In Back to the Future Part II, Marty and Doc return from 2015 to 1985, only to discover it’s an alternative timeline created when Biff used the Sports Almanac to make a lot of money, wrest power, and take over Hill Valley, referred to as 1985A.
When Marty first encounters rich Biff, Biff says to him “I thought you were in Switzerland!”
When Marty meets up with Doc again, Doc shows a newspaper clipping of him being committed to a Mental Institution.
So are there two Docs and two Martys in 1985A? Presumably the 1985A Doc did not install a Time Machine into a DeLorean, and didn’t become friends with Marty, and they did not meet up at Twin Pines Mall and all of what happened in the original Back To The Future did not occur under their watch.
And yet, that would mean the Doc and Marty we follow would fade out and no longer exist. But they don’t.
Now, a couple of hours later they zap off to 1955 again, so it could be argued they bypassed the potential disappearance by not hanging around in the questionable era.
Is there an existing explanation for this conundrum?
Remember that the fading took a pretty long while. It seems that it takes some amount of “absolute time” for a change in the timeline to propagate. The amount of time they spent in the altered timeline (both 1985A and 1955A) was less than a day, while the amount of time between Marty’s keeping his parents from first getting together to when they almost didn’t kiss was a whole week (November 5-12, 1955) according to Futurepedia. (Yes, there’s a wiki for everything, thanks to Wikia. I think Wales wanted to get all the pop stuff out of Wikipedia.)
IOW, you’re inference was essentially right: There just wasn’t enough time for them to fade.
I just thought of something else. It’s likely they couldn’t fade, anyways, as the DeLorean itself would have to fade, making the original alteration to the timeline impossible, thus making them exist again.
I believe this may be the paradox of which Broomstick speaks
The reason why they’d fade is because there’s already a Doc Brown who is in the mental institution and a Marty that is Switzerland. They’re the ones that are already from that timeline. The timeline from which the time travelers came no longer existed, so its version of Marty and Doc were never born.
The problem is why this wouldn’t have applied to Marty after he changed his future in 1955 (basically, the truck). I have two theories for that. One is that we saw the altered Marty still go back in time, so there was only one in that time period after that point. The second is more fanwankery: the two Martys wouldn’t so much fade as merge, since, at a certain point, they would have performed the exact same actions.
Still your theory that Doc did not fully understand the whole thing himself has merit. But remember that he did predict that the two Jennifers might just faint. My fanwankery is that, if they hadn’t, they might have merged, and the resulting paradox would not have been solvable and could destroy the universe as Doc claimed.
(Yeah, I’m stealing that idea from Dirk’s Holistic Detective Agency.)
BTW, strike my earlier thought about them not being able to fade. If that were true, then Marty would not have been able to fade, as his non-existence would mean he never traveled back and time and messed up his parents, meaning he would still be born.
Since this doesn’t work, I assume that Marty, while erased from history, would still exist in the time period between his arrival in 1955 to his demise. Thus I see the time delay as some sort of buffer built in to the time machine (or, to be more Dirk Gently, time travel itself) to keep a paradox from forming.
Trying to make sense out of time travel movies: ain’t it grand?!
The thing that always got me about the Back to the Future trilogy, is that after the first movie, Doc and Marty are always trying so desperately to get back to 1985. However, they never get back to the “real” 1985 and somehow the new timeline where George is a self-confident author is now the new default timeline to get back to. However, that means that there is a huge gap where Marty grew up with a confident dad and only came back into the timeline after the event of the first movie. That’s his first ever experience with those people. What happened to the Marty in that timeline, since technically, the Marty from the “real” 1985 had a dysfunctional family?
The Marty that grew up in the confident household is briefly seen (by the “real” Marty) dodging Libyan terrorists in the parking lot before disappearing in the DeLorean. What this Marty does in 1955 is unclear, at best, since he has no experience with his father’s wimpiness and indeed might not even recognize him, follow him, or keep him from getting hit by that car, which arguably restores the “real” timeline, which recreates a Marty that thinks his father is a wuss, who then tries to protect him in 1955 and creates the sequence of events that gives his father confidence, and back, and forth, and back, and forth…
These threads about BTTF just give me headaches, but you know what I did notice? In 2015, Marty and Jennifer’s home has no computer. They did have a shitload of fax machines, though.
That’s part of why I think they must merge somehow. In most time travel movies I’ve seen, even though the time traveler remembers his old past, he also remembers the new one. (The only clue we see of this in BttF is that he seems to know how to drive the black truck as if it were his.)
Oh, Delores: Be glad I didn’t get into temporal superposition: the idea that Marty both altered the past and didn’t alter the past, and that the whole point of the fade is when the waveform collapses.
What’s odd is it’s not like I actually ever tried to make sense out of this movie before this thread, and now I feel like I’m whatever the BttF equivalent is of a trekkie. I haven’t even seen the movies in 5 years, at least.
Starlog had a whole bunch of articles about “The Other Marty McFly” and stuff. Basically, they concluded that the other Marty was a selfish kinda guy and thus didn’t bother to push George out of the car’s way, and thus wound up returning to the timeline that the “real” Marty left from, where dad’s a schlub, mom’s fat, Twin Pines mall is still Twin Pines mall, etc.
These are vague memories of magazines I read like ~20 years ago
What I don’t understand is how old Biff got back to the same timeline that Marty and Doc were in in 2015. Because Biff went back and gave himself the almanac, he changed the future for the young Biff, so going ahead to 2015 from that time, should have put him in an alternate future where he is rich (not still cleaning cars for living), and presumably old Biff would then eventually fade.
But that’s not what we see. Instead, the world around Marty and Doc is exactly the same during Biff’s absence and also when he returns. They’re not in the tangent before they go back.
Edit: I’m probably not thinking four dimensionally.
I seem to recall there was a sequence filmed where Biff faded, but it came at a time in the storyline that confused preview audiences, so it was cut out.
Well, he had thirty years… the torn fragments were still in his pocket when he fainted, he could have taped it together at any point after sending Marty back to 1885.