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There are a few things that the Back to the Future franchise (now available from Universal Pictures Home Entertainment) makes abundantly clear: messing with the timeline is fraught with danger, a skateboard and moxie solves more than you’d think, and Biff Tannen (Tom Wilson) is a jerk in every decade. Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) spends the entire first film trying not to erase himself from the timeline while battling a young Biff in 1955. By the time the credits roll, Marty’s existence is assured, and Biff receives his comeuppance to the tune of a manure-filled truck and a punch in the face.
In Back to the Future Part II, Tannen turns the tables on Doc (Christopher Lloyd) and Marty, sending information from the future into the past, and transforming himself into one of the most powerful people on the planet. Unfortunately for original Biff, by going back to change his past, he accidentally deleted himself from the future. In a scene that ended up on the cutting room floor, Biff dies a terrifying temporal death.
In Back to the Future Part II, Biff Tannen’s fate is left unclear
Back to the Future Part II picks up where the first film left off. Marty is back in 1985, enjoying the spoils of his time traveling misadventures when the DeLorean comes crashing through the trash cans on the curb and into the driveway. Doc emerges from the time machine’s trademark gullwing doors with an urgent proclamation: Marty’s future children are in trouble and only time travel can save them.
After digging through the trash to fill up Mr. Fusion and get the requisite 1.21 gigawatts of power, Doc, Marty, and Jennifer (Elisabeth Shue) arrive in the distant year 2015, a future filled with flying cars, dehydrated pizza, and automatic dog walkers.
While walking around town, between encounters with computerized car mechanics and 3D holographic movie advertisements, Marty spots a Sports Almanac containing the outcomes for every game, match, and race between 1950 to 2000. Soon after, at the vintage eatery Cafe ‘80s, Marty runs into a septuagenarian Biff. He’s old and hunched over, his hair thin, white, and wispy, and he’s still as mean as ever. But that’s nothing compared to his grandson, Griff.
After a quick fight, Marty makes a hasty (and clumsy) escape on a hoverboard and heads back for that almanac. The information in that book is worth millions, provided you’ve got a time machine and a moral compass that’s a little off kilter. When Doc finds out what Marty plans to do, he forces Marty to ditch the almanac, lecturing him about the dangers of fiddling with time. What they don’t know is that Biff is listening from the shadows the whole time.
While Doc and Marty are rescuing Jennifer from the suburbs (she got dropped off there after getting picked up by the future fuzz), Biff slips into the DeLorean unseen, backs it into a dumpster, then travels back to the past with the almanac. Everything’s going fine for Biff(s) until he returns to the future and stumbles out of the DeLorean. The last time we see him, he groans, clutches at his surroundings, and slumps off screen. His fate is left ambiguous, Schrödinger’s Biff, but a deleted scene makes clear that the cat is dead.
Deleted scene shows Biff Tannen deleted himself from existence in Back to the Future Part II
When Doc and Marty get back to 1985, seemingly having protected the future, they find that something has gone horribly wrong. Hill Valley has fallen into chaos, the sort of place where people live with locks on all the gates and bars on the windows. The local high school burned down years ago, and someone else is living in Marty’s house. Most conspicuous of all, there’s a massive high-rise building called Biff Tannen’s Pleasure Paradise.
Biff became an overnight millionaire on his 21st birthday, following a well-placed bet at the horse track. That was in 1958, and 27 years later, Biff is considered the luckiest man on Earth, having turned an inexplicable winning streak into a vast and horrible empire.
The alternate timeline 1985 might be a pleasure paradise for Biff but it came at an incredible cost. As Doc Brown explains, when changes in the past ripple forward into the future, the new reality emerges around any time travelers. That’s how Jennifer is safe in the future while Doc and Marty are busy in the apocalyptic present. As soon as original Biff returned to the future (his present), the effects of his chrono-meddling caught up with him.
A deleted scene picks up after Biff slinks off screen in 2015. He’s crumpled up behind a car, like a cat looking for a dark place to die, struggling for breath, as the DeLorean takes to the sky. As soon as it makes the jump to the past, he groans one final time and fades out of existence. Apparently, dystopian Biff’s party-hard lifestyle isn’t compatible with longevity, and he didn’t survive to 2015. Of course, once Doc and Marty set everything right, even future Biff got a second chance to keep being a jerk.
Get the entire Back to the Future Trilogy now at Universal Pictures Home Entertainment.
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