Frak, and Frak!

Over the weeks since Christmas we've spent rather too long watching the series 2 box set of Battlestar Galactica which I very kindly bought myself in the sales (it wasn't on special offer but even at forty quid or whatever, it's still good value.)

It's been said many, many times on the web already, so I won't break any new ground by agreeing with many of the critics that this is perhaps the best sci-fi TV show ever, and certainly the best TV I've seen from North America since Twin Peaks. (It's filmed in Canada.)

If you haven't seen it, the bastards have got a way of reeling you in, by selling the 2004 miniseries which started the whole thing off at a very low price: £4.99 or even less in some cases. Once you've seen that you will probably move on to the individual season box sets.

Anyway this post is just to point out the amusing use of the word 'frak' as the 4-letter expletive of choice aboard Galactica - it's an homage to the original 1978 series, but more importantly, it essentially allows the production team to use as many 'F***'s as they want without offending anyone. The guy from the Jammer's reviews site doesn't like 'frak' at all, he thinks it's silly. I like it a lot. I think it's subversive. Basically it points out the absurdity of designating a particular word as a 'swear word' and then discouraging its use. There is no instrinsic reason why 'fuck' should be thought of as rude, while 'frak' is just amusing. It's all a load of lobsters if you ask me...

The other thing I wanted to point out was that there was another 'Frak' once upon a time... in the early 80s Frak! was a game for the BBC microcomputer, possibly the most ludicrous game ever made for that esteemed machine (I never had a BBC micro at school - only the rich kids had one. The plebs had to make do with a Spectrum, or maybe a Commodore 64 if you were lucky). As the wikipedia entry (very impressed that it's even there) says, Frak! was a platform game where you controlled a caveman who had to remove monsters such as large furry pineapples from your path by hitting them with a yo-yo. There were two memorable things about the game:

1. It ran really slowly. I mean it was painfully slow. The graphics were just too much for the processor... on the Amiga, for example. it would have been fine.
   
2. When your man got killed a big speech bubble came up saying "Frak!" The problem was that it was more fun getting killed than actually waiting around for the next platform to scroll into view.
   

Anyway Galactica producer Ron Moore has a blog where he takes Q&A from fans once in a while, and I think it's worth emailing to ask whether the BBC Frak! game could be used as a plot device in one of the later seasons. Maybe they could have a Star Trek holodeck where all the characters became 2D cartoons with yo-yos and it all.... went.... very.... slow. A bit like the sequence in Star Trek: The Motion Picture where they get trapped in the wormhole with the asteroid (an apt metaphor for the cinema audience, who got trapped in the cinema with an unfinished film.) "Time to impact........ 17 seconds but a second feels like a month due to Shatner's bassoon, which controls the perception of time." I think it's that sequence that makes The Motion Picture my favourite Star Trek movie. That and the sheer preposterousness of trying to cross Star Trek with 2001: A Space Odyssey.

I leave you with a storyboard sequence that has been stolen from the storyboard for one of the episodes of Galactica, Season 4. A new plot development is that the Cylons have mutated into a cross between a walrus and an aubergine. And Commander Adama has grown his hair a bit.