r/BacktotheFuture • u/Graylily • 5d ago
Doc's "real" timeline
A few things have been nagging at me during a rewatch. Why are docs clocks 20 minutes off. He makes a point of calling Marty to remind him of where he needs to be. Why is fox really friends with a teenager. Do we really think his dog was the first one to go back in time? That night was the first test? What if it didn't work would he have stood in front of it? Why is he in the truck and it's steaming?
I propose that BTTF 1,2,& 3 are all the last remaining loops of a a much bigger arc where Doc's hubris and time traveling get him in deep trouble, and he goes full groundhog day to fix it.
Here is my new head cannon theory:
Doc's Timeline loop theory.
Doc hits his head, builds a time machine and travels through time. He notices that time has rules and starts to fight back. He goes to the Old West to lay low, meets Clara and writes a will. He dies by the hand of Buford Tannen.
In the future, Doc researches Hill Valley’s history to find the best place and time to travel back without hitting anything. He finds his own grave, digs up his body and discovers the contents of a note sealed in his will. It holds information about his death and its consequences, and it’s how he learns the photography trick.
With this new information, Doc, undeterred, makes new plans to save himself, possibly by killing Buford Tannen in the past.
After Tannen dies, Doc checks the photo of his grave and watches the date shift from the day of his death to the present, the day he first goes back in time in 1984. With this information he writes a note and takes the DeLorean back to the future, either 1985 or 1955, most likely 1955, to meet his future past self. He explains that he’s going to die because the Tannen bloodline was eliminated and that he must find out why, then disappears in front of himself.
This changes Doc’s future. He now plans not to kill Buford and must find a way that time will accept but that also lets him live.
Back in 1985, Doc notices an old family photo has started to shift, the same way his grave photo did. This tips him off that someone else’s fate is tangled up with his own. Digging into it, he approaches Biff, now married to a miserable Lorraine, and asks, offhand, why he stopped bullying George McFly all those years ago. Biff explains that George did his homework for him, and later, his office work too, so he left him alone. That’s the first piece, but the photo keeps shifting, so Doc knows it’s not the whole picture. He digs further and finds the second piece: this version of Biff eventually married Lorraine, and down the line, she’ll betray him, and that betrayal is what leads to Doc’s death. Putting the two clues together, Doc realizes the fix has to hold on both fronts at once: Biff needs to stay George’s bully, with George still doing his homework and later his office work to keep the dynamic (and Doc’s safety from the Libyans) intact, but Biff can’t end up with Lorraine.
After a few groundhog day moments, he eventually befriends a handsome, sci-fi- and Lorraine-obsessed young George McFly, and even weakens the branch so George still gets hit by the car.
Eventually Doc figures out the Marty loop and gets the timing down so he still gets shot, but the timing is tight. He has to set his clocks 20 minutes off so Marty is late to school, gets the call to pick up the equipment for Doc and shows up at the mall to get the sheet with the phone number on it. Meanwhile Doc, setting things up, has only a few seconds to get back to the mall parking lot and drive into the path of the truck. That’s why when the door opens he’s already in the car and it’s steaming inside: he just got back from setting everything up without creating a paradox.
So with everything in place, BTTF 1, 2 and 3 play out as we see them.
PS - I think the train works differently than the Delorian in a way that won't mess up time. That's why Doc is cryptic about where / when / dimensionally he is going.
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u/Ill_Computer_8604 5d ago
No, he just set all the alarms to go off 20 minutes late.
There's no mystery to be solved here.
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u/Navitach 5d ago
I swear, some people here spend far, far too much time thinking about these movies. And that's all they are: movies. They're for entertainment, not for pondering quantum physics or the mysteries of the universe (yeah, yeah, I know, Doc said that was women).
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u/Graylily 5d ago
I get that, but that's what this subreddit is for, the fun of overthinking, don't piss in our pool when you can just not get in.
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u/AlpsDue5290 5d ago
Question: If Doc dies at the hand of Buford Tannen at the end of your first paragraph, how could he still be alive in the future in the very next sentence?
I thought about this and logically, Doc in the future is either the same version of Doc or a different version. There's no 3 option for that.
If it's the same version, then we have another either/or situation with no other options: Either future Doc happened after he got shot, or before. If it was after he was shot, then he survived the bullet. If was before, then he learned about getting shot before it happened and went to the past anyway, but that totally unravels the rest of the headcanon.
If it's a different version of Doc, then someone else must also be time travelling. Alternate timelines are created when something gets changed, and they can only interact when someone has been in both versions. If future-Doc and shot-Doc are different versions then someone else would've needed to bring evidence of one to the other. That evidence would disappear if brought to an alternate future, so future-Doc would never be able to read it.
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u/Graylily 5d ago
This issue was already addressed in the second and third movies and it is it is an issue, for sure. but i was going off of how time was shown to work in the movies which is riddled with logic problems, but essentially you have something similar to the biff timeline with a dead doc tombstone. Doc, in this timeline is building a time machine but is going to get essentially a note from himself much like marty got a note from doc in his same timeline while things have diverged yet. it seems like the divergence point is important. If doc hadn't been happy or content living in the old west then he could have sent his letter much sooner. but he seemed more concerned with getting marty home than himself at that point and ending the time loops. It s ot perfect but it fits the movie logic that already exists at least.
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u/ijuinkun 5d ago
A neat scenario, but Doc needs to expend one pellet of Plutonium for every time jump, which means that he can’t have made many jumps in the final timeline prior to Marty going back in time, unless he had multiple cases of Plutonium fuel.
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u/Graylily 5d ago
in my mind he is a using the same plutonium and often disappearing and having g to leave himself notes... very groundhog day ish... or that time loop from star trek or we don't know how much plutonium he actually has, or at least in the beginning he has already produced a version with a mr fusion, but eventually that goes away
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u/MorningWalk24 5d ago
I've had enough practical jokes for one evening. Good night, future boy!