If J.K. Rowling spent half the amount of time she spent on Twitter whining about trans people as she did world building, maybe we wouldn’t find ourselves writing this article, but here we are. Possibly the most glaring case of her flawed storytelling is in the play, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, her most recent literary addition to the Harry Potter universe. Although there are many things wrong with this book, probably the most universe-tearing one is the glaring inconsistency in her approach to time travel.

Time travel is one of the riskiest endeavors for an author to embark on, and Rowling took on the challenge for the first time in The Prisoner of Azkaban, the third book in the Harry Potter series. At the time, she managed to do so successfully, employing a type of self-consistent time travel in the form of a “closed loop.” This type of time travel presents all of its effects as having always happened, with only one, unchanged timeline in existence. In The Prisoner of Azkaban, this is demonstrated when Harry is nearly kissed by a dementor, but is saved at the last second by a Patronus cast by an unknown savior. It is later revealed that this savior was none other than Harry himself, who traveled back in time (through the use of a convenient plot device called a “time turner”) and cast the Patronus to save his past self. In this context, the use of time travel as a narrative tool worked beautifully, providing a clever answer to a previously introduced mystery while resolving Harry’s character arc throughout the novel in a satisfying manner.

However, this is not the case in The Cursed Child. In the play script, Albus and Scorpius, the protagonists, use a time turner to travel back a couple decades with the goal of saving Cedric Diggory, who had died in the fourth book. Already, we can see a few problems with this strategy. As we established, the method of time travel used previously in The Prisoner of Azkaban cannot change the past, and can only fulfill it. In a puzzling turn of events, Albus and Scorpius successfully use the time turner to alter the past, and therefore rewrite the present—a clear violation of the rules of time travel already established by Rowling. 

One counter argument presented by YouTuber Kevin Lohmann as a possible solution to this world-breaking inconsistency is the idea that Time Turners malfunction after five hours. Rowling wrote in an article on wizardingworld.com that “[T]he longest period that may be relived without the possibility of serious harm to the traveller or to time itself is around five hours.” Critics have suggested that this implies that because Albus and Scorpius traveled much more than five hours into the past, they somehow stopped traveling in a self consistent manner and instead were able to alter the past and affect the future. However, this isn’t actually suggested in Rowling’s article, and even the idea that Time Turners could become unstable isn't mentioned in the canon at all. Moreover, even if this oh-so-convenient detail were to be explicitly mentioned within the text, it wouldn’t be much more than a flimsy patching that introduces more questions than it answers.

It seems that as time passes, the magic of the Harry Potter series continues to fade, its legacy growing muddy and becoming tainted by the actions of the author herself. When we are able to see through the rose-tinted charm and nostalgia, we can finally notice the unstable foundations upon which lies one of fantasy’s most beloved universes.