Headscratchers / Back to the Future: The Ride

• How does Biff, a teenager from the mid-1950s know how to pilot and work the DeLorean Time Machine, let alone know what a DeLorean (a 1980's sports car) even is?
  • Also when his DeLorean loses power in the volcano, Biff mentions his "flux capacitor is out" and begs Doc for help. How would he know about the flux capacitor and what it does? It might be possible a picked up a thing or two when he first got to the Institute, but still.
  • To answer both questions: Doc's got Dymo-tape labels all over everything. There's even one which says "Do not look directly into Flux Capacitor." It's more user-friendly than it appears, thanks in no small part to Doc's more absent-minded side.
• Since the ride could fit into the trilogy's continuity, how does 1955 Biff not remember his escapade through 2015 and the Ice Age?
  • The Ride, if I recall correctly, takes place at some point after the future segment of the second movie. We saw that Doc had a device from that time period (or before) that could knock people out for a few hours; it's possible there's a similar device, at least by the time the events of The Ride take place, that produces some sort of controlled amnesia.
    • Word of God states that the audience must never see the effects of time travel before seeing the travel itself. The Biff Tannen we saw in the three movies belongs to a timeline where he did not time travel in the '50s.
• Why is the clock on the Clock Tower in 2015 working? Isn't it supposed to be still broken even after 60 years?
  • The ride takes you 4 days after the events of BTTF Part II to Oct. 25, 2015. Is it possible, with the way things work efficiently in 2015, that it was rapidly fixed or replaced within that time?
• How is the DeLorean still there? It was destroyed at the end of Part III. Did Doc Brown simply rebuild one prior to the "8-seater" DeLorean?
  • Assuming the movies, The Ride and the Telltale game all co-exist in continuity, we now know that a duplicate DeLorean came into existence when the original was struck by lightning at the end of the second movie.
  • The IDW comic features a second, incomplete DeLorean time machine in Doc's secret lab, which he fixes up and uses to return to 1893.
  • Also, Doc was able to build the time train. He knows how to build a time machine out of any vehicle and what's around him (by how the train runs on steam). So, it doesn't matter if the original DeLorean was destroyed in Part III or not: Doc was the man who invented time travel, and could probably make a time machine out of any reasonable vehicle (I say reasonable, because I know someone would mention using a kid's tricycle as being a counter-argument to this statement).

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