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Kara Thrace is the last Commander, Air Group (CAG) of the battlestar Galactica. She is a gifted Viper pilot, with an attitude that at times thwarts her career advancement. However, thanks to William Adama, Thrace's skills in battle extend beyond the cockpit to greatly aid the Fleet.
Before DW
Kara had intended to be a professional Pyramid ball player until her knee gave out. She eventually joined the military, where she found more acceptance than she had felt at home as an abused child. Although Kara's mother, Socrata Thrace, had served as a Marine Sergeant Major in the First Cylon War, Kara was the first person in the family to become a commissioned officer. Socrata was not content with her daughter's military record, however, claiming she was not disciplined enough, and she was wasting her natural talent for flying. Kara's father, Dreilide Thrace, was a piano player. He left the family when she was a child.
During her first assignment, then-Private Thrace was repeatedly insubordinate to her superior, Sergeant Mike Gibbons. Later she was assigned to the air wing on the Battlestar Triton, and received disciplinary actions from the Battlestar's commander, Commander James Jonasson.
As a Flight Instructor at the Colonial Flight School, she met and became romantically involved with one of her students, Zak Adama. Although Zak told her he did not want any special treatment from her, Kara passed him even though he failed Basic Flight, as she could not bring herself to crush his dreams.
Her leniency cost Zak his life when he was killed on his first Viper mission. After his death, Kara met his father, William Adama. He realized Kara and Zak had been engaged and brought her under his command as a Lieutenant. Zak's death, however, created a wedge between Adama and his other son, Lee "Apollo" Adama, who blamed his father for Zak's death. After the funeral, Lee broke off all contact with his father and Kara.
Kara has a natural talent for flying and is considered Galactica's best pilot, although she is also known for being an avid card player and drinker. Adama loves Kara despite her flaws and considers her something of a surrogate daughter. However, Kara and Colonel Tigh share a mutual sense of loathing.
In a card game prior to Galactica's decommissioning ceremony, Kara responds to Colonel Tigh's mocking of her call sign and her stint in the brig as a cadet by alluding to Tigh's troubled relationship with his wife. Infuriated, he flips the table over, and she punches him in the face. He sends her to the brig, promising her career is over. However, Adama tells Tigh he is probably overreacting: while he agrees to leave Kara in the brig until after the ceremony, Adama says there is no need to ruin Kara's career over the incident. Following the Cylons' attack on the Twelve Colonies, Kara is released to join the battle.
Kara keeps her secret about Zak buried inside until after the Cylon attack on the Twelve Colonies. Soon after, when Kara fears she and the rest of humanity might be wiped out by the Cylons, she confesses her mistake to Lee. He is devastated and would later confront her about it when she is chosen to train new Viper pilots aboard Galactica after several pilots are killed in a freak accident. Kara, blinded by guilt, washes all the pilots out for relatively minor flaws. She then admits her secret to Adama who is furious and heartbroken; he orders her to reinstate the trainees.
On the next training mission, Kara and the trainees are ambushed by a small group of Raiders. Kara engages the Raiders on her own to cover the trainees' escape. With her Viper heavily damaged, she plummets toward the surface of a nearby desert moon, and is forced to eject and take her chances on the surface.
Kara is declared "missing in action", and Adama orders a search and rescue operation which strains the Galactica's crew and combat resources. On the surface, Kara struggles with a broken knee and near asphyxiation as her oxygen runs out. She discovers a downed Raider and is able to pilot it back to the fleet.
Depressed by her injuries, she initially needs incentive to work on rehabilitation and is soon rubbing people the wrong way again. Even after she is able to move around without a cane, the injury sidelines her from flight for many episodes; when given tactical charge of a mission in one episode, she can not fly the critical role because her knee still can't handle the G-force.
Despite her often crude exterior, Kara has a deep-seated faith in the gods. As a result, President Laura Roslin asks her to carry out a dangerous mission: return to Caprica and retrieve the Arrow of Apollo, a religious artifact supposedly pointing the way to Earth. She takes the Cylon Raider she had captured, leading Adama to declare Roslin had suborned mutiny; he sends a detachment of Marines to terminate her presidency.
During her time on Caprica, Kara encounters Number Six (who beats her soundly); meets up with Karl Agathon and the Sharon Valerii copy pregnant with his child; and meets a fellow pyramid player named Samuel Anders. He leads a resistance group that had been waging guerrilla war against the Cylons. At one point Kara is injured in battle, captured, and wakes up in a Cylon "farm" as part of their experiments to create human/Cylon hybrids. Without her knowledge, apparently one of her ovaries is surgically removed before she escapes, a fact discovered only much later. Kara escapes, and plans to return to the fleet; she promises to return to rescue the Caprican resistance group and Anders, with whom she has developed a romantic relationship.
Soon after returning from the planet Kobol, the Battlestar Pegasus, commanded by Rear Admiral Helena Cain, is discovered. Cain promotes Kara to Captain and assigns her as the CAG of the Pegasus.
After the fleet leadership denies her request to return to rescue the Caprican resistance fighters, Kara is depressed and guilt-stricken: she has broken her word, failed her duty, and assumes the man she is "hung up on" is either dead, or will be soon. As Pegasus CAG, she also feels responsible for the pilots who have died on her watch, or died because she has not yet killed the Cylon's "top gun", "Scar". She recklessly maneuvers to take out Scar, but at the last moment pulls away, setting up the kill for Louanne "Kat" Katraine and giving up her own status as "Top Gun". Although this marks the beginning of a new resolve and the end of her self-destructive depressive behaviours, tensions between her and Apollo flare up again after she shoots him in a friendly fire incident during a hostage stand-off.
After Lee Adama's promotion to Commander and appointment as commander of the Battlestar Pegasus, Kara transfers back to the Galactica and assumes the role of its CAG.