Let’s talk about doc getting shot in Back to the Future part 1.
At the start of the film, we see the Libyan terrorists show up and gun down Doc Brown. Marty sees him get killed and then he flees in the Delorean and as he speeds away he inadvertently time travels back to 1955.
Whilst in the past Marty accidently jeopardises his own existence, so whilst in 1955 Marty has three main missions.
Firstly, he has to get his parents to hook up so he can be born. Secondly, he has to somehow get himself home to 1985, and thirdly he writes a letter to Doc Brown to warn him that in 1985 he gets shot and killed by the terrorists.
Now, let’s unpack a couple of things here before we get to the main event of what happens here.
Firstly, for some reason 1955 Doc never really bothers to ask Marty why Marty has found himself in 1955 in a time machine that Doc himself invented, but why Doc didn’t accompany him.
Secondly, Marty waits a good long while to even begin to reveal to the Doc that he is going to get killed in the future by being shot by terrorists.
Sure, when Marty first arrives in 1955, he has the worry of old man Peabody shooting at him, and then he is a bit shocked to see his parents whilst looking to find Doc from 1955.
But upon meeting Doc, Marty doesn’t give any hint to Doc that he just saw him get shot. Marty holds onto that reveal until after he’s properly set up his scenario of being stuck in the past. I may have started with ‘Doc you invented a time machine, and terrorists shot you and I had to flee in the time machine to get away. But it’s so good to see you’re alive!
But I digress.
Marty, having been told by Doc that he shouldn’t know any more about his future, decides to write Doc a letter to explain, but tells him not to read it for thirty years.
Doc then rips this up in the heat of the moment when they need to do the vital stuff to get Marty back to his own time.
Quick tip Doc, he should have just said ‘thank you Marty’ and pocketed the letter to destroy later, but ya know, rip it up and argue when you’ve only got a minute to get the exact timing of Marty’s only chance of getting home to happen. Fine. What ever…
So, here’s the main point I’m building up to. At some point after Marty vanishes, and Doc can only wonder if Marty was successful in getting back to 1985, Doc has a change of heart about the letter about the future. He figures ‘what the hell’ and after this in the huge storm he then has to go about and try to find all the pieces of the letter that he ripped up in the heat of the moment.
At the very least, this would have been at least five minutes later, in the storm with wind and rain, and even then, that would mean that Doc would have had to seek out the letter pieces pretty much straight away.
But we know that however he managed it, Doc did find the letter and reconstruct it.
But then Doc would have seen that Marty was warning him that terrorists were going to shoot and kill him. The natural thing to do would be not to be at the Twin Pines Mall knowing that the terrorists were going to show up, but that isn’t what Doc did.
Doc obviously wanted to avoid any paradoxes that could risk the space time continuum,
and therefore didn’t want to prevent Marty from ending up stuck in 1955 as this could cause a chain reaction whereby Marty doesn’t end up in the past to warn him about being shot, in which case he wouldn’t have the warning and would still inevitably end up shot.
So, realising this, it meant that Doc went to the Twin Pines Mall, this time wearing the bullet proof vest and intentionally let himself get shot.
Now Doc did have the good fortune to see the recording that Marty made on the video recorder, but this is something that Marty would have taken back with him to 1985. So Doc would only have his memory of what he did on that recording that he watched as many times as may have done in the week Marty was in 1955. And we do know that Doc watched it through at least a couple of times and watched the moments leading up to the terrorists arriving very keenly, and maybe obsessively.
So Doc, would have had to do all of what he did on the recording to keep time happening the same, including seeming chipper and excited, and from Marty’s letter, knowing he was about to get shot, allowed it to happen…and just hope that they shot him into the area protected by the bullet proof vest.
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