the m0vie blog

I just published my review of the third season of Battlestar Galactica and I thought I’d keep it rather short by divorcing this aspect from my discussion of that year. Basically, anyone familiar with the show should be familiar with the use of All Along The Watchtower at the climax of the third season finale, Crossroads, Part II. Basically four members of the crew start hearing it and quoting it and humming, drawn together by some sort of invisible force, realising that they are indeed four of the five hidden Cylons (the fifth would not be revealed until the final season). What makes the Bob Dylan classic such a perfect song for this fantastic space opera?

What's the score?

Let’s begin by looking at what the writer, Ronald D. Moore, had to say about the use of the song:

I had always had this idea of using that particular song in the show as a marker that there were other things going on here. There was this idea developed early in the series, that one of the Colonial scriptures says, All of this has happened before and all of it will happen again, that certain elements and situations and even people repeat in a cycle of destruction and rebirth and exodus and chase, etc. One of the ideas I wanted to play was, okay, if you found a song that we, the audience, recognize, you realize that you have a connection to this world too, and suddenly other pieces start to fit. Well, why do they wear suits and ties? Why do they look so much like us? What is the connection between them and us? It would put in stark relief the idea that there is a connection between the people on Galactica and our experience on Earth.

But you could make the case that any song would serve the narrative purpose of linking the world of Galactica to our own. What’s so special and so fitting about All Along The Watchtower?

Let’s take a look at the song itself, shall we? Reason to Rock suggests the meaning behind the song’s famous first lines:

Notice how Dylan starts the song by throwing us into the middle of a conversation, and begins with an urgent statement. We don’t know where the “here” is from which the speaker wants to escape, but we know he wants out. The sense of drama is immediate. We find out that the two people speaking are “the joker” and “the thief.” These are archetypal characters that have existed in one form or another for thousands of years. By identifying them in this way, Dylan invokes a sense of timelessness. Because these figures are broad archetypes, there is already a suggestion that this might be a parable of some sort, a story whose essence remains the same over many different times, places and characters.

That certainly has a quite a bit of meaning for anyone familiar with the structure of show. The series is based upon the notion of parable. Stories and legends. Earth itself is but an ancient parable in this story – itself originally conceived as an allegory for the biblical exodus of the children of Israel. The show is timeless and epic – as with the best science fiction it functions simultaneously as good drama and as a parable.

Indeed, Dylan himself offers another reason why the song may so perfectly suit the series:

I haven’t fulfilled the balladeers’s job. A balladeer can sit down and sing three songs for an hour and a half… it can all unfold to you. These melodies on John Wesley Harding lack this traditional sense of time. As with the third verse of The Wicked Messenger, which opens it up, and then the time schedule takes a jump and soon the song becomes wider… The same thing is true of the song All Along the Watchtower, which opens up in a slightly different way, in a stranger way, for we have the cycle of events working in a rather reverse order.

In a way, this foreshadows the series’ shock ending – which, in fairness, isn’t that much of a shock – where it turns out that the series isn’t set in the future – it’s set in the past. Instead of counting forward into the future, it’s counting down towards the present. This notion is echoed in Christopher Rick’s commentary on the song, noting that “at the conclusion of the last verse, it is as if the song bizarrely begins at last, and as if the myth began again.”

Reason to Rock offers a few more specific examples, for example suggesting that Tyrol may be the joker, the voice of the working class oppressed by the fleet, toiling so the upper classes may succeed:

The rest of the verse tells us why the joker wants to escape: there is too much confusion. But what is confused? Others are benefiting from his labors, and working for him to help produce the results. But neither understands the worth of their efforts. So the confusion is about values: what is valuable and what is not.

There’s also more than likely a reference to Colonel Tigh and his relationship to his wife in the third line:

Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth

Not withstanding any bad taste joke which we could make about Ellen’s associations with various other men (and the word plow), it’s no coincidence that this comes at the end of an episode where Tigh has confessed to Adama that Ellen was his “world”, a word easily substituted for “earth”. Tigh had to share Ellen, in body and ultimately soul. Indeed, that’s pretty much where he’s at by the time we’ve reached the finale.

On a tangent, it’s also possible to read a bit in Anders’ relationship with his wife (now apparently deceased) in the second verse:

There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke.

Kara was notorious for her feckless attitude and her ultimately self-destructive nature – perhaps the most positive aspect of her marriage to Anders was his attempt to ground her and offer her the potential to be emotionally honest, instead of hiding all that pain behind a cheeky smile and a bad joke.

There’s also the suggested joint experience of the four characters, serving as members of the New Caprica Resistance:

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.

Anders, Tyrol and Tigh served as the head of the organisation (and Tory assisted). They’ve been through hell together – all three have lost the woman they love, in one form or another. As episodes like Torn make clear, the horror of New Caprica is a shared experience which links them, even before the revelation that they are the four of the final five Cylon models. No doubt their new existence will be at least as shared.

Or perhaps we’re reading too much into a three-verse song. Perhaps there’s no greater meaning behind it all:

What we have is three verses, two of which are dedicated entirely to a conversation between two people who disappear in the third verse, nothing in the way of a story (you could probably make one out of the “two riders were approaching” bit, but that comes at the very end), and this feeling of cryptic, puzzling doom. Hendrix’s arrangement, as explosive as it was, could only heighten the apocalyptic aura of the song – that aura was there from the very beginning. And yet we really have nothing when it comes to the song; the whole thing is almost like one of those Creative Writing courses where you have the first part of a story and are meant to create the rest of the story from there, only the whole “rest of the story” bit was junked completely. And without that rest of the story, the more inquisitive listeners have tried to create that whole tale out of what we have, leaning on the Bible verse from the Book of Isaiah, trying to sneak glimpses of Dylan’s own life into the lyrics, and slapping identities onto the joker, the thief, the princes, and so on and so forth.

Maybe, but I think it’s human condition to look for meaning in the randomness. It’s what we do – look for patterns in the clouds.

It’s a multi-facetted song serving as a multi-facetted reference to a multi-facetted show. I can’t think of a better fit.

Filed under: Television | Tagged: all along the watchtower, battlestar galactica, bob dylan, meaning, song lyrics |