Today's Darwin Award nominee

Wait a sec. So Doc Brown, who got machine-gunned by Libyans, should have had multiple broken ribs instead of smiling and zapping hinself to 2015?

Say it ain't so.

 

Doc Brown actually should have been dead as a doornail. Bulletproof vests of the 1980s could stop handgun rounds, but were wholly ineffective against high-velocity rifle rounds. Upgraded vests that could stop rifle bullets didn't come into use until the 90s. Getting shot at close range, multiple times, with an AK-47 should have left him a bloody corpse on the parking lot of the Twin Pines Lone Pine Mall.
Of course, you could write that off by saying he had a time machine and went a few decades ahead to get something better.

 

Yeah, but he didn't make his first trip until after he was shot. If he'd gone into the future, got a powerful vest, then gave it to 1985 Doc, '85 Doc would already know the time machine worked and not get so excited.

 

But '85 Doc did know the time machine worked, because he sent Einstein ahead one minute in time before Marty took his trip. And he did it with confidence. Before the Libyans show up, he's even ready to take a trip himself. Him getting shot and Marty hopping in to escape the Libyans just changed things -- or made the whole thing possible. Doc knowing he needed Marty to go back and warn him about getting shot (but of course never telling him as much) would explain why a reclusive scientist and a random high school kid became friends.
I mean, after all of the 1955 stuff Doc knows the time machine works or will work, right? And he obviously knew what would happen that night; and the limitations of 1980s body armor; and had the time machine operational for at least some period of time before the mall incident. All he has to do is jump ahead, buy a vest in the future, and have it ready to go.

This is what I hate about time travel stories. It gets into the weeds pretty quickly with timey-wimey stuff, loops, causalities, even whether the people are actually time traveling or creating alternate realities and crossing dimensions everywhere they go. After all, just because you stop the apocalypse from your point of view doesn't mean it stopped for everyone else. The people who are about to die seconds before the time traveler goes back in time still died. It's just the time traveler who lived.
Time travelers are kind of selfish dicks, if you think about it.

 

JFC, just enjoy the fucking movies.

 

This thread just got awesome.

 

I've talked to a lot of F/SF writers at conventions over the years. When I mentioned that I had a couple of story ideas rattling around in my head, I was told several times to stay the hell away from trying to write time travel. Too many plot consequences to try to keep up with, too many paradoxes, too many ways to introduce anachronisms.

 

I think the only way to pull it off is to introduce your own rules and limits for what the characters can and can't do, and then stick to them. Something like Doctor Who has, where if you encounter one of your past selves you don't remember it and there are also fixed points in history that you can't alter without basically causing a galaxy or three to explode.
The big problem you always run into is that anything can theoretically alter history. For example, walking down the street in 1890 you block the view of a man seeing his future wife for the first time, and their great-great-great-great-grandson grows up to become president in 2050.

 

Yup. I agree with that.

I figure paranoia about inadvertent damage to the future (and his future family) is an essential plot line. I'd plot it with only one instance of time travel, back in time, probably to the year of protagonist's birth for plot reasons. He's sent back by an odd old man he meets who eventually turns out to be him in his old age, creating a nice circular time travel paradox to close things. Only one time slip keeps things far less complicated in the meantime.

Lots of ways to play it, but I lean toward sent back to the mid-1950s in scrubs, ponytail, and earring. Quickly attracts the attention of the cops. Clothes and pocket contents go back with him, so well worn coins from 40 years in the future, currency with anti counterfeit tech and Sec. Treas. signature that does not yet exist, driver's license with birth and expiration date, velcro on shoes, digital watch, etc are on his person. The currency attracts Secret Service attention. He's had a little time to think by then so he claims to know things and refuses to talk with anyone but someone he knows will eventually be Director of the CIA, say William Casey. Tries to establish bona fide time traveler status while refusing to allow himself to be pumped dry - probably by asking that Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein (who both had top secret clearances during WW2) be consulted about the dangers potentially involved.

Basically from there acts to confirm things he knows from the future - say that Kennedy is right in blockading Cuba during the missile crisis instead of a military strike - but not giving advance knowledge of anything. Verify legitimacy by giving CIA a series of envelopes. Hard to do early on - momentous current events when you were born might be hard to remember. I figure one with 11/22/63 on the outside and "Kennedy. Dealy Plaza." inside would lock down any doubt. Get on a salary as a consultant. Could have the Soviets get wind and try a kidnap, perhaps. Use the money coming in to invest in the stock market to make money on the theory that it minimizes chances to screw the future up as long as he does not play the tycoon game. Buy rare stamps and coins and baseball cards at 50s/60s prices. Buy early electric guitars and old Martin/Gibson acoustics. Accumulate silver and sell it when the Hunt Brothers corner the market. Buy Chrysler at bottom before Iacocca. Cash in along the way. Buy and warehouse muscle cars after the first gas crisis. Etc.

Get rich. Invest in research into time. Hire a young Stephen Hawking as a consultant. Build time machine. Trick and send himself back at age 35 or 40, and let the wheel spin.

Something like that. Lots of room to play with. Could throw in a potentially time changing event to make him sweat.

 

But in the first film, he says that Einstein was the world's first time traveler. He wouldn't say that in new '85 if he'd gone ahead before Einstein s trip.

What's also never resolved is what happens after the Libyans' bodies are discovered. Wouldn't there be a massive police presence the next morning, and people on Marty's street maybe reporting they were woken up by an explosion and there were tire burn marks on the road?

It can drive you nuts.

 

What if Doc wasn't saved when Marty first went back to the future. So that Marty gets in the time machine, goes to the future and gets an awesome bullet proof vest, and then returns to right before Doc was shot, and gives him the vest. That Marty then returns to his timeline. So now when 1950s Marty returns to 1985, his future self has already given 1984 Doc an awesome BPV, and it all turns out as we see it in the movie. .... and the little details (where Doc explains this all to Marty) just landed on the film editor's floor.

 

What if Einstein was a Libyan double agent lured by Gaffafi's liver treats as a pup and only ate sealed, canned dog food because he didn't trust the U.S. government from poisoning him?

What if Einstein wasn't barking to warn Doc of the Libyans' arrival, but to let the Libyans know they had the right man to gun down?

Makes you think, man.