Last weekend, I was in the mood for a romantic comedy movie, but I didn’t have time for a long movie, so I found a made-for-Hallmark movie on one of the streaming platforms. It was an older one, so from before “Hallmark movie” was such a known quantity. Before they made the standard-issue Hallmark Christmas movie (high-powered career woman goes to small town, meets small-town guy, decides to give up her career and stay, ditching her high-powered city boyfriend for small-town guy) their brand, they actually made some decent rom-coms. I remember one in particular (don’t recall the title), starring Meghan Markle, long before she became royal, that I liked, in which the heroine was a high-powered businesswoman who stayed in her job in the city. It was more about wacky dating hijinks as her sister tried to get her out of her toxic dating patterns by making her follow the advice in a dating book, only for her to meet a great guy who didn’t fit any of the book’s criteria. During this time period, they also had a Christmas movie that was a retelling of A Christmas Carol, but set in modern Chicago, and with Carrie Fisher in the role of all the ghosts, as a young woman’s late mentor comes back to help her see where she went wrong.

Anyway, if you get a Hallmark movie from before about 2015, it will be very different from what we think of as a Hallmark movie now. The one I watched was from about 2009, Before You Say I Do. It was sort of a time travel twist on His Girl Friday, in which the ex tries to keep the woman he still loves from marrying an obviously wrong guy. In this case, the guy is her boyfriend in the present, who wants to marry her, but she’s too messed-up from her disastrous first marriage. She missed all the red flags and doesn’t trust her own judgment, so she breaks up with the boyfriend she really does love. After making a wish, he ends up ten years in the past, just a few days before her first wedding. He gets a job at her newspaper and sets out to stop her from marrying her first husband so she won’t be so scared of marriage in the future.

It’s a fun little movie while you’re watching it. The cast is actually pretty decent. No one ever suggests she leave her job (she still has the same job in the future). It takes place in a city. It almost feels like a big-screen rom-com.

But the time travel part had me scratching my head. There will be spoilers ahead, though most of them focus on the fairly obvious outcome of a rom-com.

The guy and his girlfriend seem to be about the same age in the “present,” which in the movie is 2009. He goes back in time to 1999 and meets her then. Which would make him about 10 years older than she is. Not that you can tell, since it’s the same actors in both times, and they don’t seem to do anything to age her down when she’s 10 years in the past. She’s not too long out of college, and a mid-30s guy would seem pretty old to a recent college graduate. But this never comes up.

Presumably, he was around in 1999, but there’s no mention of where his 1999 self is. He gets a job and has to do employment paperwork, but no one notices that his photo ID has an impossible expiration date. He doesn’t seem at all interested in checking in on his past self or getting his age-appropriate past self to be the one to run into the 1999 girlfriend. It also doesn’t seem like he’s found himself in his 1999 body/life, getting his own do-over (like in Peggy Sue Got Married). Once he realizes that he’s in 1999 and isn’t working at his 2009 job, he doesn’t think to go to where he was in 1999.

And this leads me to the thing that really had me baffled: the ending. He does succeed in getting her to recognize the red flags and break up with her past future husband and run off with him. Then he wakes up back in 2009, where they’re celebrating their 10-year anniversary. Everything is now awesome. He married the woman he loves long ago and he and his work buddy started their own successful company instead of toiling away at a place they hate (the way it was originally — he intervenes to help his past work buddy’s career by stopping a jerk from stealing credit for his ideas). But since he apparently just arrived from 1999, he doesn’t remember any of this.

I’ve always hated this kind of ending for a “travel to the past and fix things” story, where he returns to an entirely different present that he doesn’t remember. It strikes me as tragic that the character managed to fix things, but then missed all the key parts. This guy would have no memories of his own wedding or his early married years. If they’d had kids, he wouldn’t remember them being born. That’s all rather sad. I guess it depends on whether you’re a process person or an outcome person. The outcome person may care more about having the great life that’s the result of the changes, but a process person wants to experience all the steps on the way to the great life because they’re what makes that future life great.

But the baffling thing is, he hadn’t met the woman in 1999. She ran away from her wedding and got engaged to the future version of him. So if they’re celebrating their 10th anniversary, that suggests that he stayed in 1999 and they’ve been together all this time, so there was no need to do the jump to the present, and he should remember the past 10 years because he was there.

Which means the past version of him probably never met this woman and is still out there. Do they have problems from both having the same Social Security number? Did the future version who stayed in the past have to create a fake identity?

I know, nit-picking time travel as unrealistic is a little nuts, but it’s getting the details right that makes an outrageous story work.

I think I’d have had him find his past self and coach him in wooing this woman so that they would have fallen in love earlier, before she married Mr. Wrong. That then avoids the age issue and the issue of there being two of them. Maybe the future version takes on a fake identity to point out the red flags for Mr. Wrong, and then clears the way for her to meet his past self, serving as his own matchmaker.

And now I want to come up with a plot where I can play with this and do it right.