“I would like to learn about your culture and customs. Will you teach me?”
- Release Date: 13th January 1999
- Season 2
- Episode 17
- Director: David Warry-Smith
- Writers: Tor Alexander Valenza
SG-1 arrive at a lab, which contains strange equipment and strange writing. There, they meet an old man – Teal’c recognises him as Ma’chello, the man most wanted by the Gou’ald due to being an extremely successful warrior against him. He’s acting extremely senile and even mimics Dr Jackson saying “I’m Daniel Jackson” (which turns out to be a clever part of his plan). He leads Daniel to a machine which can help, with Daniel and Ma’chello grasping onto it. Ma’chello collapses while Daniel gets shocked but says he’s fine. They take the old man back to Earth.
Daniel gets cleared by Dr. Fraiser, but then tells Hammond that he was told to go home. He sets off. After he’s gone, the old man wakes up, once again claiming to be Daniel Jackson – but he clearly knows enough stuff to prove that he actually is Daniel, with Jack believing him completely. They need to locate his actual body. At first, they’re not sure if Daniel has been copied, but once they find out that Daniel didn’t enter his home, they’re pretty sure that it’s a body swap situation.
Ma’chello, in Daniel’s body, wanders around a city, asking random people to know what the culture of this world is. A homeless man, Fred, tells him that you can’t act like that, and they instantly bond. Ma’chello suggests some food and they head to a diner, with the waitress finding a credit card and Ma’chello offering to pay for everyone to eat.
As they’re looking for Daniel, Jack and Teal’c, in full protective gear, head back to the lab to retrieve the mind swapping device. Despite all this, the device is still activated and Jack and Teal’c swap bodies. They head back and report the issue and hilarity ensues. While Richard Dean Anderson does a decent job at portraying Teal’c, but Christopher Judge is 100% believable at portraying Jack O’Neill, his performance is both extremely funny and entirely convincing.
Luckily, due to the use of Daniel’s credit card, Ma’chello is found and brought back to SGC. However, not only does he claim that he deserves it for saving humanity, to the point that his entire planet chose to let themselves be destroyed rather than turn him over. He says Daniel – who is dying in Ma’chello’s old body, is just a casualty of war. He offers to give away all his secrets in exchange for letting him keep his body. Hammond refuses. Ma’chello says the process can’t be reversed anyway.
Carter visits Ma’chello with a new plan – she wants him to talk to Daniel. Ma’chello talks about the loss of his wife, which leads Daniel to talking about his wife and still trying to save her. He also points out the hypocrisy of Ma’chello – he thinks he deserves a new body because he’s better than other humans. Daniel states that Ma’chello sees him as nothing more than a host – just like a Gou’ald. This gets through to him, but he still says that the device will not allow the same two people to get swapped back.
With some maths, she works out that Jack, Teal’c, Daniel and Ma’chello can swap with each other in a specific order to restore everyone back to their original bodies. Much later, Futurama would come up with an actual mathematical formula to work this out for any number of mind-swapped people with the exact same limitation. It works and everyone is back to normal, with Ma’chello dying.
It’s a really fun episode with some great acting, and some really good make-up for Ma’chello as I had absolutely no idea that he was also played by Michael Shanks. Plus, as said earlier, Christopher Judge playing O’Niell was brilliant.
