WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD – IF YOU ARE NOT COMPLETELY CAUGHT UP ON YOUR BATTLESTAR GALACTICA – DO NOT READ ON

Okay now that that is done I don’t want to hear any whining about me spoiling anything. You see what I did with the title there as well? I made it seem as if I maybe just had a typo and was actually talking about a Starbucks coffee shop closing…I am not. I of course am talking about the death of Starbuck on this weeks Battlestar Galactica.

First of all I did not see this coming. I, like most fans, knew something big was coming with regards to Starbuck, but I definitely wasn’t expecting it until the season finale, so kudos to the producers pulling this one off early.

Now, as to what it means. I would be shocked if somehow, someway Starbuck does not come back to the show in some capacity. It was a surprising and interesting death, and though she was in her ship, I don’t think that is the way the character of Starbuck should go out…chasing some figment of her imagination and voluntarily choosing to kill herself in a storm system.

So how will they bring her back?

My initial thought was that maybe she ejected, they had that one clip of her thinking about it, but that would be a pretty big cop-out by the producers in my opinion. Also unless she shot WAY up into the air and was able to not fall back down somehow, she still would have been crushed by the pressure anyway. I think we can rule that out.

My next thought was to the intro to the episode, you know the “previously on Battlestar Galactica…” segment. They had a clip of Starbuck when she was in that strange Cylon hospital. Is it possible that while she was there that the Cylons either cloned her OR they figured out a way to create a new Cylon model…one of her.

Another thought is that maybe the Cylon raider wasn’t in her imagination and maybe it swooped in and somehow saved her at the last second. Far fetched? Maybe, but if she does come back it seems to me that she will in some way end up on that Cylon ship with her favorite Cylon admirer…which leads to…

The easiest answer would be of course to make her one of the unknown Cylon models. All rumors had been that she would NOT be a Cylon, but this clearly puts her back to the front of the list of Cylon candidates. Perhaps that rumor was just disinformation fed to various fan and gossip sites by people associated with the show…they do seem to be very in touch and open to the fan community…perhaps they used this to their advantage and fooled us all.

While in multiple articles and interviews in the past couple of days Katee Sackhoff says she really doesn’t know if she’ll be back or not, I think that is a lie. My gut feeling is that the plan is to bring her back for this season’s finale. This is one way the decision to kill her a few episodes before the end of the season makes sense. She dies, everyone expects her not really to be dead, but the show goes on for a few episodes and characters move on (though not Lee)…then boom, she comes back for the season 3 finale!

I’m thinking something along of the lines of Jean Grey’s death in X-Men 2 and the hint of her return at the end of the film. Whatever way it’s done, I think she’s coming back.

More on this: Table of Malcontents | Ain’t It Cool | Entertainment Weekly