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Who remembers Robin Williams yelling “Shazbot!” — the all-purpose, TV-friendly alien curse word that lent Mork & Mindy part of its quirky sci-fi charm?
As a genre, science fiction has a built-in advantage when it comes to conjuring novel, never-before-heard swear words like that — swear words that manage to sound edgy enough not to break the audience’s immersion. When you’re traveling between galaxies, who really knows what kind of strange profane lingo an alien species might utter — or even our own, given enough separation of time and distance from the real world we know?
Nobody knew, back in 1980, what exactly a “nerf herder” was (or even a nerf, for that matter), when Princess Leia dropped her now-immortal “stuck-up, half-witted, scruffy-looking nerf herder!” bomb on Han Solo in Star Wars Episode V — The Empire Strikes Back. But thanks to her frustrated context, it definitely sounded at least a little bit dirty… and viewers had no trouble understanding the general implication.
Fast forward a few decades to the mid-2000s, when Ronald D. Moore’s reimagined Battlestar Galactica (streaming now via the SYFY App) was the talk of the small-screen science fiction world on the Sci-Fi Channel (the very same channel you know and love today as SYFY). Through each of the show’s four seasons, Kara “Starbuck” Thrace (Katee Sackhoff) and pretty much every other human around her slung the expletive frak around like a hard-swearing gang of space sailors.
Battlestar Galactica and the origins of “Frak”
BSG viewers know that it takes hardly any imagination to grasp what “frak” really means within the series’ larger lore-verse. It’s a handy, censorship-proof stand-in for the dreaded F word — and, indeed, sometimes for just about any swear word. Thanks to the show’s popularity, it caught on, too. From Dilbert to The Office to Scrubs and beyond, it eventually crossed over into wider pop culture so effectively that not everyone who heard it could even pinpoint its sci-fi entertainment origins.
But SYFY’s BSG revival wasn’t where the word was first pioneered. For that, you have to go all the way back to the 1970s, when legendary TV mega-producer Glen A. Larson first brought the original Battlestar Galactica series — the one with Dirk Benedict as Starbuck and Lorne Greene as Commander Adama — to mainstream network television. Initially spelled “frack” in the show’s scripts and writers’ guide, the faux profanity was used far more sparingly in the original 1970s series, while still clearly telegraphing to viewers its essential curse-word meaning.
Moore’s Battlestar Galactica reboot on SYFY updated the spelling to “frak” — apparently to make it a true four-letter swear word — while also giving it way more utility among the show’s ensemble cast (though we still can’t help but think of Sackhoff’s Starbuck every time we hear it). In hindsight, it was kind of a genius move, too: “Frak” was just as immune from censorship in the mid-2000s as it was in the late 1970s (a concern not so much for SYFY, but more for the series’ potential as an eventual network syndication show).
It also marked one of Moore’s many well-considered carryovers between his more-modern version of Battlestar Galactica and the original 1970s series as a piece of BSG screen culture that cemented the thematic reciprocity between each series’ shared science fiction lore. Stream the beloved Battlestar Galactica revival anytime via the SYFY app (click here to get started!) and feel free to crank up the frakkin’ volume; after all, there’s nary a need to cover your delicate ears.
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