Back To The Future is one of the all time greatest films ever made. It’s legacy is solidified even further by it’s fantastic sequels that make them arguably the greatest trilogy of films of all time. But are they perfect?
For some people, The Back to the Future films will always be perfect, but for many who do love the films dearly, there will always be areas to debate and scrutinise. They are time travel movies after all, and since time travel isn’t possible (at least to current understandings) there are bound to be things in the plot that may raise an eyebrow or two.
So at this stage I will give my one and only warning that unless you want your childhood memories of Marty and Doc to forever be in question, do not read on…For I am about to dig into a theory which will make you question if Marty ever made it home?
The exact answer to this question may never be fully answerable, as there is lots of evidence to unpack, but we’ll start with the biggest bombshell which should make every reader of this article sit up and say ‘Great Scott!’
Doc Brown Explains Why Marty Never Made It Home In Part 2
In Back to the Future Part 2, Doc Brown and Marty first travel to the future to the year 2015. It is there that Doc and Marty are on a mission to save Marty and Jennifer’s kids from getting into trouble with the law. Having achieved this they head back to 1985 only to discover that old Biff in the future had got hold of the Time Machine and used it to go back to 1955 and give his younger self a sports almanac to gamble with and become rich.
Old Biff’s actions then meant that the 1985 that Doc and Marty returned to was very different to the 1985 that they remembered. Biff is in power, Doc had been committed and Marty’s father George had been murdered. From this point on we’ll refer to this timeline as the Powerful Biff timeline.
And it is here in the Powerful Biff timeline that the most pivotal moment for this theory happens. To explain how things are different to Marty, The Doc draws a diagram on a chalk board to show that they were in an alternate 1985.
First the Doc drew a straight horizonal line to show the passage of time. He then highlighted this line with three vertical points. The past, the present in 1985 and the future in 2015. He reveals that old Biff had left evidence of stealing the time vehicle and must have gone from 2015 to some point in the past before 1985 and changed time.
The Doc then shows the creation of a new horizonal line below the first one to show a separate and new passage of time that has spun off from the original timeline. This establishes the idea that within the universe of Back to the Future there can be what in modern pop culture would be instantly referred to as a multiverse or parallel dimension.
Doc Brown, who is the smartest character within the film series draws this conclusion and is very clear that the timeline where Biff is powerful, George McFly is murdered and in which he is committed is an alternate reality.
By this same logic, we as viewers can look to the end of the original Back to the Future and draw the conclusion that when Marty arrived in 1985 from 1955, it was not the 1985 he had left but was in fact an alternate reality as well. We know this as in Marty’s original reality his father wasn’t a successful author, his mother was an alcoholic and Biff wasn’t a loser waxing George’s car.
From this point on we’ll refer to timeleine where the first film began as the Original 1985. We’ll also refer to the timeline where Marty’s parents are succesful as the Good 1985.
The Good 1985 is a different reality to the one Marty left at the start of the film where his mother was a drunk, Doc Brown had been shot and murdered and his dad was a loser who was still bullied by Biff. In this Original 1985 reality Doc Brown was killed and all the McFly family would know is that Marty went to bed, may or may not have been spotted on route to the Twin Pines Mall and then was never seen or heard of again…
That’s right! To Marty’s original parents who were perhaps losers in life, they would just lose again as their son Marty went to bed one night and was never seen or heard from again.
Phone records would show that Doc Brown called Marty late at night, and the police would find Doc’s body having been shot to death at the mall. Certainly there may even be evidence of the plutonium, bullet casings and if the fate of the terrorists that we see at the end of the movie held true to what happened at the start, they may have crashed their van and be available for questioning to give a description of Marty vanishing in a car.
But with all this mystery, unless Doc had kept records that explains the time machine, no one would be able to say how Marty vanished. He just went out and was never seen again.
Scary right?! Messes up your childhood doesn’t it?! Well let’s not be too quick to rest on our laurels here, as there is more evidence to unpack. Click to continue reading on the next page!
