There's something inherently romantic about predestination — that in spite of our best attempts to live our own destiny, heedless of the consequences our actions might have on future versions of ourselves, we'll still be led to the person we have been fated to love. Whether said person enters into our lives for only a short time before leaving altogether or remains to the end is another question entirely, and one among many that get posited in HBO's adaptation of The Time Traveler's Wife, which stars Theo James as the titular man unwittingly tumbling from one place to the next in his personal timeline — often literally — and Rose Leslie as the woman he's inexplicably drawn to at various stages in her more linear life, from wide-eyed adolescence to solemn maturity. Based on the book by Audrey Niffenegger, the series written by Steven Moffat (Doctor Who, Sherlock) and directed by David Nutter (Game of Thrones) retains as much of the bittersweet, thrilling, messy melodrama as its source material, which means it can occasionally veer a little too close to overly saccharine in execution but still remains irresistibly watchable.
One element of Time Traveler's Wife that soundly differentiates it from other similar stories in the genre is the fact that time travel is a genetic trait known as "chrono-displacement disorder" — but the show presents this as much more of a curse than a blessing. Henry DeTamble (James) first discovers his ability as the result of a personal tragedy, with the stress culminating in him traveling only a precious number of minutes back in time. The act of time travel in and of itself is entirely involuntary on his part, with the clothes he happens to be wearing getting left behind whenever he ends up in his past (or, sometimes, in his future) completely naked, like a man being continually reborn. This results in some very awkward and often dangerous predicaments for him, and Henry admits at one point that he's had to resort to some less-than-honorable actions — like stealing clothes, or money — solely to survive until the time comes for him to go back to his present, which also happens beyond his control.
James, by extension, has to bring in a performance for a character rooted in several stages of his life, and certainly pulls off Henry's juvenile, impulsive, incredibly fuckboy tendencies but succeeds even more on-screen when he's playing Henry as an older man — graying, world and time-wearied, and certainly more understanding of his girlfriend and eventual-wife Clare's (Leslie) situation as someone who's fallen in love with him almost against her first instincts. It's not until Henry is significantly older that he travels into the past to encounter a child-aged Clare for the first time, and has several more meetings with her throughout her growth into young adulthood, attempting to hide her real, future significance to him all the while — and when a college-aged Clare finally encounters Henry as his younger, impetuous self when their respective timelines finally sync up, he has absolutely no idea who she is or what she means to him. Not yet, at least.
The non-linear nature of The Time Traveler's Wife's storytelling would have the potential to be more confusing for an audience if not for the guiding footnotes at the bottom of the screen, pulled right from the book, that clue us into Henry and Clare's ages at a particular place in time. This offers more of an overall feeling that each scene serves as a mere snapshot in a life's thread shaped more like a figure-eight than a straight line. Due to Henry's condition, he can fall out of time and back in again anywhere within his own existence — which occasionally leads to some of the show's most hilarious sequences breaking up the drama. More specifically, the time travel in this series only follows a set number of rules, but one of them apparently doesn't include Henry avoiding any other versions of himself that he may encounter, and whenever there are two Henrys together in the same place, the results can vary from humorous to surprising to unexpectedly moving. When it comes to Henry's relationship with Clare, which undoubtedly serves as the emotional linchpin of the series, their dynamic at any given point in time may not be the same as the feelings they have towards one another in their known past or future. In one exchange, Clare decides she's more than a little jealous of her future self for being able to get married to an older, more grounded Henry while she's currently stuck with the younger one who hasn't psychologically evolved yet.
James isn't the only one that has to pull off playing a character at many different stages of life, though; Leslie is also tasked with the same demand and brings a unique facet to every age of Clare that's required of her, regardless of whether it's blossoming teenage years riddled with a difficult combination of naivety and hormones or the matured understanding of an elderly woman who has been in love with a time-traveler since before she had the ability to put her feelings into words. By the time we check in with Clare in her much older years, she's defined by her resignation and acceptance, knowing that there is nothing she can do when Henry spontaneously and unexpectedly disappears other than wait for his return, whenever and wherever that might be. That doesn't mean that the early stages of their relationship aren't incredibly tempestuous — and James and Leslie are at their most captivating when they're poised in opposition, giving their all to these clashes, which often leave you wondering how these two people would actually continue to fit into one another's lives if it wasn't for the promise of fate perpetually bringing them into each other's orbit.
There are moments when The Time Traveler's Wife, for all its sweeping romance that defies time, can tread a little too close to the maudlin; some of that might be born from the fact that the source material has been unfurled to take place over not just the course of one season but possibly more beyond, with much more of Henry and Clare's journey having yet to be revealed. It certainly affords the characters more opportunity to know one another and be known, but there's a reliance on over-repetition when it comes to some of the series' most climactic scenes, explained by the fact that Henry tends to be repetitively pulled back to his own life-defining incidents, watching traumas from his past play out as if on unavoidable loop. There's no way for him to intervene, and he has no ability to change the course of history even if he tries, and we as the audience are trapped in reliving these instances with him, which certainly leads to a sense of helplessness but also emotional fatigue. Combined with the fact that the book's most devastating future events are only subtly foreshadowed, it results in the actual culmination of the initial six episodes seeming anticlimactic by comparison — and a distinct impression that perhaps this adaptation would have been better served as a one-and-done season rather than trying to stretch out the plot for all it's worth.
Taking certain story weaknesses into account, this version absolutely comes the closest to replicating the feeling one can get from reading Niffenegger's book, which had its own addictive qualities — and also never shied away from the fact that while this is a love story, it is one that is confined to a limited span of time. It's in those aspects that The Time Traveler's Wife reminds us that what we think of as a "happy ending" may not necessarily be the terminal endpoint for both its leads, especially when one of them can't successfully hold a normal, straightforward existence. That defining notion of object impermanence is what renders Henry and Clare's journey through time — and the series as a whole — all the more riveting, making it easy for us to be swept up in the story even if it only lasts for a short while.
Rating: B
The Time Traveler's Wife is set to premiere on May 15 on HBO and will also be available to stream on HBO Max.