The Time Machine Ending Explained: What Happens to the Time Traveller (Full Spoilers)

Fair Warning

Here is the short answer. The Time Traveller escapes the Morlocks, races through the far future, and gets home in time for dinner. He tells his story, and nobody quite believes him. The next day he climbs back on the machine, vanishes, and never returns. The Epilogue only wonders where he went. This is H. G. Wells’s novel, and this video spoils all of it.

The Last Escape

Let me back up to the last scene in the future world. After the fire and Weena’s loss, the Time Traveller walks back to the White Sphinx. The bronze doors are wide open, and the Time Machine is waiting inside, clean and oiled. He sees that it is a bait, and he walks in anyway, chuckling at the thought that the Morlocks believe they have him.

The doors slam. He reaches for his matches, and they light only on the box. In the dark he fights off their hands, gets the levers back on, and pulls. He says it was a nearer thing than even the fight in the forest.

The Far Future

Then he does not go home. He is sitting sideways in the saddle, and he pulls the lever the wrong way, so he rushes forward. He watches the sun stop setting and swell red. The earth has stopped turning, and one face stays turned to the sun. On a dead beach he finds giant crabs, then cold and snow, more than thirty million years from his own time.

At the very end of that trip, the world is silent. An eclipse comes. Something round, with tentacles, hops on the shoal. He nearly faints, and he climbs back onto the saddle.

The book never says what any of it means. My reading is that it is the real ending of his theories. Class war, cattle, Morlocks, all of that sits under one million years from his own day. Here, thirty million years on, the whole thing runs down.

Home Again

On the way back, the days and nights flicker, and he slows down in the laboratory. He sees Mrs. Watchett cross the room backwards, an exact inversion of how she crossed it when he left. Then he stops the machine. The room is exactly as he left it, and he thinks, for a moment, that he might have dreamed all of it.

But not quite. The machine started in one corner of the laboratory and has come to rest in another. That gap is the distance between the little lawn and the pedestal of the Sphinx, where the Morlocks carried it. It is his first piece of proof. The Pall Mall Gazette shows today’s date, and the clock says almost eight. By his own count he has lived eight days.

Lie or Prophecy

Back at the table, he does something clever. He does not push. He tells his guests they can take it as a lie, or a prophecy, or something he dreamed in the workshop. Then he asks what they think, as a story.

The Editor says what a pity it is that he is not a writer of stories. The Time Traveller smiles, lights a match, and says he hardly believes it himself. And that, I think, is the central trick of the ending. He is the one who tells you to doubt him.

The Evidence

So the book gives us three bits of evidence. One, the withered white flowers. The Medical Man says he does not know their natural order, and the Time Traveller will not let him keep one. Two, the half healed scars on his knuckles. Three, the machine itself, with brown smears on the ivory, grass and moss on the lower parts, and one rail bent.

None of this would convince a court. But all of it fits. Even he starts to lose hold of it. He asks, out loud, whether he ever made a Time Machine at all. He has to go and look at it, and only then does he say the story is true.

What He Admits

Notice something about the three theories. After the fire, on the hill with the yellow seat, the Time Traveller says his last explanation, the Eloi as cattle, may be as wrong as any mortal wit could invent. Paradise, class war, cattle. He never says which one was right.

So the ending keeps all of it open. We do not learn what the Morlocks really are. We do not learn what happened to the Eloi. We only get one man’s best guess, told after dinner and written down by a storyteller who calls the tale fantastic and the telling credible and sober.

The Second Trip

The next day the storyteller comes back. The Time Traveller is cheerful, carrying a small camera and a knapsack. He says he will prove it by lunch, with specimens and all, and he goes into the laboratory.

The storyteller hears an exclamation cut short, a click and a thud, and glass falling. He opens the door, and the laboratory is empty. He thinks he sees a ghostly figure in a whirl of brass for a second, and then he is not sure. A pane of the skylight has blown in. The servant says nobody came out.

Notice the camera. In the dark of the Underworld, the Time Traveller cursed himself for not bringing one. This time he is bringing one. That tells you he means to come back with proof, and he does not.

Where Did He Go

The last line of the plot comes from the storyteller. The Time Traveller vanished three years ago, and, as everybody knows now, he has never returned. Then the Epilogue lists the options.

He may have gone back, among hairy savages in the Age of Unpolished Stone, or the seas of the Cretaceous, or the reptile brutes of the Jurassic, or a Triassic shore. Or he went forward, to a nearer age, where men are still men and the riddles of our time have been answered. The storyteller votes for the future. He cannot believe that our age of weak experiment is humanity’s high point.

The Flowers

But he adds one thing that is not hope. The Time Traveller thought gloomily about the advancement of mankind. He saw the growing pile of civilisation as a foolish heaping that would fall back and destroy its makers. If that is so, the storyteller says, we must live as though it were not so.

And then the last image. He keeps two shrivelled white flowers, brown now and brittle. They show, he says, that even when mind and strength have gone, gratitude and tenderness lived on in the heart of man. That is Weena, and it is the only comfort in the book.

Quick Answers

A few quick answers, before my take. Does the Time Traveller ever come back? No. The storyteller says that, three years on, he has not returned. Does Weena survive? The Time Traveller never finds her, and he believes she died in the fire. Was it all a dream? The book gives you proof and doubt in equal parts, and even the storyteller cannot decide. Is it a happy ending? Not really. It has one hopeful image, the flowers, and nothing else.

My Take

This part is my opinion, so treat it as a draft. I think the ending works because it refuses to close. The three theories fail, the far future is bleak, and the one kind thing left is a flower. I give the book four and a half out of five.

If you want to talk about it, leave a comment: did he go forward or back? The summary and characters pages are on bookexplained.com.