The Music

The Music recurs again and again throughout history. Samuel Anders, Dreilide Thrace and Hera Agathon have all drawn versions of it from the same cosmic source of inspiration.

As the Fleet approaches the Ionian nebula, four people, Saul Tigh, Samuel Anders, Tory Foster and Galen Tyrol, begin hearing fragments of strange music that only they can hear. The music becomes more distinct and distracting as the Fleet gets closer to the nebula.

Once the Fleet arrives at the Ionian nebula, the music reaches a piercing shrill. The Colonials affected not only hear the music complete, but begin to add lyrics as well. As the Fleet plunges into darkness, losing electrical power for reasons unknown, the music compels the four to meet in an isolated room.

The four are able to assemble the lyric fragments with the intact music to form a strange song. The musical experience is associated with a "switch going off" in the minds of the four, who suddenly become aware that they are Cylons. The source or cause of the music is not known, but Final Five Cylon Samuel Anders recalls that in a past life on Earth, he wrote the song and used to play it for the woman he loved and his friends ^{(TRS: "Crossroads, Part II" and "Sometimes a Great Notion")}.

Music

"All Along the Watchtower"

At the end of "Crossroads, Part II", the song starts playing as background music for the viewers to hear. The lyrics are a recurring motif throughout the Season 3 finale:

There must be some way out of here

Said the joker to the thief
There's too much confusion
I can't get no relief
Businessmen they drink my wine
Plowmen dig my earth
None of them along the line
Know what any of it is worth

No reason to get excited
The thief he kindly spoke
There are many here among us
Who feel that life is but a joke
But you and I, we've been through that
And this is not our fate
So let us not talk falsely now
The hour is getting late

All along the watchtower

All along the watchtower

—Bear McCreary (arrangement), Brendan McCreary (vocals)

Noteworthy Dialogue

Several of the song's lines appear in dialogue throughout the episode:

Anders: That song you're hummin'. What is that?

Tyrol: Oh, uh. Ah you know I don't even know, it's just something I can't get outta my head. Some way outta here.

—"Crossroads, Part II"

Margaret "Racetrack" Edmondson: Yo, Anders! Do you need a frakking invitation? Move it!

Anders: Alright. No reason to get excited.

—"Crossroads, Part II"

Saul Tigh: You'll look into it? You'll look into it? I am here telling you there is Cylon sabotage aboard our ship.

William Adama: Sabotage? With music?

Saul Tigh: I know, I know. I can't quite understand it myself. There's too much confusion.

—"Crossroads, Part II"

Saul Tigh (to self, after Adama exits):

There must be some kinda way out of here.

—Saul Tigh, "Crossroads, Part II"

Tory Foster (while washing her hands):

I can't get no relief.

—Tory Foster, "Crossroads, Part II"

Since their awakening was precipitated by hearing this music, Anders, Foster, Tigh, and Tyrol become sensitive to mentions of music by others, believing they may be clues to the identity of the then-unknown member of the Final Five. These include Gaius Baltar using music as a metaphor for spiritual awareness ^{(TRS: "Six of One")}, an idea Virtual Six told Baltar of in his first vision of the Opera House ^{(TRS: "Kobol's Last Gleaming, Part II")}, Number Two's description of a subtle music underscoring reality that only a few individuals, including Kara Thrace could hear ^{(TRS: "Faith")} and Felix Gaeta singing to distract himself from the pain of his amputated leg ^{(TRS: "Guess What's Coming to Dinner?")}.

The music is heard again during a standoff between Galactica and the rebel basestar. It draws Tigh, Tyrol and Anders to Kara Thrace's Viper, which causes the three to believe there's something special about it. Thrace investigates their claim, and discovers a clue that ultimately leads the Fleet to Earth: a Colonial emergency locator beacon signal. Upon the Fleet's arrival at Earth, they land and survey a radiated wasteland of crumbled skyscrapers and a collapsed bridge ^{(TRS: "Revelations")}.

Later Kara starts playing a song with the composer at the piano in Joe's Bar. It was a song that when she was little made her happy and sad. Hera drew a picture of some dots and gave it to her. Thrace realizes that the dots represent notes. She and the composer play the notes and they turn out to be The Music. Ellen, Saul, and Tory hear it and are shocked especially at the fact that Hera was able to draw the notes to it. The significance of this is unknown, but the composer disappeared during the song and it is indicated that he was some kind of vision of Kara's father. Though she is present to hear the song, and has regained her memories of her former life, Final Five member Ellen Tigh seems not to understand fully the implications of the song either and if she knows when they last heard it and in what context, she does not say.

After being fatally injured by a hull breach, a dying Eight's last words are "too much confusion" ^{(TRS: "Islanded in a Stream of Stars")}.

Deriving Earth's Coordinates

Later Kara tries to get answers from Anders, but fails and attempts to figure out some kind of meaning for it by assigning numbers to the notes, but that fails as well. Later, when she is ordered to jump Galactica away from the Colony and has no idea where the Fleet is, she gets an idea and uses the numbers from The Music (with The Music playing over the scene) as the coordinates to jump to, saying "there must be some kind of way out of here." She jumps Galactica there and they find a habitable planet for the Fleet to settle on that they name Earth.

According to series composer Bear McCreary, Kara derives the coordinates by assigning each note in the Final Four Theme a number based on the diatonic scale system, where each note corresponds to its scale degree (1 through 7). This approach was chosen as the most intuitive solution that someone with Kara's musical background would arrive at, as basic ear training exercises teach students to think of the tonic as '1', the second scale degree as '2', and so forth.

The melody generates the coordinates: 112 carom 365 dist 365321. McCreary worked closely with the series' science advisor Kevin Grazier to ensure the coordinates would be mathematically valid for stellar navigation, requiring two angular measurements and a distance value. The process became so complex that McCreary began to empathize with Kara as she struggled to crack the code in the music.

150,000 years later, a new rendition of the song is heard on a radio on contemporary Earth. It is Jimi Hendrix's version of "All Along The Watchtower" ^{(TRS: "Daybreak, Part II")}.

Notes

• The music is a version of Bob Dylan's song, "All Along the Watchtower," specially arranged by series composer Bear McCreary, with lyrics sung by his brother, Brendan McCreary (Bt4). The song is available on the Season 3 soundtrack.
  • McCreary described the Final Four Theme as being the only new melodic idea he wrote for the "Daybreak" episodes, with the rest of the score comprised of variations and developments of familiar themes.
  • The song is apocalyptic in nature.
  • Christopher Ricks has commented on Dylan's audacity at manipulating chronological time:

At the conclusion of the last verse, it is as if the song bizarrely begins at last, and as if the myth began again.

—Christopher Ricks

• Several people have pointed out that Dylan's lyrics echo lines in the Book of Isaiah, Chapter 21, verses 5-9:

Prepare the table, watch in the watchtower, eat, drink: arise ye princes, and prepare the shield. For thus hath the Lord said unto me, Go set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth. [...] And, behold, here cometh a chariot of men, with a couple of horsemen. And he answered and said, Babylon is fallen, is fallen, and all the graven images of her gods he hath broken unto the ground.

—Isaiah 21:5-9

• The song is not intended to indicate that the Colonials have picked up an Earth communication. Series executive producer Ronald D. Moore considers the song to be an "invention" created by a Colonial citizen in a curious parallel to what developed on Earth.
  • Moore offers that "things that happened on Galactica were tied into our reality here on Earth in some way, in the past or the future, or some other connection."
  • Moore's point of view mirrors Dylan's own early philosophy on songwriting:

The songs are there. They exist all by themselves just waiting for someone to write them down. I just put them down on paper. If I didn't do it, somebody else would.

—Bob Dylan, Sing Out!, October–November 1962

• Bob Dylan has indicated that the events in the song's lyrics are "in a rather reverse order," beginning logically in time with the "All Along The Watchtower" verse and ending with the now-famous opening lines:

There must be some way out of here, said the Joker to the Thief.

• The version used in the series omits the final stanza, though it is included on the official soundtrack:

All along the watchtower, princes kept the view / While all the women came and went, barefoot servants, too. / Outside in the distance a wildcat did growl, / Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl.

• The rhythm of the Colonial emergency locator beacon's signal matches the rhythm of the Music.

• The jump coordinates that Kara Thrace deduces from the music are 1123, 6536, 5321.
  • If treated as the notes of a Phrygian mode scale, the tune played is identical to the Music heard as Thrace keys in the coordinates.
  • The first four numbers—1, 1, 2, 3—are the first four numbers of the most common Fibonacci Sequence. The last four numbers in reverse—1, 2, 3, 5—are the start of another Fibonacci Sequence.

• In the series finale, the use of Jimi Hendrix's version of the song was intended to underscore the concept of the song as an ethereal presence:

The song itself is an ethereal presence that becomes known to selected individuals across the universe and over the eons, bigger than any single person or group.

—Bear McCreary,

External links

• Season 3 OST at Amazon, including "All Along the Watchtower"
• An analysis of "All Along the Watchtower" at Reason to Rock

• All Along the Watchtower at Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia.
• Analysis and commentary in "Of Duduks and Dylan: Negotiating Music and the Aural Space," by Eftychia Papanikolaou. In Cylons in America: Critical Studies of Battlestar Galactica. Edited by Tiffany Potter and C. W. Marshall, Continuum, 2007.