"the stump serenade"

When the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica finished in March of this year with a pretty polarising series finale - if you're asking me, it was pretty awesome and achieved nearly all of its lofty ambitions, capping the show off pretty damn nicely - I was at once grateful and sad that I was never going to see these characters take another journey along the cosmos. For its flaws, BSG was an achievement, reawakening TV sci-fi (and HARD sci-fi, lo and behold) as a challenging medium where moral, religious and political debate could co-exist with hot robots and gun battles. My favourite show ever, Lost, has arguably done the same thing for TV sci-fi, but the mysterious way that everything is put across in that show makes it less effective at stirring up such topical debate. Ronald D Moore-1, JJ Abrams-0.

But one thing I would definitely miss from watching the show was Bear McCreary's brilliant score, especially when music became so pivotal to the mythology of the show at the end of season three. (If you've never seen BSG before, all I'm going to say is that Bob Dylan may be more important than you ever thought.) Serious, when I wanted to post a eulogy to the show following the finale, I decided to give it up and just sit and relisten to the "Passacaglia" motif a million times in a row.

So some of that awesome Bear McCreary music from the final season is now out in the States, and I've got my copy and guess what? It's great. It all kicks off with a full version of "Gaeta's Lament", the song Gaeta (Alessandro Juliani) sings after he's [SPOILER REDACTED] by [SPOILER REDACTED] after having been [SPOILER REDACTED] by [SPOILER REDACTED]. There's also an instrumental version of the song, and you can check those both out below, as well as this interesting post from McCreary's blog about the writing of the song for the episode "Guess What's Coming To Dinner". (Spoilers, obviously.)

Bear McCreary - Gaeta's Lament

Bear McCreary - Gaeta's Lament Instrumental

UK cats can pre-order the soundtrack here. If you've never seen Ronald D Moore's take on Battlestar Galactica, get to it. You will be seriously hooked once you're a couple of discs into one of the DVD boxsets - and trust me, DON'T LOOK UP SPOILERS. If you know who the Final Five are before you start watching, you're an idiot who hates suspense.