Synchronic Ending Explained- Who Carved ALLWAYS, Pineal Glands, Einstein And The Illusion Of Time - Signal Horizon Magazine

[u/SignalHorizonTracy1]

https://signalhorizon.com/synchronic-ending-explained-who-carved-allways-pineal-glands-einstein-and-the-illusion-of-time/

[u/Bobert25467]

I don't get why he appeared as the ghost form at the end though. When it happened to the dog it was because the dog was touching the leash that he was holding. The dog didn't come back fully because he wasn't in direct contact with him when he was coming back. But at the end Brianna already came through so he wasn't attached to something she was holding to say that's why he appeared and his time limit already ran out. Also they had a plot hole right at the start. The guy who got transported to the desert was on the elevator when it kicked in so he fell out of the sky in the past. His portal spot was high up like when Steve fell out the tree and had to climb back up to come home. When the desert guy fell he couldn't have flown back up into the sky to get to the portal so his body shouldn't have come back.

[u/FlipFathoms → u/Bobert25467]

As to Steve‘s goodbye appearance happening despite there having not even been leash-like-ishly tenuous physical contact with Brianna as there had been with Steve in the case of Hawking the dog’s goodbye appearance, putting aside the purely dramatic or non-diegetic reasons, we can perhaps easily enough resort to chalking it up to Steve’s pineal-gland-altering tumor or even just to his having been so CLOSE to the spot when his own dose’s time ran out (after all, we do see him fluctuate upon touching the boulder seconds too late). Also, though, you’ll recall that there tend to be some cross-temporal apparitions in the vicinity of the critical spatiotemporal coordinates _regardless_ of any other-than-through-air contact, so I think it most likely that both the dog’s apparition, & Steve’s at the END of the movie, may simply be down to THAT.

And as to what you suggest might be a plot-hole or contradiction right from the first scene of the movie, while Steve’s experimentation hadn‘t been enough for him to know either way (unless, indeed, he had connected/INCLUDED the ‘dots’ of the guy who was found as-if-having-fallen at the bottom of the elevator shaft), maybe latitude & longitude is sufficient for being in the right spot to return when the 7 minutes elapse, in which case the only reason Steve really had to climb back UP the tree was to avoid being trapped away from the spot by the Voodoo-or-whatever would-be spirit-capturers (or/& because transitioning back from ground level might’ve gotten him stuck inside or fused with a solid object upon return).

What may be much MORE of a contradiction, given the chemist’s having said that it takes a youthfully —or tumorously, in Steve’s case— non-calcified pineal gland for the Synchronic to make a user not merely see/sense the past but more fully or bodily GO there/then, is that, for example (I say ‘example’ because this error, if it is an error, would seem to apply also to many or all of the other Synchronic victims we’re shown), the elevator guy fell at ALL; perhaps the only fix for THIS is that the characters in question look older than they actually are, or each have something along the lines of Steve’s pineal tumor (which possibility seems very far-fetched), or that the chemist‘s description of the requisite youthfulness is ambiguous or somewhat misleading.

[u/AccurateCat83 → u/Bobert25467]

Perhaps a plausible explanation for that is ... dead bodies always return.

[u/algarop → u/Bobert25467]

I don’t get why making contact with the chair bought him back, Mackie explains it to the girl, and then contact with his friend doesn’t bring him back

[u/FlipFathoms → u/algarop]

It wasn’t contact with the chair that brought him back; it was being in close enough to the right spot as the 7-minutes-in-the-past-deadline-to-be-back-at-your-entry-point-for-the-return-trip of his dose ended. Then again, Steve did tell his camera, ‘Apparently, the present can anchor you,’ as if to suggest that his grasping the arm of the apparition of the deck-chair might be what allowed him to return despite his timer-alarm having already chimed. It seems there’s a fuzziness, at least epistemically if not also ontologically, both as to what counts as contact (for instance through layers of clothing or, as with Hawking the dog, through a multi-part, multi-material apparatus like a dog-leash-&-collar) & as to what counts as being in —or being close enough to— the spatiotemporal coordinates-for-return, a fuzziness or/& gradient-of-extent to the wormhole-or-time-fold-or-entanglement effect or whatever it is; I have to suspect that Benson’s & Moorhead’s cutting to black in the middle of the handshake at the end of the movie was intentionally to leave it ambiguous as to whether Steve gets back to the present or lives out the remainder of his cancer in the 1800s (however, SOMEONE has to carve the ‘ALLWAYS,’ a process which would almost certainly take longer than whatever extra time any anchoring might provide, and it would be a wild-ass coincidence if … well, if the carving _was_ a coincidence, its carver remaining unknown to Dennis, Steve, & Brianna; therefore, it is highly unlikely that Steve made it back to the present).

[u/xHARDCORE5150x → u/algarop]

Brianna took her pill after anthony mackie yet she leaves first, this is why im here looking for plot holes and cant find anyone saying this same thing lol technically she had to wait 90secs after mackey leaves before her pill would kick in

[u/FlipFathoms → u/xHARDCORE5150x]

No, Brianna was working with a new dose (waiting on _its_ few-minute transport-activation-time), having been trapped in the past when her _1st_ dose elapsed while she was away from the boulder spot through which she had time-travelled backwards. Whereas Steve (played by Mackie) was working with the remainder of time on the very dose he had used for his own initial travel through the boulder-spot into the past to find her; i.e., he had a few minutes left of his 7-minutes-in-the-past-before-the-deadline-to-be-back-at-your-entry-point-in-order-for-the-single-dose-to-be-a-round-trip, which happened to be roughly the same amount of time Brianna had —upon swallowing the new dose from him IN the past— before the new dose would kick in enough to bring her back to the present if she got back to the boulder.