“I know. You construct a weapon. Look around, can you form some sort of rudimentary lathe?” – ‘Guy’, Galaxy Quest
Stranger
I’ve thought the very same thing! Especially since, they don’t know if it struck precisely at 10:04 pm. Just within that minute. That means, realistically, they’d need at least a 60 second window of opportunity to be 100% safe.
My only reasoning is, the Doc could only obtain so much cable. Plus he was getting grief from the police about obtaining the proper licenses (which, if you watch the special features, make it clear he didn’t have a license, but bribed the cop).
Another way around this would be to have a coiled cable wound within the DeLorean, attached to the hook that could’ve unwound as he traveled past. Although, there was only, maybe, 50 to 100 yards between the crosswire and the church/movie theater beyond. At 88 mph, that’s still not much leeway.
One of the best LOL lines ever in a comedy. Need more Sam Rockwell.
he didn’t actually make it, he traded the “secret” to it for some Plexiglass sheets.
Been a looong time since I saw ST IV: The Voyage Home, so I’ll have to take your word for it.
One scary possibility that is plausible is that if you think about it, the whole fading from the photograph and histronics make no sense. Marty is there in the past. His existence has changed countless things. Yet, if the Universe deletes him, he no longer prevented himself from existing, which no longer prevents him from traveling back in time and this recreates the paradox.
So the Universe itself loops until random factors (every time the universe resets, quantum dice reroll) cause him to drive the Delorean at exactly the right speed to get hit by the lightning bolt.
Well, he did have stone knives and bearskins, so he had that going for him.
My 2 cents
For a nice little comedic trilogy about time travel, there sure was an awful lot of attempted rape and murder, and at least one actual murder! (George McFly, in II)
My take is that the clock got struck mid movement to 10:04 and stopped there in mid movement. If the movement can be observed and mechanically consistent enough, one should be able to narrow it down to a fraction of a second, as the entire movement is already a fraction of a second.
However, as the movie reveals, it doesn’t get struck mid-movement between 10:03 and 10:04, but a handful of seconds after 10:04.
But you do bring up a point that if they knew where the clockwork froze beforehand, they could estimate precisely when the lightning would strike. But Marty never did that.
Which shows just how much a sociopath Biff was, and why he must be stopped, and therefore time travel invented.
McCOY: …Do you realise of course, if we give him the formula, we’re altering the future.
SCOTT: Why? How do we know he didn’t invent the thing!
The more I think about it, the film wasn’t really clear about what I claimed. What I was thinking of came from the novelization of the movie. Though it.might have been also a deleted scene…
From what I remember, they [del]needed[/del] wanted clear aluminum because of the strength/weight/pressure ratio on board the Enterprise to carry a humpback whale. Normal aluminum wouldn’t allow them to see it so they could have a marine zoo aboard.
Actually I think I meant density rather than weight, but with all that water aboard, it’d dwarf the mass of any container they put it in.
Scotty asks specifically how much of the stuff the manufacturer would recommend for enclosing what it is he plans on enclosing (whales + water), and after getting an answer, he goes on to say just how much less would be needed if he were to have the formula for the super-advanced stuff. So he managed to be able to get the information he needed out of the guy in order to properly contain the whales with time-available materials, and also be able to brag how he knew a way to make things much stronger. It’s a clever trick, moreso given that it was thought up by screenwriters.
Great Scotty!
This is precisely the kind of mucking about with the time line that Doc repeatedly warns about.
see, if they took the injector manifold off the DeLorean in the cave in 1885, then when Marty retrieved it in 1955 it would have been missing it’s manifold. Since it wasn’t missing the manifold when Marty got it, they can’t take the manifold off of it. Doing so risks a paradox that …
I read a story once where some scientists were sending messages back in time, and they asked the guy they were sending to to put a note in a safe-deposit box so they’d know it was working. they checked the box, and the note was there.
but then the administrator for the project found out that the message asking for the note hadn’t actually been sent yet, it was just in the queue of messages to be sent. So he asked one of the scientists what would happen if he ordered that the message not be sent.
After a long discussion that included Schrodinger’s Cat and various other things, the scientist realized that it was all going over the administrator’s head, so he dumbed it down: “We want this to keep working more than we want the answer to that question.”
Changing the condition of the DeLorean that Marty took from 1955 to 1885 retroactively sounds like a very bad idea unless you are 100% certain of the results.
If the Doc drained the gas from the wrecked DeLorean, surely he would’ve kept it in a container for later use. But, would he have burned through gallons of gas (assuming they just filled it before the jump in 1985a) in the preceding nine months?
I doubt it, but perhaps he could have. Depending on his initial circumstances, he may have needed the fuel to get his blacksmith operation up and rolling so fast and successfully (other than the bum shoe he put on Tannen’s horse). Plus, maybe he built a crude engine to drive that monstrous ice cube generator he had in his shop. Though it seemed clear it ran on steam.
All-in-all, it seems like making high grade gasoline isn’t exactly trivial, but the might have been able to do it for just a short, final run up to 88—assuming they could find a flat, hard packed stretch of land.
But the most likely scenario is, whether he drained the fuel or not from his DeLorean in the mine, he should’ve already had easy access to just enough gasoline.
Oh well. The train was cool.
You’re solving the wrong problem.
If, for the sake of argument, the universe needs Marty to get his parents to fall in love and marry such that he’ll be born and grow up to go back in time and get his parents to fall in love – well, then, okay: that happened; the photo’s restored.
The uhiverse doesn’t then need to give a crap as to whether Marty ever gets back to the future; he can die in a fiery car crash later that evening in 1955, he can live for decades before keeling over in the late 1970s or early 1980s – it doesn’t matter, because George and Lorraine still got together and had a kid who went back in time and didn’t stop 'em from getting together and having said kid.
So if, as far as they know, Marty disappeared in 1985 and was never seen or heard from again – well, look, that’s a personal tragedy of the happens-all-the-time variety, but it’s not the sort of thing that makes the universe sit up and take notice.