The X-Files 20th Anniversary Blogging: "Synchrony" (April 13, 1997)

Howard Gordon and David Greenwalt’s fourth season The X-Files (1993 – 2002) entry “Synchrony” is a unique and marvelous addition to the catalog because it deals with a subject left mostly untouched in the franchise: time travel. 

The sixth season story “Monday” explicitly concerns a time loop, but “Synchrony” involves itself with quantum physics and the possibility of human time travel from the future to Scully and Mulder’s present, an apparent “branching off”-point to a discovery that “changes the course of history.”

What makes “Synchrony” so engaging and tense a drama is this very notion of the multi-verse, of every action and reaction creating a new (and hopefully better…) path forward, and thus a whole new universe.  A killer returns from the future in this episode, much as was the case in Camerons’ watershed The Terminator (1984), but his motives for murder are, contrarily, pro-social, namely to save the human race from a future without hope while also preventing a personal mistake that he now regrets. 

Thus the episode explicitly involves what I have often termed in my own writing “Oppenheimer’s Syndrome:” the ambitious scientist’s reckoning that his work has changed the world in a destructive way, and that, if he could be given a second chance, he would prevent his “young” self from moving forward with it.  The syndrome is named for J. Robert Oppenheimer, who toiled at The Manhattan Project, and changed the course of human history forever with his work on the atom bomb.  The character in this X-Files episode, Jason, is actually surrogate or substitute for Oppenheimer, at least according to some accounts

The factors I primarily find so intriguing about this episode are twofold.   

First, the episode doesn’t shy away from scientific detail, and proposes specific mechanics for time travel.  These involve the act of sustaining human bodies at freezing temperatures for a passage considered beyond the limits of “human endurance.”

Secondly, I love “Sychronicity’s notion of “orphan” artifacts, objects that hail from a now non-existent future, but which continue in our present as lonely, mysterious paradoxes.

On the latter front, Mulder discovers a photograph in “Synchrony” that can never be taken in his reality because all the participants die before meeting, and before the picture can be snapped. Yet the photo still exists in Mulder’s reality, a sign that in some dimension, in some universe, that meeting has occurred, and someone did snap that picture.  We know that a photograph can’t exist unless someone takes it, and that, similarly, a photograph records a specific place and instant in time.  But suddenly, a photograph exists in “Synchrony” despite the fact that the participants never meet, and that moment never actually comes to pass.  How can this orphan artifact be explained?

 

At M.I.T. in Massachusetts an old man accosts two squabbling students on campus and warns one of them that if he is not careful, he will be struck by a bus and killed at precisely 11:46 pm.  The prediction proves true, and Mulder (David Duchovny) and Scully (Gillian Anderson) head to the scene to discover who the old man was, and how his captor, a campus security man, was suddenly frozen to death.

Soon, a visiting expert in cryobiology, Dr. Yanechi (Hiro Kanagawi), is also found dead. Mulder and Scully realize that he too has been fast-frozen by a compound that does not yet exist, and which cannot possibly exist for ten years or so. 

The bizarre answer to this riddle is related to time travel. The old man has come back from the future to prevent the creation of a freezing compound and the ensuing discovery of time travel, two factors in the creation of a world without hope or history.

Synchrony might adequately be defined as the act of keeping systems together, or operating in unison. In computer science, the term refers specifically to the coordination of simultaneous “threads.”  In terms of this X-Files episode, “Synchrony” is an apt title indeed.  The killer from the future arrives in 1997 to break or disrupt the tapestry of events -- the so-called “synchrony” -- that gave rise to his very universe.

If he starts yanking at those threads, reality itself -- the reality he knows and hates -- begins to unwind. 

So if Dr. Yanechi does not meet Lisa Yanelli (Susan Lee Hoffman), they can’t possibly work together to create a freezing compound that assists in making human time travel a reality. 

And if Lisa Yanelli dies in 1997, she will also never meet a researcher who, in 2007, discovers tachyon particles and determines that time travel can only occur at a temperature of absolute zero. 

Piece-by-piece, then, the old assassin of “Synchrony” tears apart a future that must never come to exist.

But the question becomes this: if the old man destroys the synchrony that gave rise to his life and his historical context, how can he possibly exist to travel back in change it in the first place?  His very future would be erased, time travel would not exist, and he could not, physically, return to alter his universe.  Similarly, without the invention of human time travel, and its subsequent deleterious effect on the human psyche, he would have no cause to return to 1997 even if he could.

Which must mean that he doesn’t un-write his own written past so much as he creates a new-branching off point and new universe (as is also the case in J.J. Abrams’ interpretation of Star Trek).  Isn’t that right?  Time travel, this episode suggests, creates new universes, but doesn’t destroy old ones.

Mulder and Scully largely play catch-up throughout this episode, and it is wonderful to see them grappling with a mystery beyond the monster-of-the-week formula, or even a new extension of the Mytharc.  This episode reminds me just how elastic the series format remains, and that it generously and flexibly permits one-off shows like “Synchronity,” which delve into matters of hard science fiction.  Watching “Synchrony” again today, I was reminded of Primer (2004) one of the best, smartest science-fiction movies of last-decade.  “Synchronicity” explores some of the same territory, and explores it ably.

Also, I should note that in a wonderful bit of series continuity, Mulder points out to his debating partner that she herself wrote a scholarly dissertation about time travel and concluded that it was possible.  This point gives Scully some pause in her skepticism, and is a nice call-back to the pilot episode. 

Next Week: “Small Potatoes.”