# Back to the Future- Marty wakes to a new future - question **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [December 25, 2023, 6:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/back-to-the-future-marty-wakes-to-a-new-future-question/995115 "2023-12-25T06:02:08Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![running\_coach](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/running_coach/32/15836_2.png) [@running\_coach](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/running_coach)\ **Post date:** [December 25, 2023, 1:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/back-to-the-future-marty-wakes-to-a-new-future-question/995115/21 "2023-12-25T13:30:28Z")
> [@Dewey\_Finn](#): > > Though why only two cars? What did Marty’s brother or sister drive? - Dad is now a successful author so Mom likely doesn’t have a job. Or both work from home. Neither one _needs_ a car for work. ---
**Author:** ![RivkahChaya](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rivkahchaya/32/8919_2.png) [@RivkahChaya](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RivkahChaya)\ **Post date:** [December 25, 2023, 1:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/back-to-the-future-marty-wakes-to-a-new-future-question/995115/22 "2023-12-25T13:34:11Z")
The “hiring her rapist” did not brush up against my awareness in 1985. It didn’t until I saw the movie for perhaps the third time around 2015. What he attempted was still “date rape,” and in most people’s minds, somehow a lesser degree of rape, and also only attempted, which in 1955, pretty much meant it didn’t happen. The only cases of attempted rape that were pursued legally (or illegally) involved black men, white women, and false charges. The paradigm was different in 1985, and further different in 1955. If anything, Lorraine would enjoy humiliating the man who tied to humiliate her, and there would be no other recourse for her. But at any rate, she probably thought of the incident as situation-specific, and unlikely to be repeated. It’s weird for me to try to some that up-- but I thought a lot of things in 1985 that were forward-thinking at the time, and pretty stupid now. ---
**Author:** ![Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/13edae/32.png) [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stranger_On_A_Train)\ **Post date:** [December 25, 2023, 3:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/back-to-the-future-marty-wakes-to-a-new-future-question/995115/23 "2023-12-25T15:28:14Z")
> [@Bear\_Nenno](#): > > This is a two-car household. If the car is wrecked and Marty takes the truck up to the lake, then the rest of the family won’t have any way to get around. So, the family just thought Marty was saying > “We talked about this. We’re not going up to the lake. The car is wrecked [so you’d have no way to get around while I’m gone]” > “Wrecked! When did this happen…” Yeah, this is a perfectly cromulent explanation. What doesn’t make much sense is why this family that is so functional and successful has two adult-aged children still living at home, or what happened to Lorraine’s “jailbird” brother, Joey, or why _Huey Lewis & The News_ disappears from the timeline in subsequent films. Is it because Chuck Berry was discovered to be a fraud who stole his signature composition from a high school band, or that a cowed Biff no longer pursued a campaign of terror and vengeance on the residents of Hill Valley and thus didn’t spur any awareness of the need to fire the ‘Disciplinary Vice Principal’ and sex fiend Mr. Strickland, or that ‘Clint Eastwood’ was the name of a infamous 1880s train robber causing the famous actor and filmmaker to pick a different vocation as a professional swimming coach and part-time jazz pianist. What happens in 2015 Lorraine Baines McFly gets a “23andMe” special deal for the family for Christmas only to discover that her great grandmother Margaret married Seamus McFly, producing William, and then later offspring who were adopted by or married into the Baines family, producing a Lorraine in an exact likeness of Margaret and creating a McFly family tree more interlaced than a European royal dynasty? Of course, as viewers external to this tortured timeline, we know that the total story about changes and shifts in the narrative continuum do not begin just with the first time the flux capacitor is fired up and a DMC-12 is somehow improbably accelerated to the speed of 88 miles per hour in a mall parking lot. Unlike the characters in the film we are aware that dramatic changes in appearance and manner occur to multiple characters including George McFly, Marty’s girlfriend Jennifer, and even Marty himself, who in a metatemporal timeline proceeding the actual films was a darker, brooding, proto-Goth character who was too self-aware of his inability to have agency over his own future to be enthusiastic and engaged with the light-hearted hijinks of bumbling inventor ‘Doc’ Brown. I think the reality is that they are all stuck in a continually shifting universe that only seems fixed to individual characters who occupy one particular story loop before being edited out in favor of storylines that are more successful with test audiences. And who knows how many layers down this much larger narrative structure goes; it clearly is not just limited to what appears on screen, and even the viewer may just perceive themselves to be an objective observer but actually a participant in a much grander and fungible narrative arc that extends out into the rea… ---
**Author:** ![SpicyDuckBillyHunt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/6bbea6/32.png) [@SpicyDuckBillyHunt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SpicyDuckBillyHunt)\ **Post date:** [December 25, 2023, 6:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/back-to-the-future-marty-wakes-to-a-new-future-question/995115/24 "2023-12-25T18:24:55Z")
This- Marty was saying “We talked about this. We’re not going up to the lake. The car is wrecked [so you’d have no way to get around while I’m gone]” does make some kind of sense. Maybe Dave uses the BMW mainly as George writes at home. Do Marty’s siblings live at home still or they just go there to eat Breakfast before going to work? ---
**Author:** ![msmith537](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d9b06d/32.png) [@msmith537](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/msmith537)\ **Post date:** [December 25, 2023, 6:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/back-to-the-future-marty-wakes-to-a-new-future-question/995115/25 "2023-12-25T18:43:49Z")
> [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](#): > > The real question is what happened to the ‘Alternative’ Marty; the one who grew up in this timeline and with whom the other characters are familiar, who was suddenly and inexplicably replaced by ‘Prime’ Marty? > > Stranger I assume he vanished just like Marty Prime almost did when his parents weren’t kissing. ---
**Author:** ![msmith537](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d9b06d/32.png) [@msmith537](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/msmith537)\ **Post date:** [December 25, 2023, 6:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/back-to-the-future-marty-wakes-to-a-new-future-question/995115/26 "2023-12-25T18:54:44Z")
> [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](#): > > > [@Bear\_Nenno](#): > > > > This is a two-car household. If the car is wrecked and Marty takes the truck up to the lake, then the rest of the family won’t have any way to get around. So, the family just thought Marty was saying > > “We talked about this. We’re not going up to the lake. The car is wrecked [so you’d have no way to get around while I’m gone]” > > “Wrecked! When did this happen…” > > Yeah, this is a perfectly cromulent explanation. What doesn’t make much sense is why this family that is so functional and successful has two adult-aged children still living at home, or what happened to Lorraine’s “jailbird” brother, Joey, or why _Huey Lewis & The News_ disappears from the timeline in subsequent films. Is it because Chuck Berry was discovered to be a fraud who stole his signature composition from a high school band, or that a cowed Biff no longer pursued a campaign of terror and vengeance on the residents of Hill Valley and thus didn’t spur any awareness of the need to fire the ‘Disciplinary Vice Principal’ and sex fiend Mr. Strickland, or that ‘Clint Eastwood’ was the name of a infamous 1880s train robber causing the famous actor and filmmaker to pick a different vocation as a professional swimming coach and part-time jazz pianist. What happens in 2015 Lorraine Baines McFly gets a “23andMe” special deal for the family for Christmas only to discover that her great grandmother Margaret married Seamus McFly, producing William, and then later offspring who were adopted by or married into the Baines family, producing a Lorraine in an exact likeness of Margaret and creating a McFly family tree more interlaced than a European royal dynasty? > > Of course, as viewers external to this tortured timeline, we know that the total story about changes and shifts in the narrative continuum do not begin just with the first time the flux capacitor is fired up and a DMC-12 is somehow improbably accelerated to the speed of 88 miles per hour in a mall parking lot. Unlike the characters in the film we are aware that dramatic changes in appearance and manner occur to multiple characters including George McFly, Marty’s girlfriend Jennifer, and even Marty himself, who in a metatemporal timeline proceeding the actual films was a darker, brooding, proto-Goth character who was too self-aware of his inability to have agency over his own future to be enthusiastic and engaged with the light-hearted hijinks of bumbling inventor ‘Doc’ Brown. I think the reality is that they are all stuck in a continually shifting universe that only seems fixed to individual characters who occupy one particular story loop before being edited out in favor of storylines that are more successful with test audiences. And who knows how many layers down this much larger narrative structure goes; it clearly is not just limited to what appears on screen, and even the viewer may just perceive themselves to be an objective observer but actually a participant in a much grander and fungible narrative arc that extends out into the rea… Some relevant quotes from other time travel experts. "One possible future…from your point of view. I don’t know tech stuff. –Kyle Reese, Sergeant, Tech-Com “What’s happened happened. Which is an expression of faith in the mechanics of the world, not an excuse to do nothing.” –Neil, TENET operative “People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint - it’s more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly… time-y wimey… stuff.” –The Doctor, Time Lord “I don’t want to talk about time travel because if we start talking about it then we’re going to be here all day talking about it, making diagrams with straws.” Joe Simmons, Looper ---
**Author:** ![Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/13edae/32.png) [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stranger_On_A_Train)\ **Post date:** [December 25, 2023, 6:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/back-to-the-future-marty-wakes-to-a-new-future-question/995115/27 "2023-12-25T18:58:18Z")
> [@SpicyDuckBillyHunt](#): > > Do Marty’s siblings live at home still or they just go there to eat Breakfast before going to work? That’s even weirder. Dave, who “always wear[s] a suit to the office” stops off at the family home to have a grapefruit and read _Forbes_ after 10 am, and has been there long enough to take phone messages from one of the multitude of his sister Linda’s ‘boyfriends’, all while George and Lorraine are out playing tennis? Is this a real family or a half-way house for people play-acting at what they think it is like being adults with real jobs? > [@msmith537](#): > > I assume he vanished just like Marty Prime almost did when his parents weren’t kissing. That is even more disturbing as it suggests that people are just being constantly pruned out of the timeline and the entire memory of them erased from all of existence in order to try to maintain some degree of coherence. This is not a stable simuniverse and is no doubt going to degenerate into a story where Keanu Reeves knows kung fu and says, “Whoa!” a lot. > [@msmith537](#): > > Some relevant quotes from other time travel experts. Don’t forget: [![](https://img.youtube.com/vi/OstryGGxgXo/maxresdefault.jpg "Professor Hulk explains Time Travel - Scene HD - Avengers: Endgame") ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OstryGGxgXo) Stranger ---
**Author:** ![Folly](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/folly/32/3219_2.png) [@Folly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Folly)\ **Post date:** [December 25, 2023, 7:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/back-to-the-future-marty-wakes-to-a-new-future-question/995115/28 "2023-12-25T19:53:26Z")
If any Marty was going to fade out, it would be the one who travelled back in time, but I guess that would be unsatisfying for the viewer. Maybe being in the DeLorean’s time field granted a protective affect and enabled him to commit time-travel-twin-icide. ---
**Author:** ![Galactus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/galactus/32/3581_2.png) [@Galactus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Galactus)\ **Post date:** [December 25, 2023, 9:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/back-to-the-future-marty-wakes-to-a-new-future-question/995115/29 "2023-12-25T21:02:47Z")
Did “better life” Marty still befriend Doc Brown? Would Doc Brown befriend Marty now that he knows what the future holds? Would Doc Brown still build the time machine knowing the trouble it causes? Would he at least not get the plutonium from the Libyans? Would that mean that this Marty never traveled back in time? ---
**Author:** ![Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/13edae/32.png) [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stranger_On_A_Train)\ **Post date:** [December 25, 2023, 9:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/back-to-the-future-marty-wakes-to-a-new-future-question/995115/30 "2023-12-25T21:18:52Z")
> [@Galactus](#): > > Would he at least not get the plutonium from the Libyans? One ‘plot hole’ in the film is where the hell did these ‘Libyans’ get ahold of plutonium? Even if they didn’t have the means to fabricate a working nuclear weapon, plutonium in any quantity is an extremely dangerous substance and just putting it in a dispersal device (i.e. a ‘dirty bomb’) could do enormous harm to a large number of people. This suggests that in the world of _Back To The Future_ that the security of the [United States Nuclear Weapons Complex](https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/us-nuclear-weapons-complex) is not very secure and the [National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA)](https://www.energy.gov/nnsa/national-nuclear-security-administration) has either been radically defunded by “Reaganomics Gone Wild” (video series to be announced shortly) or that someone on the inside is playing more fast and loose with plutonium than [A. Q. Khan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdul_Qadeer_Khan), and yet, we see or hear nothing about this existential terrorist threat aside from a VW van of inept terrorists taking about a fast photo booth. What would the ‘future’ of _Back to the Future_ look like today: [![](https://img.youtube.com/vi/J4LI_EqnJq8/hqdefault.jpg "Back To The Future In ACTUAL 2015") ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4LI_EqnJq8) Stranger ---
**Author:** ![Sherrerd](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sherrerd/32/8_2.png) [@Sherrerd](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sherrerd)\ **Post date:** [December 25, 2023, 9:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/back-to-the-future-marty-wakes-to-a-new-future-question/995115/31 "2023-12-25T21:25:46Z")
> [@Galactus](#): > > Did “better life” Marty still befriend Doc Brown? Would Doc Brown befriend Marty now that he knows what the future holds? Would Doc Brown still build the time machine knowing the trouble it causes? Would Doc Brown curl up into permanent fetal position if he knew that his relationship with Marty would, in the minds of millions of Adult Swim viewers, become distorted into an image of a foul-mouthed, wild-haired scientist taking for granted the companionship of a squeaky-voiced 14-year-old? ---
**Author:** ![GuanoLad](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/guanolad/32/42_2.png) [@GuanoLad](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GuanoLad)\ **Post date:** [December 25, 2023, 9:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/back-to-the-future-marty-wakes-to-a-new-future-question/995115/32 "2023-12-25T21:56:19Z")
> [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](#): > > One ‘plot hole’ in the film is where the hell did these ‘Libyans’ get ahold of plutonium? That’s explained in the news clip on the TV in the first couple of minutes of the movie. However, for a more detailed explanation, here’s a fan trailer: [Back to the Future Prequel Trailer: 1.21 Gigawatts on Vimeo](https://vimeo.com/155616916)? ---
**Author:** ![Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/13edae/32.png) [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stranger_On_A_Train)\ **Post date:** [December 25, 2023, 10:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/back-to-the-future-marty-wakes-to-a-new-future-question/995115/33 "2023-12-25T22:10:17Z")
> [@GuanoLad](#): > > However, for a more detailed explanation, here’s a fan trailer: > [Back to the Future Prequel Trailer: 1.21 Gigawatts on Vimeo](https://vimeo.com/155616916)? What a cast! All it needs is an agent Interpol Special Investigative Section who won’t give up and a sexy Eastern European money launderer playing both sides to her own ends. \*yelling at secretary\* Gwen, get me Robert Pattinson and Mila Kunis one the phone, pronto! Stranger ---
**Author:** ![Dewey\_Finn](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dewey_finn/32/4222_2.png) [@Dewey\_Finn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dewey_Finn)\ **Post date:** [December 25, 2023, 10:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/back-to-the-future-marty-wakes-to-a-new-future-question/995115/34 "2023-12-25T22:58:23Z")
> [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](#): > > One ‘plot hole’ in the film is where the hell did these ‘Libyans’ get ahold of plutonium? As I remember, when Marty was in Doc Brown’s house, the television came on, showing a news report about stolen plutonium, perhaps from a federal research lab (can’t remember). ---
**Author:** ![RTFirefly](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/c77e96/32.png) [@RTFirefly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RTFirefly)\ **Post date:** [December 25, 2023, 11:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/back-to-the-future-marty-wakes-to-a-new-future-question/995115/35 "2023-12-25T23:34:31Z")
> [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](#): > > That is even more disturbing as it suggests that people are just being constantly pruned out of the timeline and the entire memory of them erased from all of existence in order to try to maintain some degree of coherence. Yeah, that’s the sort of dilemma that killed my one attempt at writing a time-travel story. In my story, for reasons of my own, I go to sleep one night in the fall of 1987, and wake up the next mornng in November 1971, in my senior year of high school. Once I started asking myself, ‘well what happens to everything everyone experienced during those sixteen years?’ it all kinda went down the tubes. Not to mention, hundreds of millions of people were born during those sixteen years - do they just get wiped out? That would make the Holocaust look like small potatoes. The best I could come up with was a variation on the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, where the previous timeline keeps going (with one of a bifurcated ‘you’ still in it, blithely unaware of the ‘you’ that’s jumped backward in time), and all you accomplish by going back in time is add another infinitude of timelines to the multiverse. Which really undermines any reason to go back. ---
**Author:** ![DPRK](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/4491bb/32.png) [@DPRK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DPRK)\ **Post date:** [December 25, 2023, 11:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/back-to-the-future-marty-wakes-to-a-new-future-question/995115/36 "2023-12-25T23:52:55Z")
Don’t worry: it was all a dream. ---
**Author:** ![de\_Worde](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/838e76/32.png) [@de\_Worde](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/de_Worde)\ **Post date:** [December 25, 2023, 11:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/back-to-the-future-marty-wakes-to-a-new-future-question/995115/37 "2023-12-25T23:55:48Z")
> [@GuanoLad](#): > > There’s only one thing about the new timeline that bothers me, and that’s why they have such a crappy house when they’re such a successful family. Well, it’s only his first novel that just got published. So it’s not like he’s a wildly successful author. They seem comfortably middle class … maybe splurging a bit for the BMW and Marty’s truck. ---
**Author:** ![running\_coach](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/running_coach/32/15836_2.png) [@running\_coach](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/running_coach)\ **Post date:** [December 26, 2023, 12:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/back-to-the-future-marty-wakes-to-a-new-future-question/995115/38 "2023-12-26T00:05:58Z")
> [@de\_Worde](#): > > > [@GuanoLad](#): > > > > There’s only one thing about the new timeline that bothers me, and that’s why they have such a crappy house when they’re such a successful family. > > **Well, it’s only his first novel that just got published.** So it’s not like he’s a wildly successful author. They seem comfortably middle class … maybe splurging a bit for the BMW and Marty’s truck. - He might have been writing short stories, scripts, speeches, ghostwriting and/or articles. ---
**Author:** ![Gatopescado](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gatopescado/32/5711_2.png) [@Gatopescado](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gatopescado)\ **Post date:** [December 26, 2023, 12:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/back-to-the-future-marty-wakes-to-a-new-future-question/995115/39 "2023-12-26T00:10:35Z")
> [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](#): > > why _Huey Lewis & The News_ disappears from the timeline ZZ Top only opens for Jimi Hendrix. ---
**Author:** ![GuanoLad](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/guanolad/32/42_2.png) [@GuanoLad](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GuanoLad)\ **Post date:** [December 26, 2023, 1:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/back-to-the-future-marty-wakes-to-a-new-future-question/995115/40 "2023-12-26T01:47:08Z")
> [@RTFirefly](#): > > do they just get wiped out? They don’t exist yet. They will exist again, or new people will exist. Sometimes I wonder if I wasn’t born to my parents, does that mean I still would’ve been born to other parents? Or would I just simply have never existed? Not died, just never been. Nobody will miss me, and I won’t miss out, because I never was. What is “me” anyway? And then it’s just a rabbit hole of thought experiments. You can’t let that get in the way of telling a story, or even let that define the story in the first place. It brings everyone down, and also doesn’t make sense if you think about it long enough. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/back-to-the-future-marty-wakes-to-a-new-future-question/995115.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/back-to-the-future-marty-wakes-to-a-new-future-question/995115.md?page=3)