William Adama

Rear Admiral William Adama was an officer in the Colonial Fleet who commanded the battlestar Galactica before, during, and after the Fall of the Twelve Colonies. Born to a Caprican family of Tauron heritage, he flew Raptors and Vipers in the Cylon War under the callsign "Husker" before a long second career carried him to flag rank. His distrust of networked computers, born of that war, left Galactica untouched by the Cylon infiltration that destroyed the rest of the Fleet, and in the aftermath he joined with President Laura Roslin to lead a convoy of survivors in search of the lost colony of Earth. (Battlestar Galactica miniseries; Caprica, "Apotheosis"; Battlestar Galactica: Blood & Chrome; Battlestar Galactica, "Daybreak, Part II")

Early life and the Cylon War#

Adama was born to Joseph and Evelyn Adama and named in honour of his late half-brother, who in turn had been named for their mutual grandfather William. The Cylon uprising began when Adama was a child. He joined the Colonial Fleet during the war and went to it as an Ensign. (Battlestar Galactica, "Hero"; Caprica, "Apotheosis"; Battlestar Galactica: Blood & Chrome)

His first posting, about ten years into the war, was to Galactica, one of the original twelve battlestars. Though he wanted to fly Vipers, he started out flying a Raptor, with Coker Fasjovik as his ECO, and his first mission drew him into a secret operation on the planet Djerba. On the last day of the war he flew a Viper in Operation Raptor Talon, was brought down on the planet where the Cylons were experimenting on human prisoners, and learned over the wireless that an armistice had been signed. (Battlestar Galactica: Blood & Chrome; Battlestar Galactica miniseries; Battlestar Galactica: Razor)

Merchant service and return to the Fleet#

After the war Adama married his first wife, Carolanne, and they had two sons, Zak and Lee. Furloughed by the Fleet, he found work as a deckhand on a civilian freighter, where he met Saul Tigh. The two forged a lasting friendship. (Battlestar Galactica, "Scattered"; Battlestar Galactica, "Valley of Darkness"; Battlestar Galactica miniseries; Battlestar Galactica, "A Day in the Life")

Carolanne's family had political influence, and it helped get Adama reinstated in the Fleet; he later arranged for Tigh to join too. He was promoted to Major aboard Atlantia, where he made his thousandth Viper landing, and went on to command the battlestar Valkyrie, with Tigh as his XO. Some years before the Fall, Admiral Peter Corman ordered him to send a stealth reconnaissance ship across the Armistice Line; when the craft was detected and disabled, he ordered it destroyed to prevent its capture. The incident precipitated his transfer to the aging Galactica. (Battlestar Galactica, "Act of Contrition"; Battlestar Galactica, "Hero")

Both his sons followed him into the cockpit. Zak struggled in flight training and was passed only because his instructor, Kara Thrace, let her feelings for him cloud her judgment; Zak later died when his Viper crashed. The loss drove a wedge between Adama and Lee, who blamed his father, but it also began the father-daughter bond between Adama and Thrace. (Battlestar Galactica miniseries; Battlestar Galactica, "Act of Contrition")

Command of Galactica and the Fall#

By the time the fifty-year-old Galactica was slated for decommissioning, Adama's wariness of automation had hardened into doctrine: the ship's systems were never to be networked. When the Cylons launched their surprise nuclear assault on the Twelve Colonies and crippled the Fleet through its compromised Command Navigation Program, Galactica was spared. The fleet's modern Viper Mark VII fighters carried the vulnerable program and were lost in droves, but Galactica's museum held a squadron of old Viper Mark IIs that could still fly. (Battlestar Galactica miniseries)

In the immediate aftermath Adama favored a counterattack and called the surviving Fleet to regroup at Ragnar Anchorage, a hidden munitions depot in the atmosphere of the gas giant Ragnar, where Galactica could rearm. No warships answered the call. Instead Galactica met a ragtag convoy of civilian ships carrying some fifty thousand survivors, led by the newly sworn President Laura Roslin. Roslin urged Adama to abandon vengeance and lead the survivors to safety. After deliberation he agreed, and the Fleet jumped beyond the red line. To give his people hope, Adama publicly claimed to know the location of the thirteenth colony, Earth. The first test came within days, when the Cylons began catching the fleet every 33 minutes in the episode "33". (Battlestar Galactica miniseries; Battlestar Galactica, "33")

Leading the Fleet#

The years after the Fall tested Adama repeatedly. He was nearly killed when the sleeper agent "Boomer" shot him, and his recovery softened him somewhat. The arrival of the battlestar Pegasus under Rear Admiral Helena Cain brought him to the brink of open conflict over Cain's treatment of his crew; each commander secretly planned the other's assassination, though neither gave the order. After Cain was killed by the Cylon Gina Inviere, Roslin promoted Adama to Rear Admiral. (Battlestar Galactica, "Kobol's Last Gleaming, Part II"; Battlestar Galactica, "Pegasus"; Battlestar Galactica, "Resurrection Ship, Part II")

When the Fleet discovered New Caprica and elected to settle, Adama was hesitant but ultimately allowed personnel to muster out. After the Cylons located and occupied the colony, he engineered an unorthodox rescue, even jumping Galactica into the planet's atmosphere; the operation succeeded but cost the Pegasus, which his son Lee deliberately sacrificed to save Galactica. The recovery of Lieutenant Daniel Novacek, the pilot whose craft Adama had ordered destroyed years before, stirred guilt that nearly drove him to resign, but Roslin refused his resignation and awarded him a Medal of Distinction. (Battlestar Galactica, "Lay Down Your Burdens, Part II"; Battlestar Galactica, "Exodus, Part II"; Battlestar Galactica, "Hero")

Mutiny and the road to Earth#

When Adama moved toward alliance with the rebel Cylons, Lieutenant Felix Gaeta and Tom Zarek launched a mutiny. Adama was arrested, tried in a rigged court-martial, and sentenced to death before loyal crew rescued him; he retook the ship and had Gaeta and Zarek executed. By now Galactica itself was failing, and Adama reluctantly accepted Cylon technology to patch it, then accepted that the ship was dying. (Battlestar Galactica, "The Oath"; Battlestar Galactica, "Blood on the Scales"; Battlestar Galactica, "No Exit"; Battlestar Galactica, "Islanded in a Stream of Stars")

Adama commanded Galactica's final mission, an assault on the Cylon Colony to rescue the half-human child Hera Agathon. He rallied volunteers with a final speech, brokered a truce that broke down when Galen Tyrol discovered who had killed his wife, and ordered Thrace to jump the ship clear as nuclear warheads consumed the Colony. The jump carried the Fleet to a habitable world they named Earth but broke Galactica's back. Adama adopted Lee's plan to abandon their technology and scatter across the planet, and as he had always intended, he was the last man to leave the ship. (Battlestar Galactica, "Daybreak, Part I"; Battlestar Galactica, "Daybreak, Part II")

After bidding Lee and Thrace farewell, Adama flew the dying Laura Roslin over their new world in search of a place to build a cabin. Roslin died during the flight, fulfilling the prophecy of the dying leader, and Adama placed his wedding ring on her finger. He spent his remaining days beside her grave. His life spans almost the whole Battlestar Galactica timeline, from the first war to the second Earth. (Battlestar Galactica, "Daybreak, Part II")

Personality#

Adama was a methodical, pragmatic commander who rarely let emotion drive his decisions, with rare exceptions involving those he considered family: Lee, Thrace, Tigh, and Roslin. Stoic and soft-spoken, he could command a room through plain candor rather than volume. He prized loyalty above almost all else and tested those around him by it, and he held integrity so highly that, before the Fall, he walked out of an interview for a well-paid civilian job over questions he felt impugned his character. Long an unbeliever who dismissed Roslin's prophecies, his views shifted toward faith over the years, in parallel with his deepening bond with her, until religion and a sense of destiny shaped his decision to launch the final mission. Each of them has an entry in our guide to the Battlestar Galactica characters. (Battlestar Galactica miniseries; Battlestar Galactica, "Kobol's Last Gleaming, Part I"; Battlestar Galactica, "Daybreak, Part I")