The X-Files: "Synchrony" / Millennium: "Powers, Principalities, Thrones, And Dominions"

"Synchrony"

In Which Fighting The Future Proves Far More Difficult Than Anyone Had Suspected.

The X-Files is an awfully cold show. If you remember anything about "Synchrony," I have to ask you to ignore that pun. I don't mean this as a joke. There's an undeniable soulfulness to the show in its best moments, and it can often be deeply moving, but even at its most heartfelt and compassion, a certain icy detachment remains. Take "Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose," probably my favorite episode, and one that's shot through with mordant compassion. I tear up a bit by the end of that episode, and the final moments are powerful and heart-wrenching. And yet even then, it's a step removed from a more intimate genre show like, say, Lost (whose success was always as much about its "heart on its sleeve" aesthetic as it was about the mythology) or Buffy, because in some ways, this is a series fundamentally concerned with the idea of detachment. Mulder and Scully observe events, they occasionally get involved with them, but they always leave after the credits. We watch people suffer, and we temporarily care about them, but few of them stand out in our memories once we've moved on. When our heroes themselves get sucked into the storyline, whether it's Mulder's hunt for his sister or Scully's cancer, it's a shock; they are our surrogates, and we take it on faith that as bleak as things get, they'll be able to get free as easily as we do. But the shock fades. When Mulder and Scully become as much a part of what's happening as any random shmuck, instead of deepening my investment in the show, I find myself pulling back a little further. Someone has to take proper notes on all of this, after all.

If all of this sounds a little ridiculous, well, it's Saturday morning, and I have a tendency to write fairly ridiculous sentences on Saturday mornings. I'm trying to explain why "Synchrony," which has all the pieces of my favorite kind of episode, doesn't really work as well as it should, and I think that coldness is a big part of it. I don't mean literal coldness, of course; the frozen bodies that dot the landscape like tragic snowmen here are a fine visual, and the idea that they aren't exactly dead after all is a decent twist, despite the problems it raises plot-wise. I mean that detachment I'm trying (inadequately) to describe above, that chilly, one-step-back-from-tragedy feeling that views characters as less than people but slightly more than insects. I'm not sure exactly where it comes from, although I suspect it has something to do with Chris Carter's failings as a writer; he's great at exploiting undercurrents of paranoia, at grabbing the darker side of the cultural zeitgeist, but he seems to find basic human connection difficult, if not impossible, to effectively convey. All those fevered word jumble monologues that bracket so many episodes of the show are weirdly compelling, but there's something hollow in them as well. Simple, direct statements seem to make him nervous.

And time travel episodes need something simple and direct in them to work, because time travel stories at their best have to be grounded in regret. If alien conspiracies are fundamentally about our fear of what we don't know, time travel is about the tragedy of what we missed, of what we know now that, if we'd only known then, might have changed everything. They need a sense of stakes beyond vague portents of doom. Take "White Tulip" from Fringe. For all the structural trickery and body horror, that is, at heart, a story about loss. Or "The Constant" from Lost, which is about needing to find the one person in the world who you can hold onto. Hell, even Back to the Future gets more mileage from Marty's struggle to connect with his dad than it does out of the flux capacitor. The science in "Synchrony" plays out mostly in the background; we hear about fantastic compounds and that creepy pen-like injector that turns people into popsicles, but that's all window-dressing. And that's fine, because time travel doesn't need to be about the means. It needs to be about the ends, and, unfortunately, that's where this story sort of falls apart.

All right, the basic plot: Jason and Lisa are in love, and they are scientists, which means no good can come of this. The two are working together to create a freezing compound, but they're still years away from perfecting it. One day, an old man shows up, and life gets complicated. The old man is actually Jason, and he's traveled back in time from a future where Lisa successfully used the freezing compound to do something with tachyons and create practical time travel. This was apparently a terrible discovery. (Anyone surprised by this? Given what we've seen of the government's willingness to murder indiscriminately and betray the human race for the sake of expedience, does anybody really think it'd be a good idea if they got the ability to literally edit reality?) Old Jason doesn't give too many details, but he does describe a world "without history," which would put a lot of pipe-smoking professors out of work, and no one wants that. So Old Jason traveled back to the "present" to try and stop the compound from ever being perfected. He fails to save someone who might've exposed the technical flaws in Jason and Lisa's work, then he kills some people, and, after a lot of pained looks, tries to kill Lisa. In the end, he sacrifices himself to murder his younger self, but it doesn't change much.

This should be fascinating. I have a soft spot for time travel stories; I think it's because, on top of everything else, they're very much stories about writers, except we have writers who are working with actual events, as opposed to fiddling with words. But "Synchrony" never really works, because, outside of Mulder and Scully, I find it hard to give a damn about any of these people. Jason's younger self is the cliched arrogant academic, and he spends most of the episode in jail. Lisa, who I think is supposed to come across as the "real" villain of the story (in addition to eventually perfecting the time travel that causes all the trouble, she also falsified some research when test results weren't conforming to her expectations. Women, y'know?), is mostly just a very odd looking actress, and while old Jason certainly does his best to sell all of this, he isn't given enough to work with. Not to mention the random Asian doctor who dies not one but two horrible deaths. There's pathos here. Old Jason clearly loves Lisa, even though he knows killing her is probably the only way he can accomplish his goals. But while I can appreciate this conceptually, there's nothing all that moving or upsetting about it. It's just a series of variables.

Unfortunately, this just means I spent too much time trying to figure out how any of this makes sense from a plot perspective and failing. Old Jason's actions are easy enough to follow, but there's never any sense that he'll actually succeed. While time travel stories often work off this principle (one of the reasons I loved "White Tulip" so much is that it managed to both stay true to "Whatever happened, happened" and also, well, I won't spoil it), Old Jason seems to be going out of his way to fail. Like, I understand he needs the successful freezing agent to survive the trip back in time. At least, I think I understand it, since the episode never bothers to work out exactly how he's doing what he did, but I'll accept that he needs the injections. But why, if the whole point of this was to prevent that compound from ever being invented, does he keep using it as a murder weapon? He kills a campus security officer with the stuff, he kills the Asian doctor, and he tries to kill Lisa. Did it never occur to him that leaving samples of the compound lying around might not be the best way to erase it from history? And that's before Lisa reveals she thinks she can save someone who's been frozen. If the old guy had just shot her in the head, he would've saved himself a lot of time.

Plus, there's the fact that if time travel ever really was invented and if it became as pervasive in the future, you'd think the present would be a lot more screwed up than it actually is. Although maybe that's why all these crazy conspiracies are able to run for so long. Maybe somebody fifty years down the line is pulling the strings. (Although, if this was true, Mulder should be very, very dead.) I'm sure there are ways to explain this, but that's not the real problem here; if "Synchrony" had its emotional core in place, these questions would be beside the point. As it is, because Jason and Lisa and Old Jason are never more than concepts, we're left to focus on the details, and those details can't handle the strain. Mulder teases Scully a few times in the episode about a paper she did as student about time travel, and near the end of the episode, he quotes that paper in one of the show's most deterministic moments ever: Despite the possibilities of infinite universes, each individual universe can only ever arrive at one outcome. And really, that's the truth of all stories. No matter what happens, there's really only one ending for everybody. The trick is to make the journey worthwhile, and "Synchrony" never quite manages it.