Reasons I Dislike "Battlestar Galactica": Part One

This is the first in what I anticipate being a very lengthy series on why I am quite frankly irritated by the much-loved Sci-Fi series "Battlestar Galactica". For a show that has been as underwhelming to me as this one, I've seen more episodes that I'd like to have, leaving me with a bad taste that I cannot cleanse from my palette. So, to start this series I'll focus on one word, and one word only, just to get the ball rolling.

Frak

There is something about this word that I find absolutely infuriating. Everytime one of the characters sputters this expletive my blood pressure rises, my temple starts throbbing, and my teeth clench tighter than Cameron's asshole in Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

I hate this word.

I hate everything it stands for.

And when I talk about what this stands for, I am referring to the writers having one word that can serve as a curse word. I am a big fan of cursing. There is an art to it. There's an artistry to John McClane's foul-mouthed repartee with Hans Gruber and his henchmen. Try to imagine The Big Lebowski without the 200-some F-bombs. Do you think Kevin Smith ever would have garnered an audience with PG-13 dialogue? It sure as shit didn't work when he tried it. And there's a simple beauty to how Elliott Smith works a gentle "fuck" into a song.

In designating "frak" as the seemingly universal curse word, the writers no longer have to look for creative ways to express anger or convey fear or show camaraderie. It is basically an invention to enable laziness.

Now, I don't want to mislead you into thinking that I'm just pissed because this show doesn't curse like "Deadwood". I don't have the expectation that everyone in every show has to run around calling everyone "fucking cocksuckers" while talking to heads in wooden boxes. There are, however, shows on broadcast television that have managed to be very creative when skirting the censors--a rim job joke on "Veronica Mars" springs to mind immediately, as does the last three seconds of the teaser for "The X-Files" episode Bad Blood. By making up one universal curse word, the pleasure of the writers having pulled one over on the censors is gone, having been replaced by one retarded sounding bastardization of the greatest word in the English language. And that's fucked up.

So now any quasi-nerd who spends his/her time reading up on whatever upcoming project is worthy of creaming one's pants over gets to scour message boards where BSG fans the world over have littered that God damn word all over the place.

The really sad thing is that this invention really just seems to be stealing outright from Joss Whedon and "Firefly" with the Chinese cursing as a way to get around to censorship, which was at least a little inventive and reflective of a Earth that had turned complete melting pot. Adding -ings and -er and -ed to a fake word is just lame.