At the end of “Battlestar Galactica” season 1, Starbuck travels back to Caprica (one of the 12 Colonies). In season 2, episode 2, “Valley of Darkness,” she hides from Cylon patrols in her old apartment. On the wall is a circular mandala made of four layers: a yellow outermost layer, a red outer ring, a blue inner ring, and a yellow-red center.

In “Valley of Darkness,” it’s just there to shed some light on Starbuck’s hidden artistic side. It only becomes significant halfway through season 3 (in episodes “The Eye of Jupiter” and “Rapture”), when the humans and Cylons discover a temple that could lead them to Earth. Inside the temple is the same mandala that Starbuck once painted.

Sackhoff noticed the similarity and took her questions to writer-producer David Weddle (according to “So Say We All: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Battlestar Galactica” by Edward Gross and Mark A. Altman). Weddle didn’t have a clear answer (because he and the writers didn’t know yet), so Sackhoff put forth an idea (recounted by Weddle):

“Katee said, ‘You know, I think that in light of seeing this mandala, and in light of knowing I have some other destiny’ — because [co-creator Ron Moore] had talked to her about that — she said, ‘Maybe there’s something in my past. Maybe there’s an event in my past that seems innocuous, never seemed important, but now in light of my mandala on the temple, I interpret it in a whole dif­ferent way.’”

Weddle brought the idea to the writers’ room and it wound up being combined with a planned episode where Kara and Lee fly over a gas giant planet discussing their “fraught relationship.” That episode became “Maelstrom.”