Synchrony (The X Files)

Plot

In Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT cryogenics researchers Jason Nichols (Joseph Fuqua) and Lucas Menand (Jed Rees) become embroiled in an argument as they walk down a city street. They are approached by an old man (Michael Fairman), who warns Menand that he will be run over by a bus at 11:46 pm that evening, but Menand ignores him. After the man is arrested by campus security, his prophecy is proven true when Jason tries, but fails, to save Menand, who is promptly run over by a bus and killed at the exact time (11:46 pm).

Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) investigate the case, learning that Jason was taken into custody after the bus driver told police that he pushed Menand into the path of his vehicle. However, Jason tells authorities that he was trying to save Menand. The security guard who arrested the old man is found frozen to death after exposure to a chemical refrigerant. Mulder interviews Jason, who explains Menand threatened to go public with a claim that Jason had falsified data on a research paper.

The old man kills Dr. Yonechi (Hiro Kanagawa), a Japanese researcher, by pricking him with a metallic stylus, introducing an unknown chemical into his body. The agents approach Nichols' girlfriend and colleague, Lisa Ianelli (Susan Lee Hoffman), who recognizes the chemical compound as a rapid freezing agent that Jason had been engineering for years. However, she claims that the compound has not yet been invented and that if Yonechi was injected with the chemical, he may not be dead. With Lisa's help, Scully and a team of medical personnel successfully resuscitate Yonechi, only for his body temperature to rapidly increase until he bursts into flames. Police receive a tip that the old man is living at a nearby hotel. Inside the old man's room, the agents discover a faded color photograph picturing Jason, Yonechi and Lisa toasting champagne glasses in the cryology lab. Mulder realizes from the picture that the old man is a time traveller who is attempting to alter that future, and that he is none other than Jason Nichols.

Lisa locates the elderly man and confronts him; however, he injects her with the chemical after explaining that Lisa will be responsible for the coming future. Scully successfully resuscitates Lisa. Jason confronts his elderly self in the computer mainframe room at the cryogenic lab, where the old man has erased all of Jason's files from the computer. The old man tells Jason that the success of their research made time travel possible, but also plunged the world into chaos. Jason lunges at the old man, choking him. Wrapping his arms around his younger self, the old man bursts into flames, and the fire consumes them both. Later, Lisa sets to work at the cryonics lab, attempting to reconstruct the chemical compound.

Development

After Howard Gordon and Chris Carter finished their work on "Unrequited", Carter introduced Gordon to David Greenwalt, who had been added to The X-Files producers, and asked the duo to create a script for an upcoming episode. Gordon and Greenwalt got together in Simi Valley and had difficulties in creating a good plot; the one they initially worked with the most, involving a prisoner that gets free by changing his body with another man, was eventually discarded as Gordon felt it was too similar to other episodes written by him. Eventually the duo saw an article in Scientific American about time travel and decided to work with that, following the magazine's reports that, while classical physics does not allow for temporal displacement to happen, quantum physics does allow for the possibility.

Gordon decided that to make "time travel in an X-Files way", the best way was with "a guy that turns out to be you". He therefore added the plot about a regretful scientist trying to stop developments from ever occurring. The scientist's character was inspired by a story Gordon heard about Manhattan Project physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer berating Harry S. Truman on the 1945 atomic bombings of Japan, and the writer wondered "What if Oppenheimer could go back to the past and 'uninvent' the bomb?". Eventually Gordon and Greenwalt found another philosophical question that becomes Jason's motivation to halt his own research—"Life itself is about the unknown and discovering what is in front of us. But if everyone, or maybe some people, knew what would happen, that would create a new set of horrors, and it would need to be stopped". The script took over a week of writing, with sessions of 15 daily hours and the contributions of John Shiban, Frank Spotnitz and Ken Horton. Gordon was still reworking the teleplay the weekend before shooting began in Vancouver, including the removal of two "useless characters" that included a Stephen Hawking-inspired scientist in a wheelchair. David Duchovny declared that a few scenes were created during production "because no one could know if the audience understood what was happening".

Gordon stated that "In the end, I think it worked, but it's getting there that's really difficult." The experience was hard enough for Gordon to consider giving up and not delivering the script at all, and he eventually swore he would never work with time travel again.

Reception

"Synchrony" originally aired on the Fox network on April 13, 1997. This episode earned a Nielsen rating of 11.3, with an 18 share, meaning that roughly 11.3 percent of all television-equipped households, and 18 percent of households watching television, were tuned in to the episode. It was viewed by 18.01 million viewers.

The A.V. Club's Zack Handlen rated the episode a "B-". Handlen considered that while "'Synchrony' has all the pieces of my favorite kind of episode, [it] doesn't really work as well as it should" due to an emotional detachment that made him not care about the scientists and their story, and his finding Old Jason's actions to be illogical. Paula Vitaris from Cinefantastique gave "Synchrony" two out of four stars, considering it a middling episode with some effective moments, but complaining about plot holes, "not particularly compelling" supporting characters, and feeling that time travel "takes away from the reality that is this show's foundation". Robert Shearman and Lars Pearson, in their book Wanting to Believe: A Critical Guide to The X-Files, Millennium & The Lone Gunmen, rated the episode two and a half stars out of five, praising the "high concept that is told without pretension". The two also called the episode "solid and watchable" despite flaws such as the underdevelopment of the script and not fully exploring the "concept with such potential" that is time travel.