Citizen Joe

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SG-1 Season 8
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Citizen Joe is the fifteenth episode of the eighth season of Stargate SG-1.

This episode is a clip show: it is largely composed of clips of previous episodes.

Contents 1 Plot 2 Goofs 3 References 4 Notes 5 Sources

[edit] Plot

The episode opens with Jack O'Neill walking into his kitchen, talking on the phone to Samantha Carter about his "world famous omelet" (the "secret ingredient" being beer), when a man O'Neill has never met bursts in with a gun claiming that O'Neill has ruined his life. The viewer is then taken to a flashback 7 years earlier where Joe Spencer, the man in O'Neill's house, is at a garage sale and picks up a mysterious black stone. When he does, he receives a vision of SG-1 going through the Stargate against orders in the season 1 episode "Within the Serpent's Grasp". He buys the stone and, as the episode progresses, continuously receives more and more visions of the exploration team.

Joe, unable to create or tell amusing jokes or stories of his own, tells of the visions he sees as if they were stories he had conjured out of thin air. To start with, he tells these visions to his son and the customers in his barbershop, entertaining them where he had previously been nothing but a bore. Later, at the suggestion of his wife, he starts to write them down and send them in to various magazines (all of which reject them) instead of telling each and every individual the tiniest of details relating to SG-1. As the episode goes on, skipping ahead in years, the people he tells start to get tired of the tales of SG-1 and, eventually, they stop coming to his barbershop. Despite his wife's urging, telling him to stop writing the episodes down, he continues to type and becomes convinced that the visions are actually happening. After years of too-intense focus on SG-1, long since passed into obsession, his wife leaves with their son. At this point he tries to find evidence that what he has been seeing is real, collecting data on mysterious stellar phenomenon and unexplained deaths, but is unable to contact Colonel O'Neill. Eventually, he tracks down where O'Neill lives, bringing the viewer to the opening scene.

It is then discovered that the reason Joe has been seeing the visions, flashes of the life of Jack O'Neill, is because of an Ancient long-range communication device brought back from the same world as the quantum mirror. The device, which was activated by O'Neill when he touched a mysterious black stone in Daniel Jackson's lab, connects two minds together telepathically and Joe, who possesses the same Ancient gene as O'Neill, activated the companion device when he touched the stone at the garage sale. That stone, we find out, was discovered by the grandfather of the garage sales operator and had been found at a dig in Egypt. When Jack had been on the base, writing his mission-reports of their off-world adventures, the stone in Daniel's lab transmitted his thoughts to Joe. Conversely, O'Neill had been seeing visions of Joe's everyday life periodically, as the two devices could work in either direction; Jack never said anything because he found the visions "relaxing." At the close of the episode O'Neill helps Joe start to piece his life back together by personally talking to Joe's wife. Just as the camera pans out O'Neill begins by telling Joe and his wife that "it's all true".

[edit] Goofs

• In the last scene where Joe introduces Jack to Sharlene, Jack is wearing a USAF General's forage cap but the rank insignia on his shoulders are the "Eagles/birds" of a Colonel instead of the single star of a Brigadier General.

[edit] References

Battle of Antarctica; Beer; Communication stone; Evolution; Hathor; The Light; Within the Serpent's Grasp; Wormhole X-Treme!

[edit] Notes

• Dan Castellaneta, who plays Joe, is also the voice of "Homer" on The Simpsons. It has been frequently stated that The Simpsons is Jack O'Neill's favorite television show and it is also that of Richard Dean Anderson. Therefore, in this episode "Homer" is hero-worshipping O'Neill rather than vice-versa. Joe mentions that he sees O'Neill's analogy of Burns as Goa'uld. Richard Dean Anderson would guest star on the Simpsons episode Kiss Kiss, Bang Bangalore the following year. Richard Dean Anderson's name also frequently comes up on The Simpsons as Marge's sisters, Patty and Selma, are huge fans of MacGyver and have crushes on Richard Dean Anderson.
• The plot of this episode is very similar to Steven Spielberg's science-fiction film Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Both feature a working-class father from Indiana who becomes estranged from his family due to his obsession with strange visions.
• On the European and Australian DVD releases of Season 8, this is the 18th episode, not the 15th. The previous episode to "Citizen Joe" is "Threads" and the next episode is "Moebius Part 1" on those DVDs.
• Jonas Quinn (Corin Nemec) is mentioned in this episode for the first time since "Death Knell".
• Only the Region 1 DVD set has a commentary for this episode.
• This is the second week in a row that O'Neill's house has been broken into, the previous instance caused by ex-vice president Kinsey in the previous episode. Joe himself suggests that, to prevent further invasions, Jack might try locking his front door.
• Joe says that Armin Selig was killed by the NID. His murder, which occurred in "Secrets", had remained unsolved to this point.
• Bruce Woloshyn (digital effects supervisor) appears in a cameo as the garage sale homeowner who sells Joe Spencer the Ancient stone device.
• In the brief flashback where Jack activates the stone, Daniel has longer hair. However, the fact that the style and shade are noticeably different from the way Michael Shanks wore his hair for the first two seasons make it clear that he is wearing hair extensions in this scene.
• The three stories that Joe's wife had read, and didn't like are also the titles of the episodes Holiday, The Light and The Sentinel. Joe then says: "OK, I admit those may have been a few small missteps. But on the whole they are getting better, aren't they?"

[edit] Sources

• Official Stargate SG-1 site. MGM. Visited June 8, 2006. Most of site requires Flash.
• Screenplay (PDF). Distributed by MGM. Prepared by Line 21 Media Services Ltd (2004-11-29). Retrieved on October 29, 2006.
• Episode guide from Skyone. Visited June 4, 2006.
• Summary from SciFi. Visited June 4, 2006. Requires Flash.
• Summary from GateWorld. Visited May 4, 2006.
• Review from GateWorld. Visited May 4, 2006.
• Notes from rdanderson.com. Visited May 4, 2006.

This page uses content from Wikipedia. The original article was at Citizen Joe. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. As with SGCommand, the text of Wikipedia is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.