On Saturday mornings, the classical radio station here has a program of music that was written for movies. I love it — they do a lot of stuff on John Williams, naturally. The ad for the program plays the desert theme to Lawrence of Arabia, which John Williams drew on to write for Star Wars. (The same desert scene, with Luke Skywalker instead of TE Lawrence, with pale blue & gold sunrise and guy in robes looking out towards the horizon, calls for such music.)

What I haven’t heard yet on the program is anything by Bear McCready. But maybe I missed it. He wrote the fantastic music for Battlestar Galactica, the HBO series Defiance, and so many more. I went and bought the CD to Battlestar Galactica’s Season 4 because it's beautiful.

There’s a Battlestar episode in which all the Cylons (robots resembling humans) — who have been living as humans and don’t even know they are machines — are suddenly awakened to what they are, “activated,” by a weird music that keeps playing in the spaceship and only they hear. Sometimes in a corridor one will hear a bit of the tune and ask if anyone else hears it. No others do (except those few Cylons). It comes like an old memory, in broken pieces, and soon each one is singing it to himself. The words to the song are from … Jimi Hendrix’s All Along The Watchtower!

Of course it’s a Bear McCready version of Watchtower, and it’s great. Mysterious. Meanwhile, another character, a human, is also apparently recalling this same song from old memories of her father. Her father was a piano player and composer. She picks out the tune on an old piano in the ship’s bar, and meanwhile, in other parts of the ship, the Cylons are waking to some subconscious knowledge, remembering — with a horrible crashing epiphany — that they are machines. They all apparently remember at the same moment. The music for this episode is my favorite.

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Stuff about Battlestar Galactica, which you should skip if you find that kind of thing tedious…
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My sister’s a Trekkie, but I’m crazy about the Battlestar series. Even watching the old goofy 70s series it was rewritten from is interesting (to me, anyway), because I like noticing how the writers of the new series used as much of the old plots as they could. There were good ideas in the old episodes: A huge fire in space, a rogue ship captain and the damage he caused, the discovery of a 2nd battlestar ship, which gets sacrificed to save the first. It’s the transformation that the later writers did that’s worth noticing. This rogue ship captain in the 70s show was played by Lloyd Bridges. He’s far too lovable for the drama of the 2nd show. So in the new show, this captain is played by a woman, who is not simply “rogue” but a horrid war criminal. Everything she says sounds like either an insult or sarcasm. She’s frightening.

The old series had Lorne Greene as the commander of the Battlestar Galactica, replaced in the 2nd series by Edward James Olmos — what a sea change. The commander’s son in the 70s show was played by a guy so cute he could’ve been a lifeguard on Baywatch. His acting too was just about worthy of Baywatch, maybe a little better. This actor, Richard Hatch, 26 years later is a major character in the 2nd series, too — but he plays a terrorist. And he’s utterly convincing. His face, his voice and manner have aged perfectly and now he seems like a real person.

Another actor from the first series is Dirk Benedict, who also played “Faceman” on The A Team. He’s ridiculous and hammy. I blame him for what the old show was: He sort of shaped the first series and helped make it as silly as it was. When he heard that the new series was re-casting his old role with a female actor, he actually objected. It’s a big joke on him that she turned out to be a real actress and gave authenticity to the new show. As Starbuck, her character is kind of obsessive, sometimes unbearable, and unbalanced. But her courage and skills outweigh all this, just like Carrie in Homeland.

The old show (which stole theme music, effects and lots more from the Star Wars films and was sued by Paramount because of it) was redeemed by the creators of the later show. I keep saying “2nd show” but actually it’s the 3rd. There was a Battlestar Galactica 1980 show, and its plot was odd, because I think the characters on the ship are supposed to be still searching for Earth — although it’s 15 or 20 years later. In the first show, an 8-year-old boy named Boxey was the grandson of the Commander. In this 1980 show, he’s grown up and is a pilot, played by Kent McCord (whom you’d recognize from the 1960s show Adam-12. He played a very interesting role on the s-f series Farscape, too.).

It’s a problem that the old Battlestar shows were so bleak looking. They were always in black space, only touching down on planets briefly. Star Trek visited planets with actual sunlight, which made you feel better.

Battlestar the 3rd, however, which strove for a realistic feeling, repeats the dark of space, but here it gives a desperate, trapped-on-a-submarine feeling which develops the plot. They’re trying to get somewhere, after all. Their home has been destroyed and irradiated. And they have limited time, because the ship is old. Way old. Not to mention that supplies in space are … almost nonexistent.

Something that was great about the original series: the Cylons themselves. Bright and shiny as vintage toasters. “Toasters” becomes the derogatory term for them in the later show, even though most of the Cylons aren’t metal but resemble humans perfectly. They’re still called Toasters.