Back to The Future/Headscratchers: Difference between revisions
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** Actually, Marty is the one hooking up the camcorder in a deleted part of that scene. He even asks Doc for an adapter that hasn't been invented yet, and somehow ''still'' manages to get the TV working correctly with just the parts from the lab. And an earlier version of the screenplay had Marty as an A/V whiz of sorts, so maybe it's a hidden talent of Marty's that the filmmakers didn't really expand on in the films proper.
*** On the other hand, the scene might've been deleted because the filmmakers realized how hard it'd actually be and decided to let the audience assume he had Doc's off-screen help.
*** In 1985? Most new TV's in that era didn't provide anything more than an antenna input (and were likely transformerless designs where the "hot chassis" was hard-wired to one side of the AC line) so an RF modulator would've been the standard way to get a signal into the TV. Of course the 1958 TV was no better, but...
*** In the 70's my family would ask me for miracles like this. Since my grandma had an early 1970's VCR with RCA inputs we could pull it off easily but without that you would need some sort of RF converter (common now...) or a camcorder with RF output and/or a 75->300ohm adapter (pretty common adapter back then actually) and I only saw one camera like that, and that one in the mid 80's no less, the rest were RCA output. Of course none of this even applies if there is something about 1955 TV's different from 60's and 70's TV's I was asked to do this on.
*** Marty is an aspiring professional guitarist. I speak from experience when I say that there are guitarists who wouldn't know an ohm from a dog turd, but are freaking whizzes at jury-rigging electronics. They kind of have to be.
*** Possibly Doc had previously modified that TV as part of one of his non-time-travel-related experiments?
*** I have a lot of experience with hacking TV sets, starting in 1967 or so (and working on sets going back to late 50s), and I don't really think Doc would have had much trouble adding a video input to a 1950s TV set. An old set like that would be a lot easier to do that to than a modern one as the needed connection point would have been a wire between two components, not a circuit board trace. And while the video timing was changed slightly from B&W sets to color, it didn't change that much; the camcorder's output would be well within the range of the TV's horizontal and vertical hold controls. Marty, though, could not have done it without Doc's help, at least not given what we see in the film. Maybe the "adapter" he asked for was to connect the camcorder to Doc's mod, Doc having already done the inside-the-set work.
* What the heck was Marty doing going over to Doc's garage at the beginning of the film, anyway? He can't possibly blame the fact that he was late for school on Doc's clocks-- he was only there for a few minutes, and he ''was'' wearing a wristwatch.
** He probably went by to use the speaker since Doc had said he'd be out, and spent more time there than we actually saw, maybe straightening things up and getting ready a bit, and didn't think to look at his wristwatch because he was ''surrounded'' by clocks that all said the same thing.
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** Nevermind that even the best ''modern'' bulletproof vests are not going to stop even one 7.62 round at 5 times the range he got shot at. Even if he had some sort of phlebotinum vest he is not going to be able to sit up for a while.
** He had a gun, but he threw it away when he was confronted by multiple men with assault rifles who weren't intimidated. And he probably wore a vest because he calculated it gave him the best chances of survival without tipping Marty off to its presence and thus causing a paradox. He probably reinforced the vest with metal plates or something and just took a chance they wouldn't hit him in the head.
*** More precisely his Colt Single Action Army jammed when he tried to use it. ''Then'' he threw it away. In the third film we see that he owned a very similar gun back in 1955 (probably owing to his fascination with the old West) if its the same gun and if it wasn't new to begin with that would explain why it breaks. As for the bulletproof vest its time to initiate protocol [[Willing Suspension of Disbelief]]. Most Hollywood films get the durability of these things wrong for the sake of telling a good story.
* As Cracked.com pointed out, after crashing into the photo booth, the Libyan terrorists are ''still there,'' but we don't hear from them for the rest of the movie-- or the rest of the trilogy, for that matter. What's up with that?
** I always figured the crash killed them. Just because a car doesn't blow up doesn't mean its occupants are OK (and the photo booth was already on fire from the DeLorean's time jump, so even if they were just knocked out, they probably burned to death soon after).
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** Do we know he's the cafe's owner, or just a clerk? If he's just an employee, he probably wouldn't care about that phone book, either because it's not his, or he's too busy to care, or what. That's definitely my attitude at work regarding company property!
*** The other patrons refer to him as "Lou", and the place is called "Lou's Cafe", so I'd say he's the owner.
** ... [[What Do You Mean
*** Just because it's going to be replaced eventually doesn't mean that its owner would be perfectly okay with having it torn up by anyone that just happened by. It may be just a phone book that will get replaced in anywhere from a few weeks to a year anyway, but it's still ''his'' phone book and it's understandable he'd be annoyed by someone ripping it up if they weren't even going to spend a lousy nickel on a cup of coffee in recompense.
* How did that bolt of lightning not kill Doc, gloves or no gloves? Not only did he survive, he practically no-sold it-- he simply fell to the ground and got back up after a few seconds.
** Because the bolt of lightning didn't go through him. Electricity is going to take the path of least resistance, and human bodies are actually pretty resistant. Given the options of going through a human body and through a metal cable explicitly designed and made to move electricity, electricity is going to go through the cable.
** Sorry but that "path of least resistance" business is a canard. Electricity takes ''all'' paths, the available current being divided between the paths, inversely proportional to the relative resistance of each. (e.g. if one path is 50 ohms and the other path 100, then the 50 ohm path gets twice the current of the 100 ohm path.) So even though the cable provided a nice low impedance path to ground, I'd expect some of the current to go through Doc. Funny thing, though: a lot of the people who are struck by lightning every year are not killed. Yes, it's a hella lot of current, but it's also very very brief. They aren't necessarily just fine, though. Mental problems are not uncommon in lightning strike victims.
* What made Doc change his mind and go to 2015 instead of 2010?
** He says right then and there that he changed his mind because he felt 30 years was a nice round number.
** This troper noticed that he didn't "change his mind" so much as had it changed for him. He wanted 25 years in the future ''before'' Marty went through time and changed history. Part of the change was informing the past Doc that he is 30 years from the future. [[
* Why would George want Biff anywhere near his wife and kids? He was a breath away from raping Lorraine the night of the dance. Even ignoring that he's still an asshole who is still physically stronger than him. He could come back anytime and get revenge.
** George punching out Biff completely changed the power dynamic between the two. In short, after George laid out Biff, Biff was his bitch.
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* Marty and the Doc end up with a photo of an empty burial plot. So what would happen if Marty or Doc (or someone else) went to the 1955 graveyard and spied on Marty and 1955-Doc digging out the buried DeLorean? What would cause Marty to return to 1885 to save Doc?
** I presumed Doc set a false tombstone to maintain the timeline.
*** Then the post-ripple photograph would have been the false tombstone, not an empty burial plot. A bigger question is why would the burial plot be empty after 70 years in a cemetary? Wouldn't someone else have been buried there by then?
** Same reason why Jennifer still has the piece of paper that read "YOU'RE FIRED!" before the timeline changed, and why Marty still has the photo of him and his siblings in the first film: they're immune to the [[Ripple Effect]].
** Doc at one point says the picture ''represents'' what will happen with regards to the confrontation with Tannen. It's essentially become not just a picture of a plot of land, but an artifact representing the potential outcomes of time travel. Thus why it fades out completely when the confrontation is resolved without anyone dying. There might actually be someone buried there now, but the photo didn't need to show it because it's not relevant to what the photo ''is'' now.
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*** Doc wouldn't mess with the car in the cave unless there was no other alternative because even the slightest mistake could alter the timeline.
*** Gasoline has a shelf life. Even 1 year old gas will cause lots of problems.
**** And, conveniently, Marty goes back to about nine months after Doc arrives in 1885. By then Doc would have already prepared the
*** There'd be no gas in the buried DeLorean because, as any gearhead will tell you, when you put a car into long-term storage, you have to drain all fluids from it. Especially gasoline, because it will corrode the tank. Also, in 1955, the 1955 Doc says to Marty "I put gas in the tank", so it was already established that there was no gas in there.
* Did Marty remember to pick up the pieces of the letter Doc tore up that warned him about the Libyans before taking a passed out Doc Brown home in 1955?
** In ''Part I'', just after Doc tears up the letter, a limb falls off of the tree and distracts him from tearing it up further because his priorities are shifted to ensuring the cabling is still intact. You see him shove the pieces of the letter into his pocket when this happens.
* In the Telltale game, if the DeLorean was duplicated when it was hit by lightning and the duplicate was sent to a dystopian 2025 where Griff Tannen momentarily took possession of it, was Doc, who was inside the DeLorean at the time, also duplicated? If so, what happened to the duplicate? Did Griff kill him?
** One episode is named Double Visions, and in the log in screen to play the game, you clearly see Doc, as the figurehead for that episode. Not that I have been the future or nothing, but I think this will be explained soon.
** Why would the duplicated DeLorean have been sent to a dystopian 2025?
*** The lightning bolt sent the original seventy years into the past, [[Fridge Brilliance|the duplicate went seventy years into the future.]]
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*** Marty's driver's license would be expired, but it would still have his date of birth on it. If the clerk at the counter was laid back enough he could probably still accept it since it's still proof that he's 21.
*** They're also in the middle of the prohibition. Alcohol is illegal. Other than Young Emmett, Marty's only other option is Kid Tannen.
* The Marty we see at the beginning of the first film is vastly cooler than anyone else in his family and probably among the top 5% cool kids at school. He plays guitar, fronts a rock band, is an expert skateboarder, is dating someone who looks like Claudia Wells, and all the girls in the aerobics studio wave to him too. Now the running gag through all of the films is that everyone is like their parents and their parents are like ''their'' parents, but George and Lorraine are complete losers. How'd Marty-1 escape his destiny, even before he changed his past?
** The thing he inherited from his father was his lack of drive and refusal to fight for what he thinks is important. Both he and his father are interested in creative works, but refuse to send their work out to companies out of a fear of rejection. As a result, Marty in the original timeline is implied to end up like his dad and take the route of least resistance, working a desk job or something instead of doing what he really wants.
* How does Doc shift gears when the
** Close-ups of the shifter show it surrounded by wires. Doc probably rigged it and the clutch with small servos to do the shifting via remote.
== Back to the Future: Part II ==
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** It might have made the cops suspect that Marty tranqed her and left her in an alley. Even if he's her husband, that would still qualify as spousal abuse and Marty could be hauled off to jail.
*** But if they suspected that, they shouldn't have just taken her home (except insofar as the new lawyer-free, non-adversarial justice system may somehow disincentivize the cops to actually arrest people). And the suspected abuser showing himself to the cops would probably make him a little ''less'' suspicious. Although a hypothetically-abusive Marty [[I Know You Know I Know|might know that the cops would know that an abusive Marty wouldn't do that…]]
*** If he wasn't there, then they had no reason to suspect that she'd been abused and dumped in that alley for possibly suspicious reasons; they might just assume she'd gotten tanked and fallen asleep in the garbage. Her (much younger than he probably should be) husband suddenly showing up to nervously laugh it off and tell them that it was okay, he knew that his wife was unconscious in the alley for reasons he'd probably be a bit cagey about (since he's hardly going to tell them that they've both just travelled in time and she's been drugged because she was getting a bit too excited about it) is probably going to make them a bit more suspicious as to his intentions. Particularly since if she's unconscious in an alleyway, then he has no real reason to object to them helping her get home that probably isn't at least a little bit suspicious to a police officer.
* In part 2, Doc gets accidentally set back in time to 1885, he had the power necessary from the bolt, and he had the flux capacitor which was in the DeLorean, but he wasn't moving at 88 MPH ...What gives..?
** Possibly the car span round so fast that its angular momentum was 88mph. Presumably the wheels didn't have to move that fast as the car was flying.
*** Since we don't know ''why'' the 88 miles per hour was necessary, no one can say for sure. Since the timecar always arrives at its destination cold, implying that it can absorb heat as well as direct kinetic energy, maybe the molecular motion of the lightning's heat was enough to make up for the lack of momentum?
**** [[Word of God]] says that it spun that fast, and that's why the vapor trails formed the reversed 99.
** It's actually [[All There in the Manual|all explained in Doc's letter]] in Part III. The flux capacitor already had 1.21 jigowatts stored up, as Doc loaded the fusion generator prior to meeting Marty at the school. The extra power from the lightning caused an overload that scrambled the time circuits and caused the flux capacitor to spontaneously activate.
*** [
**** An obscure way of saying gigawatt.
*** Of course, a watt is a unit of power not energy so you can't "store" 1.21 gigawatts. Presumably the capacitor had stored enough energy that it could discharge it at a rate of 1.21 gigawatts for however long is necessary to work it...
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* Why did Marty have to go to the future to prevent his son from taking part in the robbery? From Marty's point of view, the robbery wouldn't happen for 30 years. All Doc had to do was tell him exactly when it was going to happen, and in 30 years, Marty could prevent it without having to time travel.
** Of course, Marty would have to remember this for 30 years. But surely he would remember something this important, no? Also, in the next 30 years, he could have just raised his son to be a bit less vulnerable to peer pressure and avoided the whole mess.
*** My theory is that this was all a [[Xanatos Gambit]] by Doc to improve Marty's life by having Marty choose to improve himself. Note that Doc doesn't mind actively telling Marty the mistakes his "son" will make, but he refuses to tell him a mistake that ''Marty'' will make; i.e., racing Needles because he called him chicken. The end of the third movie implies that once Marty changes, the future becomes a blank slate.
*** The only reason they go into the future to help Marty's kid is because that's how they ended the first one, and the ending was meant to be a joke. When the sequel happened, they had to start with the hook they'd already set up.
** And of course, kids don't always do as you say. I guess Doc used a more method which would be easier to get result.
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**** See, for example, [[Dune|Paul Atreides' copy of the Orange Catholic Bible given to him by Dr. Yueh: about palm-sized, but has thousands of pages. Has its own inbuilt magnifying device.]]
* Why does Marty get blamed for the Sports Almanac fiasco? Isn't it at least partly Doc's fault for inventing a time machine that doesn't require keys or a password or at least some sort of security measure, and then leaving it completely unguarded? All Marty did was give Biff the idea.
** Actually, it'd be more Doc's fault for talking so loudly - that other people can overhear him.
** Marty didn't get blamed. He just declared that [[
** It ''was'' kind of Marty's fault that Biff was able to steal the DeLorean from Hilldale, as he was supposed to be watching it whilst Doc was retrieving Jennifer, but instead wandered off looking at self-walking dog leashes. A split-second was all Biff needed.
**** Wanders off and leaves the door to the
*** Well, that's all in the past.
*** You mean the future.
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*** It's exactly because of that. The young Biff thought of the old Biff as "an old codger with a cane", and nothing more.
*** That, and young Biff was really dumb.
*** Exactly. Essentially a variant on [[Tricked
** This troper wants to know how in the heck Old Biff knew how to use the
*** Everything is labeled. You see, Doc is an [[Absent
*** Yeah, but how did he know to turn the time circuits on? And power up Mr. Fusion? And how did he figure out that he had to speed up to 88 mph to travel through time?
**** Maybe there's an Owner's Manual in the glove box.
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*** [[Word of God]] is that 2015 Biff left 1955 soon after he gave the almanac to his younger self.
*** 2015 Biff is an old codger with a cane and you expect him to prevent a fistfight between two teenagers?
*** 2015 Biff is also a car-detailer who probably hasn't thought the slightest about time-travel before suddenly having a time machine fall into his hands; he probably isn't thinking fourth-dimensionally to this extent. Essentially, he's probably just thinking "If I give this to my younger self, he puts on some bets and mints some serious cash, ka-ching!" and probably isn't interested in considering the timeline for possible past errors he can correct. He probably doesn't even make these connections since he doesn't remember the past timeline. He also probably thinks that punch or not, once he's a however-many-illionaire after winning on his bets Lorraine's going to be attracted to his wealth and leave George for him anyway, further increasing the "ka-ching!" and letting him get his revenge on George that way. Of course, it doesn't work out that way, but he's probably not thinking about it that hard.
* In the first film, the DeLorean's exterior ices up after each trip through time. Why didn't that happen in the subsequent films?
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* Why Doc and Marty were being so idiotic in the third movie? The previous movies have shown that when you know the future, you can change it. So why didn't they simply leave the town and think about returning to the future with better time? It's not like Tannen would have been ready to follow them to the ends of the earth. Also, it wouldn't have probably taken much persuasion to get the sheriff to arrest his gang at slightest provocation.
** But wouldn't they need to stay in town since they needed the train and that specific run of tracks to get back to the future? Also, long-distance travel was a lot more difficult in those days AND they have to bring along the DeLorean without letting anyone see it. As for the sheriff, he was clearly already doing everything he could to get Tannen and, I could be wrong, but I don't believe gun dueling was considered a crime in that era.
*** Actually, all they would need would be the flux capacitor, Mr. Fusion, and the time control chip planted on the hood; a rather small package, relatively speaking.
**** To scrap the Delorian Time Machine, put the Flux Capacitor, Mr Fusion and electronics in a rucksack, and flee on a mule... [[Rule of Cool|That isn't what people wanted (and paid) to see]]. But outwitting the most dangerous outlaw in town, helping a mad scientist to find love, stealing a train and pushing it 88 miles per hour to break the boundaries of the 4th dimension... Yeah, perhaps they aren't the sharpest knives, but the ending was worth of EVERYTHING.
*** Given that 'Mad Dog' Tannen had an armed gang and was himself a fast draw and crack shot, the sheriff might simply not have felt ''able'' to arrest him. Or Tannen might have been a suspect in many murders but without sufficient evidence (such as surviving witnesses) to actually get a warrant for his arrest on any of them. Or he might have plead self-defense in prior cases (given that his opponent would be armed). Its not like they had CSI teams back then...
**** Gun dueling (any kind of dueling) has in fact been illegal in the United States since it's inception; in fact it was called ''murder'' if it went the way it was supposed to go. This did not, however, prevent it from '''happening''', especially in the South, but there is little evidence that the "Showdown at High Noon" happened in the West, apart from one or possibly two notorious incidents. Rather, if you wanted someone dead in the West, you did it the way you wanted it done in modern-day Los Angeles; kick in the door to the bar where he's playing cards and starting spraying. Indeed, a legendary gunfighter whose name escapes me (some Troper will no doubt tack on the right name an the story) was reportedly shot in the back of the head in a bar by his enemy. The enemy confessed, but said "I shot him through the eye, in self defense." The coroner remarked, "If he shot (the gunfighter) in the eye, he was exercising good marksmanship. If he shot him in the back of the head, he was exercising good judgement." So, frankly, the only imaginable way for Buferd Tannen and his gang of crooks to go free men for as long as they did was for the Sheriff to be too afraid of him to think about trying to arrest him. That said, when that sort of thing happened in the West, as would happen today (albeit much faster thanks to telecommunications), that when the law is outgunned by the crooks, U.S. Marshals will be sent in, and if they fail, the Army. (See also: WACO and Ruby Ridge.) Remember, the government doesn't like competition.
***** All of that and, well, in a deleted scene form Part III we see Tannen killing sheriff Strickland outside town before the duel with Marty.
****** That would be [
***** As far as the time machine goes, that's a huge ''wallbanger' for me as well. Why, oh why, for instance, didn't Doc use the stored gasoline from the
****** Except that such a specially-built track probably would not have survived to 1985; it would likely have been dismantled in the meantime, or at least have undergone substantial wear and tear. The DeLorean ''would'' indeed emerge in 1985, but possibly in a very inconvenient location.
******* More inconvenient than where it did end up?
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* In the third movie, when the DeLorean is out of gas in 1885, why don't they take some gas from the earlier time loop version of the car that's still in the mine? (To avoid changing history, they could get some more gas from the future to replace it. Or just take an amount small enough not to be noticed; they only need enough for one trip.)
** In the novelization Marty EXPLICITLY think about that plan, but Doc said that he had drained the
** ''Better question'', why didn't the Doc go to Western Union and make a change to the letter he left, adding something like, "Oh, and bring along an extra jerry can of gas and some duct tape would you?"?
*** Because the letter says "Do not try to come and rescue me. I'm happy here". A letter that ends "PS: I was happy here until you come back here, told me that Bill's grandpa would kill me, and then now are stranded in the past because some stray arrow from an Indian pierced the gas tank. Help!!! Bring Extra Gas and a piece of Duct Tape. PSS: Hey 1955!Marty, I'm 1885 Marty, please, bring some Coke too. I'm thirsty." would be too hilarious and bizarre.
*** Solution: Have a second letter sent to Doc, some time before 1955 Doc sends Marty back to 1985 via the clock tower, but not too soon, saying something like "Marty will come to you at one point with a letter from yourself, and will ask for your help a second time. Make sure he brings extra gas and some duct tape. And do not, under ''any'' circumstances, let him know that you received this letter, or indeed that you have received any message from... well, you."
*** But how exactly is Doc supposed to know where to send this to Marty without Young!Doc intercepting it? The only reason the first letter gambit works at all is because Doc happens to know for a definite fact that Marty will be standing in that exact spot at that exact time in order for the postman to deliver it; beyond that, he's got no idea where Marty is going to be or what Marty is going to do. And if he sends the letter to Young!Doc's house, well, Young!Doc is probably going to be there, and is more likely to receive it.
*** Simple-yet-tricky answer to the better question: because he didn't do that. Marty reads the original letter and comes back based on it, so if Doc were to start adding things after that point, it would cause a paradox. In general, Doc's kind of keen on avoiding paradoxes where possible.
* Doc's chemical bundles cause the locomotive's boiler to explode, yet despite the engine not being under pressure it's still accelerating?
** Go back and rewatch. What does Doc say about his 'bundles' and the effects they will have on the train?
*** "Make the fire burn hotter, kick up the boiler pressure and make the train go faster" or "Each detination will be accompanied by a sufdden burst of acceleration"? The boiler had just exploded, the steam had escaped, there was no pressure to power the engine. No power, no acceleration.
** The boiler hadn't ''yet'' exploded. It was venting steam like crazy, but you can still have pressure in a leaky container if it builds fast enough.
** That wasn't the boiler that burst apart, it was the smokebox. The vapors seen escaping are smoke from the burning coal and bundles, not steam, which is why Doc and Clara weren't parbroiled on contact with them.
** The boiler pops quite a few rivets, venting steam, in addition to losing the smokestack.
* At the end of Part III we all see that not only is Doc living happily ever after with family, but he also created his very own Time Train. But in order to time travel, he needs a flux capacitor that requires 1.21 gigawatts of electricity. How was he able to create a flux capacitor with resources available only in 1885? He couldn't use the flux capacitor in the Delorean he buried in the mine, or else there wouldn't be a
** A. Doc ''built'' the Flux Capacitor in the first place. If anyone knows how to build another one, it's him. As for the initial 1.21 gigawatts? Well, Doc might not know exactly when and where lightning's going to strike again, but he's a [[Mad Scientist]]. He could rig up a lightning rod and figure out how to channel it into a train at the right time. Also, chill. You're close to going over your daily allotment of exclamation points.
*** We don't know exactly how complicated a device the flux capacitor is - or Mr. Fusion, for that matter. It's possible that Doc could have built one or both from late-1800s components, given enough time (and, based on the ages of his children, it probably took at least a decade). Even if he can't create a fusion reactor, I suppose he could electrically connect the train's wheels to the flux capacitor, and then use a lightning rod to channel electricity into the railroad track. This wouldn't require exact knowledge of when the lightning was going to hit, or exact positioning of the train, as long as the train was traveling along the track at 88 MPH when it did strike. It might take several tries to get it right, but he'd only need to get lucky once.
*** Did you guys already forget he also had the hoverboard with him before Marty went back to 1985? You can never keep a good scientist down with resources like that mo'fo.
**** If it's true that the 88 mph speed is arbitrary, then Doc could have simply removed that, built the machine, attached a lightning rod on top, and waited inside during a thunderstorm. If he set his machine to go to 2015, he could then completely hover-covert it, install Mr. Fusion, etc.
** It's time travel. He could cannibalize the flux capacitor in the
** And why was everyone yelling in that scene?
*** IIRC, the time-train was making a lot of noise. Plus, Doc and family were standing a good 3-4 feet above the ground, and [[Wild Mass Guessing|Marty had already backed a short distance away from the tracks and was too stunned by seeing Doc alive that he didn't think to move closer.]]
** Gesturing to the train, Doc [[Hand Wave|explains]] to Marty and Jennifer, "it runs on steam!"
*** Also, a fairly large flux capacitor can be seen on the train's exterior if you look closely- it's much larger than the one on the Delorean. While it's possible the size of the flux capacitor has to be somehow proportional to the vehicle it's a part of, it might also be that size because Doc made it out of bulky 1800s steampunk components of some sort.
** The other problem with all these theories is this: the whole reason for the third movie is that Doc explicitly said in his letter that he *isn't* able to fix the time circuits with 1885 components. Since he's in exactly the same situation at the end of the movie (stuck in 1885 with a
*** There are two explanations:
**** Ah) Motivation: First time he ended stranded in wild west, he feels an old man, he likes the wild west, and fixing a Delorean Time Machine would be a huge effort which could end in too many changes in the timeline. But when he sent Marty [[Title Drop|Back to the Future]] he has a beautiful wife, a über-positive attitude to life, and the idea of a train to travel. So, when he feels depressed, he has his wife to cheer him up.
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* How could Doc Brown and Clara have a healthy kid at their age, let alone two? In the first film, 1955 Doc even says that he's amazed that he's going to be that old. So how is it possible for that to happen?
** Men don't stop producing semen due to old age the same way that women undergo menopause. Doc's age is irrelevant-- only Clara's. And she's [[May
** Not to mention, In Vitro Fertilisation or some other advanced form of fertility aid would have been available in 2015 or whenever they went to the future.
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* When 1955 Doc saw his tombstone, how come 1885 Doc didn't remember it?
** Because that Doc never saw the tombstone, in the same way that the Doc from the start of the first film didn't remember meeting Marty in 1955.
*** Actually it's quite possible Doc did remember meeting Marty but was acting like he didn't, the same way he pretended to be shot instead of just avoiding the whole situation with the Libyans... he was preserving the timeline. I think the answer is more something like that when you actually become a time traveler in BttF, it endows you with [[Ripple Effect-Proof Memory]]. Thus Doc would be subject to his memory being changed by time travel interference only up to the point before he travels in time himself, at the end of the first movie. Everyone else who's traveled in time shows that their memories don't change with the timeline. Marty doesn't remember his and his parents' different lives, nor does he remember growing up in Hell Valley. Similarly, Jennifer can still remember what happened in the future of 2015 even though that future now no longer exists (as do Doc and Marty). This is probably an example of [[Required Secondary Superpowers]] to avoid paradox, since it would otherwise be impossible to use time travel to fix any sort of problem... if you fixed it, it didn't happen, thus you wouldn't become aware of needing to fix it, so it wouldn't get fixed, so you would become aware of it, etc.
* So, Doc couldn't repair the time circuits with 1885 components. But he knew how to fix them with 1955 technology; couldn't he build the components he needed? He was able to build a steampunk ice-making machine, would it be that difficult to build 1955 circuits? I don't have knowledge of these things, so probably my question is stupid... but ''why'' is it impossible?
** Because making refrigeration coils is considerably easier than making something to produce a vacuum and thus vacuum tubes, which are clearly a part of the 1955 "microchip"?
** Pulling a vacuum isn't that tough (see [
* Okay, Doc has somehow made a refrigerator that fills an entire room. Why is he filling the thing with original Hill Valley water? Surely he can build some filters or an evaporator/condenser into the thing to purify the stuff he drinks. Heck, the thing appears to be steam-powered, so why can't he capture the steam coming off the boiler and drink ''that''?
** He still has to get the water from somewhere, so he probably figures it's easier to just use the most conveniently available water source. Plus, he probably doesn't want to have to spend ages filtering it, purifying it or collecting every evaporated drop every time he just wants a quick drink. Besides which, he presumably had to live on the local water supply before he got the refrigerator up-and-running, so it's likely he simply got used to the taste, or even likes it.
* Was anyone else disappointed that Old West Doc hadn't acquired a new dog back then, and named it Newton?
== Paradoxes ==
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** Incidentally, ''Marty'' never ''does'' meet himself in 2015. Jennifer does, but Marty doesn't.
** The reason the way things work differently for Einstein is that Einstein is the only person who goes to the future, and DOESN'T go back. There's actually TWO ways a person can meet themselfs/exist twice at the same time; the first, as mentioned above, is to go back in time and meet your past self, OR go to the future meet your future self, then go back in time, ride the slow path to the future, and then meet your time traveling past self. Since Einstein never went back, he really didn't exist during that 1 minute. Also, after [[BTTF 3]] ( Unless the games say otherwise, I haven't played them) Marty lives out his life, and 30 years later Time-traveling!Marty comes does the his stuff, and leaves. Then 2015!Marty doesn't get fired, makes sure that Time-Traveling!Marty did things right, then 2015!Marty has a long heart to heart discussion with Marty Jr. to makes sure nothing like what happens again. BUT! the 2015 marty that we see in the 2nd movie DOESN'T know what is going on ( contrary to the original poster's theory ) because the delayed ripple effect hasn't reached him yet.
** Here's a totally different possibility then the ones described above. (Or maybe it's the same as one of them, because [[Timey Wimey]] stuff is so hard to follow.) The 2015 that we see Jennifer and Marty visit in Part 2 is one in which they hadn't done ''any'' time-traveling since 1985; the middle-aged Marty we see had only ever visited 1955 and returned to the modified 1985, while middle-aged Jennifer has never been in the
* If Marty prevented Doc from getting shot, that means he never looked at his tombstone, which means he never traveled back in time to save him, which means Doc got shot, which means he did look at his tombstone, which means he traveled back in time to save him, which means...
** [[Ripple
** Doc had plenty of time afterwards to buy a tombstone and put the necessary information to get Marty to come back. The tombstone disappeared at first because it looked like Doc was going to survive and go back to 1985 that day. [[Ripple
* If Marty prevented his son from getting arrested, that means he never got arrested, which means he never traveled forwards in time, which means he got arrested, which means he traveled forwards in time, which means...
** Most of the stuff in Parts II and III inevitably leads to paradoxes in a "strict" mutable timeline, where subsequent timelines don't have "memory" of what happened "the first time around". One theory that's generally accepted on bttf.com is that in the BTTF-verse, any time traveler's memories from the first time around are transplanted to any subsequent iterations. It doesn't make any reasonable sense, but this assumption helps explain almost everything.
** We call this [[Ripple
*** Actually, this isn't a case of [[Ripple
* At the end of Part III, Doc and Marty steal a locomotive. Their getaway plan is to go to 1985, which Marty does... but Doc doesn't, because Clara shows up. So why isn't he arrested for hijacking and destroying a locomotive? Surely the engineer would be able to identify him.
** Possibly he was. In the Wild West, notorious outlaws were often ''pardoned'' in lieu of hanging or imprisonment if the confessed and came along willingly; of course, there was the implication that the hanging would be very prompt and they would never see the inside of a court house if they went back to their thieving, murdering ways. Doc Brown might well have confessed the whole thing, and then, in lieu of payment, went to work for the railway company to pay off his debt. He would have soon paid himself out of debt by using future technology knowledge (we know he knows electrics damn well, and he was turning into a Steampunk Gadgeteer Genius), and that he parlayed into a fortune, which he used to construct the Time Train.
** How could the engineer recognize him? They both had handkerchiefs over their faces.
** Everyone probably figured Clint Eastwood and friend had fallen into the ravine.
*** They did, according to Zemeckis and Gale, hence the renaming of the spot as "Eastwood Ravine".
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** Lorrayne and George just ''love'' to tell the story about how did they end in love. And Doc had a lot of time to think about implications of time travel (he had experimented them!) So, while TP!Marty comes back to reality, LP!Marty will end stranded in the past without extra plutonium, just as Doc had planned; he will try to follow 1955!George as TP!Marty did, and would rush to save him from being hit by the car, as TP!Marty did. Then he would wake up and be called "Calvin Claine". He just had to put two and two together, remember the story that their fathers said for many years, and play the lines his fathers have been telling him since he was born. The only thing that would change is a "WTF" for LP!Marty part.
**** Except this theory is [[Jossed]] by Parts II and III. We're thus to believe that no "alternating timeline loop" occurred.
*** Not that we got to see. Doesn't mean they didn't exist, though.
** My theory is that the two Marty's just merged - and, eventually, Marty remembered both the Wimp!George past and the Confident!George past.
*** I don't think so. My biggest bit of [[Fridge Logic]] is how Marty intends to not look like a body snatcher. He's essentially traveled to a parallel universe where everyone (including Doc) has led a different life than he thinks they did.
**** It wasn't a different universe, it was a different timeline. I think, within time, Marty's new memories would catch up with him.
**** Marty seems a lot more confidant in parts 2 and 3 than he did in 1. I always believed that it was because he became the Marty of the new timeline. Shortly after part 1 he looses his old memories and only has memories of the new Marty's life (notice how part 2 treats the altered timeline as the original).
** I always assumed that Marty was less vulnerable to his environment than his siblings, thus he turned out okay even with the unhappy family. So that the change in family background didn't effect him much (just all his memories).
** This makes no sense. For all intents and purposes, the Marty raised in the LP timeline should replace the Marty raised in the TP timeline in the "next iteration". As for why he had the memories of the original timeline, there are different theories, from "time travelers in BTTF undergo memory replacement when they travel to the past" to "we're viewing the intermediate timeline, not the final timeline where the changed Marty returns to the future".
**** We're probably never going to come to any conclusive agreement. There are all different theories one can go with. I believe that LP Marty went back to 1955 and became TP Marty. After returning to 1985, TP Marty and LP Marty become one and the same. To me, the "memory replacement theory" makes the most sense.
***** Recall that all through the first movie, Marty's own history is ''gradually'' disappearing (as seen in the photo), and that he actually starts feeling physical discomfort toward the end. This seems to back up the "Merging Timeline/Memory Replacement" idea.
** Inherent plot hole of nearly any story where the main characters have [[Ripple
*** Okay, here's my theory. When George kissed Lorraine it caused the photo to fade back, creating the LP timeline. At that moment, TP Marty was fading out. Thus, when he faded back, he became the LP Marty. BUT he has [[Ripple
**** I still think, at the end, Marty would remember his past from both both timelines. During the week in 1955, though, there is only Marty with TP memories. To have him ever be LP Marty during that week would mess with the events seen in the film. I also really don't like the idea of everyone that LP Marty has known suddenly losing the Marty they knew and loved forever. Also, in the novel of the third film, there is an indication that Doc 1985 in 1885 would suddenly remember dressing Marty up in the outfit - even though he didn't, at first. I know the novels aren't entirely canon with the films, but that's another thing to consider.
**** My opinion's always been that LP Marty is the one who hates being called chicken. TP Marty, with low-self-esteem inherited from his father, wouldn't get worked up over it. Further details on the [[Wild Mass Guessing]] page.
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* Okay, in 1985-A, Doc was sent to an insane asylum. This means that the DeLorean time machine would never have been invented and that Marty would never have gone back to 1955. Therefore, when the ''Part II'' Marty goes back to 1955, the ''Part I'' Marty shouldn't exist there anymore. At least not until the almanac is burned, at which point the ''Part I'' Marty would be restored to 1955 via the ripple effect.
** This is simple inconsistency. Without time machine invented through all 30 years (ALL 30, this timeline must not differ from others) and Great Night (what LP Marty had seen at the end of part 1) Marty-2 and Doc-2 must be erased and fade out. However, they have a whole week, while the events of Hell Valley happen just one night. '''P. S.''' This page need to be named ''The Movies for Noodlebakers''.
** Actually, since the time machine was never invented, it would undo all the previous trips through time, including the current one, creating a very convoluted paradox. The only way to get around this is to suppose that ''somehow'', the time machine was still invented in the A timeline, and Marty still went to 1955 and back to 1985 and then to 2015. Actually, he's the Marty we're supposed to be following in 1985-A, since [[Word of God]] says (and it's consistent with other portrayals of time travel) says that he departed from 2015-A. We are, after all, dealing with [[Ripple
*** And a Ripple Effect Proof time machine. Once it (and its passengers) enter a time period, they become part of it (until they fade out, of course).
**** It appears from the films that the ripple effect doesn't occur unless the events that lead to what would be affected irrevocably changed, Doc and Marty had a working Time Machine so the ripple effect would not affect them in 1985-A, because they CAN change the events that lead to that timeline. This is also why Marty began disappearing at the dance, why Old Biff faded away when the Time Machine left, and why all but two photographs change instantly. Notably, the two exceptions have an affected event that wasn't going to happen until a week later. It's not so much metatime as the law of probability.
**** I didn't get a real good look at that newspaper (can you even * see* the date on it?) but I don't know of it saying that the committal happened in 1985.
** I'm assuming he was committed at some point after creating time travel (which, since Marty already met him in 1955 and him aware, he may have gotten a head start on in Part I's alternate 1955-85). Keep in mind that if Biff had the Doc committed before the time machine was made, Alt85 wouldn't exist, because Biff would have no way to influence himself in '55.
*** However, even if Doc Brown was committed after inventing the flux capacitor, Marty has been shipped off to Switzerland for boarding school, so he wouldn't have traveled to 2015 to allow Biff to steal the
**** Only in 1985-A would the time machine probably not be invented. Not in 1985-original. Better that way: having two time machines from different timelines about would just open up too many new and mind-screwy cans of worms....
* By 1900 or so, judging by Clara's dress and the age of his sons, Doc Brown has a steam locomotive that can fly, probably runs on [[Required Secondary Powers|phlebotinum and some sort of super-efficient steam engine]] in order to actually lift all that weight, ''and'' can travel through time. Even without bringing the time travel aspect into it, this is a ''hell'' of a departure from the technological state in our own turn-of-the-19th-century era. For comparisons, the Wright Brothers made their first flight in 1904 and air travel as a whole didn't really get started until WWI. This is such a drastic technological shift that by the time Doc goes forward to 1985, it should ''not'' be the same 1985 as Marty's. Doc couldn't built the new time machine in secret-- he could have been able to get away with building or procuring a steam locomotive (it takes more than 1 person just to operate a conventional one!) and all the scaled-up-in-size parts and fuels to build the time machine part of it without someone to help him. Something about the project ''would'' have leaked out. If a sports almanac can change 2015 so drastically, ''antigravity'' should render Doc's 1985 completely unrecognizable from Marty's.
** The Wild West don't have those meddling reporters, and during the victorian years there was still many superstitions. It wouldn't too far-fetched that the Time Train could be even the same original train that pushed the Delorean, salvaged to the extreme (Any given train would need to be almost completly reconstructed, so working with some unclaimed remains would be still plausible) With some rebuilds, the controls mostly automaticed and Doc's [[Applied Phlebotinum|Chemical Log]] you don't need many people to operate it, and hidding the big thing in a [[The Batcave|Doc-Cave]], he could still be "That odd old Smith-inventor", and his greatest secret would be Clara's secret pie recipe.
*** I'm not talking about whether or not Doc has the technical knowhow to work on a steam locomotive--he built the time machine to begin with, and there are some hints that he likes trains sprinkled through the series. What I'm talking about is the simple fact that since a steam locomotive is ''much'' [[Square
*** Don't forget that the derelict train would be a memento of Marty. Extra motivation to work, indeed!
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** As well as the above, in the new timeline, New Assertive George McFly has already kicked Biff Tannen's ass once before, and by the end of the movie doesn't seem to be willing to take any crap from the other high school bullies who used to push him around. 30 years is plenty of time for George to make it pretty clear to Biff that if he tries anything of that nature again, he's going down hard.
** Factor in some values dissonance, probably. Back then, rape... or even attempted rape... didn't occupy the place in public conscience it does now. Lorraine and George may have been raised so that they considered Biff's actions just a sign of immaturity... not a good thing, but a "young people just do stupid stuff" sort of thing. By the time rape, even attempted rape, became acknowledged as the unforgivable act it's considered today, they probably would have already gotten over it, forgiven him, and so on. What would they do, decide to get themselves all riled up and hate him again just because society was now open about the fact they were supposed to?
*** Also see [[
* At the end of the first movie, Marty tells Lorraine his real name. Lorraine clearly likes the name, implying she will eventually call her child that. The only thing... Marty was not her firstborn son. So why didn't Dave end up being called Marty and Marty end up being called something else?
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*** She certainly had at least one boyfriend prior to Marty, given that she said "it's not like I've never parked before."
** Maybe the father chose the name of the firstborn son. Then Lorraine chose it for the second son.
**** Additionally, the pop-up trivia information on one of the DVD's of Part III says that Marty's having an ancestor by his own name is an indication that he was likely named Martin partially after that guy as well.
* How come Marty doesn't have any ancestors who look like George, Dave or Linda?
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** In that case how come Lorraine didn't notice it?
*** Same deal as with George: she knew him for a week thirty years ago, and we have no evidence that Lorraine's memory is any more photographic than George's.
**** Ok, but here's the thing about that. George and Lorraine are both pretty smart, Biff was pretty dense, so how come George and Lorraine don't realize that their youngest child looks like Lorraine's ex from 30 years ago, but Biff, who only saw the
***** I think a
****** Memory isn't entirely about how smart you are, and whilst a disappearing flying Delorean is the kind of thing that you're going to remember, the exact facial appearance of someone you knew for a week decades ago isn't.
*** Specifically addressed on cracked.com: 'now we don't claim to know exactly what first enters the mind of a married man when his wife births a child who looks identical to their old high school boyfriend, but we're guessing it's not "time travel conspiracy"'.
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** Simple: Original!Lorainne falls for Original!George. Biff no longer wants her, coz he's a cool guy and why go for a girl with such poor tastes in men? It reflects badly on him. LP!Lorraine dates LP!George, who is now cooler, running for class president, and later a successful author. She is thus still attractive to Biff coz she has pizzaz. It's worth it then to murder George and take his wife, she's no blemish on Biff's reputation.
* The potential answers to many of the above are on the DVD box set documentaries. In it, the writers mention how their original idea is that there was some time-governing entity that had limited power in regulating events. It had a general outline (i.e. George and Lorraine get married and have their three children) and otherwise manipulated events to maintain this.
** [[In Spite of a Nail]] covers it quite well. In the BTTF universe, unless something happens to ''prevent'' an event from occurring as it did in the unaltered line, it happens. Slightly modified in detail, perhaps, but close enough for <s>jazz</s> [[A Little Something We Call "Rock and Roll"|rock and roll]].
*** That concept seems to be contradicted by other things in the series that show large future changes from relatively trivial changes to the past. For example, Marty's family at the end of the first movie seem to have radically different personalities, jobs, etc., apparently all because Marty's dad punched a bully in 1955. It seems likely that they could have found ways to be losers if that was really what they were "fated" for and some entity was pushing them in that direction.
**** Actually, this is answered by basic rules of the universe. Matter can neither be created nor destroyed, but pretty much anything else goes. If, barring extreme alteration, George and Lorraine were meant to have three children, then the actual personality, nature, and ultimate outcome of those three children is immaterial. Look at it this way... suppose you have an area with a cube that has thirty grams of matter in it. The universe doesn't care if this matter is cube-shaped, spherical, painted red, painted green, rendered into a dense cloud of particles, or is a very cute squeaky mouse, so long as there is thirty grams of matter there. Barring some serious fuxing of the laws of existence, all it cares about is the amount of matter, not the state.
**** That won't work; by the same token, the universe doesn't care whether the matter comes together in the form of three children or not. The matter that makes up the children came from the food that Lorraine ate during her pregnancies, and that the children ate after birth. If the children had never been born, that matter wouldn't be destroyed; it would have been eaten by someone else, or rotted.
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## reach 1885 with a fully functional flying Delorean
## save Doc
** For one thing, having the flying circuits repaired would require taking the
*** And you forgot to stop for gas.
*** 1985 Doc decided that; 1955 Doc didn't, and in fact ''can't'', because the entire timeline of the movies depends on his spending the next thirty years building it. But by the same token, 1955 Doc hasn't had the same experience of time travel as 1985 Doc, and decided the direct route was simplest.
*** Nor does 1955 Doc know anything about integrated circuits, much less 21st century technology like the hover conversion or Mr. Fusion. He could quickly learn, of course, but it'd start seriously screwing up the timeline if he did so (remember, this is a version of Doc in the past, and the more time he spends helping Marty, the more it's going to screw up 1985 Doc's memories and personality). Plus, Doc's a friendly neighborhood [[Mad Scientist]]: it seems in-character for him to think out the most direct route and not really consider the consequences. That's how his trouble with the Libyans began in the first movie.
*** Also, it wasn't the terrain that broke the fuel line but a wayward arrow. How was Doc supposed to see ''that'' coming? Without that, the
*** A car's fuel line is on the ''bottom'' of the car (note where the fuel is leaking out of). The arrow was just stuck in the side. Unless Marty was making the car do barrel rolls in some deleted scene, it was the rough terrain that did it.
**** Clearly Native American aiming skills were so accomplished that they could masterfully "bend" an arrow shot from their bows to penetrate the underside of Marty's car. That, and they knew enough about cars to know that it was a smart thing to do.
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* At one point, Doc sets the time circuits to the year "0000", which doesn't exist (Jesus was born in 1 AD, and the year before that was 1 BC). What would happen if the DeLorean had tried to travel to that time?
** Presumably, it would extrapolate the year from its dating system and thus arrive in 1 BC.
** Historically, the year of Jesus' birth isn't known, but was most likely around 3-5 BC. The modern Gregorian calendar isn't too precise that far back.
*** This troper remembers hearing on the commentary that that was a joke.
*** Wikipedia tells me that "astronomical year numbering" has a year 0 (what we would call 1 BC), and then it counts -1, -2 etc.. Maybe the Delorean is set to astronomical time. Or whatever.
*** Doc wasn't actually going there, he was illustrating an example...slightly [[Viewers
** As I mention on the WMG page, I would estimate that if you had to travel to B.C.E. years, the four-digit display would just change color. And there technically ''was'' a year zero, it just wasn't ''called'' that.
*** Also, as the DeLorean only travels through time and not space, even if the Doc was able to travel back to December 25, 0000 to witness the birth of Jesus Christ, he would have arrived in the land which would one day become California, and would have had no means to travel to that stable in Bethlehem in time to witness the birth in the first place! For this troper, this headscratcher overrides all ideas of the year 0000 not existing.
*** He'd have had a means of travel --- the Delorean can fly. But he wouldn't do it, because I can't think of anything that would do more damage to the timeline. That said, I now have the urge to write a [[Fanfic]] where the star that the three wise men followed turns out to be the Delorean.
*** The DeLorean was not hover-converted until the end of Part 1. Doc was probably just goofing off anyway.
*** He was just giving Marty some examples you could travel to with a time machine, like the Declaration of Independence or the birth of Christ. Doc doesn't seem to be kind of guy to know much about religious history, and just thought "Christ was born on Christmas Day, at the beginning of the calendar dating", thus December 25, 0000. As for the wrong location, I just can't picture him saying: "Or witness the birth of Christ?" *sets digits to DEC 25 0000* "Of course, you'd have to travel all the way to Bethlehem first, because the
* The time circuits are clearly limited to four-digit years. So what would happen if you went to 11:59 p.m. on December 31, 9999 and waited one minute?
** The Y10K bug strands you in a post-apocalyptic wasteland...obviously.
*** Maybe 9999.12.31.23.59 would actually result in a BC year if the computer is running with signed integers.
*** In one [[Fanfic]] I read once, Emmett mentioned that the vehicle COULD go back further than a year with four digits; he just figured that not many people would want to do it.
*** If the time circuits measure time in minutes after 0000-01-01 00:00 (assuming a proleptic Gregorian calendar with no 4000-year rule), then the smallest amount of memory that could be used to express all values from then until 9999-12-31 23:59 would be 33 bits (unsigned). This would actually cover it until approximately the beginning of April 16332, but you might have trouble seeing it on the Present Time display. If they measured time in ''seconds'' following 0000-01-01 00:00, you'd need at least a 39-bit unsigned integer, which would cover you until roughly mid-January 17421.
**** I don't think Doc ever planned to travel that far in time. The machine may have been intentionally built not to be capable of it, or he may have had some technical solution, or been able to think one up, if he changed his mind.
**** If he didn't stop at four-digits, how many was he going to stop at? Five? Six? 34? 24187? It probably would have been a bit mind-boggling even for the Doc to travel to build the Delorean with the ability to travel [[Toy Story (franchise)||to infinity and beyond]].
**** Besides, a 4-digit year is a good cut-off point as that can theoretically get a person back as far as the Late [[Stone Age]].
** I don't think he'd ''ever'' deliberately go that far into the future. Traveling ''30 years'' into the future is risky enough. Who would have the ''slightest idea'' what to expect in the 100th century? The Earth might have been rendered completely uninhabitable due to nuclear war or something.
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*** It cannot be a gag because, contrary to popular belief, the Delorean's speedometer does ''not'' go up to 85. It goes to ''95''.
** It's probably 88 MPH due to this number, when displayed on a two-digit digital readout like the one in the film, uses all 14 light-able segments.
*** It's been said that one reason for the 88 MPH requirement was to serve as a [[Shout
** Not to mention it makes for a far more gripping climax for the first and third films if Marty has to gun the engine up to eighty-eight. How boring would it have been if you only needed to get to three miles an hour? The third movie would have been over in a third of the time.
*** Perhaps Doc picked this number to avoid having accidental activation of the time machine. 88 is faster than highway and residential speeds, so if Doc is driving the
** Since "flux capacitor" is a mish-mash of electromagnetic terms, and Doc said that the DeLorean's steel frame is important, I'd guess it has to create a powerful electromagnetic field to trigger the time jump. A moving electric charge creates a magnetic field and vice versa, so Doc's apparently either charging or magnetizing the DeLorean's exterior, and then speeding the car up to generate a strong enough EM field. 88 mph just happens to be the magic number.
** Doc calibrated the time circuits to 88 MPH because it's a speed one is unlikely to reach simply driving around to the store to get some milk. Thus by accelerating up to that speed means that you are deliberately attempting to travel though time and not setting the damn thing off accidentally. It seems that as long as a destination date is punched in as soon as you hit 88 mph the time circuits activate and away you go, and since there is ALWAYS a destination date displayed the car is always "active." It's a machine that he designed for the express purpose of moving through time. The reason why it's a car is because you want it to go places and the reason it's a DeLorean is because the stainless steel skin optimizes flux dispersal.
*** [[Fridge Brilliance|I think]] [[Wild Mass Guessing|I've got it.]] It's a little joke by Doc Brown. To travel through time, you must (on Einsteinian theory) exceed lightspeed. Exceeding lightspeed in theory means your mass goes beyond ''infinity'', yes? Which is unbelievable on its own, but you must then somehow catch up and reassemble the infinite number of photons that have spun out since the moment you want to go back to. That would be a task in the order of ''double'' infinity, yes? Turn the number "88" sideways and tell me what you see.
*** [[Completely Missing the Point|Four boobs?]]
** I always assumed it was an issue of assisting the flux capacitor, under the assumption that time travel works by creating excessive amounts of energy (hence a lightning-bolt's worth of electricity run through a fancy capacitor), and that 88 mph was just an additional way of adding further energy to the
*** I might be thinking on the same track as you with this. You see those crazy sparks that appear in front of the
*** That may actually be the best of all of the explanations - the flux capacitor sends out energy in such a way that, in order to latch onto the same location on the earth's surface in both times, it must actually emit forwards along the earth from the capacitor itself at 88 miles per hour. The car must be travelling at the same speed in order to actually be within the resulting portal.
== Other ==
* Perhaps this is a stupid question, but did bulletproof vests that could protect you from several 7.62 rounds fired at relatively close range, exist in the 80s? I've been investigating a bit, and from what I read the standard issue back then in the US military was the PASGT vest, which was only Level II (meaning it could stop most handgun rounds, but not rifle rounds), and even modern day armor will only save you from an AK if you are wearing ballistic inserts underneath the vest.
** It's already been discussed above. I think general consensus is that Doc Mad Scienced the vest to beef it up.
* We know from the newspaper clippings seen in the opening that Brown Mansion burned down and that Doc subsequently moved into his garage, selling the rest of the land to developers. However, the scene where Marty leaves the garage in 1985 shows that these developments have resulted in Doc having his residence in the middle of what is clearly a commercial district. Would any kind of zoning commission allow this?
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* Something I discussed over (quite a few) pints really ended up bothering me. So on Doc's "personal timeline" he ends with a time machine (the locomotive) and pretty much full knowledge of the events of the movies. And he's shown himself to be sort of Doctor Who-ish in his ability to trust other "versions" of himself. Why not just use the train to go back and let himself know at various parts what he has to do to ensure the "ideal" future. He could have just traveled to 2009, printed off this page, delivered it to himself in 1985 and saved Universal millions making the the movies.
** Why would he want to do that? Didn't everything pretty much work out perfectly in the end. Why would he want to risk messing that up?
*** Because he already did it [[Timey
{{quote|
'''Doc:''' Well, I figured, ''what the hell.'' }}
*** But in that case he actually ''had'' something to prevent, namely his own death. As of the end of ''Part III'', what would he want to prevent? George's success? Biff's comeuppance? Marty avoiding the auto accident? I don't think so. He wouldn't change anything because there's nothing ''to'' change. Everything is already perfect.
** For this to work, the Doc would have to travel through time talking to other versions of himself. In II he makes it quite clear that he and Marty should not be interacting with their older selves, and goes to great lengths to avoid his older self seeing his face in the Square (although really he should have had the sense to avoid that area entirely). Also, doing all this could have created a paradox where he never ends up in 1885, and thus never gets the chance to create the train time machine.
*** To be fair, he probably ''couldn't'' avoid that area entirely if he wanted to get to where he was going without delay; the town square is usually named so for a reason, it's often the main central thoroughfare for the community -- and certainly would have been so back in 1955, when the town was much smaller. Chances are, it would have either been impossible or impractically time-consuming to get from A to B ''without'' passing through the square, so he's got little choice but to risk it.
* At the end of Part 3, how the heck does the railroad crossing gate know to come down ''when the only train that's coming is coming from god-knows-how-many-decades in the future?''
** Isn't that standard? Where I live, crossing gates come down quite a bit before the train shows up.
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*** Also, since it was a 100-year jump, the longest the DeLorean had ever made (that we know about, at least), the sonic booms were far enough apart that, and this is a stretch, the gates could have been triggered manually by an operator (likely with [[Plot Induced Stupidity]]). Compare the last jump to the first one with Einstein, which was only a minute, and thus, sounded more like three firecrackers going off in quick succession.
*** Perhaps traveling through time creates local electromagnetic disturbances several seconds before the visible/audible pyrotechnics.
* So when Marty pretends to be [[Star Wars|Darth Vader]] hailing from the planet [[Star Trek
** Vulcan is a Roman god, so the name would be likely to be used for a planet anyway. ''Star Wars'' came out twenty-two years after 1955. If you heard a name once, would you remember it after twenty-two years? Okay, ''maybe'' if the person who told you it was an "alien" invading your bedroom, but it's still conceivable George forgot the exact name.
*** And before anyone asks: no, the Vulcan salute wouldn't give it away, either. Leonard Nimoy drew on his Jewish background and the hand gestures used by rabbis in synagogue ceremonies to incorporate that into the character of Spock. The gesture, in other words, is common, not specific to Darth Vader from Planet Vulcan.
*** To add to this, there was a minor craze in science fiction in the early-mid twentieth century in imagining a tenth planet in the solar system, and given the tendency for naming planets after Roman Gods 'Vulcan' more or less stuck; ''Star Trek'' is the obvious example, but ''[[
** By the time George has published the science fiction story which is (presumably) based on his 1955 experience, Star Wars has already been out for almost ten years. It's quite possible that he was saving the Darth Vader name for that, but then when [[Star Wars]] came out he thought "Dang it, some one else used it first" and changed it.
*** It's even possible that George no longer believes the thing really happened, but still considers it a fine yarn on which to base a novel.
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* I'm bothered by the "Save the Clock Tower" foundation. It was struck by lightning, a natural accident. How does that make it worth keeping broken?
** I believe the Mayor was planning to replace it with an entirely new clock. Since the old one had been around for 100 years, some people just wanted to keep it for the sake of tradition.
** Meh, people create activist groups for all sorts of silly reasons. Do we ''really'' need a campaign for [
*** Yes.
*** Wy dose we hav to spel good?
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*** I thought that the protest foundation were trying to get the clock fixed so that it would work again, not just preserve it in the same broken state it's been in for 30 years.
*** No, they wanted to keep it broken.
{{quote|
*** This is not unheard of in [[Real Life]]. The old Christchurch Railway Station's clock (well, one of them) has been left to read 4:35 as a reminder of their earthquake.
* How on earth does Doc control his height and altitude in the hover-converted DeLorean? Surely we should see him doing more than merely turning the steering wheel—that should only turn him left or right. Shouldn't there be an extra lever or something somewhere?
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** The terrorists are hippies. =)
* If The Punch back in 1955 caused Biff to become a nice guy/complete wimp in 1985, why did he become, well, like his teenaged self again in 2015? Y'know, treating "Marty Jr." the way he treated George as a teenager and trying to alter history to make himself rich and powerful and all that.
** It was 60 years later. He went from a teenage bully to a wimp, probably getting bitter over the years. He also knows that most people, like Marty Jr., aren't going to fight back when he bonks them with his cane. He's 77, fer cryin' out loud. [[Screw Politeness, I'm a Senior!]] and all that.
** It was probably just George that he was ridiculously nice to, he's probably scared of him because he knows he packs a mean punch when backed into a corner and/or he could well report him to the police for his attempted rape. Anyone but George (even his grandson) is fair game however. Not to mention the fact that he's probably seen Marty Jr. around town, and his worried that he's going the same way that George before he manned up, or the same way Marty Sr. has gone, so giving him a bit of friendly advice is for his own good.
*** Supported briefly at the end of Part III when Marty goes to get his truck (so he can drive to Jennifer's house and awaken her). Biff starts to yell at him as a "butthead," but quickly falls back into the meek submissive role once he recognizes it's Marty.
* Did the clock tower in the original movie have a second hand? If not, how did they know the exact time the lightning would strike the clock tower? It seems to me that Doc and Marty would have had to have figured out a way to make the DeLorean hit the wire and remain attached to it for around sixty seconds. Otherwise, the lightning would strike too soon or too late to do any good.
** You know... If you need to do that, you should put a metallic grid over the
** The flyer said the lightning struck the clock tower at ''precisely'' 10:04 pm. That is, 10:04:00 pm. Yeah, a [[Contrived Coincidence]], but there it is.
*** A car traveling at 88 MPH equates to a speed of 129 feet per second. That would mean that Marty would have to be really, really precise.
*** In the defense of this theory, the producers mentioned a being that controlled space and time. And if that were the case, the being would have made things line up perfectly so that Marty reached the clock tower at the precise moment lightning struck it. Note that had he started going when the timer went off, he would have been late.
*** Maybe that wire that the
*** Also, lightning actively seeks out the most conductive available pathway between ground and clouds. Even if the timing ''wasn't'' absolutely perfect, and it had to jump a gap between the hanging cable and the hook on the DeLorean, it'd do so as long as that was a cleaner conductive pathway than going straight through the clock tower's superstructure.
* Hmmm. Another thought. At the end of the first movie, [[It Was His Sled|Marty makes it back to 1985, watches Doc get shot, and then watches himself go backwards in time.]] We'll call the one who watches himself the TP Marty, and his counterpart the LP Marty. Anyway, the implication is that TP Marty has now arrived at the far end of a [[Stable Time Loop]]. But logically that can't be so, since the future TP Marty has arrived back ''to'' is different from that of his counterpart - the ripple effect has made his life great, and his father always stood up to Biff in this timeline. So what past does the LP Marty wind up in? Does LP Marty just hang with Doc for 7 days and then make a perfect run back to the future? And when he does, does he replace the TP Marty? [[Your Head Asplode|My head! Argh!]]
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** This troper remembers a fanfic that said he met Marty then he crashed into his trashcans after he lost his grip on a car.
** Simply because Doc knows he'll have to befrend Marty at some point from meeting him in 1955. Doc is probably the one who sought Marty out, so that there would be no major paradoxes.
** [[Word of God]] is [https://web.archive.org/web/20120904232828/http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/97285 right here]. Turns out that Marty was just a curious kid circa 1981, and wanted to see this crazy inventor who everyone told him to avoid. Doc found Marty's curiosity to be heartwarming, and hired the lad on as a part-time lab assistant.
*** As a side note, for many years there were rumors of a script for a prequel TV movie called ''Back to the Beginning'', which would have shown how Marty met Doc.
* When Marty writes the letter to Doc in the first film, why does he write "Do no open until 1985" on the envelope? First, there wouldn't have been anything wrong with Doc opening the letter right after Marty had left anyway and secondly, all it did was tell Doc that Marty was trying to tell him about the future, prompting him to tear it up.
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**** The AK-47 assault rifle on full auto kicks like a mule on amphetamines. The terrorist had it pointed at Doc Brown while set to full auto. Hence, he aimed for the biggest part of the body: the chest.
**** Few people ever shoot at such small targets. Everyone who knows how to use a gun knows to shoot at an object's center mass. Of course, there's still the chance that they'll ''miss'' and hit his head. But anyone who would knowingly design and build a machine that could theoretically create situations where a conceivably universe-ending paradox is possible has got to be more than a little reckless.
**** I'm not sure I know what you mean. As a person who has seen what bullets do to human flesh, I don't think I would entrust my life to a vest when someone is firing an assault rifle at me. Some people fire at "6 o'clock mast." You aim tends to creep upward at night. Also, an AK-47 has significant recoil, which causes the barrel to climb. Firing from a moving vehicle is erratic and unpredictable. I'm just saying that if I'm a six-foot-tall man, I'm not going to trust my life to a single piece of protection that covers around one-third of my entire body. Plus, Marty didn't see what happened after he goes back in time. How does he know the terrorists wouldn't go back and light Doc on fire? In summary, Marty's warning was vague and Doc's precautionary measures were too limited.
**** Guys. It doesn't matter. No 1985-era concealable body armor vest could have possibly stopped a full magazine of AK-47 rounds from thirty feet. Even a fully-reinforced 2000s era SAPI rig would have problems with that. If the Libyan has been firing an Uzi (with its much lighter ammo), maybe...but its clear that the Libyan is firing a much longer assault rifle, at point blank range. ([http://www.cracked.com/article_18576_5-ridiculous-gun-myths-everyone-believes-thanks-to-movies.html Cracked] even snarked this exact scene.
*** Concealable under normal clothes, maybe. Doc was wearing a bulky, baggy radiation suit and didn't need to be doing a lot of dextrous maneuvers. He might have put multiple steel plates in the thing (or lead plates, to help with radiation shielding while he was at it).
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* Why don't the fire tracks left by the Delorean in the beginning of ''Part 1'' burn Marty and Doc when they're ''standing right in them''? Are they supposed to be in the same spatial location, but a different time? If so, how come 1955 Doc specifically avoids them once he's sent Marty back to 1985?
** I'm guessing that the only reason they appeared to be standing almost right in the midst of the flames was a [[Special Effects Failure]].
** It could also be because that wasn't actually fire. 1955 Doc thinks this, and avoides them, but this is because they look like fire. They could infact be holes in the space-fabric left by the
*** It probably '''''isn't''''' fire. When Doc gets sent back to 1985, the "fire" is actually visible in the air for a few seconds.
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* Why oh why did no one, over the course of five years, among any of the thousands of people involved with the trilogy, ever inform Gale & Zemeckis or any of the actors of the correct pronunciation of "gigawatt"?
** People probably didn't know at the time. They probably thought it was a derivative word from "gigantic."
*** Most people know the correct pronunciation today either ''because'' they heard how ''Back to the Future'' mispronounced it, or because the term "gigabyte" has become widely known due to the advancements of modern computers in the last decade or two.
*** "In the film Back To The Future the term is pronounced "jiggawatt" in reference to the 1.21 GW of electricity needed to power the fictional Delorean time machine. Though obscure, the "j" sound is still [
*** The movie's science adviser had the habit of pronouncing it "jiggowatt" (which, as noted, is technically acceptable). Nobody in the case or crew realized that the science adviser was using an obscure pronunciation.
* A number of questions related to the first film, brought up by comedians Chris Hardwick, Mike Phirman, and Matt Mira, between two Internet articles and a podcast:
** Why does Marty only set the time machine to give himself ten minutes to save Doc's life upon returning to 1985?
*** Because Marty figured he'd be able to drive over there and warn him. But that would have caused a time paradox, which is exactly why the
**** It was Marty, however, who made the choice as to how far back he'd travel. Why not an hour? Why not a day? Ten minutes is not ''nearly'' enough time; even if he ''had'' made it there in time to see Doc (and his other self, and ''there's'' a time paradox for you), it's not like he could have expected Doc to simply have a bulletproof vest on hand.
**** Two miles in ten minutes to drive somewhere and shout "Doc, in a few minutes you're gonna get shot, ''get out of here now!!''" is easy if you're in a rather fast car in the early hours of the morning with little traffic to impede you -- he's not expecting the car to break down, remember. A day or an hour, and he risks bumping into himself or hanging around and losing track of time somehow, and although he's not exactly the sharpest stick when it comes to thinking fourth-dimensionally he's probably had enough time travel-related headaches in the past week to decide to make this particular instance as simple and painless as possible.
** What experiment is Doc conducting where he's elated that the clocks are running 25 minutes slow? Is he just messing with Marty? How does he ''know'' Marty would be there anyway?
*** How it is possible to ''(change time on the clock)'' for all clocks simultaneously, even from another place with remote? Doc tried it and it worked.
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*** Gale and Zemeckis say in the DVD materials for the box set that they thought of Doc as having probably worked on the Manhattan Project. If the Libyans did their homework then they would likely have heard of him, so either they sought him out and he took advantage of the opportunity or he used his credentials to his advantage and sought ''them'' ought with his hoax already in mind.
** Why does Lorraine's father (Marty's grandfather) complain that ''another'' teenager threw himself in front of the car? Has this happened before?
*** [[Rule of Funny|Yes.]] It's an [[Oh, No, Not Again]] gag.
*** I thought it was a sneaky comment about horny boys eying his daughter as she changed.
*** [[Wild Mass Guessing|This has happened before.]] Lorraine met all of her previous boyfriends because they were trying to look through her bedroom window and got hit by her father's car. This also helps explain why Lorraine is so taken with Marty: she assumes he was looking at her as she dressed (and apparently she doesn't find this creepy; maybe she even sets it up on purpose) and therefore she assumes that Marty is already attracted to her. In fact...we can further suppose that Lorraine's father suspects that this is the case. Therefore, he tends to hit these boys with his car ''on purpose'' (not too hard, mind you) as a way of saying "stop being a peeping tom". He further describes Marty as "an idiot" at the dinner table, because he thinks Marty was peeping.
** Why does the family just have Biff, who attempted to rape Lorraine, hang around and do auto detailing work for them (as asked earlier on this page)? Furthermore, why didn't they get him sent to jail?
*** It was [[The Fifties]] at the time, with different societal attitudes. Also, time heals a lot of wounds I guess (see ''[[Watchmen (
** In the new 1985, why is Dave in a suit and going to the office on a Saturday? If he has an office job that requires a suit, how come he still shares a car with his parents (as implied by his anger when Marty claims the car was wrecked)?
*** Maybe the people at his office carpool. And maybe he's working on the weekend because he has a [[Pointy
** As asked above on this page, does George McFly eventually suffer mental breakdowns when he sees "Darth Vader" on ''[[Star Wars]]'', the Vulcan salute on ''[[
*** This question has been addressed above twice.
* [[The Power of Love]] is great and the song with that title used in the first ''Back To The Future'' is great too. But how exactly does the content of the song relate in any way to the plot of ''Back To The Future''?
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*** Plus, this is a movie from the 1980s we're dealing with; you couldn't swing a cat in Hollywood without hitting a movie which had at least one catchy pop song with bugger-all relevance to the actual movie on the soundtrack during that decade.
*** Doesn't it kind of deal with the plot since each movie contains a love story of some sort. In the first movie it had to do between Marty, George, and Lorraine and was the entire plot for what they were doing it 1955. In the second movie it was Biff, Lorraine, and George. Although George was dead Marty still loved him and his mother enough to change things back to where they are supposed to be. As for the 3rd movie, i mean come on. It was the entire reason that Doc didn't come back to 1985 with Marty. It was the reason that "Eastwood Ravine" was never named "Clayton Ravine." I mean come on, how can you not say that "The Power of Love" wasn't relavent?
* So the "old" McFlys from ''Part III'' are George's ancestors, and unless we admit a massive [[Squick]] moment, we are assuming that George and Lorraine are not related in any way, shape, or form...so why does George's ancestor look exactly like his wife? ** shivers**
** [[Word of God]] is that McFly men are just predisposed to be attracted to women that look like Lea Thompson.
*** Yes, Claudia Wells could pass for Lea Thompson if you squint ''really'' hard...
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** And the hoverboard. Other than freaking him out though, I don't see how that's [[Fridge Logic]], more like [[Fridge Brilliance]]. [[The Prestige|Are you watching closely?]] His ''incredibly'' disturbed reaction to seeing the DeLorean in 1985 ("What the hell is going on here?") probably made him remember that he saw it in 1955. He has a good memory even when old, as evidenced by 2015 Biff ("The manure! I remember that!"). By 2015, when he sees it for a third time and eavesdrops on the Marty/Doc conversation he finally has the solution to a sixty year old problem: how he was able to see a flying DeLorean, an unusual car even without the hover conversion, on three seperate occasions in his life ("So Doc Brown invented a time machine"). Of course you could argue that 1955 Biff only saw the DeLorean after Marty and Doc travelled back to retrieve the Almanac and hadn't seen it at the start of the movie when only Marty went back to 1955, but even so; he saw it in 1985 and again in 2015 before any serious changes were made to the timeline, creating 1985-A by having 2015 Biff travel back to 1955. Seems like he would have come to the same conclusion either way. If that isn't [[Character Development]] I don't know what is; he goes from a dumb kid in 1955 to an [[Evil Genius]] old man in 2015.
*** The Biff we see at the beginning of Part II isn't a part of a [[Stable Time Loop]]...he's only merely freaked out by seeing a DeLorean fly into the air and explode. Remember, in this trilogy, things happen from Marty's (and the audience's) POV; ergo, this Biff<ref>and, by extension, Old Biff</ref> doesn't have memories of a flying DeLorean in 1955 (or, for that matter, a second manure truck crash) because ''those things haven't happened yet''.
** Watch the tunnel scene again. 1955 Biff does ''not'' get a very good look at the
*** The only headscratcher here is: In the span of a week, Biff went to being the [[Incredibly Lame Pun|King of the Valley]], to see as a foreigner with funny clothes that Pwned him, then the same guy befriended the local [[Butt Monkey]] and made him a confident and assertive man that punched him KO. and THEN the same guy with funny clothes robbed him from a magical Sports Almanac, who was incidentally using a ''flying board'', and finally he was helped by what looked as a frigging 'SPACESHIP'. And then, the guy dissapeared and never was seen again. HOW is that Biff didn't commited himself to an asylum? How is that he remained in Hill Valley and didn't hid himself in a cave for the rest of his life, for fear of "Aliens with a Lifesaver Vest"?
** The first few things are demoralizing, perhaps, but not really the kind of thing that intensive psychiatric therapy is called for. The "aliens with a lifesaver vest" thing is a bit more of a potentially destabilizing thing, to be true, but the very fact that 1985!Biff ends up a completely spineless wimp is perhaps indicative that his experiences did indeed take a bit of a toll on him, but thirty years is also a pretty long time -- time enough to more or less come to terms with things, at least.
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* Here's something I've always wondered, and I'm surprised it's never been mentioned yet. Why does 1955 Doc have such a colossal freak-out at the end of [[Btt F 2]]/beginning of [[Btt F 3]] upon seeing Marty again right after sending the past Marty back to 1985? He knows all about the time machine by this point, so why would seeing another future version of Marty cause him to go into shock, pass out, and then act in denial of Marty's existance until he shows him the letter from his future self?
** He had just spent a whole week wrapped up in that scheme, only for it to come to naught (as far as he can see) the very ''moment'' it had succeeded. Anyone would be tempted to be in denial after that. Besides, Doc is an excitable fellow.
* After the time machine was destroyed in ''Part III'', one would think that eventually someone would come by to see if there were any bodies in the rubble, and to clean up the scene. The problem is, there are several parts of the time machine that were either unique to it (the flux capacitor and time circuits) or were borrowed future technology (Mr. Fusion and the destroyed flying circuits). Does it stand to reason that someone may have found, say, the Mr. Fusion device, and reverse-engineered it to become the "new" creator of the Mr. Fusion? Kind of like what happened in [[The Terminator]] or ''[[Star Trek IV:
** Marty and Jennifer probably picked up the most important pieces before they left the scene.
** What are the odds of someone who would know what to do with such an elaborate kind of mechanism chancing to come across the rubble before it was cleared? Or that the pieces would be in any condition to help them?
* I don't know enough about science to answer this myself, but I've always wondered: can a single lightning bolt generate 1,210,000,000 watts of electricity? Or can the small amount of plutonium seen in the first film? I wouldn't know, but it sounds like an awful lot....
** According to [[The Other Wiki]], it could send hundreds of Deloreans [[Title Drop|Back To The Future]]. "The average peak power output of a single [
** Fissioning one kilogram of plutonium can produce 20000 megatons of energy, which is about 100 petajoules. So, in theory, it could keep on producing 1.21 gigawatts of power for about 3000 years.
*** Uh, no. Try 18.5 hours, if we're assuming pure Pu-239 and fissioning 100% of it (in reality, some of it would be transmuted into heavier isotopes and some would remain Pu-239 after the reactor has gone subcritical due to fuel depletion).
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** [[Rule of Funny]] -- as noted above, the joke is that even after having thirty-or-so years of his life rejuvenated Doc looks exactly the same as he ever did.
** Doc explicitly says to Marty that he's wearing the mask because he wants to avoid the surprise and confusion of older Doc disappear one day and younger Doc show up the next and all the resulting questions this would raise (such as "Doc? How come you look thirty years younger now?!") and ease Marty into accepting this when he feels they have some time. Of course, the effort turns out to be pointless because he looks exactly the same, but the logic's there.
* Why are we 5 years out from the events of the 2nd film and still without hoverboard and flying cars? Seriously, Mattel needs to step it up.
** [http://gizmodo.com/5549271/a-real-working-hoverboard-exists We're getting there.]
** We destabilised the space-time continuum when fax machines fell out of popularity. Without the amazing development of having a fax machine in your cupboard, scientists have been unable to replicate the technology for flying cars, hoverboards, self-lacing shoes, and self-drying clothes. Some suspect this to be an conspiracy on the part of moviegoers in order to prevent the making of fifteen more ''[[Jaws (
*** Well then said fax machines must have prevented the advent of such technologies as cell phones, which are surprisingly absent from BTTF's 2015. Either that, or in five years none of us will use them anymore.
**** Yeah, if it depicted the now modern world accurately then everyone wouldn't be driving in flying cars but instead constantly yapping on their cell phones in ordinary ones. Which to be fair is no less dangerous.
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*** It can't have waited a few hours though?
*** Doc might have got himself locked into a '[[San Dimas Time]]' way of thinking (i.e. the clock is always ticking and I have to get this done right away!); perhaps not rational, seeing as [[San Dimas Time]] doesn't seem to operate in the BTTF universe, but he's perhaps running on adrenaline a bit given the nature of the crisis and not really thinking straight.
*** Doc's watch is set to the precise 10/21/2015 time, and he's calculated all the events down to the moment. Remember when he looks at his watch [[Right
* I know I know, [[Berserk Button]] and probably not thinking straight, but Marty is still a [[What an Idiot!|massive idiot]] for letting Griff get to him from being called ''chicken'' in 2015. The insult was meant for Marty Jr., so why does Marty even care? Or could he be taking the insult as a means of saying "nobody calls ''my son'' chicken!" ?
** Pride is rarely rational. A personal example: When I was in drama club in high school I was never comfortable playing buffoonish, doltish, or silly characters because I had a very hard time separating myself from the character I was portraying. So when the audience would laugh at something I did on stage it felt like they were actually laughing at ''me'' rather than at the buffoonish character I was portraying. No matter how many times the cold and logical side of my brain told me that they were laughing at my character and not at me, it took me a long time to learn how to get over my pride and stop taking their laughter personally. The same thing is probably going on with Marty. Even though he knows Griff is technically insulting Marty Jr., Marty Sr.'s pride causes him to take it personally all the same.
* Leaving Jennifer on a porch in 1985-A, with nothing but Doc's guess/hope that history will shift around her and she'll end up where she's supposed to. I understand ''why'' it was done from a story perspective - the ending of ''Part I'' forced them to bring her along, but they couldn't just leave her in the back of the DeLorean in a coma for all of ''Part II'' '''and''' ''III'' - but every other fictional treatment of time travel This Troper has seen says that she would have been lost in a timeline that's no longer accessible/doesn't exist. You don't switch time-tracks without a time machine, period. Since they were already re-shooting the ending to substitute Shue for Wells and add Biff's reaction, they should have just left her standing at the curb and saved a lot of trouble.
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