Now what about predestination and free will?

Is our life story written, or do we at least have the power of co-authorship of every present act?

And if so, couldn't a visitor from the future prevent future disasters, solve crimes, or warn us of what is to come?

Ursula Scheer

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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None of this is possible for Henry, who is vagrant against his will.

Except for a lottery trick, he is unable to capitalize on his special ability, or rather handicap, as he calls it.

Henry, as its inventor wanted almost twenty years ago in her bestselling novel "The Time Traveler's Wife", is thrown out of his present against his will again and again and finds himself in other places in the past or future.

Things get complicated when he meets the love of his life, which turns the story of a chronotype out of step into a love story with a crushing factor: an ideal basis for film adaptations.

In 2009, director Robert Schwentke adapted the novel for the cinema, starring Eric Bana as Henry and Rachel McAdams as his wife Claire.

That was a year after The Curious Case of Benjamin Button had raised the bar for cinematic twists on the timeline.

The Time Traveler's Wife was nice as a movie, nothing more.

Now Steven Moffat is trying his luck, a man with expertise in the field: As the producer of the British science fiction series "Doctor Who", time leaps are commonplace for him, and his series "Sherlock" based on Arthur Conan Doyle stands for the art of cinematic Acceleration of a literary more leisurely pace.

"The Time Traveler's Wife" as a six-part series, created for the American pay channel HBO and can be seen on Sky, clearly enjoys comedy, action and show effects - without doubting the basic assumption, softened with backlighting and warm colors, that absence intensifies it Love because it provokes longing.

Librarian with a defined physique

The fact that Henry, this time literally embodied by Theo James, always appears naked on other time planes could be enough advertising for any fitness program, the physique of the time traveler is so hyper-defined and perfectly illuminated in the arrival mode.

Rolling off the rails in front of an approaching train, stealing clothes and money, punching down attackers, running away from them or breaking into shelters are among the life-saving skills of the gifted librarian that we are shown.

The series doesn't really take that seriously, otherwise the action scenes in Adam's costume would be pure boasting.

But what about the title heroine, whose story is supposed to be unrolled?

To really do that, it would have had to be told by Clare alone.

Instead, Henry and his wife, played by Rose Leslie, give each other home video-style explanations - which allows one to quietly admire the art of makeup that ages the characters, but remains somewhat bland and disorienting in the jumble of time not really serves.

The plot is not all that confusing: Six-year-old Clare, who is playing alone in a clearing near her parents' house, encounters Henry as a middle-aged man one day and becomes her fatherly friend, who keeps coming and going for a short visit .

He knows very well that he has his future wife in front of him, but he also keeps a platonic distance from the almost grown-up teenager.

Only when Clare has turned twenty does she meet Henry as a young man of her present - but who knows nothing of his future.

Their love affair begins, although Henry initially proves to be a complete moron who has yet to become the mature man Claire already knows.

Father complex, you could say, and indeed Henry's end can also be interpreted in this direction.

The lovers shape each other retrospectively and prospectively.

This is connected with waiting, which is interrupted by time somersaults, the bloodily painted flashback to the death of Henry's mother and the drama about prenatal time-traveling children in our present.

The series succeeds in empathizing with the ambivalence of a fantastic on-off romance;

she benefits from the successful interplay of the main actors.

But the whole thing is not really to fall in love with head over heels, and be it because the tip to invest in face masks does not yet catch up with the crazy real unpredictability that plays no role in the life of the chrono chaos couple.

Adaptation cannot resolve time paradoxes or clarify the question of predestination.

The Time Traveler's Wife

starts today at 8:15 p.m. on Sky Atlantic and Sky Ticket.