[1][2][3] Daniel's maternal grandfather and only living relative, Nick Ballard (played by Jan Rubeš), was a noted Dutch archaeologist and too busy to take the orphaned Jackson under his wing.

An aged woman named Catherine Langford approaches him to offer him a job deciphering the cover-stones of a device found in Egypt.

Daniel meets, falls in love with, and marries a native woman, Sha'uri (named Sha're in the TV series Stargate SG-1).

[7] Daniel is briefly reunited with Sha're, who had been made host to Apophis' queen Amonet, in season 2's "Secrets", when she temporarily controls her body while pregnant with the Harcesis child Shifu.

[9] In season 3's "Maternal Instinct", Daniel discovers the Harcesis child on another planet and leaves him under the care of Oma Desala, a being of great power and wisdom.

[11] In the penultimate season 5 episode "Meridian", Daniel is exposed to a lethal dose of radiation while attempting to fix a naquadria reactor on the planet Langara in the Nation State known as Kelowna.

[16] This leads to the discovery of the Ancient Outpost at Antarctica in the season 7 finale "Lost City", contributing to the spin-off Stargate Atlantis.

[25] In "Unending", the last episode of the series, SG-1 gets stuck in a time dilation field aboard the Earth ship Odyssey, and a romance between Vala and Daniel comes to fruition.

Before the time dilation field is reversed after fifty years, erasing all linked memories in the process, Daniel and Vala express their feelings for each other.

[26] Jackson makes a cameo appearance in the pilot of Stargate Atlantis, "Rising", where he assists Rodney McKay and Elizabeth Weir on the Antarctic Outpost, unearthed in SG-1's season 7 finale, "Lost City".

Whilst there he and McKay are captured by a rogue branch of Asgard, who wish to use them to activate the "Attero Device" to neutralize the Wraith threat in the galaxy but with the unforeseen consequence of destroying the Stargates which would explode, killing tens of thousands of innocent people.

[1] Prior to this, Daniel's moments of (involuntary) infidelity include claiming a young woman in "The Broca Divide" while regressed to a primitive stage of Homo sapiens, is sexually assaulted by Hathor in "Hathor", and is drugged and held prisoner to be the consort of a young woman named Shyla, the daughter of the planet's ruler, in "Need".

Daniel develops a love-hate relationship with Vala Mal Doran between seasons 8 and 10; it is established multiple times that their feelings for each other are far deeper than either of them care to admit.

[26][30][31] On a personal level, Jackson is very close to his teammates on the original SG-1, with each of them constantly depicted as willing to go to great lengths to protect each other, even with such moments as Teal'c's role in Sha're being taken by Apophis or Jack distancing himself from the others to go undercover and expose the NID's theft of alien artifacts.

Pseudo-archaeology operates, generally, outside of the empirical and analytical methods of the profession of archaeology, and often is associated with claims of extraterrestrial life, magic, and other phenomena.

In the fictional universe of Stargate, Daniel is proven correct about his claims that the Egyptian pyramids are much older than anyone believes, and even finds out they are of extraterrestrial design.

In the season 7 episode "Heroes", one of the SG teams examine some ancient ruins and a scientist says "Dr. Jackson is gonna die when he sees this!"

In Stargate: Continuum Daniel is feared dead when he asks Carter and Mitchell to leave him behind while they search for help in the Arctic, only to be rescued by Col. O'Neill.

[35] Showtime's announcement to not renew Stargate SG-1 after season 5 coincided with Shanks' decision to leave the show for concerns of being underutilized.

Casting agents met Corin Nemec at the courtyard of MGM's Santa Monica offices by chance and offered him the role of Jonas Quinn, beginning with the penultimate season 5 episode "Meridian".

[38] For his portrayal of Daniel Jackson, Michael Shanks was nominated for a Leo Award in 2000 for "Best Performance by a Male in a Dramatic Series" in 2000 for the episode "Forever in a Day".