Margaret Edmondson
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| Margaret Edmondson | ||
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| Birth place | {{{birthplace}}} | |
| Birth Name | Margaret Edmondson | |
| Birth Date | {{{birthdate}}} | |
| Callsign | Racetrack | |
| Nickname | {{{nickname}}} | |
| Introduced | Kobol's Last Gleaming, Part II | |
| Death | ||
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| Family Tree | View | |
| Role | Raptor pilot and ECO, assigned to Galactica | |
| Rank | Lieutenant | |
| Serial Number | {{{serial}}} | |
| Portrayed by | Leah Cairns | |
| Margaret Edmondson is a Cylon | ||
| Margaret Edmondson is a Final Five Cylon | ||
| Margaret Edmondson is a Human/Cylon Hybrid | ||
| Margaret Edmondson is an Original Series Cylon | ||
| Related Media | ||
| @ BW Media | ||
| Additional Information | ||
| [[Image:|200px|Margaret Edmondson]] | ||
Lt. Margaret "Racetrack" Edmondson is a female Raptor pilot aboard Galactica. She harbors a deep hatred of the Cylons, almost certainly because of the loss of loved ones during the Fall of the Twelve Colonies. In her job she is competent and trusted, although she is willing to put her personal beliefs above duty. Racetrack tends to have a dark, fairly cynical attitude after the Cylon attack.
Biography
Racetrack accompanies Sharon "Boomer" Valerii on a mission to destroy a Cylon basestar. She witnesses Boomer's attempted assassination of William Adama in Galactica's CIC (Kobol's Last Gleaming, Part II). Immediately after, she informs the CIC staff that Boomer returned from placing the nuclear warhead inside the basestar orbiting Kobol without her helmet on and that she probably gave away Galactica's position to the Cylons (Scattered).
During the SAR mission to Kobol, Racetrack pilots the Raptor carrying Lee Adama, encountering fire from Cylon anti-aircraft missiles. Galen Tyrol destroys the missiles' DRADIS dish on the surface, and they fail to lock on. Racetrack's Raptor then destroys the Centurions on the ground with a missile, and recovers the trapped Galactica crewmen (Fragged).
She aids the escape of President Laura Roslin from the brig by falsely claiming that her Raptor was having technical problems, enabling the furloughed Lee Adama to report to the hangar bay instead of the brig per his arrest. She then helps prep the Raptor used as the escape craft for launch, but remains on Galactica (Resistance). On Boomer's death, Edmondson becomes the only person in the Fleet who has seen the inside of a basestar.
Racetrack serves as ECO on Raptor 1, plotting the best point of orbital entry when taking Commander Adama to Kobol to find and meet with President Roslin (Home, Part II). Since then, Margaret flies basic supply runs between Galactica and the Fleet. She continues to light candles for fallen comrades in the Cylon attack. She is almost certain she will eventually die on a mission, and is more focused on taking out as many Cylons as she can before that happens (Final Cut).
Along with many other pilots, Edmondson intially snubs Helo upon his return because of his romantic relationship with the Caprica-originated copy of Sharon Valerii. After she insults Kara Thrace over the matter, Starbuck pushes Racetrack face-first into a card table (Flight of the Phoenix). Racetrack later congratulates Helo on his help with the Blackbird, whose DRADIS-absorbing carbon composites Helo suggested, which serves as a quiet apology for her earlier rudeness.
Racetrack is particularly overjoyed when Galactica encounters the advanced battlestar Pegasus. While socializing with Pegasus pilots in the hangar bay, she fails to understand Starbuck's contempt for the "scorecards" on which they tally their kills (Pegasus). Racetrack's Raptor rescues the unconscious Apollo during the Battle of the Resurrection Ship, and she revives him using defibrilator paddles in her emergency gear (Resurrection Ship, Part II). When Racetrack transports Apollo and a squad of Marines to check the Daru Mozu for signs of sabotage by Cylon sympathizers, her vessel narrowly escapes the ensuing explosion (Epiphanies). Racetrack also later flew a Raptor transporting Apollo back from Cloud 9 after he spent some off duty time there with Shevon (Black Market).
During Starbuck's rescue mission for the Caprica Resistance, Racetrack serves as ECO on one of the 20 Raptors to make a series of ten jumps, aided by a Cylon navigation system. On the first jump, Racetrack's Raptor jumps to the wrong coordinates, ending up in a gas cloud. Starbuck and the main group proceed on without her. Preparing to return to Galactica, Racetrack picks up a lot of gravity distortions on her sensors and upon clearing the gas cloud she discovers a habitable planet that the Fleet could colonize (Lay Down Your Burdens, Part I). Though the planet turned out to be marginally habitable at best, it would later be named New Caprica, and most of the human survivors of the Fleet would settle down there permanently (Lay Down Your Burdens, Part II).
Racetrack remains with the Fleet and flies missions to detect communications from the New Caprica Resistance (Occupation). She also plays a leading role in the rescue mission to New Caprica (Exodus, Part I).
Although she is a qualified Raptor pilot, Edmondson agrees to serve as Sharon Agathon's ECO after the crews of Galactica and Pegasus are combined and far more pilots than aircraft are available, because she thinks being ECO is better than not flying at all. When Edmondson refers to Agathon using the callsign of her Cylon doppelgänger, "Boomer", the room of pilots gleefully offer a less controversial callsign for Sharon Agathon: "Athena".
On her first mission with Agathon, the two make a recon flight to the Lion's Head Nebula to investigate a clue to the location of Earth. The information proves to be correct, but they also find a deserted Cylon basestar (Torn). After undergoing precautionary quarantine measures due to a possible viral infection, the two fly together again in the Battle of NCD2539 (A Measure of Salvation).
Edmondson lends her Raptor talents in a harrowing series of escort flights to shepherd the Fleet through a very dangerous star cluster to a planet with desperately needed foodstuffs (The Passage).
On a routine patrol around the Fleet, her Raptor suffers from an engine and RCS malfunction, due to impurities in its tylium fuel. Unable to regain control and on a collision course with Colonial One, she and her ECO Hamish McCall are forced to eject from the Raptor. The craft collides with Colonial One, causing moderate hull damage and several injuries, but no fatalities (Dirty Hands).
As the Fleet approaches the Ionian nebula, Admiral Adama, worried about Cylon pursuit, tasks Raptor pickets with staying one jump point behind the Fleet to watch for Cylons. One of those patrols, Racetrack and Skulls put their Raptor to station-keeping behind an asteroid and start playing Triad to pass the next twelve hours. Shortly after that a Cylon fleet jumps to their position. They manage to spin up the FTL drive and escape seconds before an enemy missile would have hit their Raptor (Crossroads, Part I). Shortly after, she instructs nuggets in basic Raptor operations and technology to prepare them for flying (Crossroads, Part II).
Racetrack participates in the Battle of the Ionian Nebula, and refers to Samuel Anders not shooting down an easy Raider target as a dumb nugget mistake (He That Believeth in Me). Later, during Lee Adama's retirement party on Galactica, Edmondson enjoys a game of strip triad (Six of One).
Later, Racetrack and McCall are on a routine mission when they have another technical malfunction on their Raptor and crashland in the landing bay (Escape Velocity).
After an uneasy truce is formed between the Colonials and the rebel Cylons, Edmondson and McCall are sent on a scouting mission to the reported location of the Cylon Resurrection Hub (Guess What's Coming to Dinner).
Notes
- Racetrack was probably created as a replacement for Crashdown, the ECO of whichever Raptor a given episode focuses on; Crashdown himself was created as a replacement for Helo after he was stranded. Racetrack was introduced in the first season finale, simultaneous with the seeds of Crashdown's demise: signs of his incompetence for command while stranded on Kobol.
- Racetrack's given name was revealed in the episode "Final Cut". Her name was misspelled in the caption during her interview, however, as noted by Bradley Thompson (See Sources:Margaret Edmondson). Confusion about her name's spelling resulted in Racetrack's last name being mispelled in the end credits of many episodes in Season 2, although is corrected in Season 3.
- Ron Moore noted in his podcast to "Kobol's Last Gleaming, Part II", Racetrack's debut episode, that she was only meant to be a one-shot character, like Helo. But, just as with Tahmoh Penikett's performance in the Miniseries, Leah Cairns' performance in the episode was impressive and she was decided to be a new recurring character.
- A fan of Helo, "Sabaceanbabe", once wrote a short fan fiction romance scene between Helo and Racetrack (located here, scroll down to part 5). Tahmoh Penikett, who plays Helo, and actress Leah Cairns read it at a party, and Cairns decided that she'd work that into the character. While not canonical or acknowledged by the writers, Cairns said in an interview on June 27th, 2006, that she chose to incorporate this into her character backstory and how she plays scenes with Helo, that she is wildly attracted to him and jealous of Sharon Agathon. Although Sharon isn't supposed to know about this, Penikett reacts with underlying tension in his scenes with her. This is also referred to in the fan-made Battlestar Galactica game Beyond the Red Line, when one of the pilots during a mission notes that whenever Racetrack sees Helo she "slobbers all over him."
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