On Frakking…

(WARNING, STRONG LANGUAGE)

The universe of Battlestar Galactica is not your daddy’s sci-fi show. In fact, my grandparents STOPPED watching the show early on due to “too much sex.” As if there’s such a frakking thing as too much sex! So besides my grandparents’ outlandishly prude and horribly unfair generalization of the show, there is a lot of sex. Gaius and 6, Chief and Boomer, Helo and Boomer 2.0…  SOMEONE is always getting it on in the fleet. It’s a military space opera, of course there’s going to be harsh language as well… so what do you do when you want to have am edgy-hard-hitting show that doesn’t pull any punches? What do you do when you’re Sci-Fi Channel (a Universal/NBC subsidiary) and you simply CAN’T say fuck left and right on your new show? You do what they do with everything else in Science Fiction, make up a technology to “fix it.”

In the case of swearing, the word “fuck” is simply replaced by the word “frak.” It’s a frakking genius idea. At first it seems hoaky and weird, and then you keep watching the frakking show… and it starts to frakkin grow on you (I’m a frakkin poet and I didn’t frakkin know it). We get every iteration of the word the writers can apply it to, from “frakking on the table” to motherfrakker, to frak you to frak me… No wonder people started making shirts that read, “Shut the frak up you frakkin frak.”

Now I’m not sure if “frak” has been accepted into Websters as something other than horribly toxic and water-well tainting underground gas drilling with high-pressure chemicals (they call that frakking to, although whether with one k or two I’m not sure)… but it frakkin should be. I was even watching a silly rom-com show on NBC (funny enough, subsidi-what?) where the geeky hot girl drops the “f” bomb… and by that I mean “frak…” whilst trying to bed a recent conquest- and she laughs it off as “having seen an episode of Battlestar Galactica” or two. Hilariously a few minutes later she fessed up to being just a little more than frakking obsessed with BSG… Ha!

(the beautiful Alessandra Torresani – who everyone knows as Zoe Graystone, aka, the first Caprican Cylon – plays the Princess Leia in this clip)