The Other Marty McFly

I always kind of figured that the Marty we follow was the first one to go back, and all timelines after his are effected.

If that was the case, it would certainly suck for Marty 2, coming back to the dimension where Doc is most likely now dead, and his familial situation is the crappy version.

My problem with intellectualizing the time travel in Back to the Future is that the film sets itself up as not giving a shit about science, as evidenced by the mysterious fading picture and McFly's guitar playing abilities depending on how close his mom and dad are to kissing.

I thought this thread was going to be about Eric Stoltz.

Right, but why is he fading? He either exists or he doesn't, scientifically. Same with the photograph. If his siblings and him are fading from existence, why would the photograph even exist? To take a picture of that tree they're standing by?

Point is, the movie itself doesn't care about the science of it at all.

This thread is why you can't think too much about time travel.

Heh. Me too.

Me three.

And I agree with Ripoll that he was forgetting how to play guitar. Personally, I don't care about the science, however. Hell, unless it's Primer, no time travel movie is going to stand up to close scientific scrutiny (actually, I doubt Primer would either)... the whole plutonium-powered DeLorean time machine thing should be a dead giveaway. As long as the movie obeys its own internal set of logic (which BTTF does in spades), who cares? Strap in and enjoy the ride.

Aww, I was gonna make a reference to Mr. Granger and/or the party. Now that somehow has outright mentioned Primer, it wouldn't seem as clever.

I want a moratorium on any more nerd attempts to explain the time travel "science" of Back to the Future. Just move on already.

Umm. What about Somewhere In Time? You just have to concentrate!

Me 5?
That flick has even worse time travel logic. Mary Steenburgen (she sure digs the time travellers, don't she?*) goes into the future and sees her death reported in the newspaper, but by leaving the past, she effectively removes herself from that timeline and should have prevented her death. Why would it still be in the paper? Not to mention the fact that the 2 romantic leads worry so much about preventing her murder... when they have a friggin' time machine! If she were killed, couldn't HG just go back and fix it? The whole "self-fulfilling prophecy" (can't change "fate") thing doesn't jive with me.

But it's fun for the anachronistic fish out of water stuff, Malcolm McD's and David Warner's performances, and seeing Steenburgen say "dike".


* She also digs playing Will Ferrel's mother figure.

EDIT: From the future... Past DARKMITE8, this is future DARKMITE8... That's TIME AFTER TIME, dummy. Not SOMEWHERE IN TIME.

Except that's Time After Time. Somewhere in Time is with Christopher Reeve who uses self-hypnosis to go back in time.

I just went back in time to tell my past self how dumb I am (so I could edit my post). Don't worry. It'll all work out.

What about the original-timeline John Connor, the one who's dad couldn't have been from the future? What about him!?

Well then you could get in what happened to the original-timeline of Bill & Ted.. how could they succeed with the band and rule the world if they failed their oral report and Ted's dad sent him to military school in Alaska.

If you read the replies below the article on the link, someone posted a letter from Bob Gale debunking the "Marty 2" theory. Still though, there's some interesting ideas being thrown around there.

Because it proves she eventually returned back from the future in order to be killed. It's self reinforcing.

I've been debating this shit since I was a kid with my siblings and friends. The same thing happens in BTTF2...the complaint is how can Marty and Jennifer see their older selves if they left the timeline? Because it proves they go back to the past eventually in order to marry and have kids, and blah blah blah. It's not a paradox.

But then Future Jennifer would have remembered running into herself as Present Jennifer, and wouldn't have freaked out and passed out.

I maintain that Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure is a massively under appreciated gem of time travel fiction. The whole thing with Ted's dad's keys shows a pretty brilliant understanding of how time travel works.

That's an invention of the film...even Doc said there are two possibilities...either passing out, or goodbye universe. Not even the filmmakers knew, so they had her pass out because you can't destroy the universe since the movie's not over yet.

The explanation I gave is the most reasonable one based on what we know about time travel. If you run into yourself in the future, it is evidence that eventually you returned to the past in order to exist in the future. But if you run into yourself in the future, and your older self is shocked, we're in occasm's razor territory. Your older self simply forgot that it was going to happen, or thought it was going to happen later (got the date or time wrong). It had been thirty years (at that point) since Old Jennifer ran into her (then) older self, and it's reasonable to assume she simply forgot it would happen and therefore was shocked and Doc's first theory proved correct.

Again, the theory proves itself by the events that happen. There can be no older Jennifer if young Jennifer never returned to the past. So she did exist in the timeline for the 30 years they traveled to the future.

That's the best part of the Back to the Future trilogy: Brown says meeting yourself would create a paradox, and then he meets himself and creates a pair o' docs.

He said seeing yourself. 1955 Doc never saw 1985 Doc... he just heard his voice and took a wrench from him.

No! The pun must survive!

Yeah, I just had to say I never took the bad guitar playing as Marty forgetting how to play. He's obviously in some pain from fading from existence ... so he's just starting to randomly strum as he loses control. But still, it's interesting to hear the "forgetting" angle ... never heard that before.

So if you travel into the future, future events you see may have happened due to you time travelling to the future, then going back into the past and effecting things, settings things in motion that you have already witnessed in the future? That means the future is already set in stone and cannot be changed.

Still doesn't explain why HG can't just go back in time to prevent the murder (using the time machine), if it does indeed happen. Why are they so worried about it?

How could any Marty come back without the Delorean?

Delorean 1 or Delorean 2?

That's an entirely different topic i suppose.

But walking out of some light...? My guess it was an electrician walking through a shot. Sons a bitches do it all the time.

You know, this whole argument depends on whether you believe in Single String Theory or not.

ETA:

Except for that part.

Are there any screencaps of this Marty 2 character?

I'm dying to see some Stoltz footage. I wish Zemeckis wouldn't be so respectful and get it out there already.

Well my theory is this...the future is interpolated from whatever data the universe has at the time you left...and it's not entirely accurate. Like when Marty and Jen went to 2015, Jen snuck in her future house, witnessed Marty being fired, and playing the guitar badly because he broke his hand. The universe is "guessing" what the future would be like based on what it knows about you the instant you leave the present and to go to the future (like, it knew Marty would race Needles and get into an accident and break his hand, based on his attitudes at the time...and it knew Needles would try and race Marty and egg him on based on the way Needles is, etc).

Seeing yourself proves you eventually return to the past, but when you do return, you may have seen things in the future you didn't like, start doing things differently. Like Marty refusing to race Needles, and therefore never getting into the accident where he breaks his hand, and so on and so forth.

So the future, if you travel to it, becomes kind of like an incredibly complex illusion, or (Star Trek) holodeck. It's not "real" because it hasn't happened yet. But since you somehow managed to find a way to cheat time and go into the future, the universe has no choice but to show you something.

So the future knew that Steenburgen was going to take those sleeping pills... Heavy*.

EDIT: *Just came back from 1955/1985. Apparently weight has nothing to do with it.

Considering the alterations to a timeline do nothing that you can't easily take a nap through (ex. Jennifer sleeping an alternate 1985 off on her front porch) I don't see how it's hard to comprehend nothing changed in the timeline until the exact instant the Delorean went to 1955 in the first place.


That's how I took it and I was in grade school. The Two Marty's, alternate Marty's, multi-dimensional Marty's is bunk I say.

That's how BTTF and TIME AFTER TIME differ. In BTTF, the future is only extrapolated from the real present (or events that lead up to the present, which would be the past). In TAT, the future is also extrapolated from time travel that hasn't happened yet ("future" time travel, not necessarily time travel "to the future", if you get my meaning). One flick (BTTF) is effected by time travel (but only by the main time travellers), while the other (TAT) actually considers time travel when predicting the future. It's giving me a headache thinking about it.

It's weird. If time travel was invented (much like cyborgs in THE TERMINATOR), wouldn't trips to the future reveal a world with time travel as a common occurence. It would have to be regulated (like TIMECOP). Unless (like T2), the technology was destroyed or kept secret, preventing anyone (like Biff) from using it. But, because T3 happened, we all know Judgement Day couldn't be prevented. However, it would appear that Doc Brown prevented 2 Ron Silvers from occupying the same space (with disastrous effect), by being so greedy with his tech.
I think that "1955" is just shorthand for the DeLorean's "user interface". The 1s and 0s are much more complex under the hood.

Not if you have the power of love.

Rewatched part 1 one recently. I've seen it a million times, but it didn't occur to me till this viewing that Lorraine doesn't mind having a rapist (or attempted-rapist) around the house at the end (in the NEW future). She doesn't seem to be bothered with Biff around her their kids, or their property/possessions. Either...

A. Knowing that George decked him in HS, she feels relatively safe.
B. She doesn't have to lift a finger around the house (he washes the car!).
C. She's got post-traumatic Stockholm Syndrome and has turned it around into some S&M shit on the side.
D. All of the above.

I thought maybe this thread would be a reference to this.

http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1917317

I'm going to travel back in time and stop Nick from getting rid of the rep system so that - perhaps in some alternate timeline - I will be able to shower you with green boxes after reading this post

if you were to somehow time-travel, wouldn't you end up in the same exact spot in the universe, not the world? which is more than likely now way the fuck out in space somewhere. in that case, I imagine seeing yourself is way far down the list.

Yeah, a time machine would have to take into consideration the Earth's rotation AND revolution, etc.

Yeah, Bill & Ted took the "what happened happened: you can affect the outcome, just not change it" idea of time travel and played it out in pretty hilarious ways. Much like films like Timecrimes, there is no original timeline in B&T, just the timeline. This can especially be seen in the final confrontation at the end of the second movie where only the destined "winners" are able to set up gags from the future.

"Don't forget to wind your watch Ted!"

(And with this post I move from being the guy with the ironic Bill & Ted avatar, to being the Bill & Ted guy. Sigh.)

There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Bill and Ted, not unlike Wyld Stallyns, rule. No, seriously.

I was just thinking the other day that I am totally dreading the inevitable anouncemment that there will be a Back to the Future 'Remake'.