Identity and Captain Louanne “Kat” Katraine
Sasha was a drug trafficker before the Cylon invasion of the Twelve Colonies in Ronald D. Moore’s reboot of Battlestar Galactica. Sasha stole the identification papers from someone who had been killed in the attack. She wished not only to cover up her past crimes but take on a new identity altogether. The very method in which Sasha became Louanna Katraine was a trespass of the basic ethics of respecting the life of others, namely the deceased woman from whom she stole her identity from. This only compounds the transgressions of having been a drug runner.
When Galactica needs new pilots, Sasha volunteers and excels in establishing, yet another, new identity. What happens next is rather remarkable. We see this former criminal become part of a new group, a tight-knit group, in which she could demonstrate her talents in a way that benefited others – that protected the fleet from the Cylons. Now known as “Kat,” she had found her family, her group identity. No doubt the life of a drug runner had a deeply upsetting, degrading, and depressing impact of social isolation. Now part of something larger than herself, she could shine apart from that social isolation.
Haslam, et al. “argue that the lack or loss of meaningful social group memberships is one of the key causes of loneliness (especially, but not only, its social form [13]).”
This claim is based on the argument (a) that group memberships furnish people with social identities, (b) that these social identities make a sense of (group-based) social connection to others possible (via social identification), and (c) that these group-based social connections have a distinct capacity to provide people with a sense of shared meaning, purpose, support and efficacy.
(“Social identity makes group-based social connection possible: Implications for loneliness and mental health,” Current Opinion in Psychology, 2022, 161)
Not only did Kat locate her own group membership as a pilot on Galactica, but she excelled to the rank of Captain. Her competition with Starbuck was legendary.
For me, at least, it is rather unclear why she disliked Starbuck as much as she did. It could not have been only out of a sense of competition. Perhaps it was a sense of projection, seeing Starbuck’s phenomenal leadership qualities as a threat to her identity, her assumed identity, that Kat was perhaps in conflict with now imitating someone else, but having found true social group membership. However, we cannot say that Kat was fearful of only being discovered. It was only after she was discovered that she gave her own life escorting the Faru Sadin through the star cluster. She masked her level of radiation exposure so that she could continue to fly; a mission she took on certainly knowing she would not survive.
It could be argued that even with this act of self-sacrifice, she was still hiding her personal status as she hid her radiation exposure. Hiding. Again. It was not clarified if Adama knew about her assumed identity when he visited her as she lay dying. There is a sense that he did know, but, of course, Adama would have the ability to look past it. Kat was one of his pilots. A pilot that just gave her life for the fleet. Adama would no doubt acknowledge only the best of Sasha just as Starbuck came to do. Repeatedly after that Kara Thrace would visit the wall of pictures of those who had died to view and acknowledge respect in Kat’s memory, if not even admiration.
Through the hardship of the Cylon invasion, Sasha had found not only mere redemption, but an identity in group membership that gave her a way in; a way into an ethical life that she was cut off from obtaining being trapped as a drug runner and those who had influence over her before the attack, before she assumed the new identity. I am reminded of the Star Trek: Strange New Worlds episode, “Those Old Scientists,” when Pelia tells Boimler about a man she knew that confessed to her that he was mostly pretending to be the person he wanted to be until finally he came that person, “or he became me” (2023).