Leland Joseph Adama, commonly referred to as just "Lee" or by his call sign of "Apollo", is a former Colonial Fleet Reserve officer who became the Caprican delegate to the Quorum of Twelve, then later the interim President of the Twelve Colonies of Kobol. He is the sole surviving son of William Adama.
Biography[]
Lee was born and raised on Caprica. A headstrong, scrappy boy, he was forever getting into fights at school with much bigger kids and usually coming away with the better of the encounter.
His parents divorced when he was eight years old and he and his younger brother, Zak, were raised by their mother. Their father visited when he could, but the military life often took him away for long months at a time and Lee and Zak grew up with only snapshot memories of their father. Nevertheless, both boys grew up worshiping the distant man who periodically showed up at the house in his blue uniform with a big smile and a toy bought in some exotic port.
Despite his mother's misgivings, Lee always wanted to be a pilot, to follow in his father's footsteps and join the Fleet. He studied hard in school, aced his entrance exams to the Academy and graduated number three in his class. He was immediately accepted into flight school and again quickly rose to the top of his class. His superiors marked him down early as a young man on the rise, an officer destined for the top commands and eventually the Admiralty itself. It was about this time that Lee and his father began to have a falling out. The boy's hero worship had turned into the young man's resentments at being abandoned and neither he nor his father knew how to bridge the gap and so the visits became rare and the phone calls grew terse.
While Lee was at flight school, his younger brother Zak was just entering the Academy. Zak had a tougher time of it than Lee, constantly falling behind in his studies, always on report for some infraction of the rules, forever one step away from being bounced out.
Lee took top honors at flight school and soon was on his way into a Viper squadron and a plum assignment on the Atlantia - flagship of the fleet. Meanwhile, Zak barely graduated from the Academy and when he still wanted to go to flight school, Lee tried to dissuade him from even applying. Lee loved his brother, would do anything for him, but it was obvious to Lee that Zak wasn't really cut out for the military life, much less the rigors of flight training. The only reason Zak even applied to the Academy was because he worshiped the ground their father walked on - as Lee himself once did. Lee tried to convince Zak to seek another job in the fleet, but Zak wouldn't hear of it; he wasn't going to be the only Adama without wings on his uniform.
Zak's application was turned down and that seemed to be the end of it, but then a phone call was placed to the flight commandant from Commander Adama and a place suddenly opened up for Zak. Lee was furious, couldn't believe his father would pull strings like this, but there was nothing he could do but hope for the best and continue to encourage Zak in his training. Then came yet another shock - Zak wrote Lee to tell him he was engaged to one of his instructors at flight school.
Lee made time to come visit and it was then that he met Kara Thrace for the first time. She was the polar opposite of Zak - where he was quiet, reserved, almost painfully sensitive, she was brash, loud, and had a thick hide. Lee liked her immediately. He was pretty sure that she felt the same, but never seriously considered anything further. Lee wished them well and left to rejoin his squadron.
Two weeks later, Zak's plane went down while he was flying a routine solo mission and he was killed. Lee's resentments and grief boiled over at the funeral and he lashed out at his father, blaming him directly for his brother's death, saying in so many words that Adama had all but killed his own son. Father and son never spoke again.
Lee spent the next two years focusing on his career, having no personal life and working to become the perfect fighter pilot.
He applied, and was accepted, to test pilot school, the highest honor for any pilot and a sure sign of his rise to the top. He was at test pilot school when the orders came in to report aboard Galactica for her decommissioning ceremony.
Personality and characteristics[]
Lee Adama has his father's strength of character and a virtually inviolable code of ethics. He can be stubborn and difficult, often drives his pilots too hard and himself even harder. He rarely gives anyone a break and never gives himself one. From his mother, he's inherited a secret love of cooking and food, which he indulges whenever he can, the rigid pilot finding an outlet to allow his creative juices to flow only in a kitchen filled with steaming pots and pans.
He's a young man with a lot of anger, a lot of resentments and a lot of frustrations who knows not what to do with them. But he's also a fair and decent human being whose deeply felt sense of right and wrong have kept him afloat when so many around him have sunk. He's the kind of man few would call friend, but many would follow into the jaws of hell. He is his father's son.
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