X-Files--"Synchrony"

It is difficult to believe we made it 92 episodes before featuring time travel as a story element. Surprising still, considering The X-Files usually does weird science well, “Synchrony” falls flat. There are always inherent logical flaws within any story that does time travel, such as time traveler to the past desiring to change an event should be able to go back in time over and over again, learning from his failure, until he gets the desired outcome. It is a logical point one has to overlook. But some logical flaws are so glaring, it is impossible to over look them. “Synchrony” suffers from

Mulder’s curiosity is piqued by a strange murder at MIT. Allegedly, a man in his seventies approached two quarreling young doctoral students, Jason and Lucas, and informed one of them he was going to be hit by a bus at exactly 11:46 PM. The old man is arrested by campus police. As 11:46 nears, Lucas accidentally drops the papers he is carrying. Jason, fearing the old man might be right, chases after him, but instead of saving Jason from an oncoming bus, pushes him into it path instead. Jason is arrested for murder. He claims the old man as an alibi, but not only is he no where to be found, the campus cop is found frozen solid with Jason’s fingerprints inside the car.

Before we are even done with the first act, we have already figured out the old man is Jason from the future. For a change, Mulder does not draw that conclusion until the end of the third act., which is refreshing even though we are way ahead of him. But when we have already figured out the extraordinary twist to the story, there is an expectation there is an even more surprising element to come later on. If you have that expectation about “Synchrony,” you will be disappointed by the time the final credits roll.

The major clue that cues mulder in on the time travel aspect is when another scientist is also found frozen solid after being spotted with the same old man. He has been frozen by a compound in which Jason’s team of scientists are working on--an instant coolant--but are still five or ten years away from the technology to physically make it. Si it has been brought back from the future to use as a murder weapon.

At this point, Jason’s girlfriend Lisa is introduced. To give us all the exposition on the theoretical coolant. Mulder suspects Future Jason will try to kill her next. He does. She is frozen solid. Future Jason’s final target is his younger self. While the two are scuffling, Scully figures out how to thaw Lisa out safely. Jason ‘s plan was to confront Future Jason to discover how to do that. He could have just asked scully and saved himself a lot of trouble. Did I saw trouble? I meant being incinerated by his future self’s rising temperature. In the final scene, we see Lisa attempting to recreate the formula from memory after Future Jason has destroyed all the research data.

So what does a coolant have to do with time travel? Time travel is actually incidental to the plot. Future Jason offers a throwaway line to lisa saying she will meet a physicist in a decade who will discover a way for a person to travel through time, but the stress on the human body would be too much--that is, without the coolant. So she eventually teams up with Dr. Sam Beckett (I kid, I kid) to give him the one piece of the puzzle he lacks. Keep in mind Future Jason knows Lisa is the one who will do that, not his past self.

But why is Future Jason killing his past colleagues? It is another throwaway line. Time travel is common in the future thanks to the coolant. It has made everyone miserable because there is no mystery to life. He sort of implies, but never says, people are traveling to the future, too, and learning their fate. Philosophically speaking, that might make for an interesting theme to explore, But like I said, it is not only a throwaway line, it is one of the last things Future Jason says before killing his past self. Not only is there no indication that is the issue that has tormented him the entire time, we are not given enough time to absorb the concept ourselves. We need more elaboration, and we do not get it. All we see is lisa working diligently to recreate all the research.

Lisa is the biggest problem with the episode. Keep in mind, mulder has not made the connection between the coolant and time travel. He has no idea how Future Jason traveled into the past. He only knows that young Jason is going to force him to reveal how to defrost Lisa. Mulder stops him from harming Future Jason by telling him Scully, brilliant doctor she is, has saved Lisa. Future Jason heard this, knows Lisa is going to survive, knows she is going to eventually collaborate with a scientist who has developed time travel, knows she is smart enough to reproduce all the research data he just destroyed, but decides to sacrifice himself in order to kill younger Jason thinking he will have solved his problem that way.

Cast aside the truth that if Young Jason is killed, Future Jason will not exist to travel back in time to kill him in the first place. Why would Future Jason sacrifice himself to kill Young Jason when he knows, noty only is Lisa the one to hand over the coolant for time travel instead of him, but he failed to kill her, so she is naturally going to develop the coolant anyway? If he is that dedicated to stopping the development of the coolant, then stop fighting with Young Jason, give up, and wait for another opportunity to kill her. Or do something even more breathtakingly rational and talk her out of working on the coolant. She already believes Future Jason is from the future. How hard could it be?

I also need to knock on Mulder. Once the two Jasons are dead, mulder lectures Scully on the inevitably of fate. He says since someone already came up with the idea for the coolant, it is bound to get made at some point. Uh, yeah. Lisa is going to make it, because she is familiar enough with the data to recreate it. So maybe you should, you know, advise her not to? Sure, she would probably not listen, but mulder does not even entertain the possibility she is going to continue the work.

How dumb is he? Oh, yeah. Dumb enough to risk the lives of a plane load of passengers by carrying alien technology onboard which aliens want and the military has proven will kill countless innocents to hide. That is how dumb. At least said dumbness is consistent with “Synchrony.” It is a very bad episode.

Rating: * (out of 5)