This is what the majority of this discussion has revolved around. I completely disagree with your conclusion that #1 is the simplest. The cloud-parting handwaving grinds Occam’s Razor down to a dull safety-scissors nub.
How’s this for Occam’s Razor:
The rain stops at the time the Weather Service, an agency that predicts the weather, predicted.
To show this, we see clouds parting and the sun shining. This is not a special effect but rather actual footage, just sped up. We’ve all seen this in movies. People look up and see the clouds parting and the sun coming out. It’s not some kind of special BTTF magic.
That’s really it. That’s all I – and some of the other #1 voters – are arguing. I don’t understand how you can consider that handwaving when the alternative is that an agency called the Weather Service but which actually does something different, in a movie full of made-up terms, uses no effects, in a movie full of them, to create a midday rainstorm and then make it stop.
That seems far more…actually, I’ll meet you halfway. That seems exactly as far-fetched as #1. How about that?
Anybody agree? Anybody besides Munch?
This is a common misapprehension. The Razor is a tool for developing hypotheses, not for choosing between them. It’s a rule of thumb, not a law of nature. “Entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity” is an argument that it’s better to focus on the hypothesis that introduces the minimum number of factors necessary to account for all the available evidence. This is a practical approach, as it makes for hypotheses that are easier to analyze and test, but it has no probative value of its own.
Newtonian mechanics is simpler than relativity or quantum mechanics. Lamarckian evolution is simpler than Darwinian evolution. Does that mean that they are more correct? Obviously not–one is less complete than its more complex brethren, and the other is simply wrong. Science has no particular bias toward simplicity. We simply prefer simplicity because it’s easier to deal with.
Worse, your “simpler explanation” simply ignores at least one piece of evidence, thereby failing to account for all the available evidence. It does not meet the “necessity” standard of the Razor.
Yes, we all know where you stand, Balance.
I’m casting about for independent voters.
Another point toward ‘predicted’ rather than ‘created’ is that if the Weather Service had such precise control, they’d want to make the rain gentler than that downpour (Remember all the near-collisions mid-air?). They’d also probably schedule all the rain after dark to make the daytime shopping hours more pleasant.
I acknowledge that this doesn’t add a lot of weight to #1, but it makes sense to me.
Just coming in to support #1. I always assumed he meant predicting, not controlling, the weather. I’ve read most of this thread and don’t even understand what #2 supporters think the joke is supposed to be. If they wanted to make a joke just at the expense of the Post Office, they didn’t need a weather-centered sequence to set it up. It was obviously a joke about weathermen. The whole aesthetic of the future scenes are hammy and cartoony (in a good way), people picking apart an obviously broad joke are reading too much into it, IMO.
As an 12 year old sitting in the movie theater watching this movie my assumption was the weather was controlled. There’s a lot of technology that just isn’t explained, like how cars can fly without needing any external modification, the Flux Capacitor, bionic implants, how everything works more efficiently without any lawyers, and more!
Wasn’t there an advert for a hovercar upgrade, only $39,999?
I’m curious how the hovering DeLorean can travel back to 1885 at the end of film with just a lightning strike, lacking the lateral speed of 88 mph.
I always assumed 88 MPH was what kicked in the reactor that generated the 1.21 gigawatts for the Flux Capacitor whereas the lightning just fed the FC directly but as I type this I realize if this were true it would make the suspense at the end of the first movie moot because Marty had to get the car up to 88 there didn’t he?
Which reminds me of still another question: if the lightning that struck the clock tower in 1955 was diverted to the time machine does that mean the clock is still running in Marty’s new and improved 1985?
Was the clock still frozen in 1985? I can imagine Marty having a leaflet describing that time the clock was hit by lightning, but it seems kinda dumb to not to fix the damn thing and just let it sit there frozen for 30+ years.
Despite all Doc’s concerns about old/young versions of the same person meeting, the real paradox hazards arise from things like this. The thing that saves them is that in the BttF universe, changes to the timeline have propagation hysteresis; that is, changes propagate forward along the timeline relatively slowly, but revert back quickly. Further, some changes seem to propagate more quickly than others.
Consider the first movie. On his first day in 1955, Marty interferes with his parents’ meeting. That evening, his older brother Dave had begun to disappear from the photo. Dave was born in 1963. It seems plausible that his image began to disappear when the changewave reached 1963, so it propagated through the first eight years in a matter of hours. It took much longer for Linda–who was born only a year later–to start to disappear, suggesting that as the scope of the change increases, the propagation slows down.
Even so, it seems as if Doc and Marty should have been hosed unless there was another factor involved. After all, the changewave had clearly reached 1985 before (or very shortly after) their arrival in 1985A. So, why wasn’t the DeLorean–or at least, its time machine components–disappearing? My current take on it is that while the change had caught up to 1985, it had not quite caught up to the DeLorean itself. In the couple of linear days since its initial voyage, the DeLorean had experienced a week in 1955 and enough time in 2015 to get a hover-conversion done, at least. (Doc and Marty each got part of the same extension, which is why they weren’t changing.) The breadth of the changes at that point meant the changewave was propagating very slowly, affording them a small window of opportunity–they had no idea how small, exactly, which is why it was so urgent for them to get the book back from Biff immediately. Otherwise, there was no need to risk running into their other selves or any of the other chances they took trying to get the book back the night of the dance. Once the book was destroyed, of course, things quickly reverted to their previous state.
The firetrails it left behind were in a spiral shape. Maybe the jolt from the lighting and/or the destruction of the flying circuits sent it into a flip in which the flux capacitor (or the front bumper components, or whatever needs to be moving that fast) briefly achieved the critical speed?
It was my impression that they were going by the time on the clock face when they planned the lightning run. Also, the guy in the future who was looking for donations to “save the clock tower” talked about it being struck by lightning. I would infer that the clock still took enough of a hit to break it. If it hadn’t, Doc would have had to break it himself, in such a way that people would attribute it to the lightning, so that Marty would still have received the flier from the Hill Valley Historical Society. Otherwise, they would have been facing another paradox.
I don’t know why they never fixed it. Maybe it couldn’t be repaired without replacing significant parts, and the HVHS blocked any plans to do it? They do seem to be omnipresent.
Has anyone listened to the DVD commentary to see if they address the weather issue? I have the DVD but I can’t remember if there is a commentary track. I’ll try to remember to check it out.
ETA: I’m still firmly with #2.
Doc’s letter to Marty, the one that was held by Western Union for 70 years, says “The lightning bolt that hit the DeLorean caused a gigawatt overload which scrambled the time circuits, activated the flux capacitor, and sent me back to 1885.”
And yes Skammer, I checked out the commentary and unfortunately he doesn’t mention it. I’m still firmly with #1. 
I’ve always assumed it was #2. Number 1 never even occured to me. The joke was that the Weather Service of the future actually provides the weather (which is what the name really implies). Again, the language used, the comparison to the Post Office, the rapid clearing of the sky, and the generally over-the-top futuretech all make #2 seem natural, while #1 would be forced and awkward. And what would the joke be with #1?
ETA: And why does the car have to get to 88 mph? I always thought that there was something about the flux capacitor that had to be moving that fast to work, but I remember arguing with my dad, who thought it was just an arbitrary switch. Which doesn’t make any sense at all to me. But then, neither does having to go 88 mph, especially given the end of BTTF 2. Is there any technobable explanation that hints at why 88 mph is significant?
Um, that the Weather Service has gotten so good at predicting weather that they can name the second a storm will stop, and the Post Office is still struggling to get the whole mail-delivery thing down? It’s really not that hard of a joke to get…
It’s also much less funny. That barely even counts as a joke. Admittedly the Weather Service going from predicting the weather to actually serving it up isn’t much of a joke, either, but at least it’s clever.
And again, the wording is awkward if that’s the point. There are punchier and more obvious ways of phrasing it if that’s all they were going for.
I had never even considered #1 over the countless times I watched it, I think that’s really neat. #2 seemed on the same level as suddenly flying cars, hoverboards, water cancelling the forward momentum of hoverboards but not the vertical, bionic implants, a sky-way, elijah wood being a child, 19 Jaws movies, and Pepsi costing ~$50 a bottle. One thing I can guarantee is that the writer(s) of this joke never looked that deeply into it, considering how quickly it was thrown away. It’s a joke either way, though IMO it’s more effective if the weather is controlled rather than predicted. It’s the future…why not dream?
My fanwank, they crossed past the changewave while time traveling to 1985 thus protecting them from it. If they’d staying in 2015 a bit longer, they would’ve been hosed. Marty couldn’t get out of 1955 until after the changewave would’ve caught up to him.
The “guy” looking for donations was a woman, btw. Anyway, I don’t see why the clock couldn’t have been working in the new timeline, clearly there were several changes in the new timeline, Twin Pines mall became Lone Pines mall, Biff became a wuss, the McFlys became successful, etc. Maybe the flier would turn blank now, but it wouldn’t have been blank at the time Marty was using it, it would’ve turned blank some time after the lightning had been diverted into the Delorean, by which time Marty was already on his way.
Also plausible. I will keep it in mind when I waste more time pondering such things in the future. In your scenario, why do you think they’d be in such a rush to retrieve the book? Of course, they couldn’t know for certain that they were protected, so I suppose my original guess at the reason for the urgency could still hold.
I meant the guy in 2015 who asked Marty to “thumb a hundred bucks” to save the clock tower, and who wished he could go back in time and bet on the Cubs, not the woman in 1985.
Your reasoning is sound regarding the available evidence from the first movie–the lightning diversion was the last thing that happened while Marty was in 1955 the first time, so if it prevented damage to the clock tower, there was no time for the change to show up before he was gone. I think the fact that someone in 2015 mentioned lightning striking the tower suggests that the clock was still damaged in the altered timeline; otherwise, why would anyone know or care 60 years later that lightning had struck it? If it were still working, I would expect a different spiel–like “That clock has been ticking since 1885…”
Still, that’s all circumstantial. Fortunately, there’s a bit more. I cued up BttF II this evening–I was wanting to watch the movies again anyway, after all this talk about them–and noted something relevant. Starting with a blurry shot at 18:50 and more clearly later in several scenes starting at 19:41, the clock is visible. The hands show the time as 10:04–the same time it showed at the beginning of the first movie and the time of the lightning strike. Since Doc had indicated when they arrived that it was 4:29 PM, and it hadn’t gotten dark yet, this clearly wasn’t just coincidental timing. The logical conclusion is that the clock still didn’t work, and had read 10:04 ever since the night in 1955 when Marty went back to the future.
ETA: In a previous post, I referred to the “Hill Valley Historical Society”. On another viewing, I note that it’s the “Hill Valley Preservation Society”. Oops.
Because that version of 1985 was pretty hellish, so they wanted to make like a tree and get out of there.
Oh, my bad.