Time travel is a notoriously messy subject to bring up in fiction, and J.K. If writing about time travel is such a mess, why bother? As much as those reshuffled Ron-Hermione relationships provide fodder for fanfic writers, everyone should be happily settled in the one central timeline by the end of the play. Going by that admittedly shaky rule, it seems that each successive trip to the past rewrites history, so the alternate futures we see in Cursed Child would simply cease to exist once Albus and Scorpius set things right. That might not be satisfying, but hey, magic! The universe can stitch discrepancies into a single timeline, but big alterations make it change course. To the extent that Cursed Child explains itself, it does give one bit of new time-travel info: Scorpius mentions “Professor Croaker’s law - the furthest someone can go back in time without the possibility of serious harm to the traveler or time itself is five hours.” Perhaps, after that point, the rules of time travel shift. In that book, Hermione mentions that “Professor McGonagall told me what awful things have happened when wizards have meddled with time … Loads of them ended up killing their past or future selves by mistake!” In a post on Pottermore ( here’s a screenshot for those without accounts), Rowling describes one witch who got stuck in 1402, and changed the course of the lives of those she met so dramatically that “no fewer than twenty-five of their descendants vanished in the present, having been ‘un-born.’”
Rowling wrote a great example of single-loop time travel in Azkaban, her descriptions of how time travel works in the Potter world are less consistent. So if Cursed Child changes how time travel works, is it not Harry Potter canon? If Cursed Child operated according to the same principle, then Albus and Scorpius’s meddling would be incorporated into the central timeline: They would’ve already meddled in the Triwizard Tournament, and Cedric would’ve already died anyway - sorry, Robert Pattinson. After time-traveling, Harry realizes that he is that wizard, and casts the patronus himself. Before Harry goes back, for instance, a mysterious wizard casts a patronus to save him from some dementors. This all happens in a single loop: Harry and Hermione don’t alter the future so much as ensure that the past all goes in the right order.
Still, at the end of the book, Hermione breaks the rules, going back in time to save Sirius Black and Buckbeak. Consider Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban: Hermione’s Time-Turner only allows her to go back in time for a few hours, and she only uses it to take more classes. In trying to fix that by traveling back to the second stage of the tournament and embarrassing Cedric, they create an even worse future where Voldemort wins.īy depicting this kind of time travel, Cursed Child deviates from the model used in the Potter books, where time travel operates within a closed loop instead of generating alternate timelines. When they disarm Cedric during the tournament, they also rejigger Ron and Hermione’s romantic history, making Ron end up with Padma Patil and erasing poor Rose Granger-Weasley from existence. Much in the style of Back to the Future, Albus and Scorpius’s actions in the past radically alter the future. In the play, our main travelers are Albus Potter and Scorpius Malfoy, who jump back in time to the Triwizard Tournament in order to save Cedric Diggory from his untimely death, which happened near the end of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. In the books, it all occurs in a single loop. It seems we’re dealing with two different theories of time travel: In the play, time travel creates alternate futures. And, as so often happens when time travel is involved, inconsistencies and questions have resulted. There’s a lot to discuss: Scorpius and Albus’s friendship, the fact that nearly every Potter adult works for the government (or runs a prank store), and the greatness of the Trolley Witch.īut above all, there is Cursed Child’s persistent use of time travel, thanks to the use of an uber-powerful Time-Turner (or pair of Time-Turners, technically) that can carry people years back in time. Now that the script of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child has been loosed upon the world, we can talk all we want about the mechanics of the new Potter play.
Spoilers ahead for those who haven’ t finished Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.
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