Hey, a time travel episode. With lots and lots of apparent paradoxes, except that they are explained by, of all things, Scully's graduate thesis that she wrote when she was 23.
'Synchrony' has a lot of good points, but maybe made the plot a little too obvious at times.
I pretty much called the old man being Jason near the beginning of the episode. I've seen enough time travel stories that even before we knew there was time travel involved, it seemed like the place for them to go.
There are plenty of stories, too, about people running into prophecies in ways they don't expect. So when the bus driver said it looked like Jason pushed Lucas into the street, I thought they were going with a theme of not trying to avoid the future, since that might involve creating that future. It's better not to know the future - then we can maintain our free will, or at least the illusion of it even if the universe happens to be deterministic on a subatomic level.
Thankfully, 23-year-old Scully is able to explain that one away, too. And the explanation is a neat one that has come up in numerous science fiction stories, and again, forms the very basis for much of the plot of the middle three seasons of Fringe: Parallel universes.
Every choice we make creates a new branch. Only it's not really every choice so much as every possible arrangement of subatomic particles at any given time in the entire universe that forms a separate branch, so given the sheer size of the universe, there are an extraordinarily large number of universes that are, from our perspective on earth, exactly identical. As of the smallest possible unit of time during which the universe's state could change immediately following the big bang, there are an extraordinarily large number of nearly identical universes. And some that are drastically different.
In the universe that this episode takes place in, the bus metaphor is actually a lot more relevant than we may have initially thought. Because the old man, future Jason, has introduced the chemical compound that allows the kind of freezing of cells needed to travel through time, it is found by Mulder and Scully and shown to Lisa, who understands the science. Naturally, this breakthrough is exactly what she needs to discover the key to time travel.
And Jason failed. Time travel will be discovered anyway, even if the timelines diverge at the point of his death in the present at the hands of his future self. Really, Scully's theory about multiple universes is the only way to explain this without there being a lot of paradoxes, and even then it's not perfect.
I mean, it's the classic time travel paradox, in fact. You go back in time and kill your past self. It's perhaps not as elegant as going back and preventing your parents from meeting or something, but it's certainly simple. However, if all it does is create a new branch in the timeline, it implies that the person from the future is not actually there from the same timeline at all, but travelling from a different universe.
The other classic time travel paradox that shows up here is, of course, the idea of something being invented because it always existed. In this case, the chemical compound for freezing is never actually invented. It's brought to Lisa from the future, creating a closed loop in which it is constantly returned from the future back to her in 1997.
It's not unlike the Time Turner in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. By going back in time, Harry and Hermione were simply participating in events that had already happened. That is, the only way they could go back and interact with the past was that they already had.
Which is Scully's entire point in her thesis - the future cannot be changed.
Personally, I find it fascinating, and I wish they'd developed this more, that Mulder read Scully's thesis. He really is interested in what she has to say, even if he's sometimes dismissive of her skepticism otherwise.
Because I can't think of anything more profound to say, I'll end with this thought, courtesy of They Might Be Giants, the final verses of their 2011 song, 2082, regarding meeting your past or future self:
You must honor and respect the older fellow
Even as you suffocate him with his pillow
Though you're strong
He was wise
There is much you can learn from the sage
And though you'll leave and travel back to your own age
You will meet again, you two
In 2082
What was the look he gave intended to convey?
Was there something else he was trying to say?
It will all be revealed to you
In 2082
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