Laura Roslin: the dying leader

Laura Roslin was the President of the Twelve Colonies during the years following the Fall, having served as Secretary of Education under President Richard Adar and been sworn in as the highest-ranking government official to survive the Cylon attack. Together with Commander William Adama she led the remnants of the Colonial Fleet and its convoy of survivors. Though never elected to the office she first held, she came to be regarded by many as the dying leader foretold in the Book of Pythia, who would guide her people to a promised land but not live to see it. (Battlestar Galactica (2003 miniseries); Battlestar Galactica, "The Hand of God"; "Daybreak, Part II")

Background#

In the years before the Fall, Roslin lost her entire immediate family: her mother to cancer, and her father and two sisters to a car accident caused by a drunk driver. She began her career as a schoolteacher, as her mother had been, and gained political experience working with Richard Adar, the mayor who later became president and with whom she had a relationship. As Secretary of Education she navigated bitter teachers' strikes; after her own terminal cancer diagnosis she broke with Adar to hear out the union's demands, prompting him to demand her resignation. He agreed to keep her on until after a scheduled visit to Galactica's decommissioning ceremony. (Battlestar Galactica (2003 miniseries); Battlestar Galactica, "Act of Contrition"; "Epiphanies"; "Daybreak, Part I")

The Fall and the founding of the Fleet#

Roslin travelled to Galactica with her aide Billy Keikeya. When the Cylons attacked the Colonies during her return aboard the transport later called Colonial One, she rallied the passengers to make room for refugees. A reply to the government's emergency beacon confirmed that she, forty-third in the line of succession, was the highest-ranking official left alive, and she was sworn in as President by the priestess Elosha. Billy and the politicians she later clashed with, Zarek and Baltar among them, have entries in our Battlestar Galactica cast guide. (Battlestar Galactica (2003 miniseries))

Commander Adama at first wanted to fight on, but after Galactica withdrew to Ragnar Anchorage to rearm, Roslin persuaded him that the Fleet should abandon the Twelve Worlds and search for a new home. When Cylon Raiders found the convoy, she made the wrenching decision to leave the ships without FTL drives behind so that the rest could escape. After the escape, Roslin confronted Adama and he admitted he had made up his claim to know Earth's location; she kept his secret, and the two slowly worked out a division between his command of the military and her authority over the civilian Fleet. (Battlestar Galactica (2003 miniseries))

First term#

Roslin built a civilian government under impossible pressure, surviving relentless Cylon attacks that forced the Fleet to jump every thirty-three minutes. She authorised the destruction of the Olympic Carrier, suspected of guiding the enemy, at the cost of more than a thousand lives. She ordered the captured Cylon Leoben airlocked, a method of execution she would turn to again. (Battlestar Galactica, "33"; "Flesh and Bone")

Her use of the hallucinogenic chamalla, taken in place of the doloxan treatment she had watched her mother suffer through, coincided with visions that Elosha matched to the prophecy of Pythia. Convinced she was the dying leader, Roslin pressed to recover the Arrow of Apollo to open the Tomb of Athena and point the way to Earth. When she persuaded Kara Thrace to take a captured Raider back to Caprica, Adama had her arrested; she escaped with Lee Adama's help, hid in the Fleet with Tom Zarek's aid, and rallied much of the Fleet to follow her back to Kobol. There, after Adama reconciled with her, the Arrow opened the Tomb and revealed the road to Earth. (Battlestar Galactica, "Act of Contrition"; "The Hand of God"; "Kobol's Last Gleaming, Part I"; "Kobol's Last Gleaming, Part II"; "Resistance"; "The Farm"; "Home, Part II")

Return to power and a contested election#

Reinstated, Roslin found her health failing and her authority challenged by Rear Admiral Helena Cain of the Pegasus. After Cain was killed, Roslin promoted Adama to Rear Admiral. She made her most controversial decisions in this period: faking the death of Sharon and Karl Agathon's child to hide her, and, after Gaius Baltar projected that the human race was heading for extinction, banning the termination of pregnancies despite having long supported the right to choose. (Battlestar Galactica, "Pegasus"; "Resurrection Ship, Part II"; "Epiphanies"; "Downloaded"; "The Captain's Hand")

The ban handed Baltar a platform, and he ran against her on a promise to settle the newly discovered planet of New Caprica. Believing a Baltar presidency would endanger humanity, Roslin authorised her aide Tory Foster to rig the vote, and when early results favoured Baltar, a box of ballots for Roslin was swapped in with help from Saul Tigh. When Adama confronted her, she conceded and let Baltar win. (Battlestar Galactica, "Lay Down Your Burdens, Part II")

Second term and the road to Earth#

After the Exodus from New Caprica, Roslin returned to office, declaring a general amnesty for collaborators and shutting down the Circle, the secret tribunal that had been executing them. She insisted that Baltar receive a trial rather than be made to disappear, even as her cancer returned and was exposed in court; Baltar was acquitted. She began to share prophetic visions with Caprica Six, Sharon "Athena" Agathon, and the hybrid child Hera. (Battlestar Galactica, "Exodus, Part II"; "Collaborators"; "Crossroads, Part I"; "Crossroads, Part II")

When the Fleet finally reached the planet it had sought, only to find it a radioactive ruin, Roslin suffered a crisis of faith, burned her copy of the Pythian prophecy, and later stopped her treatment, even as she grew openly close to Adama. When Gaeta and Zarek mutinied, she broadcast an appeal for loyalty to Adama, fled Galactica with Baltar and reached the rebel Cylon baseship, from which she rallied support for him. Gravely ill, she nonetheless volunteered for the final mission to rescue Hera, leaving Romo Lampkin to lead the civilian Fleet and helping Hera evade the enemy during the battle. (Battlestar Galactica, "Revelations"; "A Disquiet Follows My Soul"; "The Oath"; "Blood on the Scales"; "Daybreak, Part II")

After Hera was rescued and the Fleet jumped to a new habitable world, Roslin asked Adama what to name it, and he answered "Earth." With her death near, Adama flew her over the planet's surface in a Raptor. Her last words were "So much... life." Adama placed his wedding ring on her finger and buried her on the hilltop where he meant to build their cabin, fulfilling the prophecy that the anointed leader would not live to enter the new land. (Battlestar Galactica, "Daybreak, Part II")