Time-Turners are fun magical devices in Harry Potter, but did they create the ultimate plot hole?

Throughout the Harry Potter series, fans come across a variety of imaginative magical objects and artifacts that help and hinder the heroes. One of the most important in the entire series, so important that it is a key aspect of two different Harry Potter stories, is the time-turner. The simple little device allows a witch or wizard to travel through time at their leisure.

The problem is that while time-turners are certainly handy little devices, they may have created more problems than most Harry Potter fans would care to admit. With Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban standing out as one of the best movies in the entire series for a lot of people, it might even be controversial to say that time-turners kind of ruin the series. While the problem did have an in-universe explanation that limited their scope, even that was later undone for convenience's sake.

What Problems Were Created By The Time-Turners?

On the surface, there are a variety of problems with Time-Turners, problems that many have strived to refute. The examples of how the Time-Turners work in the series often do provide examples of why they don’t actually ruin anything, but that also requires accepting that those using the devices would have no will to make any drastic changes to the timeline in the first place. Essentially, the devices are said to simply send people back to experience the exact same events in a fixed timeline from a different perspective, so Buckbeak never actually dies in The Prisoner Of Azkaban, viewers simply don’t see how it survives until later. Ignoring convenient facts that create issues with time travel with that movie in general, there’s never any explanation as to what would have happened if a time traveler went rogue.

Thanks to the much-maligned Harry Potter And The Cursed Child, it is now known that the explanation that prevents major issues within the series really doesn’t work. Anyone using a time-turner is theoretically capable of absolutely altering any and every timeline they want at any point by introducing brand-new actions to the timeline. With this story being considered canon, the entire series is wide open to massive scrutiny. Even with the explanation that the time-turner used in The Cursed Child is special, massive changes could be made at any point.

Hogwarts faculty could have reversed the petrifications in The Chamber Of Secrets and discovered the issue immediately. Other major changes would be that Harry Potter could have been ejected from the Triwizard Tournament, Dumbledore’s curse leading to an early grave could have been avoided, and even his death altogether could have been prevented. Then thinking of these newer time-turners, it absolutely is the case that one could have been used to go back and kill Voldemort, though obviously, a plan like that would be incredibly risky. Literally every problem in the wizarding world could be prevented, or a dark wizard could make everything much worse, and there would be no real way to stop them.

Why Weren’t Time-Turners Used To Beat Voldemort?

Under this understanding of time travel that can be gleaned from the always infamous Harry Potter And The Cursed Child, there really isn’t any reason someone doesn't go back to stop Voldemort before his first rise to power. Considering his life would have been relatively well documented or at the very least known about by figures like Dumbledore, there is almost no excuse to not go back and put a stop to the evil before it even has a chance to grow in power. Of course, it can be argued that the forces of good that are met throughout the Harry Potter series would never want to stoop to something as horrific as child murder, but desperate times call for desperate measures.

Confronting Voldemort at the peak of his power would surely be foolish for anyone other than Dumbledore, but again, there was a long period of time when he was nothing but a student or even an untrained boy. With just how much fear Voldemort managed to strike into the wizarding world, it’s actually shocking that no one within the Ministry of Magic came up with a horrific plan to put a stop to Voldemort before he became a problem. Even if all of that is put aside, surely time-turners would have been a useful tool for members of the Order of Phoenix to take on Voldemort and his Death Eaters and yet they are hardly ever mentioned in-universe.

Why Didn’t Voldemort Use A Time-Turner?

The real reason why Voldemort didn’t use a time-turner is likely that the author of the series had no idea that concept even existed when writing the opening conflict. Time travel always screws things up if too much focus is put on it, and that is precisely what happened when it was re-introduced in The Cursed Child. It could be argued that the limits placed on the devices made them meaningless to Voldemort, but why in the world wouldn’t someone so desperate for power tilt the scales in their favor as much as possible? Realistically, this same line of thinking could be applied to Felix Felicis as well. He obviously would have used one considering he was willing to go as far as to kill a baby if that baby even remotely had a chance of rising up to challenge him one day.

While people may not love everything that The Cursed Child did to the Harry Potter canon, one thing that can be said is that Voldemort’s daughter Delphini clearly got her brains from someone else. She seeks to use the time-turner to help her father rise to power and stop any of the events of the Harry Potter series from occurring, and she’s nearly successful at that. If Voldemort had just put a little bit more effort into wizarding world domination, maybe the most feared wizard of all time could have been a little bit more feared.

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