In the fictional universe of the reimagined ''
Battlestar Galactica '', is the former president of the
Twelve Colonies Of Kobol . Her character is played by
Mary McDonnell .
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Roslin was the Secretary of Education to
President Adar and had worked with him since he was
Mayor of Caprica City. Roslin appears to have been in a romantic relationship, possibly an affair, with Adar. When it began is unknown, but it seems to have continued until their last meeting. While it is speculation, it is possible that Roslin's rise to the cabinet was in some way tied to their involvement.
Before attending the decommissioning of the
Battlestar Galactica , she was diagnosed with terminal
Breast Cancer .
One of Roslin's last acts in her capacity as Secretary of Education was to work to resolve a labor dispute between the government and a group of striking teachers who had engaged in some acts of violence. Roslin was able to convince the teachers to return to work and continue to negotiate. However, Adar had not intended for her to achieve this outcome, and asked for Roslin's resignation. Roslin refused, and said that when she returned from her visit to ''Galactica,'' she would fight Adar if he still wanted her to leave her post. Roslin's conversation with the head of the teachers' organization happened at the same time and place as one of Gaius Baltar's meetings with the Cylon known as Six. As a result, Roslin may be aware that Baltar has an involvement with the Cylons which is unsuspected by everyone else; during the election campaign, she confronted Baltar with her suspicions, and his reaction confirmed them. She also may have also seen the people Six met with afterwards, who could be Cylon agents.
Roslin traveled to ''Galactica'' to attend decommissioning ceremonies, and was on her way back when the Cylon attack began. During the latter part of the Cylon attack on the colonies, she responded to an automatic beacon, and was later informed that she (the 43rd in line) was the first (and possibly only) person in the line of succession to respond. She was sworn in as president by a priestess aboard her ship, in a scene highly reminiscent of the
1963 swearing-in of
Lyndon Baines Johnson aboard
Air Force One after the assassination of U.S. President
John F. Kennedy .
Her first actions included organizing all
FTL -capable ships together and convincing Commander
William Adama to abandon a retaliatory attack on the Cylons, and instead join the "ragtag fleet" she had assembled, in escaping.
President Roslin and
Billy Keikeya , her aide/press secretary/chief of staff, established a working office space aboard her shuttle, renamed "
Colonial One " (which the series' production team intentionally designed to resemble
Air Force One .)
She also immediately clashed with Commander Adama, the senior Colonial military leader. They made an uneasy truce - that Adama would lead the military and the fleet's ships, while Roslin would preside over the fleet's personnel and look after the civilians' well-being.
For the first few weeks, she acted as the sole voice of government, attending meetings and issuing orders alone. Soon after the "
Bastille Day " Conflict, Roslin bowed to popular pressure and agreed to establish a new Quorum of Twelve - the legislative branch of the colonial government, made up of a representative from each of the twelve colonies. The Quorum is similar to the
UN Security Council or the
United States Senate .
It was at the first meeting of the new Quorum that Councilmember
Tom Zarek of Sagittaron moved to nominate a vice-president; few were surprised when Zarek nominated himself for the post. Zarek, a newly-released political prisoner, has been striving to reinvent himself as a sort of
Che Guevara /
Yasser Arafat freedom fighter on the series. Some years ago, Zarek bombed a government building and killed many civilians, and President Roslin and Commander Adama will stop at nothing to prevent him from gaining any power in the fleet (in Zarek's defense, the government of Sagittaron was stated to be a brutal dictatorship put in place by the other Colonies to exploit the planet, as a result many Sagittarons see him as the man determined to lead them to freedom, as evidenced by Zarek's winning the seat for Sagittaron on the new Quorum in a fair election).
Not to be undermined by the former terrorist, President Roslin chose an old political ally, Wallace Gray, to run for Vice-President, but he fared poorly against the well-connected Zarek. After giving a stirring speech to the news media, it became clear that Dr.
Gaius Baltar had become a popular individual in the fleet, and Roslin pressured Gray to drop out so that Baltar could enter the race. With Baltar in the race, it came down to a 6-6 deadlock in the Quorum, and President Roslin broke the tie in Baltar's favor. With a contested presidential election coming up, all eyes are on Roslin and Zarek (On the series, one season does not equal one year of story time: the first season takes place during 2 months of story time. In the early first season Roslin is said to be serving out that last 7 months of the former president's term; the presidential election occurs at the end of season 2).
By the close of the first season, the soft-spoken Roslin has cut her teeth being a leader. She has gone from evading Cmdr. Adama to ordering torture and executions of Cylon agents when, in her judgment, it was necessary. The President of the Twelve Colonies has made some enemies within the fleet, and must now watch her back at all times.
In season 1, President Roslin became convinced that she was the spiritual leader of the remainder of the human race, as prophesied in the ancient scriptures of Kobol. To follow through with the prophecies, she intends to lead the fleet to
Earth , which is supposed to be a
Safe Haven .
After President Roslin convinced
Starbuck to go back to Caprica to retrieve the mythical
Arrow Of Apollo , Commander Adama had her arrested and thrown in the
Brig for interfering in military matters.
With the aid of
Captain Apollo , Roslin escapes and leads a team on Kobol in search of
The Tomb Of Athena . On Kobol, she finds the tomb. She later reconciles with Commander Adama and is reinstated as president. In the period of time after Roslin's return to power, her medical prognosis was grim. She was told that she had, at most, about a month to live. This appeared to be accurate, as Roslin was admitted to the ''Galactica'' sickbay only weeks after the discovery of ''Pegasus,'' and was on the verge of death. Meanwhile, Admiral
Helena Cain of ''Pegasus'' and Commander Adama came to the brink of a shooting war with each other over Cain's total disregard for civil liberties and the civilian fleet. Roslin realized that Cain did not accept her as the true president, and that if she simply stripped Cain of her rank, Cain and her crew on ''Pegasus'' would simply ignore it. As a result, with her health rapidly deteriorating, President Roslin compelled Adama to have Cain assassinated following a major victory against a Cylon fleet. After the battle, Adama decided that he could not lower himself to that level (and simultaneously Cain dropped her own plans to assassinate Adama).
Regardless, after the battle Cain was shot and killed by an escaping Cylon prisoner, and deathly ill Roslin promoted Adama to the rank of Admiral. Roslin's condition soon turned grave and she lay on her deathbed in ''Galactica's'' sickbay. However, a desperate attempt to save her life by injecting her with blood from the Human-Cylon hybrid fetus carried by Sharon Valerii seems to have cured her cancer at the eleventh hour. Whether Roslin will make a full recovery, and whether there are any long-term effects from this novel treatment remain to be seen.
President Roslin recovered very quickly and soon reassumed her active duties. However, while hallucinating as she lay dying, she remembered that she had seen Dr. Baltar (who she did not yet know at the time) kissing the known humanoid Cylon "
Number Six " in a park on Caprica the day before the Cylon attack. With no solid evidence against him (and perhaps not entirely trusting of this barely recovered memory), not long after her return to duty she politely asked Vice President Baltar to resign his post. Roslin cited that Baltar struggled to cure her even though if she died he would succeed to the presidency, and thus already seemed to be uncomfortable with the idea of presidential power. What Roslin did not know was that Baltar had saved her (and avoided becoming president) because he couldn't handle the pressure and felt certain that unlike with Roslin, Adama did not respect him and would competely dominate Baltar's office. However, Baltar still enjoyed the political power associated with the Vice Presidency. When Roslin suggested (subtley pressured) that Baltar resign, his pride was wounded and he refused. Roslin said that she would never give him another chance to do so.
Following her return to duty Roslin discovered she had fallen behind in her work, and sought to again regularize internal trade within the Fleet. To these ends she sought to curtail rampant black market trading that had spread through the fleet, and Apollo began investigating it. However, he in the end reported to Roslin that their system would never be perfect, and there would always be some black market trading in the Fleet. Apollo killed the leader of the established black market network (an unscrupulous man that had the network dealing in drugs, killing with impunity, and engaged in
Child Slavery , etc), and let the survivors continue black market trading with the warning that if any of these unsavory actions were continued, he would destroy them all. Roslin was less than happy that Apollo had made this decision and that trade could not be totally regulated, but had to endure it. Apollo had been put on the trail of the black market leadership by Councilman Tom Zarek, who said that he knew of the black market, but did not try to shut it down because it was a testament to Roslin's failures. After Apollo killed the old leadership and cleaned up the black market to a degree, Zarek was seen walking through the old trade bazaar of the black market; implying that he may have orchestrated the entire confrontation to have Apollo kill the old black market leadership, and then Zarek would step into the power vacuum.
When a young Gemenese woman stowed away to the Galactica in order to have her pregnancy terminated, President Roslin insisted that the girl was within her rights to control her own body; abortion had been legal under federal law before the Cylon attack, and Roslin considered this law to be still in effect. Roslin commented that she had been fighting her political career in support of pro-choice policies. However, Admiral Adama reminded her of the day following the attacks on the Twelve Colonies, when she told him that the human race, in order to survive, would have to retreat and then start to make babies. She then conferred with Dr. Baltar, who confirmed that with the Fleet population continued its constant rate of decline, the human race would go extinct in 18 years. Subsequently, she reluctantly put forth an Executive Order banning the interference in any further pregnancies. The Gemenese girl's pregancy had been terminated before the Order was announced so neither she nor Dr. Cottle could be held criminally liable.
This decision will undoubtably weigh heavily in the upcoming elections for the new Presidency, especially since Dr. Baltar, while admitting that he had to support her decision as a member of her administration, publically announced his private objection to the ban and announced his candidacy for President. The Gemenons in the fleet, who are religiously very fundamentalist, originally supported Roslin, but the Colonial religion views abortion as an abomination in the eyes of the Gods. Although banning abortion may have kept the Gemenon vote (as well as furthering the survival of the species), it has rankled many against her.
A key issue of the election became the possible settlement of a new,
Habitable Planet discovered by accident as a Raptor hit the wrong jump coordinates. Baltar leapt on the issue, prompted by visions of
Number Six , to push for colonization of the planet. President Roslin continued to push for the search for Earth as a final settlement. As most of the people wished for land under their feet and a roof over their heads that wasn't the deck of a starship, Baltar gained considerably in the polls.
Vice-President Baltar and his political advisor Tom Zarek were able to successfully capitalize on the colonization issue, and public opinion swung in favor of settling the planet, christened
New Caprica , and electing Baltar. During the night of the election, vote totals remained very close until approximately 5 hours after polls had closed, at which point Baltar was leading Roslin by roughly 5000 votes, with 3 ships yet to have their votes tallied. At that point, Roslin's campaign manager secretly called on Colonel
Saul Tigh , who was among the military officers supervising vote-counting aboard Galactica. Tigh then signaled Petty-Officer
Anastasia Dualla , who left the room and commandeered an incoming ballot box, replacing it with one apparently prepared ahead of time and containing forged votes which favored President Roslin. When these votes were tallied, President Roslin was announced as having won re-election. Tom Zarek was suspicious of the results, but Baltar personally assured him that Roslin would not engage in electoral fraud.
The small conspiracy quickly unraveled, however, when Lieutenant
Felix Gaeta noticed that the forged ballots had Vice-President Baltar's first name spelled correctly (Gaeta knew that the ship in question had a set of misprinted ballots). He brought this to the attention of Tigh, who insisted that he would handle the situation, after which Gaeta grew suspicious and personally alerted Admiral Adama. Adama, in turn, privately informed Roslin, who then herself confessed to authorizing her campaign manager's subterfuge. Adama eventually convinced Roslin that, despite the likelihood that a Baltar presidency would be "disasterous", they should announce that there had been a "tabulation error" and allow Baltar to take office rather than betraying their principles.
After leaving office, Roslin chose to settle on
New Caprica with the rest of the fleet's civilian population, and resumed her old occupation as a school teacher.
