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Would the DeLorean have ran completely out of fuel?
- Thread starter Trekker4747
- Start date
This always bugged me too, but the overall effect of the time machine kicking up is different, like the flames coming from the front tires, but I always chalked it up to the 1955 components changing things.
I just got done re-watching Three and caught this. Oddly, it only happens in 1955. When Marty enters the destination time before the train sequence it operates "normally." Marty enters the date, we hear him press the "confirmation button" and then we get the shot of it popping up on the display. Not sure what's going on here... Maybe the different cars they used in production operated differently with the internal components. (I believe the colors of the various dates on the display change over the course of the movies as well.)
I always thought it was interesting that the picture at the clock tower Marty recovers from the DeLorean wreckage happened to have his side of it broken off and only shows Doc. (I'm guessing Marty would have appeared on the other half of this thing like every other time pictures change in the movies.)
And Marty's impressive sprinting skills! He's able to run from town square to the Lone Pine Mall in just 10 minutes. Even if we're being generous with distances, that's still at least a couple miles.
That was always my interpretation.
Hell, it's probably closer to 4 or 5 miles!
He leaves the Peabody Farm (the future location for the mall) at morning twilight, he stops the DeLorean in front of Lyon Estates build site when it's broad daylight! I mean, that's a few minutes long drive there in of itself and the Lyon Estates was 2 miles from Hill Valley's town square.
(I guess we could argue something of a "triangle" arrangement where the three locations are all 2 miles from the other two points.)
But Marty is apparently an Olympic-level sprinter if he can run 2 miles inside of 10 minutes!
I always found it odd how little time Marty gives himself when he resets the destination time on the DeLorean but this is a trope you run into any time you give a character control over time. Marty says, "I've got all of the time I want, alright 10 minutes ought to do it!"
Huh?! "All the time I want" equals 10 minutes?!
Which is also a plot hole, surely? Don't Marty and 1955 Doc read in the 1955 library that Buford is arrested for a stagecoach robbery on the day Doc is shot? So all Marty and 1885 Doc need to do is skip town for a week, and find gasoline elsewhere. (If Doc can build a barn-sized fridge, I imagine he could make a few gallons of gas...)
First of all, this is a sci-fi board on the internet--there is no such thing as over-analyzing anything. Second, the real mistake, as others pointed out, was that if you are traveling to a time where there is no gasoline, put some extra gasoline in the trunk as well as some parts.
It was interesting that a man of Doc's knowledge couldn't synthesize gasoline, and yes, it is also a bit odd that Doc didn't save the gas that he drained.
It was interesting that a man of Doc's knowledge couldn't synthesize gasoline, and yes, it is also a bit odd that Doc didn't save the gas that he drained.
Maybe he can remember how to, maybe he can't. But maybe he also doesn't have time to source crude oil and to build the apparatus before Monday morning.
I don't recall them reading that at all. I mean, it is what ends up happening, but there's nothing about his fate in the newspaper.
What I find fun about this thread is that we're analyzing issues in Back to the Future that are far more subtle than the bigger, more obvious ones.
If stopping his parents from meeting would cause him not to be born, then he would never have stopped his parents from meeting. If the time traveled version of himself still existed to stop his parents from meeting there's no reason he should have disappeared. If he existed to stop his parents from meeting, it means any time traveler exists outside the normal time flow and he shouldn't have felt any effects.
Because that IS how it worked when he went back to 1985, the original version of himself from that timeline was still in a boarding school somewhere and there existed two Marty McFlys.
But old man Biff should have gone back to a changed 2015.
And even if they had hoverboard technology it means they generate a massive amount of energy to counteract gravity for the weight of an adult male. Which means there are micro-fusion generators in the hoverboard. Which means they are widespread and everywhere and probably not hard to use to power bombs. Which is terrifying.
Also Marty and Doc, upon going back to 1885 should have been met by a host of terrible infections their immune systems are not trained on.
Also I'm surprised nobody has retroactively criticized the film for giving a white man credit for Chuck Berry's success.
If stopping his parents from meeting would cause him not to be born, then he would never have stopped his parents from meeting. If the time traveled version of himself still existed to stop his parents from meeting there's no reason he should have disappeared. If he existed to stop his parents from meeting, it means any time traveler exists outside the normal time flow and he shouldn't have felt any effects.
Because that IS how it worked when he went back to 1985, the original version of himself from that timeline was still in a boarding school somewhere and there existed two Marty McFlys.
But old man Biff should have gone back to a changed 2015.
And even if they had hoverboard technology it means they generate a massive amount of energy to counteract gravity for the weight of an adult male. Which means there are micro-fusion generators in the hoverboard. Which means they are widespread and everywhere and probably not hard to use to power bombs. Which is terrifying.
Also Marty and Doc, upon going back to 1885 should have been met by a host of terrible infections their immune systems are not trained on.
Also I'm surprised nobody has retroactively criticized the film for giving a white man credit for Chuck Berry's success.
My dad had that complaint in the early 90s, and I explained to him the movie is quite clear that in the original timeline, Marty had nothing to do with said success. He merely gave Berry Berry's own sound a bit early in the new timeline.
There is a certain amount of that already, Marty seems to keep all his memories no matter what he changes.
How do you know it ain't cold fusion?
That's easy, Doc inoculated them with his handy vaccine box he keeps in the car at all times alongside the case of multiple forms of legal tender.
I’d be more worried about them bringing modern microbes back that the 1885 world had no immunity to. Doc and Marty had already been given vaccines in childhood to protect them against most of the bad stuff that was floating around in 1885, but even the 1985 version of the “common” cold might decimate the 1885 population.
Hmm ... do we know that for sure? We do know that changes take a while to take effect. Severe "rolling changes" wipe you from existence. Minor rolling changes would probably just overwrite you with altered memories.
At the end of Part III, do we have any evidence that Marty has the same set of memories as he did at the beginning of Part I? Does he remember George being a failure, Dave working for Burger King, himself not having the SR5, Jennifer not being played by Claudia Wells
?I was just thinking that rolling changes might explain where the "chicken" business came from when we never had any hint about it before. Perhaps this has been discussed already.
I dunno. But at the end of part 1, he still has his original memories after spending several hours in the new 1985. That's about all I can think of.
No one called him a chicken in the first movie.
The last couple seasons they've pretty much switched mostly to horses for transportation, except Daryl's motorcycle. It's honestly kind of bugged that they haven't explained why Daryl's bike seems to be the only gas powered transportation that's still working.
Well, I admit (aside from being temporarily deranged), I'm a couple of seasons behind on that show.
True, but it became a plot point so many times in the next two movies that it's conspicuous by its absence in the first movie. Besides, doesn't the subplot with Needles and the drag race depend on Marty having a fancy car? If that never happened in the original timeline but Marty now acts like it's normal, that may mean his memory is different.
Sure, we could easily assume that "chicken" was always Marty's berserk button and Needles challenged him in other ways (that we never saw) in the original timeline. But I have to wonder ....
Marty has never had a fancy car.
The pickup he acquires at the end of BTTF 1 is nice, to be sure, but it's not "fancy" as such.
In any case, it seems clear that Needles is nuts enough that he'll race anyone, regardless of what kind of car they drive. And people like Marty are easy prey for Needles and his ilk.
And yes, we are all aware that "chicken" wasn't a thing in the first film, but that's only because the plot never called for it. There's no evidence that there was ever a timeline where Marty wasn't sensitive about being called a chicken.
Now all I can picture is Biff driving George's car, drinking his beer, racing Needles before the other car gets in the "blind spot"
I don't mean to be dense, but how should he react? He doesn't ever act like he always owned the truck, and he's already long-since dealt with the altered '85. The "rules" are so dicey anyway, Jennifer brings back a fax with her and when they alter the future only the text erases and not the fax paper.
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