Troublesome or not?
SPOILERS FOR ‘THE TIME TRAVELER’S WOMAN’
It’s the moment Clare has been waiting for since she was six years old… the ending of ‘The Time Traveler’s Wife’ saw it become, well, the title of the series from HBOMax.
The star-crossed lovers have finally become husband and wife but, and this is the most important thing, it seems that their romantic version of marriage is giving way to something much darker.
Also, the apparent twist at the end seems to suggest that Clare’s despair over a child apparently overrides Henry’s desire to spare her.
But we’ll get to that, and whether or not it’s problematic, in due course. First, we have a wedding to discuss.
Of course, the wedding does not go smoothly. Do you think a boyfriend with cold feet is hard to track down? Try a cold-footed groom whose anxiety over a no-expenses-spared wedding shoots him into his past or future without warning.
As you can imagine, a total nightmare.
Throughout the episode, we see Henry (played by Theo James) at multiple points in his life. At the age of 28… At 42 (but looking older and without feet)… And each one comes with her own trap.
On a fleeting future visit, he finds a teary-eyed Clare (Rose Leslie) on the couch in her living room, crying as she watches her wedding video and her wheelchair sitting unused in a closet… That is not the ideal future he saw for himself.
But Henry is determined to walk down the aisle and say ‘I do’ to Clare by any means necessary. And he knows the right person to help him: himself.

Hence the creation of “Shoeshine Day”, something Clare has known about most of her life. Trying to hide elements of his future with Clare so she can experience them herself, their wedding was annulled with a whiff of shoe polish when an older, future version of Henry stuffed it into his graying hair to appear the age-appropriate version, who was supposed to get married that day.
A very nice story for a very nice couple. But happily ever after is definitely something for a fairy tale.
During the run up to the wedding, Henry also testifies on his travels to Clare crying over a mysterious wooden box on her nightstand. It looks like a jewelry box and it looks like it’s where she keeps her rings to begin with. Turns out it’s something much more heartbreaking: It’s where she keeps her positive pregnancy tests.
One thing neither of them was prepared for was the sheer difficulty of getting pregnant. Since Henry’s time travel is a genetic disorder, it seems like it’s an ability that begins in the womb. So every time Clare gets pregnant, she soon loses the baby, and the unborn child bursts out of her womb and can’t come back because it’s not fully gestated.
This has already happened at least five times to previous versions of Clare and Henry, and soon, after seeing Clare in such pain each time, Henry, 36, decides to have a vasectomy against his wishes. Clare is furious at Henry for taking away her ability to be a mother.

On the day of the wedding, 28-year-old Henry walks into his 36-year-old life and sees his 42-year-old self marry Clare in their wedding video. She notices that she misses the younger version of him for the first timeafter years of saying that he preferred her kinder, older version when he visited her.
She makes him promise to visit her, and then, in the mid-credits scene, she makes an important note: This 28-year-old version of Henry hasn’t had a vasectomy yet.
Issues about consent in ‘The Time Traveler’s Wife’ have come up more than once during this series., as the lines are so blurred between what they were trained to believe and what their instinctive thoughts were that it all seems like a magical picture. But did Clare just…basically plan to make 36-year-old Henry a father without her permission?
SPOILERS FOR THE BOOK BELOW

Now ‘The Time Traveler’s Wife’ Fans Know Henry and Clare Finally Have a Child. This will happen in the series, as we have seen very brief glimpses of a girl that we instinctively know is her daughter.
But that still doesn’t change the fact that things seem a bit weird and problematic here. For one thing, future Henry may know that he’s already a father, but then why wouldn’t he mention that, or even let Clare know?
Which suggests that Clare is getting pregnant behind his back.…even if we were to argue that he’s not cheating, since he’s technically the same guy, surely there’s some level of responsibility there that the older version of Henry just doesn’t have and she’s taken on.
If the genders were reversed, this would seem like a huge bummer waiting to happen and shouldn’t be okay just because Henry and Clare are who they are.
While he may have had the vasectomy against her wishes, ultimately it’s a two-way street for them to have kids, not just win someone over.

How this plays out and how it will be different from the book remains to be seen. Currently, the show has not received confirmation for a second season and we are waiting for news. But Steven Moffat clearly has a long-term arc in mind.
Hopefully it will make at least enough changes to prevent an increasingly problematic and toxic situation from getting worse.
Source: Fotogramas

Camila Luna is a writer at Gossipify, where she covers the latest movies and television series. With a passion for all things entertainment, Camila brings her unique perspective to her writing and offers readers an inside look at the industry. Camila is a graduate from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) with a degree in English and is also a avid movie watcher.