Ten years ago, in March 1999, a little show called Farscape premiered on the Sci-Fi Channel. It was shot in Australia, and long before the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica had even been thought of, had made place for itself as the craziest Sci-Fi TV show ever to air. Farscape is the story of John Crichton, the American astronaut who is accidentally launched through a wormhole into the far reaches of the universe, a place where Earth and humans are simply irrelevant, where he makes enemies with psychopaths and meets the love of his life. The show regularly featured mind-bending acid-trip plots, Muppets, lots of sex, and basically the entire breadth of the Australian BDSM scene, on top of which you throw one of the greatest love stories ever told and a hero who — through nothing more than an accident — finds himself outranked, outsmarted, and outmaneuvered by vastly superior creatures on a daily basis. The combination of Crichton learning both his and humanity’s place in the universe, while simultaneously being his lovable, loyal, and inferior self towards his shipmates aboard the living ship Moya — a Leviathan and escaped prisoner ship crewed with escaped prisoners — is simply one of the most highly addicting and enjoyable TV series I’ve ever seen. (And you know I’ve seen a lot.) It was a show about looking for home, about celebrating the physical, a show where the bad guys were always turning good, and keeping the peace was all about defeating your own inner demons. You guys should watch it.

Click Me. Come on . . . do it.

I spent practically the entirety of January through April 2008 watching this show, driving to Casa Video at all hours because the DVDs are so ridiculously expensive and I couldn’t afford to buy them. The smell of musty popcorn will forever be associated with Ben Browder. And, as it often is when you love something that is underappreciated, you take what you can get. Farscape DVDs run from around $90-$300 per season. For some unfathomable reason, the tiny little company ADVfilms owned the rights to the DVDs, and they produced a ridiculously expensive and inconvenient product. The earliest set of Season One featured poor quality images and sometimes only two episodes per disc. In the early 2000s, ADV released another version of the DVDs, that while still expensive in comparison to other DVD sets, was more reasonable. And then, due to either a mistake or laziness, ADV let the rights to Season One expire. Sony quickly snatched them up. So, what happened as a result is that ADV recalled all of their DVDs and Sony has yet to make any plans to release a set of their own. Luckily, the Henson Company made a deal with iTunes in December 2007 for monthly releases of all four seasons of Farscape, but that just really isn’t the same as having those DVDs on your shelf. My life basically sucks, right?

Enter last Thursday. I was attempting to do work over Spring Break. I had about six books to read and two papers to write. So what do I do? I sign on to Twitter. I checked Google Reader. And lo and behold, I come across the announcement that it is Farscape‘s 10th Anniversary, and in celebration, The Henson Company will be giving away free Farscape stuff all day long. On Twitter. This is how I responded:

It’s nice to have a goal, don’t you think? So for the next FOUR HOURS, I sat in front of my computer and tried valiantly like the nerd that I am to win some Farscape shit. Time after time I missed being the first to respond by about one or two people. I got pretty frustrated:

The problem was that I was so nervous that I would forget things like how to spell or what the name of the human-like race in show was called (Sebaceans). My hands were shaky and sweaty. I missed out on some pretty cool prizes, too. And then, came this:

An autographed shirt, like, you mean, HE TOUCHED IT!?!? You guys, that’s my husband we’re talking about. I was flooded with a new determination. That shirt was MINE. Henson Company had tweeted ahead of time that the next question would be announced at 2:40 PM EST, so for about two minutes before, just to make sure, I just kept hitting refresh over and over and over. Finally, the question appeared and I was all OMG I TOTALLY KNOW THAT ONE. And then my brain exploded. It was on the tip of my tongue, but I just couldn’t get it to register. In a panic, I opened my iTunes. I knew it was the first episode at the top of TV queue, but I felt sure that having to take time to do this was going to cost me the prize. My heart was pounding and my fingers were shaking. You’d think I was being chased by a murderer or something. Finally it popped up, and even though I was 99% sure I was going to lose, I typed my answer in anyway, having to fix my shaky typos in a hurry.

I was almost afraid to check if people had answered before me, but I did it anyway. Not surprisingly, two people had answered before me, BUT, they had answered a different episode than I did. In case this is important to you, they answered “The Flax,” in which John Crichton and Aeryn Sun make out for the first time. But making out isn’t sex, people. And they totally had The Sex in “A Human Reaction.” Two minutes later, I received this message, and then promptly died from happiness:

I started running around my room and screaming like a crazy person. I think I genuinely terrified Emily. And, because I’m a very bad person, I gloated:

So, just to paint you a further picture: I’m running around like an asshole, screaming and jumping and thinking about how I never win anything ever and then more screaming, and then the gloating, and then I get this:

Guuuuhhhhhhh.

Just what I needed while in this excitable state: an ego boost. But also: ha, ha, ha, ha, ha because the Henson Company thinks I’m funny. I mean, I’ve never done drugs, but I’m pretty sure that’s what being high feels like. So I DMed the Henson Company tweeter with my address, also throwing in an obnoxious question (which she rightly ignored) about the future of the Farscape DVDs, and then bounced around like an idiot for a couple more hours. I know you guys have no idea why I am so excited about getting an old t-shirt that I’m never going to wear, signed by a TV star who practically no one who isn’t a nerd has ever heard of, but let me try to explain it to you. Take a deep breath, inhale and exhale slowly, and then picture THAT PERSON. You know, the one who you would pounce on in about three seconds if you ever saw them in real life. That person who would make you puke from happiness like Jack Donaghy. Do you have that feeling? Okay, now multiply it by at least five and you might come close to just exactly how excited I was for those idiotic couple of hours.

Then I gloated some more to Dan and Mia, who are the only two people I know who watch Farscape. Dan responded with this:

This was the wrong response as it turns out, but he probably knew that, because then this happened:

I knew right then that that was exactly what I was going to do, and that I was going to film it. So, here’s a video of me, being an ass (the password is “sexy”):

Have any of you ever acted like a lunatic because of a celebrity? Please share your stories in the comments so I won’t feel so alone.