The inclusion of Bob Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower" in the series, which began with the third season finale "Crossroads" and saw the song continue to pop up on the show until the last episode, is an attempt to link our present to the past time when the Colonials lived. It seems so obvious now that we've seen the whole show, doesn't it? In fact, it's an idea that has been bouncing around the writers' room of Galactica since at least the first season, though at that time it was deemed too early in the process to include it in an actual episode.
"It was a simple way to communicate clearly the idea that this is not the future, that this is a story about a culture that gave birth to ours," says Eick. "There was an episode in season one in which Helo and Sharon are running for their lives and they hole up in a diner and there's a Cylon centurion cornering them, and for the longest time we planned to have an old jukebox in the diner that would play 'Yesterday' or, I don't know, whatever we could afford."
"Probably not 'Yesterday,'" laughs Moore.
"Something from The Guess Who!" counters Eick with a smile. "And I think we felt it was too soon and that it would confuse things and it would be so non-specific that people would just be thrown by it. But we were thinking about it that far back, that music would be a great way to say to the audience [that] it sort of follows that cyclical theme of this has all happened before and it will happen again. That this culture is the one that gave Earth ours, so that all the colloquialisms and all the slang that you hear, and all the behavior and idiosyncratic nuance, and how people interrelate, playing cards and whatever, we get that from them. Not the other way around."
"The notion is … that the music, the lyrics, the composition is something sort of divine, eternal, it's something that lives in the collective unconscious of the show for everyone on the show and everyone today," elaborates Moore. "It's a musical theme that repeats itself and crops up in unexpected places and people hear it and people pluck it out of the ether and write songs and hear it, and it's sort of a connection of the divine and the mortal… That music is something that people literally catch out of the air and can't really tell you or define exactly how they compose it. Here is a song that transcends many eons and many different peoples and cultures and literally [travels] across the stars and ultimately was reinvented by one Mr. Bob Dylan."
