Since early childhood, Henry has found himself with a unique talent, or rather a curse in this particular situation: he can jump through time, backwards or forwards, to any place or time he has or will visit at any point during his life. The curse lies in how his power works: he has no control over when – or to when and where – the jumps occur (though he has noticed how they’re more likely to trigger as he experiences intense emotion), and he always arrives stripped of his clothes and nauseous (which evidently leads to awkward circumstances when he suddenly finds himself butt-naked in the middle of a busy street – and makes the series a prime target for a HBO adaptation). After a while, an interval that varies randomly and over which he has no control either, this superpower returns him to his proper time, naked once again.
The premise of the show, and the book it’s based on, is very compelling. Over the years, science-fiction has imagined various alternatives for time travel, one of which being that past, present, and sometime future, are immovable, thus any time traveler can observe events, but not influence them in a way that could cause changes or temporal paradoxes later. This story is largely based on this variant of time travel: Henry can live through his past from a different perspective, even interact with people close to him, but that never alters the outcome of events. The theme goes back further to philosophical debates over free will versus predestination – clearly this story leans heavily into the predetermined camp.
Abstract concepts aside, the movie does an excellent job of interpreting how this ability affects Henry’s life, both emotionally and in the choices he makes. By necessity, he becomes a skilled burglar – when you arrive naked everywhere you would tend to leave moral quandaries aside and just secure clothes and some money as quickly as possible. He gets a job at a library because he reckons few will notice him going missing. When he travels to his childhood, he seeks out his younger self to teach him survival tips for time jumps – a touch of self-fulfilling prophecy here as well.
The most significant impact for the character is his longing for his mother, who dies in a car crash when he was just a young boy – and riding with her in the back seat. In fact, had it not been for his time-jumping talent, he might not have survived the accident either. It’s no surprise that his jumps frequently pull him back to relive the happy moments in his parents’ life – but also the horrific instant of his mother’s death. It’s one of the strongest aspects of the show in my opinion, seeing him struggle with this grief, and yet unable to move on because his talent keeps reviving the hope that he may somehow be able to alter events.
But, as we are being reminded quite inelegantly at some point by the narrator, this story is not about the time traveler, but his wife, or their convoluted relationship. And here things are starting to falter in unpleasant and twisted ways. Due to his uncontrollable time jumps, a mature Henry first meets Clare when she was six years old at her father’s house, and continues to visit her for years until her eighteenth birthday. The young librarian Henry then meets Clare as she starts her studies, at which point she is already well aware that they will marry and quite enamored with his more mature persona, while he has no idea who she is. Their relationship develops as another self-fulfilling prophecy, and we don’t get a clear sense of why these two are together besides: ‘oh, the handsome man from the future told me so when I was a little girl’.
There are a number of issues overlapping here: a partner with an idealized image about the other, trying to mold him into this pattern; both of them fantasizing about past or future versions of their partner – only in this situation both can enact these fantasies as Henry travels backwards and forwards through time, on some level cheating on each other with themselves (!?); and huge lack of consent from both sides: Henry essentially grooms the young Clare, while Clare later conceives a child with a younger, unsuspecting Henry, after her present husband had a vasectomy without consulting her. This might have resulted in worthwhile drama and character development, but it happened on the last episode, and the show wasn’t renewed for a second season, so we’re left solely with the act without any of the payoff.
My core issue with their onscreen relationship is how mundane it feels despite extraordinary circumstances. In other words, if these two people who essentially know that they’re destined to be together are still facing common troubles and unnecessary frictions, what hope is there for the rest of us to sustain happy, fulfilling relationships as people without any certainties about their futures as couples?! From this point of view the show leaves me with a nihilistic feel that is hard to enjoy.
There are various other strange choices throughout the show. Initially it seemed that Henry took great care to hide his ‘condition’ from the wider public, but as we advance through the episodes more and more people are revealed to know about his time traveling, from his father to a former girlfriend to another couple, and… they just accept it!? You would imagine there would be a stronger personal reaction, that the news would leak to the press or the government, who would send some agency to question and study him – but I guess the author just wanted to explore the dynamic of Clare and Henry and glossed over other implications. The friendship with another couple feels flat, unengaged, another instance of people spending time together because they’re expected to instead of having a genuine connection.
Despite my criticism, I would recommend watching the series, if only for the unusual thought experiment. Unfortunately, as I mentioned before, there won’t be a second season – some plot points from the book are hinted at during this season, but never properly developed – and on top of that it has been removed from HBO as part of their merger with Discovery. Let’s hope it will be licensed to another streaming service when HBO’s current management gets their act together eventually.
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