Case 04, File 19: Synchrony

AKA: This Villain Is A Dumb Name Away From Being A Batman Villain

One of the reasons I wanted to do this project was to interrogate my own opinions, something I do a lot. The X-Files is my favorite show, yes, and that is very unlikely to change, but I wanted to examine that feeling. What is it about The X-Files that I love, what episodes speak the most to me and, perhaps just as importantly, what episodes don't work for me and why. And while the answer to that question is usually pretty straightforward, sometimes it can be more complex.

Synchrony opens up with a pair of guys at MIT arguing about something before an old guy runs up to them and tells them that one of them is going to get hit by a bus and die in 2 minutes. The old guy gets hauled off by campus security, and the guy he warned went on to indeed get hit by a bus. But the other guy (named Jason, by the by) is accused of pushing him in front of the bus. Oh and also the campus security guard who arrested the old guy turns up frozen. That's weird.

So Mulder and Scully are called in and Mulder questions Jason who says that he was trying to save the other guy but also admits he was about to go public with evidence that Jason was falsifying data. Meanwhile, a Japanese scientist named Yonechi checks into a hotel but is intercepted by the old guy who tells him he's going to invent some cool thing in the future and then immediately freezes him. Still weird.

Mulder and Scully go to see Jason's girlfriend, Lisa, about a substance they found in Yonechi's wound and she confirms that it's the substance Jason is working on but that it's years away from being made. She also suggests a method to unfreeze Yonechi, which seems to go well, as he unfreezes, but then it goes too far in the other direction and he catches on fire and dies. Whoops. Later, on the bus, the old man follows Lisa and tells her he came there to kill her, but finds himself unable to do it.

"You have to believe me! Duchovny is going to leave the show and it'll get boring! They're going to kill the Lone Gunmen!"

Mulder and Scully get a tip about the hotel where the old man is staying. He's not there, but they find a faded photo of Jason, Lisa and Yonechi together, which tips Mulder on to what's going on: The old man is Jason from the future, come back to stop his own research. Dun dun dun! Lisa comes to the same conclusion and goes to see Old Jason, and he tells her about how she'll create tech that will make time travel possible and then freezes her. It's how he solves all his problems.

Scully tries to unfreeze Lisa, hoping that they can fix the "Catching on fire" problem from before, while Old Jason heads to Young Jason's lab to erase all his work. Young Jason confronts Old Jason about why he's doing this and how to save Lisa, and Old Jason gives him an oblique answer about how the world has no hope? I dunno. Anyhoo, Lisa gets saved, but Old Jason grabs Young Jason and they bot burn, and the episode ends with Young Jason's assistant finding the scraps of his research.

Synchony is an episode that has never really worked for me, and I'm not totally sure why. It seems like it should be the sort of thing that would really appeal to me, I like Time Travel narratives (random shout out to the movie 12 Monkeys cause it's awesome) but whenever I ran into Synchrony there was always a weary resignation...including this time. So let's knuckle down and figure out why.

"Hey Scully, what killed the dinosaurs?"
"Mulder, please-"
"The Ice Age!"

My initial instinct is to blame the character work, which is one of the weaker parts of the episode. The X-Files is remarkably good at creating good, memorable characters, but the characters in this one don't strike me as memorable at all. It divides its time too much between the three episode leads (Jason, Old Jason and Lisa) that none of them make much of an impression. They show up when the plot needs them and disappear as soon as they're done until the next time the plot needs them, aside from one mostly expository scene near the end.

Maybe this would work better if he had a better grip on anyone's motivation, but we don't. Old Jason has, theoretically, the most interesting motivation, but it never gets explored. The closest we get is a blowoff line in the climax about how the future is a world without hope, but we never get more than that, and by that point I'm usually pretty checked out. Jason's motivation is too couched in the science jargon and MIT politics the episode fires at us from a T-Shirt cannon and Lisa doesn't really have motivation, she's just kind of there. We found out early on that Jason is lying for her, but like the rest of the episode, it's never explored.

I would guess that all of this is a casualty of the desire to keep the twist involving Old Jason a secret, as we can't spend too much time exploring him as a character. There are other issues with the script, such as the fact that Mulder and Scully don't actually seem to do much. They wander around just sort of bumping into the plot occasionally, but it seems that their only actual accomplishment is keeping Lisa alive through her freezing, which isn't nothing, but also comes in the final scene, so it's hard to feel like they were involved.

"I have to delete the Pensky File before George Costanza gets fired!"

It's a shame, because there does seem to be some potential in the episode. The scene where they unfreeze Yonechi is really well put together and the concept behind it is solid, but the episode never gets enough of a grip on its story and characters to put together a compelling episode of television and its pacing is too sedate for us to get caught up in energy of it. In the end, I spent this review and this watch the way I have every watch of this episode; Wondering when it's over so I can get to Small Potatoes.

Case Notes:

• Out of context, it's kind of dumb, but once you know the episode, the opening shot of the old guy running down the sidewalk with the clock dominating half the shot is kinda neat.
• Look, I'm not a superstitious kind of guy, but if an old guy came out of nowhere and told me I was gonna get hit by a bus at 11:46, I might avoid roads until 11:50, just to be safe.
• The cold open is pretty effective overall, setting up the mystery also being a solid little sequence.
• I like Mulder building the suspense to the reveal that the campus security officer is frozen solid.
• I dunno why they revealed the campus security officer was drinking on duty, except to set up Mulder's drinking and driving joke. Maybe it's relevant later, I don't remember this episode too well.
• I'd forgotten how much of this episode is devoted to the internal politics of who gets which grant.
• The scene with Yonneichi getting frozen doesn't work for me, and I've never been able to determine why. If I had to guess, I think it's a little too slow paced and we don't know enough about Old Jason's motivation to get emotionally involved.
• Honestly, so much of this episode is just throwing technobabble at me, and while it's all interesting, I don't understand it enough to get involved or know if it's accurate.
• The scene where Yonneichi goes from being frozen solid to on fire is easily the best in the episode. I don't totally get why it happened, but it's a freaky scene.
• There's a lot of pathos, conceptually, in Old Jason's story but the episode is too interested in the twist to explore it. I honestly would have moved the twist to the scene where Lisa confronts him and then spent some time with him as a character.
• Honestly so much of this episode rolls off me. Like, the stuff with Jason's grant is supposed to be interesting but I end up not caring because Lucas and Lisa are such flat characters.
• Mulder hops from a photograph directly to time travel and immediately susses out Old Jason's motivation. He's right of course, but jeez episode, let us take the journey.
• Mulder quotes Scully's graduate thesis from the Pilot back at her. That's some deep lore X-Files, and also kind of cute that he remembers it.
• Lisa follows Old Jason back to his hotel room because she needs to know how time travel works, and gets frozen for it, which feels like a Price of Knowledge metaphor.
• I will never get tired of Mulder's habit of chucking his theories at people.
• Mulder and Jason discuss why Old Jason wants to stop time travel and I would very much like to know the answer to that. The explanation he eventually gives is very unsatisfying.
• The building has fingerprint scanners for entry because otherwise Old Jason couldn't sneak in.
• Mulder asks the research assistant to pull up some of Jason's files and he just does it. I guess the assistant is underpaid enough to not care.
• The Old Man's body just disappeared, which I take it means that Young Jason dying stops Old Jason from ever existing? Is that a Time Paradox?
• As always, these reviews are supported by my Patreon, so check it out if you'd like me to devote more time to them.

Current Celebrity Watch:

Old Jason was played by Michael Fairman, a veteran actor who's TV appearances go back to recurring role on Cagney and Lacey. More recently he played Mr. Pensky (of the Pensky File) in Seinfeld and also an important role in Mulholland Drive, which is an excellent film.