Okay, here’s the official explanation from the third DVD in the box set. I transcribed this text first by hand, reading off the TV screen, then by typing here. Any transcription errors are my fault. Bold text corresponds to emphasis I added, or comments I added in relation to this thread.
My objection to this argument centers around the last emphasized quote. I contend that it is NOT just as believable for the Lyon Estates of 2015-A to be physically identical to the Lyon Estates of 2015–in fact, it seems overwhelmingly more probable that Biff’s megalomaniacal corruption of the city would have led to a vastly different scene than that of 2015. Consider that in Biff-horrific 1985, Strickland was reduced to a paranoid, shotgun-wielding caricature of his former self; the high school had been destroyed; and poverty was rampant. A city like that is not likely to rebuild itself into the wealthy, yuppy-inhabited suburbia that we see depicted in 2015. With an interruption in the operation of such a major societal institution as the city high school, the corruption among the city police loyal to Biff, the gambling culture that focuses citizens’ attention away from the problems their city faces, the social fabric is torn apart and rendered almost incapable of repairing itself from the inside. Repairing the city would require the help of people outside the city, who would bring their own unique perspectives to the task of rebuilding. To propose that the physical appearance of Lyon Estates in 2015-A is superficially identical to its counterpart in 2015 assumes many propositions of dubious validity, for example, that the architectural/decorative tastes of the developers and residents of 2015-A perfectly coincide with those of the developers and residents of 2015.
Perhaps the BTTF script writers had not heard of sensitive dependence on initial conditions (SDIC, a term popularized by the chaos theory literature) when they wrote the script, but that principle has existed in nature independently of human acknowledgment of its existence. Did gravity not affect the unfolding of the universe until Newton (or later Einstein) developed a conceptual framework around it?
I conclude that the stock explanation is not satisfactory, and that it should have read more along the lines of the next answer in the FAQ, namely, attributing production concerns, such as prohibitive cost of redesigning the Lyon Estates set for a 2015-A version, rather than probabalistic arguments that misrepresent the likelyhood of the particular outcome they portrayed.
Yep, I love the series too. The DVD set is a much cherished possession of mine. A piece of trivia here is that the US edition does not have DTS sound, but the Region 2 or 4 (Europe/Japan or Australia) has - so if you don’t have the set yet, but can play either region 2 or 4 DVD’s on your player, get either of them.
aaaaanyway. dalovindj - I think the easiest explanation to this is to make an interesting film. If it would take 6-7 hours before you would see an effect of McFly punching Biff, it would have been less dramatic, cinematically. Now, with the immediate effect, the movie came to a close quicker and the conclusion that Marty had “saved” his own future didn’t hang in the air for longer after the punching occurred.
I get it, it’s just a game to somehow arrive at a place where it all makes sense. Answers like “for dramatic effect” may well be true, but it’s cheating!
It helps to watch the films together (I might have to get the DVD set, after all). I didn’t realize for the longest time that Marty got the idea for making a “bullet-proof vest” out of the stoive hatch from the clip of the Clint Eastwood movie he caught when he was in Biff’s penthouse in BTTF II.
There was a cartoon? Wait, never mind, I don’t want to know.
This is one of my all time favorite movies ever. The second two films were more than a little repetitive – “Mom, that you?” ad nauseum – but I have to agree that even with all the time travel issues, they wrote a tight story. The DVDs explain all the inconsistences nicely enough for me, and even pointed out a few I had missed, even though I must have seen it 300 times by now.
Right next to the Star Wars trilogy, this has to be the best incest movie trilogy EVER!
~Marty McFly: Wait a minute, Doc, are you trying to tell me that my mother has got the hots for me? Dr. Emmet Brown: Precisely. Marty McFly: Whoa, this is heavy. Dr. Emmet Brown: There’s that word again; “heavy”. Why are things so heavy in the future? Is there a problem with the earth’s gravitational pull?~
I think a lot of people were put off by the abrupt change at the beginning of the second film. Doc Brown grabs Marty and Jennifer at the end of the first film, announcing “This concerns her, too!” and the DeLorean zips off into the future and movie posterity.
Then they found out the movie was a big hit and hastily began assembling a trilogy. For some reason, the Jennifer character was an problem in the second part, so when the second movie begins, mere seconds after the first movie ends, Brown zaps Jennifer with some kind of sleep beam. Well, geez, Doc, make up your mind!
That’s why I called the effect hysteresis; the propagation of the changes is not symmetric. It changes slowly and reverts quickly–essentially, history resists being changed, and will return to its original course almost instantly if the disturbance is corrected. Think of it as trying to compress a stiff spring; you slowly squeeze the spring into a new shape, then you let go and it snaps back to its original shape. This also explains why 1985-A would transform instantly (or nearly instantly) back to the original 1985 around Jennifer and Einstein, as Doc claims. Also, there seems to be some dissociation between time-travelers and their original timestream, otherwise, their memories would change…and worse, the time machine would disappear. After all, in the alternate timeline, Doc wasn’t free to build it. Eventually even those factors would change (like Marty starting to disappear), and the new timeline would become the “real” one. Thereafter, changes to the new timeline would propagate slowly.
Oh, and while I don’t think Lyon Estates would be identical in the two timelines, they could be similar enough that two guys running to a car in the dark while carrying an unconscious woman wouldn’t immediately notice. All of the structures were already in place in 1985, and substantially similar in both timelines. The place hadn’t been reduced to rubble, so Marty and Doc just didn’t notice the changes. The production staff just needs to shut up and leave the retcons to those of us who are good at it.
I’ve got one for ya in Mamaroneck, NY. They were asking 8K. I figgered, I walk in there with 5K cash in a bucket, I walk out with the slip on the car. Apparently it needs a new starter, but otherwise well…I sat it it. I couldn’t help myself. I always wanted to. I’m such a fan.
Oh, this thread ! Now, I have to go out and rent the DVD Trilogy and watch it all in one glorious indulgent glut of BTTF wonderfulness !!!1
Thanks for the correction–that gives Old Biff something more like 3-4 hours to get back to where he stashed the car and return to the future. I imagine that an hour would have been cutting it pretty close, since he couldn’t move very fast.
But it didn’t snap back to it’s original shape. The future he returned to was much different than the one he left (truck, biff slave). The original timeline was not clicked into place when Biff got smacked. A new one was created. It should change at the same rate as any change made by Alex Keaton. Unless a time traveler causes ripples at a different speed then someone who is a native to the timeline . . .
I think I have a solution. Let us suppose that each of us and all matter in any timeline would have a quantum signature (or some such thing - I think I am jacking this from Star Trek). Now as you flow into different timelines, the natives of all those timelines will have a different signature. The more drastic the differences, the more likely the time signature differences will be deadly. Perhaps, once the time traveler gets into a timeline that has a vastly different signature, it is not possible to exist there, but there is a comfort zone - just like life can only live in certain temperature ranges.
So, if you manage to keep the timelines similar enough, you won’t end up with a deadly signature violation. Of course, the more changes, the further away you get from your signature and you become unstable. Such a signature could also explain the difference in the time it takes for the propagation of changes. If your signature is the same as the timeline you are in the effects are instant. If your signature is different than there is a hysteresis effect as the timeline trys to decode your signature to make it compatable. If it can’t decode it, your iced. So the timeline at the end of Part 1 was close enough that it didn’t kill him. This would explain why he doesn’t have the memories of growing up in a world where Biff was a bitch. He didn’t. He is in a different timeline with a different signature but it is close enough that he survives.
So, really, that kid who went back in time right after doc gets shot at the end of part 1 was a different person. McFly’s punch didn’t save Calvin because he grew up and had him as a child (he had a similar but different child), it saved him because the timeline sigs were close enough to be compatible. The kid never gets back to his own timeline. Just one close enough to it not to kill him. As a matter of fact, his original timeline may or may not have had a return version of him. His real parents may still exist in a timeline that saw Doc die and himself disappear.
Another big question is, can multiple timelines exist together, or can there ultimately be only one timeline (out of all possible timelines) that can have the quality of existing? Does “realness” flow like water, and they divert space-time energy into different channels whenever they change something - while at the same time drying it up in the channel where it was originally flowing? Does every timeline get destroyed when they mess with it, or does it just get far away?
If they destroy a whole timeline everytime they activate the flux capacitor, Doc becomes pretty evil (if unintentionally). He destroys billions of lives every time he time travels if there can only be one timeline at a time. <---- That was a fun sentence to type! If they all just branch, then he is a traveler and not a destroyer.
I prefer a probabalistic-based explanation for the lag in timeline-change.
Consider the picture of McFly siblings Dave, Linda, and Marty. Think of it as representing the probability that a certain moment in the future (the moment the picture was taken) will come to pass. At the beginning of BTTF1, the probability of George and Lorraine meeting, marrying, spawning, etc., was 1 (i.e. it had already happened).
After Marty interferes with the first meeting of George and Lorraine, the future (represented by the picture) is in flux, and multiple timelines are superimposed with various probabilities. That is, G&L might still get together (George is, after all, Lorraine’s destiny ), but not necessarily in time for Dave’s birth. Thus Dave disappearing from the future. As the events of BTTF1 progress, G&L’s marriage (and therefore the existence of their children) becomes less and less likely as George gets more spazzy and Lorraine falls deeper and deeper for Marty. But there’s still a nonzero chance of him staying in the picture (literally), either by taking actions that increase the probability of his parents getting together ASAP or by trusting to capricious fate to bring them together. The former option is not open to him if he gets erased from existence, and at that point (at the dance, before George kisses Lorraine) it’s pretty darn unlikely they’ll get together in time for his birth (if at all).
Now consider some of the other changes we see:
The newspapers from 1985-A change nearly instantly to reflect the change initiated when Marty burned the sports almanac. This is because George getting murdered is extremely UNlikely in any timeline except the one leading to 1985-A (i.e. unlike George and Lorraine’s wedding, there’s virtually no chance that it would “have happened anyway”.) The newspaper from the future would be a probabalistic superimposition of the various timelines fanning out from that specific moment in time. By taking a specific action that rendered 1985-A inaccessible, Marty ensured that the overwhelming probability is that George makes it to the award ceremony.
Likewise the fax from 2015 firing Marty from his job. After he refuses to drag-race and DOESN’T hit the Rolls-Royce, the odds shift dramatically AWAY from Marty growing up to hold that particular job. (We’re told by Lorraine in BTTF2 that that accident was the only reason Marty gave up on his music.) Presumably odds now favor Marty becoming a rock star or holding some other non-loser job. (Note that this doesn’t explain why the paper itself doesn’t vanish out of existence, the same way people do.)
As a child I was deeply in love with Marty, and the films are still my favourite films ever. Sadly none of my friends share this enthusiasm so I sit in the corner and make little time travelling jokes all alone.
The day my dad recorded two minutes of a test match over the tense steam train bit in Part III, I think he began to wish he’d never had children.
I want a Delorean. Sadly I’m having to make do with a pink skateboard that mildly resembles the hoverboard, and a venus fly trap named Marty McFly. Sad, innit?
