How did the Final Five Cylons know about Bob Dylan?

Posted 23Jul2017.

Ohhh… another fun distractor from reading about politics on Quora.

tigh_pic — (Source: https://www.flowjournal.org/2008/01/signal-to-noise-the-paradoxes-of-history-and-technology-in-battlestar-galactica/?print=print)

So, this is an interesting problem: fictional characters from a distant past, running from human-killing machines they created, towards a planet where they can start anew, only to eventually lead to Bob Dylan’s cyclical and subtly religious song as they create machines that will probably run amok and try to kill them…

Months ago, I came across a fascinating thread on songmeanings.com about this exact song and was pretty impressed with Dylan’s storytelling. I had never considered that the song ended where it began – with “two riders approaching” and their search for “some way out of here.” You could go and check out the 185 comments which discuss the symbolism of the song, or you can just extrapolate the obvious conclusion that the song represented an odd and somewhat tragic cycle of trial and error.

Ronald Moore’s cast of devious (and at times, boring) scriptwriters really stumbled onto something in the process of this show, in my opinion. The challenge of crafting a story where the end and the beginning are somewhat muddled and unclear is something that can easily be the shiny object in a landscape filled with a litany of opinion, implications, and poorly-sourced discourse…