Stuff I Wish I'd Done | Catch the Frak Up - Battlestar Galactica: The Final Episodes

"Catch the Frak Up!" is a video recap of the last four seasons of Battlestar Galactica, and it's Something I Wish I'd Done, damnit.

First of all, get off your high horse--Galactica is excellent TV. It is easily the most sophisticated sci-fi series ever made, and like nothing that's been on television before, genre or otherwise. It's what you'd get if you let Joseph Conrad write Star Trek after getting high and watching soap operas with Philip K. Dick. There's no room for whimsy here--no lasers, no growling space bears and no velour onesies. People smoke and drink, lie and fight and play cards. Some dude screws the wrong girl and the world ends. And then things get really bad. It's frakkin' awesome.

Anyway, the folks at scifi.com put this thing together to help people get a handle on the story. The 13-minute film surveys the entire sixty-five-episode broadcast run, with all of its shifting alliances and snaking storylines. Faster-than-light editing shuffles us efficiently through the show's tangle of sweaty intimacy, putting weird names to pretty faces while showcasing its gunmetal palette and quaking cinéma-vérité style.

The narration (my chief creative woulda-coulda) is deadpan perfection--a caffeinated stream of minimalist snark that manages to evoke the clicking chatfests of the nerderatti with only a touch of technojargon and not one whiff of fanboy elitism.

The show's makers, mavens and marketers are shrewdly extending an olive branch to the uninitiated, leaving the screen door cracked for neophytes and stragglers who might have otherwise gone home. Diehard fans might slurp up every drop in one sitting, while new and lapsed viewers are free to linger, unfolding layers of subtlety and gathering precious tokens of geek-chic cred. "Catch the Frak Up!" works either way, bringing the new and confused down to Earth (hee...) for the big finale.

And I wish I'd done it.


The final episodes of Battlestar Galactica begin airing Friday, January 16, at 10 pm on SciFi.

by Jared Peterson
(originally published on proweirdo.blogspot.com)