*MY* confusion about the Time Turner

[Tammy Rizzo]

No: HPFGUIDX 124139

cdayr wrote:
> Howdy! I'm delurking to briefly add to this fascinating 
> discussion--
> 
> I agree with you about all of these motivations for H/H to hurry 
> and turn back in time. 
> However, I've also always believed that they have to hurry 
> because they have to save Sirius *before* he gets soul-sucked 
> in current time. Once a definitive event like a death or a 
> soul-sucking happens, it does not seem to be able to be 
> changed in HP-brand time-travel. Since time only happens once, 
> if you die, you are dead, no matter who has time-turned back and 
> is living that time over again. So, if H/H sit around and chit-chat in 
> current time for too long, the dementors will arrive, destroy Sirius, 
> and he will be lost forever. Therefore, they must time-turn and get 
> Sirius out before the dementors get to him, or there will be no 
> saving him at all, no matter how many times they time-turn back. 
> 
> What do you think? 
> 
> -cdayr

To which Tammy Rizzo says:
Howdy, cdayr!  Glad to have you on board.  :-)

I would say, "I think you're absolutely, one hundred percent, dead-on correct", but then the 
listelves would probably make me iron my ears for a one-liner post, which is not a pleasant 
experience.

I do like the way you put it here, though -- the 'HP-brand time-travel'.  That makes this way 
of looking at time travel very specific.  This (however Jo meant it to work) is the way time 
travel works with a Time Turner in the Potterverse.  It really doesn't matter whether or not 
Jo's time travel is consistant or inconsistant with how OTHER writers have presented the 
various and sundry uses, misuses, and abuses of time travel.  I've read hundreds of time-
travel books over the decades, many done very well, some simply awful, but most were at 
least adequate.  There are so many ways of presenting time travel (you can change things, 
or you can't change things, or you can only change very small things; anything you change 
makes a whole new timeline,  or the timeline is elastic and can handle any change, or each 
change splits off an alternate branch of the main timeline, etc), that, unless one learns to 
handle each version on its own, one can quickly develop an aversion to time travel stories.  
Anyway, the question here is, "Is Jo consistant with her time travel within her Potterverse 
(allowing for reasonable Flints since we know maths is not her strong point)?"

I, for myself, think that she is (reasonably) internally consistant.  Leaving aside the dire 
warnings from McGonnagle (which I'm sorry to say, I had forgotten came from McG, but 
then, it was a while since I'd even HAD my books -- they were on loan to a neighbor and I 
just got them back, so my apologies about that faulty remeniscence in my first post) about 
not changing anything (which I can easily believe were 'hyped up' to ensure that Hermione 
took them seriously -- after all, she's spent two years hanging around with a couple of blokes 
with a 'certain disregard for the rules'), I saw nothing in the course of Harry and Hermione's 
second trip through that evening that seemed at all out of place for a 'time only happens 
once' version of time travel.  The TT seems quite straightforward -- while Time flows onward 
like a river, a Time Turner transports the user backwards to an earlier moment, from which 
he or she (or they) can observe (or participate in) events from a separate and different 
perspective.  It does not 'reverse the flow of Time', which WOULD make all sorts of 
changes possible. 

However . . . I believe that the bell jar in the DoM *DOES* actually reverse Time.  They 
seem to have captured Time in a bottle, there.  At least, a small piece of Time.  I'm 
wondering if they'd ever be able to enlarge the field or whatever that is holding that yo-yo-
ing bit of Time, and with that tool, go back and change things.  I doubt if Jo will go that route 
(she's gotta leave SOME mysteries in the Department of Mysteries, after all), but that's how 
I see the bell jar, as some isolated eddy in the flow of Time, where it seems to bounce back 
and forth, independent of the rest of Time around it.  I see nothing wrong with that, either, 
though -- after all, it's *MAGIC*!  OOooooooh.  ;-)

***
Tammy Rizzo
ms-tamany at rcn.com

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