How did Biff get SO powerful in 1985-A? Even if he was the richest person in the world it doesn't seem like he would be able to take over the whole city (or maybe even the whole state) without the federal government stepping in.
Biff hasn't literally taken over the city / state in a violent uprising and overthrown its lawfully elected government with an army like a warlord or anything, but he is hugely wealthy, and money buys influence. He buys off the cops so that they'll turn a blind eye to his crimes and he buys off officials to get them to do things that will give advantages to him and his business. As for the federal government, the Biff to the Future comics states he accidentally saves Richard Nixon's career by buying the Washington Post and firing Woodward and Bernstein, thereby strangling the Watergate investigation in its cradle. Nixon is forever indebted to him, and as a result, Biff's rise to power is greatly expedited thanks to having President Nixon as his ally.
Biff managed to build a massive hotel-casino AND a toxic-waste reclamation plant in a residential area. Plus, we saw that he has armed thugs riding on a tank in plain view patrolling around his hotel.
The Tank was mannned by HVPD in SWAT gear, probably to make sure the bikers didn't get too out of control and/or damage the town/hotel.
The dad from that family that lived in Marty's house yells that they are not going to sell, no matter how much the "company" (which must be BiffCO) terrorizes them. While Biff may not literally own the city, it seems he is at least attempting to do so.
Biff sees the DeLorean take off and vanish into thin air, and is clearly baffled and disturbed by this. But the next time we see this version of Biff (which is chronologically one day later from his POV), he's acting totally normal and doesn't seem to have remembered the flying car at all. Obviously everything by that point was already wrapped up with Biff's storyline, but it is a minor plot hole.
An unidentified flying object? People tend to look at you funny when you bring those up. And not believe you.
The human mind is actually pretty good at wiping away 'inconsistencies'. Sure, it would have thrown Biff immediately afterwards, but it's not like he got that good a look at it before it disappeared, and it took him another thirty years to join the dots together. Chances are, since no one else saw it, he probably reasoned away with "probably just a weird-looking helicopter".
Wouldn't it have been easier to take the Almanac from Biff the day after the dance, or just break into his house when he falls asleep?
Doc and Marty wanted it to be over with quickly, and probably didn't want to risk spending too much time on the task lest something go wrong (for example, Biff could have made a copy or took greater security measures which would make it more difficult). Heck, Old Biff told young Biff to buy a safe for the book. Besides, they already knew a lot where Biff would be and what he would be at that time; that gave them an advantage.
He brought the almanac with him to sporting events. In one of the articles where Biff wins big at horse racing, he's got the almanac in his pocket! Biff seems pretty lax about security.
Just because he has it with him doesn't mean he doesn't have a "backup" in some form hidden somewhere. He easily could have hand-copied information from it and stashed it in a safe place just in case anything happened to the actual Almanac. Or for all we know, it's just another copy of Ooh La La with the Sports Almanac jacket on it.
Also, how much time do you think they have to waste on this? Remember, in 1985A, Doc was in an asylum and Marty was in a school in Switzerland. Technically speaking, the Marty and Doc that we follow in the movie did not exist anymore, much like how Marty erased himself from history in the first movie and had to put it right again. They were basically on a time-limit until the timeline corrected itself and the two of them faded out of reality forever. They couldn't afford to wait for 'tomorrow', at any moment time might catch up with them.
Marty and Doc could have stopped the police from taking Jennifer "home" to Hilldale. All Marty had to do was claim to be Marty of 2015, his thumbprint scan would have verified it, and surely the police would have left Jennifer in her "husband's" custody.
It was risky already, according to Doc, for them to have been in 2015 at all in the first place, in situations where they might create a paradox by running into their doppelgängers.
Marty had been in the future for just a few minutes and probably didn't know that or was too disoriented. Plus it'd be pretty odd for a visibly teenage Marty to just appear out of nowhere and give a thumb scan identifying himself as a 47-year-old man—especially since, if you look closely at Doc's newspaper, there's a bit in the news-line about "thumb bandits" (which are presumably the identity thieves of 2015).
The cops that find Jennifer unconscious are not *that* surprised that the scan shows she is 47. Arguably, it is entirely possible in that timeline to look 30 years younger if you spend lots of money in the top of the line antiaging stuff.
What if Marty walked up to them claiming to be Marty Jr.? The thumb print would say he was 47, but since he and his father have the same name, he could explain it away as a computing mistake.
It might have made the cops suspect that Marty tranqed her and left her in an alley. Even if he's her husband, that would still qualify as spousal abuse and Marty could be hauled off to jail.
But if they suspected that, they shouldn't have taken her home. The suspected abuser showing himself to the cops would probably make him a little less suspicious.
If he wasn't there, then they had no reason to suspect that she'd been abused and dumped in that alley for possibly suspicious reasons; they might just assume she'd gotten tanked and fallen asleep in the garbage. Her (much younger than he probably should be) husband suddenly showing up to nervously laugh it off and tell them that it was okay, he knew that his wife was unconscious in the alley for reasons he'd probably be a bit cagey about (since he's hardly going to tell them about the time machine) is probably going to make them a bit more suspicious as to his intentions.
What about this? When the cops drop Jennifer off at "home," Marty could have gone in and Doc could have stayed with the car. Marty could have just waltz in with the thumb key then explain the situation to Jennifer and haul @$$ back to the DeLorean. If at that exact moment, Lorraine and George showed up, he could pretend to be Marty Jr on his way to a date. If Marty Jr showed up while that was going on... um... HEY LOOK!!!
That would require Marty getting to go inside of and see his future home, something that Doc was very adamant about him not doing, presumably because he doesn't want him finding out about the car accident that would befall him. He also specifically says he wants to avoid Marty running into his future self, likely not just for time paradox reasons, but he probably also wants to avoid Marty seeing with his own eyes just what a Future Loser he becomes.
Also, there's no way Marty could be aware of the fingerprint-entry systems that appear to be in common usage in 2015.
Doc gets accidentally set back in time to 1885, he had the power necessary from the bolt, and he had the flux capacitor which was in the DeLorean, but he wasn't moving at 88 MPH ... What gives..?
Word of God the car span round so fast that its angular momentum was 88mph. That's why the vapor trails formed the reversed 99.
Since we don't know why the 88 miles (141.62 km) per hour was necessary, no one can say for sure. Since the time car always arrives at its destination cold, implying that it can absorb heat as well as direct kinetic energy, maybe the molecular motion of the lightning's heat was enough to make up for the lack of momentum?
It's actually explained in Doc's letter in Part III. The flux capacitor already had 1.21 gigawatts stored up, as Doc loaded the fusion generator prior to meeting Marty at the school. The extra power from the lightning caused an overload that scrambled the time circuits and caused the flux capacitor to spontaneously activate.
Why did Marty have to go to the future to prevent his son from taking part in the robbery? From Marty's point of view, the robbery wouldn't happen for 30 years. All Doc had to do was tell him exactly when it was going to happen, and in 30 years, Marty could prevent it without having to time travel.
Marty would have to remember this for 30 years.
But surely he would remember something this important, no? Also, in the next 30 years, he could have just raised his son to be a bit less vulnerable to peer pressure and avoided the whole mess.
WMG: this was all The Plan by Doc to improve Marty's life by having Marty choose to improve himself. Note that Doc doesn't mind actively telling Marty the mistakes his "son" will make, but he refuses to tell him a mistake that Marty will make; i.e., racing Needles because he called him chicken. The end of the third movie implies that once Marty changes, the future becomes a blank slate.
Kids don't always do as you say, so Doc used a more direct method which would be easier to get results.
A Mary Jean Holmes fanfic titled "Waiting" offers a possible explanation, Marty asks Doc that if his future hasn't been written yet, what good would it be for him to into the future to change his kid's futures? Doc's answer: "Ah... no good whatsoever actually." He goes on to explain that at that particular point in his travels, he was still as much a novice to time travel as Marty was, and didn't understand how the effects worked and he simply felt he had to do something to improve things. He later admits his actions were ultimately wrong. He was also afraid that flat-out telling Marty about the accident could've made things worse. Marty would've avoided that particular accident, but that would not have solved the root cause of it: his Berserk Button. So you can ultimately chalk up the whole time-traveling calamity in the three films as Marty growing up and learning how to handle himself in ways that no one could've planned for or taught him.
What's the harm in Marty Jr. doing a little of jail time or whatever the punishment is? It's not ideal but neither is disrupting the space-time continuum.
For one thing, it's not "a little bit of jail time" since it's specifically mentioned that Marty Jr. was sentenced for 15 years, with Marlene being sentenced to 20 years. For another, regardless of the length of the sentence, he'd still be unjustly incarcerated for something he was innocent of, so they would obviously want to prevent that if they could. Not to mention, as Doc says, the event starts a chain reaction which completely destroys Marty's entire family. Given that his and Jennifer's relationship seemed to be on the rocks, their kids going to jail, combined with Marty losing his job, would probably spell the end of their marriage, plus his kids would have to deal with having criminal records and the social stigma of being ex convicts. The novelization also implies that Marlene commits suicide after the whole ordeal. So there's a lot of harm in Marty Jr. doing jail time.
Gray's Sports Almanac was supposed to have the results of every major sporting event from 1950-2000. Did anyone think that book was just a little too thin to have all that history in there? Then in 1955, old Biff manages to open the page up to the exact game that's playing on the radio.
The almanac could have been part of set. Marty might have only bought a volume with certain sports, either not realizing there were others or the shop didn't have them.
The implication of the dialogue does * seem* to be that it's complete, though, and on the commentary track Zemeckis and Gale admit to the absurdity. If it just contains the bare, basic statistics, which fill most every page in tiny print and in many columns, using lots of abbreviations, they could probably fit a hell of a lot more in there than it would appear by glancing at the cover and page number.
The first draft of the BTTF2 script mentions that the pages of the almanac are super-thin, and that the almanac is composed of 5000 pages.
It's the future. They probably found some technology to make it small.
Or holographic in a controllable way, so that it's like several pages in one for each page. Or...something.
Isn't it highly possible that Biff's bets and his actions would probably eventually have a serious effect on the sporting world itself, and thus begin altering the actual results from the timeline that the book was from?
As long as Biff doesn't get directly involved, probably not. Even if the almanac only works for the first few games, Biff can still get rich off of it, but BTTF-verse rules are that the results in the book would change, too, like what happened with the newspapers.
Eventually it wouldn't matter. Biff was making and celebrating his bets extremely publicly. So when the "Luckiest Man Alive" makes a bet, regardless of the odds, any gambler worth their salt should also make that bet, which would then drive the odds up to the point where they're not worth making a bet to begin with. This happens with sure-thing horse racing all the time.
Also: the ripple effect. If Biff's betting caused something to change, it would update in the book once it had happened, and things could only change in Biff's future, after he had done something using the book. IE: something he did in 1980 could hardly affect something that happened in 1979, but it could affect something in 1981, but by 1981 he'd still have the 'right' information from the book.
Why does Marty get blamed for the Sports Almanac fiasco? Isn't it at least partly Doc's fault for inventing a time machine with no security measure, leaving it completely unguarded, and then talking loudly about it? All Marty did was give Biff the idea.
Marty was supposed to be guarding the car, but wandered off to look at dog leashes. As an old adage says, it doesn't matter how good your security is if the users have bad practices.
Arguably, Marty is more at fault because he had greedy intentions when he bought the Almanac. Doc had more noble intentions when he invented the time machine.
How does that make it Marty's fault? He may have had greedy intentions, but that doesn't mean he intended that outcome any more than Doc did. If it wasn't for Doc taking the almanac away from him and causing a fuss about it, Marty would have been the one to get rich, presumably with much better consequences.
It's Marty's fault as if he leaves the book well alone in the shop, none of this happens.
Not implementing those security measures was certainly a foolish move but that doesn't mean it's his fault if someone steals it and does something bad with it. If someone enters a house that was accidentally left unlocked, steals a firearm, and uses it for a mass shooting, the shooter is still the only one guilty of the crime.
Most importantly though: Marty blames himself for it, probably because him buying the book led to the very personal consequence of his father being murdered. He's blaming himself because he feels guilty over causing his father's death. When he starts saying it's his fault, Doc simply says that it's all in the past (which leads to some Time-Travel Tense Trouble) and moves on to trying to fix the situation. Marty is the one who says it's his fault, nobody else.
Doc does ultimately blame himself. In the third film he says he wishes he "never invented that infernal time machine" and opines that it's caused "nothing but disaster". So in the end he is quite aware that basically all the problems he and Marty have had since the first test in the mall parking lot were his fault.
If Biff going back to 1955 created another timeline (and that's why going back from the alternative 1985 is useless unless they get things back to normal), how could he get back to his own 2015?
There is a deleted scene in which Old Biff fades away the way Marty almost did in the first movie. This suggests that the timeline was in the process of repairing itself, but hadn't caught up. We know this can't happen instantaneously, or Marty would have started fading the moment he interfered with his parents' encounter. The scene was trimmed however, and we never actually see Old Biff fade away (although he does seem to be in pain upon returning).
The timeline changing might not start until young Biff decides to use the almanac.
Word of God was that Biff did indeed return to 2015-A, which we saw on-screen after Biff returned, and which happened to be just that similar to the original 2015 for Marty and Doc to still carry Jennifer out.
Same reason they could leave Jennifer and Einstein in 1985-A; time transforms around them.
Doctor Who time travel rules: touching the time-stream (ie time traveling) grants some kind of paradox-resistant armor, in for the rest of your existence, timeline changes and the like alter you less than your non-time-traveling companions. Marty, Doc, Jennifer and Einstein all have this armor, and as such, having the timeline change on them allows them to remain as they originally were... to a certain degree. Screwing up your ability to exist isn't something the armor allows you to 'walk off', but for minor infractions, caused by other time-travelers, they will be the only ones present to notice. Note in the game, where Marty and Doc are the only ones to recognize the sudden disappearance of Hill Valley. A similar case could be made for this instance, with Hilldale changing very little.
Word of God is that Old Biff is able to return to 2015 (the one depicted in the film) because his younger self is unable to immediately act on the information he received and make changes to the timeline until 1958-A comes around (when Biff reaches the gambling age).
According to the Biff to the Future comic, Biff-A was killed in 1986 (technically, his 1986 self was killed in 1884 but the effect is the same) and Lorraine-A used his fortune to turn Hell Valley back into Hill Valley so it's no surprise Hilldale in 2015-A wasn't too different.
The old Biff could meet the young Biff in 1955 perfectly comfortably, with neither of them falling unconscious or even the Universe imploding. Perhaps it is because the young Biff did not recognize the old Biff as being himself?
The Jennifers fainting wasn't due to some time travel effect but simply the shock of unexpectedly seeing your double, so yeah, it's exactly because of that. Old Biff knew he was talking to his younger self and directly sought him out, so he wold have likely prepared himself for the prospect of seeing himself as a young man. The young Biff thought of the old Biff as "an old codger with a cane", and nothing more. That, and young Biff was really dumb.
How did Old Biff know how to use the DeLorean in the first place? He wasn't around when Doc explained it to Marty in BTTF.
Regarding driving the car, Biff's a mechanic. Regarding operating the time travel, everything was labeled quite clearly - the flux capacitor says 'time travel circuitry' with lights indicating which bulb was 'on' and 'off', the date displays likewise indicated current and desired time (though that should be blindingly obvious to anyone), and there was a digital speedometer with a label saying 'set to 88' (freeze frame and it's easier to see). Mr. Fusion, being a 'home energy reactor', was likely familiar to Biff (or the car might've even had enough juice so Biff never had to touch the thing). Plus, it's a time machine. He could have driven off and then taken his sweet time to figure it out, time traveling back to return it one minute after he stole it.
The comic shows that Biff initially didn't do it right and ended up in prehistoric times. Maybe he tested it out several times until he got it right.
In the first film, the DeLorean's exterior ices up after each trip through time. Why didn't that happen in the subsequent films?
Actually it does every time (though it thaws out relatively quickly). It's just not obvious to the camera. The ice is probably most noticeable when Marty and Doc return to 1955.
Why in the world would Doc have Marty take Jennifer out of the time machine and leave her in an alley? What, was she in his way or something?! Sometimes Doc is the dumbest smart person in the world.
She probably was in his way. There's not a ton of room in that car; Jennifer pretty much has to sit in Marty's lap when all three of them are in there. He probably got her out so that he could get out all the stuff he needed without risking groping his young friend's girlfriend in the process, and didn't think it was worth it to try and wrestle her back in when they only planned to be there for a few minutes anyway.
He had to take the car out in broad daylight to intercept Marty Jr. He probably didn't want to have to explain to people why he's got a teenage girl unconscious in his front seat.
Because the Doc needed room for Einstein, he went to go pick him up from the kennel while Marty was doing his thing.
What kind of place must Hill Valley be in 2015 that a gang could assault a teenage boy in a cafeteria without anyone uttering a word of protest?
Combination of Bystander Syndrome and not wanting to get involved lest you get into physical or legal trouble, especially when the agressors are nerdy white males
Would you be willing to stand up to Griff, with his glitchy cybernetics and his collapsible baseball bat?
Immediately after the DeLorean gets struck by lightning and is seemingly destroyed, the storm ends! And then a few seconds later it starts raining down heavily, with no lightning! Interesting weather they're having in 1955.
Rainstorms often work like that; it's dry when the thunder and lightning happens, and then the heavens open.
So, if you meet a version of yourself from another time, you either pass out, or a universe-destroying paradox occurs. Why would you pass out? What's so shocking in seeing yourself? Sure, it'd be weird, but there are perfectly natural explanations, like it's your lost twin sibling or just an accidental double (I think I've heard somewhere that it's possible even between strangers), or somebody has assumed your appearance with cosmetic surgery for some reason.
Who said those are the only two options? All we really see is that's how Jennifer reacts. One data point does not equal a pattern or a standard or even a trend.
Doc Brown says that in rather no-nonsense terms.
He's not exactly omniscient; he's making an (albiet educated) guess.
Note that Marty and Doc never met their past / future selves face to face (Future Doc is very very careful to make sure that Past Doc never gets a look at his face), Marty only meets another version of himself in passing and, unlike Jennifer, Marty never gets a good look at what he looks like when he's thirty years older. For all we know, direct face to face contact would overwhelm them similarly as well.
Plus Jennifer doesn't know nearly as much about time travel as Marty and Doc, so she was overwhelmed by all this time travel stuff.
Maybe the thought of her teenage self seeing herself as an old woman with grey hair and wrinkles was genuinely disturbing for her, hence shrieking 'I'M OLD!!!' before collapsing.
Under what circumstances would what's essentially a TV repairman call his customer a "chicken"?
Maybe he offered to hook up free premium channels for a bribe, and Marty was scared of getting caught?
An accident, not knowing it's his Berserk Button. Perhaps he could have offered that Marty buy a new TV, Marty said he was unsure of the benefit of getting a new one instead of fixing the old and didn't want to take some risks involving payment, and the repair guy said something along the lines of "Come on, you have to take some chances, don't act like a chicken." Cue dramatic chord.
Why would Marty and Doc leave the DeLorean unattended, unlocked, with the keys in it? Doing that with a normal car is risky, never mind a rare-ish car that's also a time machine.
Doc left it with Marty. Marty got distracted and wandered off. Sometimes he's not that bright.
Strickland takes the almanac (actually just a porno mag with the dust jacket around it) from Biff. Did he not notice how the cover boasted statistics from years up to the next century?
He didn't take that close of a look at it at first - he just saw "Sports Almanac," and opened it right up to the porn. He didn't look at the cover much at all. Even if he had, he might think it's a prop from the theatre department, and once he saw the actual contents he might've thought Biff or one of his friends had created a fake cover to hide the fact that they were bringing pornography to school.
Some publications that call themselves "almanacs" are more like once-a-year books of horoscopes than actual guides for farmers or whatever, offering made-up "predictions" for the year to come. Even if Strickland noticed the dates on the cover, he may have dismissed them as some ripoff artist's bogus fortune-telling pamphlet, that happened to have a sports theme.
And let’s be honest. If you take a book off a guy like Biff and see the future dates on the cover, what’s your first thought more likely to be? "Omg it’s a book from the future" or one of a million variations of the above? Especially as once he flips through it he sees it’s the Ooh La La magazine without a sports statistic in sight.
When Doc and Marty arrive in 1985-A, Doc explains they cannot go back to the future and prevent old Biff from traveling to the past, cause they would be moving into that timeline's future, aka 2015-A. Yet earlier, Biff traveled to 1955, gave himself the Almanac (thus triggering the change in history), and was still able to go back to the original 2015. He does die, perhaps reflecting the fact that Lorraine-A killed him in 1996-A, but why doesn't the whole 2015 timeline collapse around Marty and Doc?
Delayed Ripple Effect. If Doc and Marty had stayed in 2015 longer it would've started changing around them. This is also why they absolutely had to get the almanac back ASAP—if they didn't, the paradox caused by the DeLorean not being made into a time machine would have caused the universe to implode.
Another possible reason is that perhaps Hilldale doesn't change much between 2015 and 2015-A. Once Old Biff comes back with the DeLorean, we never see anyone else from that timeline again. The sequence of events is: Old Biff returns with the DeLorean, in pain; Marty, Doc, and Jennifer head to the car, quick-prepping it; Old Biff doubles over in pain; Doc & Company all leave. While we see Old Biff in pain (according to canon outside the movies, Lorraine shoots him to death in 1996-A, meaning that Old Biff isn't reverting to an alternate Old Biff, he's just plain ceasing to exist), we don't see what's happening to anyone else in this time - for all we know, everyone else in Hill Valley is fading away.
Why did the paperbackGray's Sports Almanac have, or even need, a dust jacket?
Because they make the book look fancy.
Alternatively, it was added on by the store owner - if it was found in an antique store, it was probably old and fading.
Old Jennifer faints from seeing her younger self due to shock, but wouldn't she remember that 30 years ago she traveled through time to 2015?
She didn't remember. The next movie, when she wakes up and Marty checks up on her, she seems to have initially decided that everything that happened was just a really weird dream (which is not entirely surprising, considering her experiences in the future are pretty much limited to repeatedly getting rendered unconscious). Her memory is only kick-started when Marty avoids the accident that turns him into a loser in 2015, by which point that future has apparently been negated anyway, so presumably in that timeline she'd have just continued believing it was a dream and forgotten all about it.
BTTF doesn't have a Stable Time Loop. The 2015 Marty and Jennifer whom we see might not have time traveled.
When Griff chases Marty over the water feature in 2015, why do his cronies hook on? They serve no purpose in beating McFly, they'd only slow Griff down, and even if they did hit Marty, they'd be sent flying into the courthouse either way.
Because he told them to. Griff isn't the kind of guy you argue with. That gets you a retractable baseball bat in the face.
Safety in numbers, or so Griff thought.
Okay, so Doc wants to stop Marty Jr. from taking part in a crime. Just walk up and knock him out with his stunner, then toss him in the DeLorean and go forward in time a few hours until the crime that gets him imprisoned is over with. Then drop him off on his front step. This is pure Occam's Razor, people!
That presumes that Griff was going to do the crime with or without Marty. Doing that doesn't stop Griff from just finding Marty later. Having "Marty Jr." rebuff Griff and refuse means that Griff's not going to keep coming after him about it.
Incidentally, did they ever explain why Griff needed Marty Jr. for this crime so much?
No. Given that Marty Jr.'s the one who gets arrested, though, while Griff himself might have told Marty Jr. differently, in actuality it might've been as a fall-guy.
"Something inconspicuous!" - cut to Marty wearing a laughably conspicuous outfit for the 1950's. Why? Marty knows perfectly well how to blend in 1955, he just finished a weeklong visit there, as Doc points out. And it's not like Doc's admonition is just paranoia - Marty's joke of an outfit does get him in trouble, in the sense that it makes him stand out to Biff and his thugs when they're looking for him.
Marty isn't recognized because of his clothes, he's recognized in spite of them. One of the things Biff's gang wonders is how he keeps changing his clothes so fast.
It's not like he has time or money to buy a whole new wardrobe to immerse himself in the culture or anything; Marty needs to find Biff ASAP before he meets Old Biff so that he knows exactly when the Almanac swaps hands, so he likely just ran into the first men's clothing store he found open, grabbed the first things that he thought would basically prevent anyone from recognizing him on first glance, and ran out again.
Because Marty wasn't trying to be inconspicuous during that week, he was trying to blend in. If Doc had told him to "blend in" he probably would have dressed normally, but he had a different idea of what "inconspicuous" meant.
It's the crack of dawn on a Saturday in a small town in 1955...where did he find a clothing store that was open?
It's the weekend and Biff says in the first movie he likes to sleep in during them. By the time he got up, did his morning routine had breakfast and finally left to get his car it was probably late morning to early afternoon. Plenty of time for Marty to find a store open and buy his outfit.
So, it's established that Hill Valley's high school was torched by vandals in 1979-A. Did Hill Valley ever build a new high school to replace the original one or not? If not, where would high schoolers attend classes in 1985-A?
If the powers that be didn't build a new school (not unlikely, given that in Hell Valley education is unlikely to be a priority), then kids probably get bussed to a school or schools in a different town. Plenty of kids probably just drop out and join a gang, however.
The exact point of the movie is that the high school wasn’t rebuilt and they live in a dystopian, gang-torn, society.
As Marty and Doc get back from 2015 into 1985A it is late October 26th, 1985A. However, wouldn't earlier in that very day, a Marty from 1955 have shown up, just after traveling back to the future using the clocktower lightning strike? That event is unchanged, so a Marty from 1955 must have appeared in Hell Valley, scared and confused in the DeLorean. Yet no mention of him? Did 1955 Marty get himself killed or something?
As history was changed so dramatically in 1985A, Marty obviously never met Doc, and never travelled in time. Biff tells Marty that he's supposed to be in Switzerland, so presumably that is where the actual 1985A Marty is. This explanation does create problems itself, though, mainly how the initial Marty and Doc are in 1955 when the current Marty and Doc travel from 1985A to 1955. I suppose you can chalk it up to the story requiring suspension of disbelief on some of the paradoxes. Given that Marty and Doc are already interfering with the events in the first place, the two versions of history could, theoretically, be co-existing at once in some sort of balance with each other, depending on how spacetime works in the BTTF universe. Hell, according to Doc this is how time works, given his whole "the future isn't written yet" thing in Part 3.
Why are there no Halloween decorations up in October 21, 2015? Is there no Halloween in the future or something?
The future might finally have gone sensible and not put them up weeks before the holiday.
Given that this is the weird, zany future of hover-boards, nineteen Jaws sequels, lawyers banned from the justice system, incredibly powerful anti-aging treatments, instant dry-cook pizzas, and so many other unlikely-bordering-on-impossible things, it's entirely possible that Halloween has somehow been banned or otherwise disappeared to the point where it's no longer celebrated between 1985 and 2015. Furthermore, there were also no Halloween decorations up in 1985, despite the scenes set there taking place even closer to Halloween (October 25 to 27). So if Hill Valley didn't celebrate Halloween in 2015, they apparently didn't celebrate it in 1985 either.
Simple answer: 2015's Halloween decorations are holograms, which take less time to put up than physical decorations. People just haven't turned them on yet.
In Hell Valley there's a toxic waste reclamation plant, but there's also a luxurious hotel just a few steps over. Wouldn't having the plant nearby be bad for Biff's business?
He might not really care. By this point Biff's business holdings would have diversified enough that he makes money either way. Even if the hotel is a wash (which let's face it, is more for himself than anyone else) the plant still makes plenty of money for him to keep it open.
To some degree this is also just Rule of Funny, since it's really just there as a joke about what an absolute shithole "Hell" Valley is; it's just reinforcing what a ludicrously awful place it is. That said, considering the town square in Alternate-1985 is basically all but an outright warzone, the toxic waste plant by itself probably hasn't affected business as badly as much as the fact that Hell Valley is all up just an absolutely horrible place that no one in their right mind would want to visit for any meaningful amount of time anyway.
How is it that Marty's kids look exactly like him and nothing like Jennifer?
What do you mean they look nothing like Jennifer? Marlene is clearly blonde!
When Marty is trailing Biff at the dance, Biff sends his goons off to find Marty. In Part I, Biff finds Marty at the car with his goons, which according to the timeline presented in the second movie was only about 2 minutes after Marty followed Strickland. How did Biff meet up with his goons and find Marty that quickly?
Why are virtually all of the police in 2015 female?
We only saw two. That's not a representative sample.
In a real-life situation like that, the cops would have to have at least one female officer present. Cops aren't supposed to touch civilians of the opposite sex. That could be why the pair we see were dispatched to help Jennifer.
Doc specifically stated universe-destroying paradoxes if Crapsack 1985 Marty ever ran into Johnny B. Goode Marty. But just earlier we see 2015 Biff hitting 1955 Biff in the head and grabbing his butt pocket in order to shove the almanac into it. Even Doc took his time tiptoeing through scenery he knew very well, the clock tower area, instead of rushing on or avoiding it completely knowing that his 1955 counterpart would be there setting things up for Marty's run. Why bother with the whole paradox angle, then? Doc could just have told Marty that if he ran into Johnny B. Goode Marty, he could endanger that timeline and therefore his existence now.
Because Doc didn't see any of what 2015 Biff did, and he's saying outright that he's describing a worst-case scenario. He's speculating and being overly cautious.
Technically, he didn't say a paradox would arise if his younger self saw him, it would arise if Biff's goons beat him up, because then that version of Marty wouldn't make it to the lightning bolt at the clock tower on time, and if this Marty doesn't go back to the future, then he won't go to 2015 and give Old Biff the idea to use the almanac, etc.
For all of Doc's talk about being careful with time travel, why did he think it was a good idea to loudly talk to Marty about not using the time machine for gambling in public at the town square? If he hadn't done that Biff might not have been able to find out that they had a time machine.
It's not like Doc planned to have that conversation; he was annoyed at Marty and venting a head full of steam at him. People sometimes speak a bit too candidly when they're emotional. Besides, it's not like they're in the middle of a huge crowd at the time or that Doc's aware Biff is listening nearby; they're off to one side of the street near an empty alleyway with seemingly no one nearby. Biff only overhears because he's eavesdropping from hiding; had Doc known he was there he would likely have been a lot more circumspect.
How was it that no one in the McFly house heard the sounds of the Delorean arriving at the beginning of the film/end of the last film? The machine gave off loud sonic booms, yet despite the fact that George and Lorraine were at the front door just seconds before Doc's arrival, they didn't hear it. Even Biff only found out about the time machine because he saw it take off, yet he didn't hear it before.
Who says they didn't hear it? They're inside at the time, so it's not like they've gotten a glimpse of the Delorean in flight, so they probably thought what most people think when they hear loud noises coming from the sky roughly above them and don't have a clear view of the sky at the time; "Huh, must be a plane or a helicopter or something flying overhead." Given they live near to Doc Brown, they might have also (correctly) assumed it was another of his crazy experiments.
Where did Doc get the money for the hover conversion, Mr. Fusion and rejuvenation surgery? Also, money from different time periods? It's unlikely that he had big amount of money in the first place (spending a lot on building the time machine), and he wouldn't steal it from anyone either.
Disagree - the man stole plutonium from terrorists, so he wasn't above stealing. In and around California, Doc could probably just take some money from San Francisco in 1906 or Los Angeles in whatever future year the big earthquake hits.
According to one of the comics, he went back to the 1930s, bought a bunch of Superman early issue comic books the day they were published then returned to 2015 and sold this "mint condition" copies for hundreds of thousands of dollars. He calculated the comics would be something of sufficient value that he could buy in bulk easily (they were only a few cents when they came out) and would be something of no significance as far as the timeline was concerned so he could move them without causing any problems. This goes against what he told Marty about not using the time machine for personal gain, but Doc justified it as recouping his investment in the time machine (which he spent his whole family fortune on) and using the money simply to fund his time travel adventures and personal expenses so he didn't plan on becoming "rich" with it by returning to 85 and buying up assets like Biff did.
How did Biff manage to get so unspeakably wealthy with that almanac? Sooner or later people will realize that he almost never loses, and will stop accepting bets from him, possibly also going on to alter the odds whenever he tries.
Biff could use proxies to place his bets if that became an issue. There's also indication in-universe that Biff doesn't make all his money from betting - he runs a (presumably somewhat profitable) energy corporation, a hotel/casino, a waste processing plant or something...
Biff has total knowledge of every win, so all he'd need to do to deflect suspicion is deliberately pick anyone else but winner and sacrifice a small bit of his already vast fortune which likely wasn't a problem. He wouldn't have to worry about picking the right winner anyway by luck either because he already knows the won't win. Biff also has a head for business and it's likely that while he used his betting to get a lot of money early on to fund the beginnings of his empire once he'd gotten enough assets it probably started making money for him without the need to constantly keep betting. Based on the state of the almanac when he pulls it out in 85 it looks like he hadn't needed to use it in quite a long time and probably only made bets with it once in a while if he lost a lot of money on a bad deal or business to keep his fortune topped off.
Another problem with Biff accumulating his wealth through betting is that bookies and gambling organizations is after he gained a reputation for never losing, they would have simply refused to take his bets. In fact, after he'd won a certain amount of money the mob likely would have figured (correctly) that he was gaming them somehow, and simply had him killed. Having someone else place the bets for him wouldn't have made a difference, the mob would have noticed a pattern and dealt with both Biff and his patsy. Make a large killing on a bet? Somebody's got to pick up the winnings.
According to the comic Biff To The Future, that's exactly what happened.
He could have placed some bets he knew would lose for this exact reason (particularly when dealing with the mob). It would still be suspicious that he won so often, but could potentially be chalked up to just being really lucky.
If Marty goes back to 1985 after saving his kids in the future, wouldn't that undo everything he and Doc did in the future? Since foreknowledge might cause him to act differently?
It might, but then again, it might not. As it happened all the stuff Doc and Marty got involved with throughout the trilogy happened to be major events, and it's likely that more minor ones wouldn't cause the entirely of reality to be rewritten. To put it another way, deciding to have milk instead of orange juice for breakfast one day might cause you to get stomach flu because the milk was expired, but over 30 years it's not going to have a major noticeable effect on your life.
In the first movie, Doc sent Einstein on minute into the future, resulting in the dog ceasing to exist in the present for one minute. So, when Marty and Jennifer go to 2015 with Doc, how come they meet their future selves? Shouldn't THEY have been removed from the timeline until 2015?
No, because they always intended to go back. Einstein never "time traveled back."
Even if they intended to go back, there's no guarantee that they will until they actually do so.
The larger the difference between the years you travel, the longer it takes until reality changes to fit a timeline where they don't return. It's why Doc was afraid they don't have much time to undo the changes caused by the almanac.
Word of God offers the explanation that time travel into the future takes you to the likeliest future of the way things are going at the moment when you traveled.
The Ripple Effect. We know that it takes a week to catch up to 30 years, but Einstein only went a minute into the future. His disappearance had already caught up with him when he arrived. Marty and Jennifer went 30 years into the future, so they would have had roughly a week before their 47 year old selves faded from 2015.
The effects taking a week in the original film had more to do with the fact that Marty had a week left until the dance, when Lorraine realized that George was the one for her, to fix things and set the timeline back on track. Marty hadn't actually traveled 30 years into the future yet, so he could still change things. This doesn't suggest that if Marty had immediately traveled back to 1985 without fixing anything, he would have lasted for a week before fading away. When he travels to 1985 from 1955 at the end of that movie, and then to 1985 from 1885 in Part III, a much larger time jump, the effects of his changes are present immediately, so why would there be a delay in effects to the timeline going from 1985 to 2015?
Why did old Biff return the DeLorean to 2015? All it did was give Doc and Marty a chance to undo what he's done.
Some possibilites:
One, Biff is dumb and isn't the type of guy who considers every angle and probably was more focused on returning home than anything else.
Two, Biff is actually smart doesn't know if not doing so would cause a big paradox, or (if he was having difficulty figuring out how to activate the time circuits) Doc and Marty might've been able to find him in 2015 and stop him before he could even do anything, thus returning the car kept them from suspicion.
Three, Biff is dumb after all and expected to return to the alternative timeline he created where his younger self would've amassed a huge fortune for him to enjoy.
Four, Biff was counting on his past self to get rid of Marty and Doc as instructed without telling either of them how, where, or when he received the almanac.
Doc says "assuming we succeed in our mission this alternative 1985 will be changed back to the real 1985, instantaneously transforming around Jennifer and Einie. Jennifer and Einie will be fine, and they will have absolutely no memory of this horrible place!" How does he know that would happen?
By that point in his travels, Doc was probably familiar enough from experience the effects that changes to the timeline had.
Before Marty finds out that George is dead in 1985A, he asks Lorraine, "How could you leave Dad for [Biff]?!" Why did he think Lorraine willingly left George, considering that he just saw her get furious when Biff insulted George?
In Marty's defence, he's a bit overwhelmed by the whole situation and isn't really thinking straight (and also probably doesn't want to jump straight to the whole "OMG my dad's dead" scenario).
Old Biff is meant to be the future of Cowardly Biff, not Bully Biff. So why is his personality more in line with the latter rather than the former? The man we see at the end of the first film is not a man who would walk around with a fist at the end of his cane rapping people on the head. And bear in mind that he is attacking George's grandson here, is he not even remotely scared that George is going to come around and beat him up?
There isn't a "cowardly Biff" or a "bully Biff." They're the same person, just different sides. Biff seems "cowardly" because we only see him around George in 1985. And he's not "attacking" George's grandson, just harassing him a little. He and George are both way beyond the age where they're going to be beating people up. George isn't some roving strong man — he's an elderly author, which is why he only bullies people who wouldn't hit an old person.
Despite falling back into his old gruffness, Biff to his credit was trying to be a nice guy there... he thought someone was messing with Marty's truck and was going to run them off, and was trying to give Marty Jr. some life advice not to end up like his old man.
Doc leaves 1985 with Marty and Jennifer in the afternoon, so why does he return to 1985 at night, given how in Part I, he intended to send Marty back at the exact same time he left?
Video game Doc stated it was a sort of time travel jet lag mitigation.
When leaving Jennifer on the porch, he says "When she awakens here in her own house and it's dark, you should be able to convince her that it was all a dream", so he may have intended to go back the moment he left, but changed his mind after Jennifer fainted.
Consider the events from 1955 Biff's perspective. A crazy old man gives him a book containing information about the future. Later, he has the book stolen by 'Calvin' after being beaten up. Biff catches up with him and retrieves it. 'Calvin' inexplicably shows up outside Biff's moving car, gets the book back and is saved from being run over thanks to a flying car. Biff then crashes into a manure truck for the second time. Biff's not going to forget about all this. You'd think he'd figure out in the 1980s that Marty McFly really, really looks like the guy that ruined everything in 1955.
Even if he does put two and two together and doesn't just chalk it up to a coincidence, what's Biff gonna do? Marty's father is the same guy who punched his lights out all those years ago when he tried to rape the woman who is now Marty's mother. Chances are, George isn't going to react any better towards Biff trying any funny stuff with one of his kids, and this Biff doesn't own the cops in this timeline. Even if he does figure it out, Biff has little choice but to suck it up.
Perhaps Biff, and a number of others who knew 'Calvin', think that Marty is the result of Lorraine Cheating with the Milkman. The fact that 'Calvin' vanished means nothing - they'll just assume he moved and kept in touch with Lorraine.
Maybe it's precisely why Biff is such a cowed bastard around the McFly's. Because of all of this he is really, really scared of them. At the same time he probably has chalked all his weird memories about the book and everything up to just being a nervous breakdown, which probably precipitated a real nervous breakdown.
When Marty and Doc get back into the DeLorean after Biff used it, why didn't they notice that the time circuit readout had changed? There's a readout for telling the time traveler when the time machine had been last, and after Biff used it, that would have read "November 12, 1955" when before it had read "October 26, 1985." And considering from there they got back on the skyway, they had plenty of time to notice before they jumped back to 1985.
Later on in the film, the readout is shown malfunctioning. Doc may have thought this was the first time the time circuits glitched out, or the time circuits had already been malfunctioning, and was showing a readout of 1955 for whatever reason.
They also were probably too distracted and hurried to notice.
Just where the hell is Biff going after the dance? He gets on the highway and drives out of town, which means he can't be going home (his house was close enough for him to walk to the garage where his car was being repaired, which was in downtown Hill Valley).
A nice long drive to clear his head after being punched by George. The event does radically shift his personality after all so he may be in a state of shock.
Biff is taking the same route he took to the dance from his house, as he goes through the same tunnel. Most likely he is going home and only walked earlier because he didn't have a car then. Plus he was driving from the school, which was farther away from his house than the town square.
In 1985-A, when Marty reaches what is his home in every other timeline's 1985, why does the fence door has a padlock on the outside if the family who lives there was inside? Did Biff's goons lock them in as part of a plan to force them to sell?
In a crappy neighborhood, why wouldn't you keep everything that can be locked locked? It's not like it keeps them in; all it means is that if they wish to open the gate they'd need to head out the front door and do it from the yard, which is honestly a tiny inconvenience.
Why does Biff take the almanac out with him out in public? People would be onto him really, really quickly if they read just the cover.
He's not very smart, plus people probably wouldn't notice the dates unless they looked closely, which they would have no reason to, since he kept it in his back pocket and wasn't reading it at the dance.
If anyone did see the title, they would probably think it was a joke. In fact, it sounds like something Biff would do, trying to make people look foolish by convincing them he had a book from half a century in the future.
If Marty prevented his son from getting arrested, that means he never got arrested, which means he never traveled forwards in time, which means he got arrested, which means he traveled forwards in time, which means...
Most of the stuff in Parts II and III inevitably leads to paradoxes in a "strict" mutable timeline, where subsequent timelines don't have "memory" of what happened "the first time around". One theory that's generally accepted as fanon is that in the BTTF-verse, Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory is in effect.
Why was Doc put in an insane asylum in Hell Valley timeline? If he'd asked Biff about the almanac, he'd have done worse than just have him committed (per Old Biff's instructions), and besides, Doc wouldn't have knowledge of the almanac anyway, because the trip that caused it began in 1985.
Biff could have just had him committed because he thought he was crazy.
His interactions with Marty in 1955 probably left him with enough foreknowledge about how the timeline was supposed to go that the contradictions resulted in him being committed somehow. Either by him acting on how he expected things to happen causing him to look like a crazy person, or him actually going insane.
In the altered timeline created by Old Biff going back in time, why did Lorraine marry Biff?
With George McFly being murdered and Lorraine being stuck with three kids who she had trouble supporting, Lorraine probably married Biff so that both she and her kids could be secure (and she probably wasn't aware that it was Biff who killed her husband). Notice when Lorraine threatens to leave that Biff threatens to cut off her kids, at which point she backs down.
Why is Doc suddenly in such a rush to destroy the time machine after the rather minor incident in 2015 with Jennifer? It's more understandable with Hell Valley 1985, but the Jennifer incident? That was the nail in the coffin for all time travel?
Doc Brown is a pretty smart guy. After the "Jennifer incident" he immediately realized the full, horrifying implications of meddling with the timeline.
Doc spent quite a bit of time in the future before returning to 1985 to get Marty and Jennifer, so there's no telling what adventures he had.
In the span of a week, Biff went to being the King of the Valley to being 1-hit K Oed by the local Butt-Monkey thanks to a pep talk by a random out-of-towner, who then proceeds to rob him of a magical Sports Almanac via a flying board, helped out by a guy in some crazy UFO. And then, the guy disappeared and never was seen again. HOW is that Biff didn't committed himself to an asylum?
The first few things are demoralizing, perhaps, but not really the kind of thing that intensive psychiatric therapy is called for. The "aliens with a lifesaver vest" thing is a bit more of a potentially destabilizing thing, to be true, but the very fact that 1985 Biff ends up a completely spineless wimp is perhaps indicative that his experiences did indeed take a bit of a toll on him, but thirty years is also a pretty long time — time enough to more or less come to terms with things, at least.
This might help explain why Biff and George have a far closer relationship in Altered 1985; both of them believe that aliens messed with them as teenagers.
When Doc went in to have a hover conversion fitted to the DeLorean, did no future mechanic notice the flux capacitor, time circuits switch and the huge LCD readout panel mounted to the dash with the labels "DESTINATION TIME", "PRESENT TIME" and "LAST TIME DEPARTED" - not to mention the converted nuclear fission reactor on the back?
Doc might've bought the parts and done the hover conversion himself.
Doc installed all the time-travel stuff into the car in the first place. If he needed somebody else to perform the hover conversion, he could probably just take out all the time-travel stuff, get the car converted as if it were a normal car, and then re-instal the time-stuff himself.
Possibly he told the mechanics who did the conversion that the car was needed as a prop for an upcoming sci-fi/comedy movie about a time machine. Don't touch those fake dials and gizmos, please, the prop department worked really hard making those look like old antiques from the '80s.
Why does Doc Brown need a disguise for showing himself to Marty? Marty has seen him younger and thus would recognize Doc 30 years younger, so that seems kinda pointless?
A "just in case" choice by Doc Brown. He almost always takes extra steps to prevent catastrophic events due to the effects of his time travel, so this always seemed like Doc taking every available precaution, whether or not the risk was very high.
Doc explicitly says to Marty that he's wearing the mask because he wants to avoid the surprise and confusion of older Doc disappear one day and who looks like younger Doc show up the next and all the resulting questions this would raise.
Also, Rule of Funny: the joke is that Doc believes he needs a disguise because his appearance has been altered so drastically that Marty would not recognise him, only for it to turn out that despite all the treatments he's been through, he looks almost exactly the same as he ever did. Doc is being pointlessly over-cautious (and somewhat lacking in self-awareness).
Why did Doc Brown get so upset with Marty over buying the Grays Sports Almanac, when in the first film he said he planned to get the results of the next 25 World Series?
Doc was simply curious. He was upset at Marty because not only was he planning to use the knowledge for financial gain, the events of the movie demonstrated how troublesome even having the almanac can be.
Also, at this point Doc doesn't have much experience in the ways of time travel. By the time he tells off Marty, he's lived through the first movie's chronological shenanigans and apparently had a few adventures besides. He knows what the consequences could be.
Why would there be a thumb reader on both sides of the door, as shown when young Jennifer can't get out because "there's no doorknob"? Isn't that just a little weird that you need authorization to get out?
Similar safety measures have been implemented in stable facilities and is suggested for mobile facilities and vehicles in Real Life. it prevents anyone who does manage to get in from jumping and running at the first sign of trouble, since they'd have to work their way through the security from the inside (assuming they hadn't simply blasted through the window or door or stolen the owner's finger).
Still seems odd for there to be one on a private house, though. Dangerous, too, if you think about fire safety.
Maybe everything's fireproof in 2015, or the system automatically lets people out if it detects a fire.
Perhaps it's to ensure that only authorized people (i.e. the residents, maybe even just the parents if it's a strict household) can let people into the house.
Regarding 'Marty' being called a chicken. Yes it's his Berserk Button, but the insult was meant for Marty Jr., so why does Marty even care?
Pride is rarely rational.
Marty might also be defensive of his son's reputation.
Leaving Jennifer on a porch in 1985-A, with nothing but Doc's guess/hope that history will shift around her and she'll end up where she's supposed to seems reckless. Every other fictional treatment of time travel says that she would have been lost in a timeline that's no longer accessible/doesn't exist. You don't switch time-tracks without a time machine, period.
It wasn't a random, cross-your-fingers guess, it was an educated one by Doc. 'Every other' is a slight stretch - this movie, and many others, opt for 'traveling in a time machine renders you a certain level of immunity to the ripple effect.
This version of time travel has consistently shown that there is only one timeline that is rewritten by changes to the past rather than multiple coexisting timelines.
Wouldn't breast implants that can light up like headlights and can automatically adjust be A) dangerous and B) painful? (If you didn't catch it, there is an advertisement for them on Marty's 2015 television).
Depends what kind of implants we're thinking of. If they're like current ones, then yes. If they're more similar to a bra that you wear, then probably no.
While the point above is valid, who's to say that people actually bought them?
When the gang returns to 1985 (actually 1985-A), they don't realize anything is wrong for a while, till they notice things (a strange family living in Marty's house, Chalk Outlines etc.) The problem being: Biff's casino is right in the middle of town, quite large, and has a bunch of lights. How did they not see it when they were flying a mile up?
They traveled back over Hilldale, which, according to Part III, is located right by the ravine, a fair distance away from the town square, where Biff's casino is.
The human brain can be remarkably bad at recognising things right in front of them. Doc and Marty were tired and weren't on the lookout for anything weird, so it probably missed their eyes.
So Doc collected a bunch of money from different periods, presumably to avoid awkward questions. The suitcase he laid out showed he had a bunch of notes from across the 20th century. But why? US banknotes are valid indefinitely, and ever since the Federal Reserve Act was passed in 1914 the design's remained largely the same. Doc could probably get away with just a large stack of bills from 1914.
He may have thought it would be suspicious if he had very old dollar bills in seemingly good condition and people might think that they're counterfeit. He also has a bit of a Complexity Addiction.
Extremely old bills will draw attention and raise questions and speculation about their origins. Doc preferred to keep a low profile if at all possible to minimize damage to the timeline, so naturally he would try to use contemporary bills whenever possible.
Why is Mr. Fujitsu 5 years younger than Needles and Marty (the video call information bit at the bottom of the screen lists his age as 42, whereas Needles is 47, the same age as Marty) if he's the supervisor? Was he some kind of child prodigy or something?
Presumably he was more competent at his job than Marty, who's a washed up loser, and Needles, who's a troublemaking bully, and was promoted through the ranks faster. He also is in a managerial line of work, while Marty is implied to be a dead end grunt, so he likely had more career advancement opportunities.
Where did the Part I Marty in 1955 come from? He can't be the Marty of 1985A. He's in a Swiss boarding school, and moreover, the Doc is in an asylum.
He seems to be the earlier version of the Marty the film follows, since he does all the same things Marty did in the first movie. Since he arrived in 1955 before Old Biff did, he probably wasn’t affected by the changes to the timeline.
Why did Marty hide in the back of Biff's car? Shouldn't he have waited until Old Biff left before he tried anything? Doc himself said that Marty should let Old Biff leave thinking he succeeded in his mission. Marty was lucky Old Biff never noticed him the whole time when he very well could have. If he had, Old Biff probably would have stuck around for longer and it would make it more difficult for Marty and Doc to succeed in their mission to steal the almanac back from young Biff.
He probably didn't want to lose track of Biff's whereabouts.
More importantly; he wants to keep track of the almanac's whereabouts. Being as close as possible when Old Biff gives Young Biff the almanac means that Marty has a golden opportunity to see what Young Biff does with it; where he puts it, whether he keeps it on himself
About the Mr. Fusion- Doc uses this in lieu of plutonium to power the time machine. But this invention was intended as a home energy generator. So how did Doc convince a future mechanic to put one on his car? As we know from the movie, cars in the future still ran on gasoline as evidenced by the Texaco station we see. So wouldn't the person who put a Mr. Fusion on the Delorean question why Doc would want one if not to power the car? It's not like Doc could just say "Um...well...it's for time travel."
He might have spun a story about wanting to use it to power another part of the car.
Doc's an engineer. He likely bought the Mr. Fusion and attached it to the Delorean himself, thus neatly side-stepping any such awkward questions. All he'd need to know would be how to hook Mr. Fusion up to the time circuits that he wanted powered, and if he can figure out how to put a mini-nuclear reactor in there a bit of 21st century consumer electronics should be fairly straightforward. (This would also explain why Mr. Fusion wasn't hooked up to power the car as well, as revealed in the third movie, since the car mechanic could have likely also done that when they installed the flight capability.)
It seems a bit too coincidental to me that the newspapers reporting George's death and Doc's committal changed to report other stories about the same people. With George, we know from the end of the first film that (a) he and Lorraine still live in the same house they did in the original timeline, (b) still had three children called David, Linda and Marty, and (c) George's first novel was published in October 1985. Not saying he couldn't possibly have been an award-winning author in 1973 but it seems unlikely. And the newspaper reporting on Doc was dated May '83. Two issues with that: first, seems a bit harsh for someone like Strickland to have called him dangerous at the beginning of the first film, unless the commendation was a change caused by meeting Marty in 1955. And on top of that, he finished building the time machine in October 1985. How does 1985-A even exist if he was committed before then? Was 1985-A Doc even trying once Biff became rich and powerful? That timeline only exists because of the time machine, and if there isn't a time machine, there shouldn't be a future Almanac to have brought the timeline about.
It's possible that George was a freelance writer for journals or short stories before he made it big with a novel. As for Strickland, he probably just has impossibly high standards and/or thought that everyone else was foolish to commend Doc. As for the timeline, there are several other examples of the timeline continuing despite the events that led to that timeline being created getting erased (i.e. Marty going back to save Doc from getting killed in the Old West, which would remove his reason for going back), so maybe the timeline is capable of holding itself together in those cases.
George's case is explained in the comics. Biff kills him in the very same night he's supposed to receive the award.
Old Biff is able to steal the time machine because Marty carelessly leaves it unattended with the door open and the keys inside. But surely Biff wasn't expecting to be so lucky so what exactly was his original gameplan for getting the Delorean away from Doc and Marty if they never let the car out of their sight? Was he going to hold them at gunpoint? Or if they did leave it briefly but locked it and took the keys was he going to try to hotwire it? Did he even have a plan or all or was he just winging it?
He was probably just making it up as he went along.
In the alternate 1985 Biff's bodyguards are played by the same actors who played his high school buddies in 1955. Assuming they are playing the same characters as well...how come they dress and talk like Texas cowboys? These guys aren't from the south..they went to high school with Biff in California in 1955. Billy Zane in particular is dressed like some kind of cattle baron and speaks with a southern twang. What's the deal?
They probably thought it sounded cool, and thought it made them look tough instead of like idiots.
The TV show Dallas was very popular in the 80s so maybe Billy Zane's character fancied himself as a JR Ewing type.
Why exactly is Marty so afraid of Strickland in 1955 when he thinks he has the almanac? Yes we know that he really just had the Oh La La magazine instead but Marty thought he had the almanac and he went out of his way to not be noticed as he attempted to take it...even going so far as to force himself to stay quiet when Strickland crushed his hand with the chair. Why couldn't Marty just push Strickland down and grab the book and run? I'm pretty sure Marty could take him in a fight even if he caught up with him. Think about what Marty is trying to accomplish here..his dad was dead in the alternate 1985 because of that book. He is literally trying to save his dad's life so if he has to knock down or beat up a few people along the way then so be it.
He and Doc probably wanted to avoid messing with the past as much as possible. In addition, openly getting into an altercation with an authority figure would probably lead to him calling security and the police getting involved, which would cause trouble both for himself and, assuming Strickland recognizes him, his past self, who has a strict deadline to meet to get back to the future, as well as potentially disrupting the dance that his parents need to kiss at to ensure his own existence, both of which would cause a time paradox.
In 2015 Doc makes a comment to Marty that the Skyway is jammed and it will take forever to get to Marty's future home to intercept Jennifer. How can the Skyway be jammed? This is not like a regular freeway with four or five lanes...they literally have the entire sky to work with. How can they run out of room? Also..they have a time machine. They don't need to be stuck in traffic. All they would have to do is go back to some random day before flying cars were invented and they would have the sky free of traffic for them to get to Hilldale. Once they arrive in Marty's neighborhood they just need to go back to October 21 2015...let's say a minute or two before the cops show up with Jennifer..then they are already there to grab Jennifer right away after she is dropped off and problem solved.
Doc might have wanted to avoid any unnecessary complications that might arise if they travelled back and had more alternate selves to avoid, so he probably would only have done so if he had no other options. As for the Skyway, there are shown to be markers dividing the flow of traffic, so it might be that people are only allowed to fly in specified lanes much like roads on the grounds to minimize traffic accidents.
How exactly did the Western Union guy find the exact spot Marty was standing at? Supposedly the letter gave the exact location but how? The road that led there didn't exist in 1885 so it would look extremely suspicious if Doc had wrote something like "There will be a road in 1955 that doesn't exist now and just follow it until you get to a sign advertising the new Lyon Estates housing development which will be in the process of being built by then." Obviously Doc couldn't write anything like that so how did he direct the guy to the correct location?
Given that he gave the full name and physical description of the person to whom the letter would be delivered to on a specific date down to the minute in seventy years, who, based on being described as a young man and from the perspective of anyone living in 1885, wouldn't even be born until many decades after the letter was written, giving those types of specifics for the location as well would hardly be the most audacious part of the letter for the couriers who accepted it. Alternatively, maybe he gave the latitude and longitude coordinates instead.
What exactly happened to Hilldale between 1985 and 2015? In 1985 it was implied that it started out as a very upscale upper middle class neighborhood. When Marty finds out his future home is there he gets very excited. But by 2015 it has gone to Hell and one of the cops that drops off Jennifer says the whole place should be torn down. How did Hilldale go so far downhill in only 30 years? This one can't be blamed on Biff because it was like that in the original 2015 before Biff got the almanac. It is strange also that the rest of Hill Valley in 2015 seems to be just fine...only Hilldale went bad. What happened?
Likely just urban decay.
Thirty years is a whole generation. That is plenty of time for a neighbourhood to change. Besides which... 2015 is not doing just fine at all. It is a dystopia that has abolished lawyers, has lithium being pumped through the air conditioning and has everyone's fingerprints on file. And we know that there are violent cybernetically-enhanced street gangs attacking people in broad daylight with baseball bats because we witness it first hand. Don't mistake the bright colours and flying cars for this being a nice place to live. It isn't. There are some frightening undercurrents of fascism and brutality implied in this setting whether intended or not.
