:::: One Part FANDOM RETROSPECTIVE, One Part ANALYSIS ::::
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is a play that premiered in London, 2016. It was met with praise by theatergoers and disdain, even hatred, by those who read the script. Today, there is a...
Based on what we know of the events in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, time travel in the wizarding world is self-consistent. There is a single, unalterable timeline where characters jump back and forth, changing nothing.
I'm about to get technical. It'll be quick, I promise.
The theory presented in Prisoner of Azkaban comes down to causality. By causality, I mean the connectedness and state of being between different versions of the same character, as they each inhabit a moment in space and time.
The actions of the past version are partly responsible for and partly dependentupon the actions of their future counterpart.
Causality. Cause and Effect. These principles were first discussed by Sir Isaac Newton in 1666.
(Wait... He was 23 at the time? Dang... What have you done with your life, Michael? How did you get in here, Mom?!)
Newton explained that there are three laws when it comes to motion. The first "Law of Motion" states that every object will remain at rest unless compelled to change its state by the action of an external force. Newton's third law, perhaps more familiar to you, states that for every action, there is an equal and opposite re-action.
I'm falling asleep, Mike. How does this relate to what we learned in Prisoner of Azkaban?
Well, when Harry returns to the past to save Sirius Black, he realizes that he, not his father, had been the one to cast the Patronus in the shape of a stag. A future version of Harry had always been the one to save past Harry. The causality of events is known as a closed loop.
Both versions of Harry are partly responsible for and partly dependent upon one another.
It was a beautifully complex Möbius strip of causality (Google it. So cool). JKR had impressed so many fans in her usage of this time travel plot device. It was elegant and masterful, while keeping with that standard of self-consistency we've come to see in film and literature. In the wizarding world, if you attempt to use a time turner to change the past, you will discover, while you are there, that your actions are causing those very events that you had traveled there to witness or prevent.
Mwah, Queen Jo! This is why we love you. Magnifique!
Here's an illustration:
You have a Time-Turner. You decide to use that Time-Turner to stop Lee Harvey Oswald from shooting JFK. Once inside the Texas School Book Depository, where the shots were taken, you hear someone calling out for help. You pry open the door to a service elevator where the individual under duress had been trapped. It's a man. You recognize his face. It's Oswald! You notice his 6.5×52 mm Carcano infantry rifle resting on a nearby crate. And in those quick seconds, as you realize what you just did, he grabs the rifle and knocks you out cold with the stock. Oswald steps over your unconscious body, whispering his thanks. He then heads to the sixth-floor, finds the window on the building's southeastern corner, and waits for the motorcade to pass by the building.
Whoopsie.
Self-consistent cause and effect.
For some reason (a reason none of us understand), Cursed Child has chosen to depart completely from the rules established in OS-Canon (original source material). You can now alter the course of past events through the use of time travel. And, in fact, it goes even further than that. Based on how it's shown in the play, where we are able to witness the simultaneous narrative of both past and present characters, it's clear that JKR and Co. took massive steps in the opposite direction.
They went with the multiverse concept, where the unchanged future exists concurrently with the now-in-process altering of the past. Multiple universes exist, all simultaneously running through their programming, parallel to one another, at a consistent rate of one second per second. This means that not only are characters able to affect the past, but the present can go unchanged throughout.
W T F
I know, it's starting to get confusing. Well, it gets even more confusing when you realize the writers also made the same characters from multiple universes aware of alternate realities through shared dreams.
W T Actual F
Yes, this is all in the play. Yes, it's overly complicated. Yes, I will help you understand. And, yes, how in the crap are people not totally up in arms over this trash?
I've waited until now to bring all of this up because the most frustrating aspect of this entire play to me is when the Time-Turner is used and reality separates. It's in those scenes where we get the clearest examples of flawed characterization, confused motivation, changes in canon, and straight up narrative blunders.
In order to make sense of this, I'll label the following sections as such:
Let's take a stroll through each and point out what caused the universe to diverge, why their attempt to change things didn't make sense in the first place, the effects of the divergence, and why the alternate universes themselves don't make sense.
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