The Mysterious Dean Stockwell

A discussion about the penultimate episode to BSG's demiseason will have to wait for a few more days. But along with the show needing more Baltar and more Zarek, I'd like to ask where Dean Stockwell's been hiding out. It's nice that he reappears for the important episodes, but it was distracting to wonder where the hell he had gone to for half of the season. His reappearance only serves to break my private hope that every Stockwell model had left to form their own renegade cylon armada.

I'm starting to suspect that BSG has never been very good about getting contracts set up with their cylon actors. For the longest time, I was convinced that there was a reason you never saw Religious Cylon interacting with the rest of his kind. The real reason turned out to be "to stretch the casting budget." This was perfectly fine in the beginning, but once you start killing off characters who won't commit to multiple seasons, it's bad form to turn around and only hire "real actors" for three episodes at a time. Especialy when they play characters who ought to be present in every episode.

For you non-BSG watchers out there, despite what Narraptor said there is no "frelling" in the cylon occupied world of the future. They've upgraded to "frakking," which is unfortunate for most everyone concerned. It must be said that things could have turned out worse. In my youth, I read Shadowrun novels where the reader was expected to take lines like "What the frag?" seriously. Harder science fiction authors would just substitute curse words from other languages, assuming you count Esperanto as a real language.

I dimly recall that Tad Williams had come up with some good fake curse words for his made-up future. He claimed that this was because you couldn't accurately predict what slang would be like even ten years from now, so you might as well just come up with a word that sounds good.