Over in Chief's hangar, Laird's reporting to Adama that all the "birds" are in the air for "the attack thing." He stumbles over his "sir"s and "yes sir"s and Adama takes Cally aside, having realized that Laird is not military. In fact, the way Adama works, I'd be willing to bet he's got this whole "stripping the ships" thing about four-fifths down, and hasn't made the jump to that last fifth merely because it's just too awful. Cally mentions that he was on the Scylla, as a civilian aeronautical engineer, before he got "drafted" onto what's technically the Pegasus, although Laird's story demands we call it the Charybdis at least once before all is said and done. "Scuttlebutt is that the Pegasus used to have a civilian Fleet, but something happened to them." Which is actually WAY worse than what I thought, which was that the Pegasus was just running across civilian leftover ships and ripping them up as she flew. Which is bad enough. The idea that Roslin, and responsibility to the civilians she represents, made the difference for Galactica; that kind of drops off here. The fact that Cain had her own Fleet just like ours means this is even more strongly an issue of character rather than humanizing circumstance -- that Adama and Cain are very, very different, like in a full-on nature v. nurture way. Which is fine, it's just not how I saw this going. It's better. You know, this is the first time I've listened to the podcast before writing the recap, and I've gotta say it's exactly like I thought it would be: like if my own ChipSix had a goatee and a devilish grin, and I don't know which are my thoughts and which are things I've absorbed, and I won't be doing it again. I get confused enough just being me.

Adama relates this new, horrible Cain story to Tigh in a conversation we don't see, and Tigh heads straight to the Tool Room to get Pegasus XO Fisk drunk some more. I'll mention again that I love Tigh in this episode. I think mainly because he's used too often as a tool for the plot, like Donna Moss -- the character that says, "What does that mean?" so that Josh or Bartlet can tell her (us) what the thing means. In Tigh's case, that accounts for most of the "What the hell?" all the time. It's a credit to the actor that he delivers them all so differently and freshly that you might never notice, if it wasen't your job to write down what these people say. Which I realize -- and I do apologize -- is a lot like the time I pointed out to my dad that Whoopi Goldberg has no eyebrows, and twenty years later he's still calling to curse at me because it's like all you can think about when she's onscreen and it gets really distracting. (Also, Marcia Gay Harden's nostrils are really, really asymmetrical, as long as I'm on the subject.) So but Tigh's totally on point in this episode, and he's got Fisk good and drunk, and at this point, this is all it takes: "So. Laird's ship was the Scylla." And he's off! "Scylla was a civilian transport, and like many other ships we found a week after the attack, we ripped out all the important parts, FTL drives and weapons and personnel, left the rest to float aimlessly and starve or get carved up by Raider fire, and the people we wanted that refused to leave -- including Laird -- we threatened to shoot their families, their wives and husbands and kids, and out of fifteen of these, we ended up putting two families against the bulkhead and shooting them dead." Tigh is so freaked out that he gasps a fairly blasphemous, or at least somewhat inaccurate "Sweet mother of Artemis!" and some other versions of the big OMG, but I mean...I'm not going to say that's cool, but it's a die slow/die fast situation, so I don't know if the shot families actually got the shit end of that particular vile stick.