck had been kidnapped and held for months by a sexually obsessed Cylon, the same crazy Leoben. It's hardly surprising she finally flipped - the only surprise is that it took her so long to kill herself (or somebody else).

As for whether she'll be back, who knows. It would be ballsy for the show to leave her dead, though. There are a lot of other interesting characters in this fleet - like Doc Cottle, or Roslin's assistant Tory - I'd like to see a lot more of. Personally, I think that boring romantic quadrangle Starbuck, Apollo, Dualla and Anders were locked in earlier this season is proof positive they'd run out of things for Starbuck to do. With someone as frakked up as she was, it was obvious from the miniseries her time was gonna come sooner or later. It probably should have come sooner, but the way she finally went out made perfect sense. Here's hoping they handle the fallout on the survivors as well.