Episode Report Card Jacob: A | 85 USERS: A- YOU GRADE IT That Old Song They Used To Play
By Jacob | Season 3 | Episode 19 | Aired on 2007.03.18
"How do we measure loss?" Cassidy searches the faces of the tribunal: Adama, Franks (Tigh's real-life wife!), three other ship captains. They are not yet bored. "How do we measure loss? We measure it in the faces of the dead. The faces that haunt our memories and our dreams. How do we measure loss? We measure it in our own faces. The ones we see in the mirror every day. Because it has marked each of us. So how do we measure loss? When the scale of it becomes too hard to absorb any other way, we use numbers. How many killed. How many maimed. How many missing. And when those numbers become too vast to comprehend, as they did two years ago, we had to turn it around. We began to count the living." She turns to a whiteboard (!) and begins the cold equations.
"Those of us who survived to continue the saga of the human race: 44,035. The sum total of survivors from the Twelve Colonies who settled on New Caprica with President Gaius Baltar as their leader and protector." (This number actually includes the ~4,800 people who stayed in orbit, no matter what she says or implies.) "38,838: Our number the day after we escaped." (This number doesn't include the ~2,600 military personnel in the Fleet, based on the survival count for "Collaborators." You know I could give a fuck, but it's like, dude, you're writing a show with a serious Asperger's contingent, second only to like Lost -- think you could not send them screaming? Actual whiteboard, with actual numbers, which actual viewers obsess over every week. Come on. On the other hand, I'm so sure that they fought this out in the writer's room, or at least Taylor did some double-checked math on this, so it's presumably just another way of looking at them. Or Cassidy's as dirty as the rest of us. However: that means that around 5,523 were lost between Cloud 9 and the Year in Baltar's Hair, and only 2,592 died during the Occupation and Second Exodus: she's right by being wrong, because actually that's 8,115 people he's killed in the last two years alone -- besides, you know, almost the entirety of humanity. But given the charges, she can only indict based the civilian casualties of the Occupation and Second Exodus, so I guess that's where her numbers ultimately come from, and they're not that far off.) She subtracts one from the other: "And the missing number, the one that no one wants to face. 5,197. 5,197 of us killed, left behind, or simply disappeared. 5,197 of all that remains of the human race. Lost."