Warning: There are huge spoilers if you have not read "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child."
"Harry Potter and the Cursed Child," the eighth story in the franchise is here, and it's a doozy.
Taking place 19 years after the events of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," the play follows the sons of Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy, Albus and Scorpius, as they venture back in time to the events of "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" using an illegal Time-Turner to save Cedric Diggory. (Yes, it's weird.)
The boys' manipulation of time results in changing the future, and, eventually, the deaths of some beloved characters in the present.
This results in even more time-traveling adventures to fix all of the wrongs made to the present timeline. After a multitude of characters travel back in time three times, it all begins to get quite exhausting.
Recently, in the midst of rereading the "Harry Potter" series, I noticed the entire plot of the play was something author J.K. Rowling first hinted at years ago in her third book, "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban."
It's in that book readers are first introduced to the idea of time travel and Time-Turners. However, these Time-Turners worked a bit different. They needed to be manually spun and only sent the wearers back in time several hours as opposed to years.
Hermione received special permission to use them to maintain an exhausting school schedule with overlapping classes during her third year. Near the end of the books, she and Harry are encouraged by Dumbledore to use the Time-Turner to go back in time to save the hippogriff Buckbeak and Harry's godfather, Sirius Black.
At one point, Harry asks Hermione if they could instead just go and capture Peter Pettigrew, the man responsible for their time-travel adventure, but she warns him of the dangers of going back in time.
From "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban":
Hermione: "Don't you understand? We're breaking one of the most important wizarding laws! Nobody's supposed to change time, nobody! You heard Dumbledore, if we're seen—"
Harry: "We'd only be seen by ourselves and Hagrid!"
Hermione: "Harry, what do you think you'd do if you saw yourself bursting into Hagrid's house?
Harry: "I'd — I'd think I'd gone mad or I'd think there was some Dark Magic going on —"
Hermione: "Exactly! You wouldn't understand, you might even attack yourself! Don't you see? 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!"
Reading this excerpt after knowing the plot of "Cursed Child" immediately made me think of how Albus's meddling in the past eventually led to the death of his future self.
However, my colleague Kim Renfro points out Hermione was speaking only about what may happen if you were to be seen by yourself in the past. That's not what happens to Albus in "Cursed Child." Still, I interpreted Hermione's explanation to speak more about the dangers of time travel in general.
Regardless, Rowling later expanded upon Time-Turners in a since-deleted post on Pottermore where she had Professor Saul Croaker, a man who spent his career in the Department of Mysteries, divulge some details on his investigations into the device and its effects on time throughout history.
Here's an excerpt from that since-deleted post which has been archived on fan sites and forums. Via Reddit:
All attempts to travel back further than a few hours have resulted in catastrophic harm to the witch or wizard involved. It was not realised for many years why time travellers over great distances never survived their journeys. All such experiments have been abandoned since 1899, when Eloise Mintumble became trapped, for a period of five days, in the year 1402. Now we understand that her body had aged five centuries in its return to the present and, irreparably damaged, she died in St Mungo’s Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries shortly after we managed to retrieve her. What is more, her five days in the distant past caused great disturbance to the life paths of all those she met, changing the course of their lives so dramatically that no fewer than twenty-five of their descendants vanished in the present, having been "un-born."
That sounds more like what we see play out in "Cursed Child." Albus and Scorpius's forays into the past end up affecting many of the lives of people in the present around them including the entire Potter family line.
It's strange that this expansion on Time-Turners, along with other Rowling writings, have been removed from the revamped Pottermore site. Perhaps it was all taken down because it was to be used as inspiration for the next chapter in the series.
