Stargate SG-1: Touchstone Rewatch

April 2, 2025 4:12 PM - Season 2, Episode 14

While attempting to return a stolen weather device to the planet of Madrona, O'Neill and the SG-1 team uncover a government agebda that has sinister implications.

When attempting to study the Touchstone on Madrona, SG-1 discover it is missing. The Madronans blame the Tau'ri since people in SG uniform took it earlier. Soon after noticing strange weather on Earth, SG-1 comes to the conclusion that the NID is launching secret offworld missions by using Earth's second Stargate from Antarctica stored in Area 51. SG-1 launch a mission to find the Touchstone before Madrona is destroyed.

posted by Carillon (7 comments total)

An interesting mix of goofy and serious. I know the Madronans are experiencing a crises, but I found the way it was shot and the costumes etc to just be a bit too silly. The second gate though is such a good threat. Love how you get a sense of how isolated they are in Colorado when someone is putting the screws on the base. Fun to see Hammond in civilian clothes too!

I wonder though how much this device strays from 'tech' into 'magic'. I get in this show the line is very thin, hell look at last week with the spirits functionally disappearing folks. But generally I think it does an ok job of making it understandable how even with fantastical outcomes, the extraordinary things we see are technically based. This has no such justification. Which is fine enough, but did leave me thinking about it rather than the plot or the threat at times.
posted by Carillon at 4:23 PM on April 2 [1 favorite]

I laugh every time at the knock-knock “hey it’s plastic!” gag. You are totally right, Carillon, about the weird brew in this ep.
posted by janell at 4:59 PM on April 2 [1 favorite]

Agreed about the costumes. There was a bit of missed casting in that the king/chief appeared to be an older white guy, with a young white daughter as princess, and then...it seemed everyone else were POC. Throw in the costumes and it felt so awkward.

This episode really walked the fine line for me between keeping an Earth based conspiracy story interesting versus getting a bit too much into the mud. In the future, I feel like it crosses the line, so much that I'm left wishing we were off world doing something.

Seeing the stargate in a crate made me wonder where the prop is now. Is it one big mold? I assume it's assembled, so it's in a much smaller box(es).

I think the working premise in SG-1 is essentially that magic is just advance technology, which I think was how they rolled out the Nox tech back in season one.
posted by Atreides at 6:48 AM on April 3 [1 favorite]

the mcguffin is like an sd card, it stores the settings for the atmosphere. remove it, and the next time it reboots, it goes back to whatever settings they used in the testing environment.
posted by the antecedent of that pronoun at 10:06 AM on April 3 [1 favorite]

I think you might have put more thought into the mechanics just now (re the SD card) than the writers did.
posted by janell at 10:54 AM on April 3 [2 favorites]

I did love the plastic stargate in the crate too. Also I'm on the fence with Maybourne here. He comes across too convincingly that he doesn't know what's going on. Obviously, we know he's evil here, but at times he felt befuddled more than duplicitous.
posted by Carillon at 1:02 PM on April 3 [1 favorite]

I think that’s one of Maybourne’s charms. Sometimes he plays dumb while twiddling his invisible mustache knowingly and sometimes he just plays dumb. And sometime he is just dumb, tbf.
posted by janell at 1:04 PM on April 3 [1 favorite]