HBO's Time Traveler's Wife Admits The Worst Thing About The Book & Movie
This article contains spoilers for The Time Traveler's Wife episode 1.
The Time Traveler's Wife episode 1 openly acknowledges the problem with its own story — but can't do anything to fix it. Time travel serves as the primary plot device for countless science-fictions, but rarely does it inspire a romance. Audrey Niffenegger's debut novel The Time Traveler's Wife, published in 2003, is one of the exceptions; so influential it inspired Doctor Who showrunner Steven Moffat to create the Doctor's wife River Song, led to a 2009 film adaptation starring Eric Bana and Rachel McAdams, and has now become an HBO TV show written and produced by Moffat himself.
There's a sense in which The Time Traveler's Wife cannot really be considered a love story, however. Neither two of its main characters possess any sense of agency at all, simply because of the time travel. Clare met a future version of Henry when she was just a child, and she formed herself around this relationship, knowing for most of her life this was the man she was destined to marry. Henry, in contrast, first meets Clare when he is 28 years old; she bursts into the scene like a thunderbolt, insisting she is his future wife, and from that moment on she begins the process of transforming him into the Henry she already knows he will be.
Related: The Time Traveler's Wife Cast, Character, & Changes Guide
It's a fascinating concept, but there are actually some rather troubling implications. Steven Moffat's The Time Traveler's Wife engages with these directly, albeit in a rather tongue-in-cheek fashion. This is because, unfortunately, the problems lie at the very heart of the story. The Time Traveler's Wife episode 1 shows both first encounters — including one in which an adult
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