Back to the Future: The Game/Headscratchers

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • In the Telltale game, the timeline eventually gets so messed up that the events of the movies never happened, up to and including the part about the time machine having been built in the first place. Shouldn't that cause a major Grandfather Paradox, making that version of the timeline unviable?
  • Couldn't Doc and Marty just kill Edna in 1931 instead of having to go through a long sequence that leads to the planned break-up?
    • Right, because Doc and Marty are cold blooded killers who would be totally fine with straight up murdering someone. That's completely and totally consistent with their characters.
    • The timestream would also take a way bigger hit if they did that.
  • Also, why doesn't Marty just swap Emmett's mind-map with Kid's? Surely Kid must be a "Degenerate Criminal", and Emmett didn't even test Kid's mind-map when the break-up was about to happen. Why go through such a long sequence involving changing smells?
    • Maybe the punch card had some kind of identifier we couldn't make out printed on it. So switching them wouldn't work because Edna would have noticed, being the one to get Emmett to build the thing.
    • If you click on Kid's card, Marty examines it and notes that Kid's name is written on the card. Why you couldn't just get a blank card and punch holes in it to match Kid's is beyond me though.
  • In the third episode, Einstein and Doc disappear from the Delorean wreck and we only see their alternate universe personas. But Marty never changes to his alternate personas throughout the series. Why does this affect Doc and Einstein, but not Marty?
    • Because Doc isn't Doc anymore. By going off with Edna instead of going to see Frankenstein, he is essentially preventing a fundamental aspect of his own Doc-ness. The moment he displays the mind map thing instead of the flying car, he stops being Doc Brown, and starts being First Citizen Brown. It just took until Marty hit 88 for the timeline to catch up to him. Marty didn't disappear because: a.) He didn't put his own existence in jeopardy, and b.) even if he had, it would have taken the timeline longer to catch up to him (due to being the last born), which gives him a chance to undo the damage.