Laura Roslin

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.

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.

The Fall and the founding of the Fleet#

Roslin traveled to Galactica with her aide Billy Keikeya. When the Cylons attacked the Colonies during her return aboard the transport later called Colonial One, she took control of the ship as a refugee coordinator. With the death of President Adar confirmed and no one above her surviving, she was declared President and sworn in by the priestess Elosha.

Commander Adama at first refused to recognize her authority, but after Galactica withdrew to Ragnar Anchorage to rearm, Roslin proposed abandoning the Twelve Worlds entirely and leading the Fleet in search of a new home. When Cylon Raiders found the convoy, she made the wrenching decision to leave thousands aboard non-FTL ships behind so that the rest could escape. At Ragnar, after Adama privately admitted he had lied about knowing Earth's location, the two reached an accommodation: she kept his secret and his command of the military, and he acknowledged her authority over the civilian Fleet.

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 authorized the destruction of the Olympic Carrier, suspected of guiding the enemy, at the cost of more than a thousand lives. She ordered captured Cylons airlocked, a method of execution she would use repeatedly, and publicly revealed that the Cylons now appeared human.

Her growing reliance on the hallucinogenic chamalla, taken in place of the treatment that had failed her mother, 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 steal a captured Raider and return to Caprica, Adama tried to remove her from office; she was arrested, escaped with the help of sympathetic crew, 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.

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 the human race's extinction within eighteen years, banning the termination of pregnancies despite her lifelong support for the opposite policy.

The ban handed Baltar a platform, and he ran against her on a promise to settle the newly discovered planet of New Caprica. As the vote tilted toward Baltar, Roslin's campaign manager and Saul Tigh arranged to substitute forged ballots in her favor; when Adama confronted her, she reluctantly accepted the result's reversal and let Baltar win.

Second term and the road to Earth#

After the Exodus from New Caprica, Roslin returned to office, declaring a general amnesty for collaborators and halting Tom Zarek's secret retribution tribunal, the Circle. She insisted that Baltar receive a fair 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.

When the Fleet finally reached the planet it had sought, only to find it a radioactive ruin, Roslin suffered a crisis of faith, burned the Book of Pythia, and stopped her treatment, even as she grew openly close to Adama. She survived Gaeta and Zarek's mutiny by hiding in Adama's quarters and was spirited to the rebel Cylon baseship, from which she rallied support for him. Gravely ill, she nonetheless volunteered for the final mission to rescue Hera, appointing Romo Lampkin as acting president and helping Hera evade the enemy during the battle.

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.