Lieutenant Junior Grade Sharon "Boomer" Valerii is a Cylon sleeper agent programmed with false memories of being raised in the mining colony Troy.

After resurrecting into a third body, Boomer develops a relationship with John Cavil, a Number One who embraces his machine nature and sees human traits as a weakness.

Sharon uses her knowledge of the Tomb of Athena on Kobol as leverage to avoid immediate execution aboard Galactica and consistently demonstrates her loyalty by defending the group from Cylon ambushes.

She is sent back to New Caprica as the liaison between the Galactica fleet and the resistance effort and is able to infiltrate the Cylon base and steal the keys for the civilian ships.

After the successful rescue mission, Sharon is assigned to join the Galactica's pilot corps with the callsign "Athena" after the goddess of warfare and wisdom.

[2] Eve Bennett similarly writes that Boomer's actions as a sleeper agent echo stereotypes of East-Asians as conformist and robotic, and a character whose motivations cannot be understood in human terms.

Bennett also comments that the repeated depiction of naked Number Eight models (when Cylons are usually clothed) is an example of the eroticization of East-Asian women in the Western media.

Athena's eventual romance with Karl Agathon, which leads her to change her allegiance to the humans, is specifically described as mirroring the narrative in "Miss Saigon", despite Battlestar Galactica's color-blind casting.

[3] Pegues writes that in the human society depicted in the series, race is not a meaningful category, but the show nonetheless explores racial difference via Human-Cylon relations.

She writes that while the comparison superficially suggests that Galactica prosecutes a more humane war, it symbolizes the overt abuses in Abu Ghraib and the less publicized treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay detention camp.