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Implausible Synchrony

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In Real Life, if you take two clocks at random the chances that they show the exact same time are fairly low unless someone's taking care of keeping them in sync.

In fiction, however, every clock and/or watch shows the exact same time of day. Always. Sometimes even ones in different time zones. All miserable cheapo wristwatches and all cell phones and street clocks run in harmonious synchrony with the precision of an atomic clock. Sometimes used for dramatic effect by highlighting the improbable, often significant timing of an event, or the fact that two remote, seemingly unrelated events happened at the same time.

Normally fueled by Conservation of Detail (every detail is important. If it didn't matter, you wouldn't tell us). Super-Trope of Time Zones Do Not Exist (time of day is the same in multiple far-apart places when it should logically be zoned) and Sister Trope of Universal Universe Time (the rest of the universe follows Earth's time system). Compare Right on the Tick (the association of important plot events with a specific time). Contrast Clock Discrepancy (the time of an event doesn't happen at the time it was said). Might be the result of Clock Tampering (changing a clock's time for an ulterior motive). Nothing to do with Mirror Routines or Fearful Symmetry.


Examples:

Anime & Manga

  • Case Closed: Exaggerated and invoked. One arc takes place in a house with hundreds of clocks, all of which show the exact same time. The owner of the house keeps a team of clock repairmen on call 24/7 to ensure that this is the case. One of her previous employees died because she made the man climb the outside of the clock tower to fix the clock there in the rain, causing him to fall. This is why she gets murdered.

Comic Books

  • Cuori Grassi: Subverted for the sake of a joke. The protagonist—an overweight teenager—tries to psych himself up for a diet and tells his friends to take note of the time because it'll go down in history.
    Friend #1: My watch says it's five o'clock.
    Friend #2: Mine says four-thirty.
    Friend #3: Mine's stopped.
    Rocco: This is not a good start.
  • Morning Glories: Hunter's ability tampers with his perception of time displayed in clocks, which results in this trope. Every clock he sees reads it's 8:13 down to the second.

Comic Strips

  • The Far Side: A policeman wonders why are all the clocks reading the same time; it's because they just happened to stop at the exact same time.
  • FoxTrot: The Train Problem that Jason solves includes him assuming all the clocks are accurate, ignoring any relativistic effects.

Fan Works

  • Lilly Pilgrim Vs Their World: All clocks at the Pilgrim household are set exactly 4 minutes forward; no discrepancies in their malfunctioning.

Films — Live-Action

  • Animal House: Subverted As the Alphas prepare their showdown, each looks at his watch (with all watches being synchronized except for Bluto's), which shows some completely random time. Could be justified if (other than Bluto) they deliberately synched them ahead of time.
  • Back to the Future: Invoked in the opening scene. Doc's house is full of hundreds of different alarm clocks that he has painstakingly synchronized to all go off exactly 20 minutes late. Every single one of them.
  • Die Hard 2: Invoked as the bad guys—Garber, Miller, and Cochrane—carefully synchronize their watches before splitting up to put their Evil Plan into action.
  • Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban: In the book's time-turner scene, Dumbledore tells Hermione that it's five minutes to midnight. In the movie, this is replaced as visual cues in the two clocks present—the one on the hospital room's wall and the giant one integrated into the tower. Just a few moments after Dumbledore exits the room, as Hermione loops the time-turner's chain around her and Harry's necks, the second clock starts to chime, indicating it's midnight. That same time is displayed in the wall clock. While it could be magic that keeps them in sync, it's never confirmed.
  • High Noon: Justified. A train arrives in Hadleyville at noon on a routine basis, therefore allowing all the clocks in town to be synchronized by a single point.

Literature

  • Thief of Time:
    • Clockmaker's Guild member Jeremy Clockson is able to keep every single clock in his shop synchronized almost perfectly, even ones that rely on animals or plants to operate. He's so obsessed with keeping perfect time that he beat another guild member (possibly to death) for deliberately keeping his pocket watch a few minutes fast. As it eventually turns out, his ability is due to his being one of the two son (yes, that is written correctly) of Time herself.
    • The rest of the city of Ankh-Morpork averts this; the bells that ring every hour are never in sync. It takes a while for all of the bells to settle down.

Live-Action TV

  • CSI-verse:
    • CSI: NY: The 333 killer will time certain events to happen exactly at 3:33, and he can rest assured that's precisely the time Mac's clock will be showing.
    • NCIS: The Cyber Vid character gives the time of his victims' deaths and then broadcasts the murder over the internet. He lists the time of death as five minutes to midnight. Two clocks are shown when the victim dies, and they both show the precise time, despite the fact that the poison that kills him was administered hours ago. This is justified because both clocks are at the Naval Yard. Military bases take care of keeping their clocks in sync with a standard, especially when the time is very relevant to an ongoing investigation. And, because the killer mostly leaves the clue for Gibbs, he would have operated according to that time. The perfect timing of the poison is a completely different trope, of course.
  • Doctor Who: In "The Pyramid at the End of the World", all clocks and watches, whether analog or digital, are set to the Doomsday Clock in perfect synchrony.

Video Games

  • The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask: All of the clocks in the game are synced to the In-Universe Game Clock, and as such, all of them display the exact same time. This is, however, justified in-universe by the fact that the game is set in and around a place called Clock Town. If there's anything you'd expect them to have down to a science, it would be timekeeping.
  • Hitman (2016): Invoked. The Obsessively Organized militia leader Sean Rose's OCD compulsions manifest, amongst other habits, as synchronizing all his clocks to his watch.

Western Animation

  • Batman: The Animated Series: In "The Clock King", before his Start of Darkness, efficiency expert Temple Fugate has four watches—a chain pocketwatch, and a wristwatch, and in his office, he has a grandfather clock and another clock at his desk. Being as obsessed with time as he is, it's not that implausible that they have the same time.

Real Life

  • The increase in internet and cellular-connected devices is leading to most of them always showing the same (correct) time, as many of them periodically connect to, and adjust their own clocks by, atomic clocks that provide time accurate to less than a second. GPS devices also connect with the GPS satellites which each have an atomic clock on board (which is necessary for their function). Therefore making it something of a Broken Trope.

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