Citizen Joe

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

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".

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.
 * At the end of the episode it is revealed that as Joe was seeing visions of SG-1, Jack was seeing visions of Joe's life. Yet in the begining of the episode, Jack doesn't seem to recognize Joe.
 * In the scene where Joe meets with Sharlene to try the first time to convince her it's all real, he refers to Jack as being "Head of Stargate Command." However, during this conversation, he also sees a vision of the battle of Antarctica, as seen in Lost City, stating the battle is happening "right now". As that happened in the Season 7 finale, and Jack wasn't promoted to Head of Stargate Command until Season 8 premiere, New Order, Jack wasn't yet Head of Stargate Command at the time.
 * At the start Jack references meeting with someone named Johnson from the CIA relating to recent events with Kinsey. This person is quite clearly implied to be Kerry Johnson whom Jack is shown to be having a relationship with at the start of Threads (she is a CIA agent involved in investigations after the Kinsey incident). So a subtle mistake here occurs when this episode is aired after Threads in some DVDs as Jack acts as though he doesn't know her yet.