You can find two other reports on the SF and the Canon Conference online. One is Professor Sarah Annes Brown’s excellent blog, Ariachne’s Broken Woof. The other is a set of notes from the first couple of sessions by Jon Crowcroft on his blog, A True History of the Internet.
Let me just say that I loved the season finale of Battlestar Galactica. I was honestly as surprised as Apollo (above) to see Starbuck miraculously reappear. I was goofing around yesterday, and I began to annotate the lyrics to Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower,” which is apparently the song of choice for activating four of the final five Cylons. It’s a work in progress, but this is what I have down on paper.
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Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” Annotated in Reference to the Re-imagined Battlestar Galactica
Jason W. Ellis
“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.
[These are the lines the apparent four of the final five Cylons repeat throughout the episode--Saul Tigh, Galen Tyrol, Tory Foster, and Samuel T. Anders]
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.”
[The final five are identified as the joker and the thief. To joke is to subvert that which is serious, or objectively real. Cylons subvert the real by masquerading, as does the Joker, as something that it is not. ]
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,
[The Cylon armada is the wildcat.]
Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl.
[The “two riders” are Apollo and the miraculous reappearance of Starbuck.]
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Back to reading Starship Troopers for a special post-9/11 review of Heinlein’s popular novel, which will appear in the next issue of SFRA Review.
