MovieChat Forums > Back to the Future Part II (1989) Discussion > Did Marty and Doc actually mess up Marty...

Did Marty and Doc actually mess up Marty's family's future?

posted 3 years ago by TMC-4 (19416)
4 replies | jump to latest

I'm repost what I just found on AVClub:

https://film.avclub.com/1846511189

The whole of the first film is about making sure everything happens exactly as it should so that it doesn’t wipe Marty and his siblings from the timeline (the couple of tweaks that improve their lives later is a bonus). But in Part II they deliberately change what happens in 2015 just because its a bit shitty (despite Doc’s whole “Don’t fuck with time, you’ll fuck it all up, oh great now Biff’s in charge and we’ve got alternate timelines” message with the almanac)

But what about Mary’s grandkids? And his great grandkids? By messing about with Marty Jr. and changing what happens to him and the effects it has on Marty’s other kids, surely they’re creating an alternate timeline? One where, whatever children they would have had, are now wiped out because circumstances are completely different? And their children and their children...

Basically the entire future McFly family born after 2015 are wiped out just because Marty didn’t want Marty Jr. to do a bit of jail time. I realize Zemeckis and Gale were somewhat trapped by their ending to BTTF (which was supposed to be a punchline, not a sequel set-up) but it’s funny to think the solution was McFly genocide.

[–] Threadkiller (2952) 3 years ago

I suppose that since Marty's 2015 life is considered a failure with a dead end job(which he gets fired from), a loser clone son, & a tranny clone daughter, the audience was expected not to feel bad about that future being erased.

[–] Karl Aksel (1451) 3 years ago

Good point. It's as if Doc had suggested, in the first movie, that they go back in time to the 1910s or something, change a few things so that Marty's loser dad had never been born.

"But won't that mean that I'll cease to exist?"
"Yes it will, Marty, but your grandparents will have much better kids and grandkids instead!"

[–] Furienna (3322) 3 years ago

Well, we don't really know if Marty's son would have had any kids if he had gone to jail.
It is never mentioned what was going to happen after 2015 in that timeline.

[–] mcp7 (142) 3 years ago

2015 is not only "a bit shitty" for the McFlys. Doc literally says Marty's son being in jail would start a series of events that would eventually destroy his family. Any time a person is saved, or a catastrophe is avoided, many future lives are erased too. By this logic, anything Doc and Marty do is wrong because there will always be someone that will never be born in an hypothetical future because of their actions.