I wanted to use "All Along the Watchtower" playing in a jukebox, in the background, not in the familiar Hendrix version, but just a Galactica version of "Watchtower", as a way of saying to the audience that there is a tie between this show and our reality. That, essentially— y'know, you've heard us say, over and over again throughout the series, that "all this has happened before, and all of it will happen again", and there's a sense of the cycle of time, that certain of these events are preordained, and that there's a cycle, there's truly a cycle. If you remember, in the episode "Flesh and Bone" in Season One, Leoben, the Cylon, is talking to Kara and he says that "there's a cycle of time. And maybe the next time through the cycle, I'll be the interrogator and you'll be the prisoner", and that the story is the same, but the players swap positions.
And the idea that there was a song or verse that transcended that cycle, that certain things repeated themselves— I mean why do they wear ties, why do they speak English, why are there certain phrases— there are phrases from Shakespeare sprinkled throughout the series. And there's a certain idea that all these things repeat themselves in certain ways for certain reasons, and so I wanted to use "All Along the Watchtower", something that would grab the audience to go: "Wait a minute, how the fuck could that be?! How could they possibly know what that is? Does that mean the show takes place in the distant future? Does it take place in the distant past? And what are the connections of that?" So it is a clue towards the larger explanation of what Galactica says the cosmology is, and so—
