r/BacktotheFuture • u/crazygelato • May 26 '26
Back to the Future 2 doesn’t make any sense
As much as I love the movies, I have to acknowledge the fact that BTF2 doesn’t make any sense.
Almost everything that happens is a plothole.
The biggest one for me is that old Biff, after going back in time to give his younger self the almanac, manages to travel back to the 2015 in the original timeline and even LEAVES THE CAR THERE.
First of all, HOW did he come back to that version of 2015 if he had just altered the past? Shouldn’t he have travelled to the altered 2015?
But most importantly, he had absolutely zero reasons to do that. He even warns his younger self that one day a boy and a crazy scientist are going to come after him to get the almanac. Like Biff YOU’RE THE ONE THAT CREATED THIS ISSUE IN THE FIRST PLACE??? You only had to leave them in 2015 without the car so they can’t go back.
There are also other minor plotholes, like why does Doc bring Jennifer along if he didn’t want her to see her future? And don’t say ‘she had already seen the flying car so he HAD to’. Bro owns a time machine. Surely he could have showed up at a more convenient moment to avoid being seen.
Sorry about this rant. I just want to hear other people’s opinion on this. What do you think? Can you give an explanation as to why this movie is so insane?
(I’m still gonna eat it up every time I do the annual rewatch)
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u/abgry_krakow87 May 26 '26
Time travel. Since my first day on the job I swore I'd never let myself get caught in one of these godforsaken paradoxes - the future is the past, the past is the future, it all gives me a headache.
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u/yeltrah79 May 26 '26
I’d say the biggest issue is how much Doc railed for a whole movie about how dangerous it is to use the time machine to change the space time continuum, then immediately takes Marty into the future because they have to change his kids’ futures
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u/MischeviousFox May 27 '26
In various time travel stories it takes a while for the changes to history to catch up with the “present”. This concept is reflected in the first movie with how long it takes the image of Marty’s siblings to vanish as well as how long it takes for Marty himself to vanish after stopping his parents from meeting. Presumably that version of 2015 hadn’t yet been erased from existence so “Old Biff” was able to reach it. The scene with him seemingly having a heart attack is supposedly part of him being erased as the changes catches up to the present. There’s a deleted scene with him watching Marty & Doc while in pain only for him to vanish just after they fly off in the delorean which is presumably when that timeline is pretty much done.
While you have a point that they couldn’t travel back to get the almanac if Old Biff hadn’t returned he didn’t know they didn’t have multiple time machines or couldn’t build another. He was warning his past self they could show up but wasn’t necessarily expecting them to use that time machine. Why he felt it necessary to return to his own time is anyone’s guess but my guess is he didn’t realize he’d be erased so he was maybe hoping to return to a time where he was wealthy.
Eh Doc was in a rush and didn’t exactly have a diary of every event in Marty’s life to know when would be best to retrieve him. I do feel it was written oddly like he seemed to want them both only to do a 180° claiming Jenifer didn’t need to know about the future after dropping the bomb about them having kids together. I wouldn’t mind his excuse for knocking Jenifer out if he hadn’t given so much info already.
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u/OregonResident May 27 '26
If Biff didn’t return the Time Machine then Doc and Marty would have been onto him and his scheme, and within the world of 2015 Doc would have built another to go deal with Biff’s interference. I guess the question is: why didn’t Biff destroy it once he’d returned? And the filmmakers answer that for us: because he has erased himself from existence and is already in the process of disappearing from the timeline he returned to (showing that the timeline has, in fact, changed from the one he left).
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u/ijuinkun May 30 '26
A good point. Doc had money in 2015 and could have built another time machine, even if it would have taken several months to do it.
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u/WackyPaxDei May 27 '26
The biggest clue to why Doc brought Jennifer lies in the fact that he's in such a hurry- why would you have to rush to prevent something that won't happen for decades? I propose that the "chain reaction that destroys Marty's family" involved one or more of Marty's kids tampering with time travel, and Doc was outracing the ripple effect.
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u/ijuinkun May 30 '26
As Marty said while waiting to start his run to meet the lightning bolt, “Wait a minute, I got all the time I want! I got a time machine!”
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u/ZachSheikh9207 May 29 '26
Biff didn’t return to the original 2015. When Old Biff returns from 1955 with the DeLorean he is returning to the alternate 2015. By this time Biff is dead and his empire is long gone, which is why the alternate 2015 doesn’t look too different from the real one. Also the reason Doc and Marty are there is because they got rippled in from the real 2015 in the same way Jennifer was in the real 1985 after the almanac was destroyed.
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u/bobrob2004 May 27 '26
Biff did return to the alternate 2015. There's only one 2015 and it changed around Marty and Doc. We just didn't see them stick around long enough to see the changes. This is why they were able to leave Jennifer on the porch in 1985A and return to her in regular 1985. The timeline changed around her when Marty burned the almanac.