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An interesting look into the "All Along the Watchtower" piano arrangement. http://ow.ly/IK5r #BSG /via @battlestarwiki
This is the non-shortened link:
http://collaborativepiano.blogspot.c
This line from the post encapsulates what is so cool about the episode:
'Someone To Watch Over Me' is fascinating in that, only a few hours from the end of the entire series, piano music permeates the soundtrack of the episode whose principal plot line is essentially about piano playing.
I finished watching the Battlestar Galactica television series about two weeks ago or so. I liked the show a lot, but I was not a rabid fan. There were a lot of plot weaknesses actually, and a couple of bad ideas. One of the bad ideas was this use of "All Along the Watchtower" as a kind of switch-on for sleeper cylons on board the Battlestar. I mean, why Bob Dylan (or Hendrix, if you're liking that version instead, which was the version that got played in the very last scene of the very last episode) if the story takes place 150,000 years or so before Dylan wrote the song? Why does the Dylan generation of baby-boomers *still* enjoy this kind of god-like and iconic privilege in our pop culture? At the end of Season 3, when the noises were revealed to be sounds from that song, it was a total shark-jumping moment for me, total buzzkill.
That said, the very presentation of the song, the strangeness of its arrangement and instrumentation, the way it congealed aurally for the sleeper cylons, was pretty cool. And then, in Season 4, in the episode referenced in the blog post linked above, we learn that Starbuck learned how to play the song on the piano when she was a child, because her father always used to play it, and Hera, the cylon-human half-breed, had written the notes out on a piece of paper as a gift to Starbuck, and it all came together. It was hokey, an attempt at creating mysterious plot connections between characters (a la LOST, but not as good as LOST does it), but I liked it anyway... one of those fun, if rather pointless, a-ha moments. Pointless, because it's obvious the writers were just creating an a-ha moment out of thin air. The connection didn't have much meaning, development, or explication in the show's overall mythology.
Anyway, the blog post I linked to above tells about how adults who played piano as a child (like me!) might get more out of the episode than anyone else. Starbuck (Katee Sackhoff), to me, was by far the BEST actor on the show, and this was an episode where she could deliver. (See the scene below) The writers asked her to do some stupid things throughout her character arc, and she really pulled it off. Despite some silly demands, she had me hooked all the way until the end. I really liked this piano episode, with the mysterious piano player who channeled Starbuck's father. It encapsulates some of the very best and the very worst aspects of the show:
December 6 2009, 18:22:02 UTC 2 years ago
On a whole different note, here's something to enjoy, not to overthink:
http://www.youtube.com/user/MuppetsStud
December 7 2009, 14:43:14 UTC 2 years ago
Likewise with the Dylan song, which (now that I've done some hardcore wikipedia research LOL!) bears some biblical resemblance to a passage from Isaiah. The cool thing about the lyrics for all along the watchtower, which I didn't know until my wiki adventures, is that the chronology of the lyrics are backward, and so that kind of loops into the mythology of the show about all this has happened before and will happen again, frakking with time. But that song is soooo loaded (or overplayed if you want), such a huge touchstone in the rock and roll canon...of a certain generation, that is. Dylan wrote it and performed it first and Hendrix made it into a classic rock institution. Two rock gods! I just couldn't buy it when suddenly it's a trigger for sleeper cell cylons and then became a lyrical and musical motif for the rest of the series (Kara Thrace's heartbreaking and fragile rendition aside), which in the last episode we discover all happened 150thousand years before Dylan wrote the song. It fits what they were looking for, but it completely broke up my suspension of disbelief and I took the show much less seriously from there until the end.
You're right, I'm overthinking this. (I wish I could be this thoughtful and serious and critical with my data from Aceh) Because it's produced for a western audience, and needs to draw on a set of familiar myths that this audience can relate and tap into. You could go further, and keep critiquing it as in: "OMG they had pianos 150000 years ago exactly like the pianos we have today?" or "They speak American English???" So yeah I get it, you have to suspend disbelief for the sake of a plot and a world that we can enter and get absorbed in with minimal difficulty. I guess my point is that it comes with a price.