Messenger Leoben
An unknown entity that takes the form of Leoben Conoy guides Kara Thrace through her past and her unresolved issues with her long-dead mother, Socrata Thrace.
The Leoben likeness appears to Kara Thrace as she awakens in what appears to be her old apartment in Delphi. In reality, Starbuck found herself chasing what she believed was a Heavy Raider down a gigantic planetary storm, and was knocked unconscious, alarms blaring from her Viper, when she finds her waking on her bed on Caprica.
The Leoben image partially succeeds in convincing Thrace that she was not captured by the Cylons when the entity changes reality around he and Thrace to Socrata Thrace's apartment (approximately six years before the Fall of the Twelve Colonies) on the last day that Thrace saw her mother.
The Leoben image and Thrace soon appear at Socrata's bedside, where Thrace is not only able to say goodbye to her mother before her death (never doing so before her mother died in reality), but also understands why her mother was so abusive to her. Rather than mourning, Thrace smiles.
Thrace realizes that this Leoben was not a Leoben Conoy Cylon at all. "I never said I was," is the image's answer. The Leoben-image tells Thrace that he was there to help guide her to the place "between life and death."
When the vision ends, Starbuck accepts the offer to explore the place "between life and death", does not alter her fighter's course, and soon dies as the Viper explodes (Maelstrom).
Notes
- The Leoben image significantly differs from the virtual Number Six and virtual Baltar in that it never claims to be a Cylon, nor does it appear to Thrace in real-time; he appears only in Thrace's vision while she was unconscious.
- The demeanor of this Leoben image is not manipulative than the genuine Leoben Conoy models.
- The virtual Leoben is the fifth instance where visions or other extra-sensory perceptions guide a Colonial member to something pre-destined by the Sacred Scrolls or other lore of the Thirteenth Tribe.
- The first instance are Laura Roslin's prescient visions that lead her to believe her destiny as the "dying leader" (season 1).
- The second instance is the Tomb of Athena, where ancient tribal technology creates a hologram that points the general location of Earth (season 2).
- A third instance involves Galen Tyrol's extrasensory ability to sense and find the Temple of Five on the algae planet (The Eye of Jupiter).
- As the algae planet's home star began to nova, the Temple of Five's mechanisms allowed a Number Three Cylon to see persistent vision of who she believed to be the missing five Cylons. The vision may or may not been intended for Gaius Baltar, also in attendance (Rapture)
- The Temple of Five, built 4,000 years before, contained an mandala that Kara Thrace has known of and drawn as a child without an external source for the symbol, leading to the fourth instance and the Leoben image.