Cracked Theory: Doc Brown’s Family Is The Reason Our Future Sucks
Back to the Future Part II just doesn’t play the same today as it did back in 1989 – and not just because of the brief, shocking racism, or the “Hill Valley Theater of Live Sex Acts” you never noticed when you were a kid. No, it’s hard to watch because the awe-inspiring future of 2015 is now seven years in the past. Brad Pitt could have had a whole Tibetan vacay in that time. And in case you hadn’t noticed, things suck; we never got flying cars, hoverboards, or self-lacing sneakers.
Maybe there’s a reason for this – you know, beyond the one that will force us to confront the fact that our favorite movie characters aren’t real. It’s possible that our 2015, and the one the characters of Back to the Future ultimately experienced is the very same. How? What if Doc Brown invented most of the fantastical technology we see in the future? After all, he cracked time travel by smacking his head on a toilet, who’s to say that he wouldn’t have followed that up with, say, the hoverboard?
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Perhaps Doc’s genius was responsible for most of the future tech we see in 2015, but the timeline we see at the beginning of Part II was subsequently altered since Marty kept meddling with the past after this trip to the future. Specifically, Doc and Marty save the life of Clara Clayton, who died in the original timeline, leading Hill Valley to name the ravine after her – the same ravine that led to her untimely, violent death. What a tribute.
In the new timeline, Doc marries Clara and they have two kids: Jules and Verne. We can’t remember which is which, exactly. We’re pretty sure Verne is the one who keeps pointing to his junk during the touching conclusion of Back to the Future Part III.
So now Doc has a wife and two kids of course he’s not going to have time to work on his inventions. Young people find raising a family to be exhausting, Doc was in his sixties and had to find the energy to chase after two small kids, while also having to explain everything from toasters to traffic lights to his wife. If there ever was a future where Doc had the time to patent hoverboards and dehydrated pizzas, that all went away when he became a family man. Somehow, though, this development also paved the way for the internet to rise in prominence and replace the “fax machine in every room” strategy.
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Top Image: Universal Pictures
