The story of The Time Traveler’s Wife has been a fabric for much of writer Steven Moffat’s work. We saw its influence over his era as the showrunner of Doctor Who, and now that he’s adapted the Audrey Niffenegger book into a series for HBO, it’s clearly a love letter to the story as a whole. The series stars Rose Leslie as Clare, the title character, and Theo James as Henry, a man with a genetic condition that causes him to time travel unpredictably, in the story of love and loss and understanding why all that pain is worth it in the end.
The story has always had some problematic aspects to it, given that Henry meets Clare when she’s six years old and the two are destined to be in love with each other (and the little thing about Henry time traveling and ending up places completely naked), but what’s great about the HBO series is that it’s humorous and a love story at its core, even if it does fail a bit at trying to fix the more problematic side of things.
Not to spoil the show (or the novel, for that matter), but let’s talk a bit about the core themes of The Time Traveler’s Wife that fans are already familiar with going in. If you’ve missed the story until now and want to go in knowing nothing, turn back now.
A story of loss
At its heart, the story is about Henry coping with his life of losing things he wants—time, primarily, because even if he is a time traveler and therefore always stuck in his own time loop, never ending, he is left with a life of barely being able to unpack even what he did lose. One of the key parts of Henry’s story is the death of his mother in a car accident that he time travels out of, to safety, and through his life, he will constantly travel back to this moment at different ages.
A story of love
Henry and Clare eventually meet both of their “presents” when Clare is 20 years old and Henry is 28 years old. And despite the fact that they both know that it will end in pain, given what each of their timelines have led to, both Clare and Henry still want to be in a relationship together. They’d both rather feel the pain of losing the other or having been hurt by knowing that they both have loved each other. It’s the same idea of “It’s better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all,” and Clare and Henry are the embodiment of that.
Clare knows from a young age that something bad is going to happen to Henry. She knows that being the “time traveler’s wife” isn’t going to be an easy task. But she does it because she loves him and he continues to go back to their love because, to him, it is worth whatever pain it will cause him. And that’s what makes a story like The Time Traveler’s Wife so fascinating to audiences.
**Spoilers for The Time Traveler’s Wife lie ahead**
Now, the show itself has brilliant performances from Theo James and Rose Leslie as Henry and Clare at different ages, Rose Leslie more than Theo James. As Clare ages from meeting Henry at the age of 6, she goes from Everleigh McDonnell to her pre-teen self, played by Caitlin Shorey. That’s where the complicated and problematic bits of the books sort of get glossed over by the show. In the novel, when Henry and Clare meet for the last time in the clearing by Clare’s house, they have sex for the first time on her 18th birthday. The version of Henry in this instance is much older than Clare, and still, after a fight, when Clare says she wants this, Henry gives in.
They don’t really meet in Henry’s timeline until he’s 28 years old and Clare is 20, but I don’t necessarily think that makes it fine that the two have this weird bond with each other that started when Clare was 6. To the credit of Moffat’s writing and the performances of both James and Leslie, the characters also constantly talk about how it’s weird and how it influenced Clare’s taste in men while also setting Henry’s future in stone because of her.
The show is funny!
One thing that makes this show work is that there are parts I openly laughed out loud at. It’s not funny in the sense that this is a comedy; it’s still a story about a man who is forced to live his life out of order and the woman who wants to be there for him, but it is also just the characters using their humor as a way to deflect from their own pain, and in that comes the reason this show is relatable despite, you know, no one actually knowing what it feels like to just suddenly time travel.
Third time’s the charm?
To me, the show does a great job of telling this story. Maybe that’s due to Moffat’s love of it and how well he handles shows that deal with deeper themes in the midst of science fiction, but I think the HBO series is a lot better than the 2009 Eric Bana and Rachel McAdams movie adaptation (sorry, I love you both). However, I admittedly haven’t read the book—I just know the story—so I can’t compare it there, but regardless of which one more faithfully translates the book, I prefer Moffat’s take.
We won’t see the full story in the first season of HBO’s series, because what I did remember from the movie is not in the show (yet), so we’ll have to hope for a second season, but overall, it’s a new look at a story so many of us know and makes it feel fresh and new. Maybe it helps that the show is set in the present day for Clare and Henry’s “present,” instead of being a period piece inside of a time traveling story. (The original book was set in 2003.)
Even if you don’t know the story of The Time Traveler’s Wife, it’s still a fun watch and one that is woven into Moffat’s other work. And who doesn’t want to see Theo James and Rose Leslie falling in love with each other out of order? The Time Traveler’s Wife premieres on HBO on May 15.
(image: HBO)
