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Over the course of four decades, Back to the Future is a film that’s inspired a lot of fan theories. While some of them are just fun exercises in time travel extrapolation, others can get really dark. You might have heard, for example, the theory that Marty McFly actually dies more than once over the course of the franchise.
But even that fan theory feels a little brighter in comparison to another, even darker theory, one that makes Doc Brown a little bit of a circumstantial villain, to the point that Christopher Lloyd has actually flatly denied that it’s possible.
The “Marty Martyr” Back to the Future fan theory is so dark, Christopher Lloyd had to set the record straight
Known online as the “Marty Martyr” theory, this idea has been floating around for a very long time now, and it centers on a moment near the end of the first Back to the Future film, when Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) goes back to 1985. In the film, because he knows Doc (Lloyd) was shot in the Twin Pines Mall parking lot by Libyan terrorists, Marty secretly programs the DeLorean to go back to 1985 ten minutes earlier, so he can hopefully save Doc’s life. The DeLorean breaks down on arrival in 1985, leaving Marty to run to the mall just in time to watch Doc get shot and see his own alternate self climb into the DeLorean and leave 1985, presumably for 1955.
According to the theory as it’s laid out on Reddit, because Doc warned against Marty ever meeting his future or past self (something Back to the Future Part II dances around quite a bit), Doc would’ve taken precautions against the original Marty meeting an alternative version of himself who also went back to 1955. If they went back to the same time and place, they could’ve run into each other. So, to prevent this potentially dangerous paradox from happening, Doc supposedly rigged the second DeLorean (the one Marty watches from a distance at the end of Back to the Future) to either be destroyed or to go to a time where Marty could never find a way back. Essentially, according to this fan theory, Doc knowingly and intentionally kills the second version of 1985 Marty, so that the first version of Marty can come back to 1985 without running into his other self.
It’s an interesting idea, and it’s helped along by the detail that Doc knew (because Marty wrote a letter warning him) that he’d be shot in 1985, so he put on a bulletproof vest to save his own life. Maybe he also knew that Marty would come back from 1955 early, and took precautions with alternate Marty as well? After all, if Marty hadn’t reprogrammed the DeLorean in 1955, he would have simply arrived back in 1985 at the same moment he left in the first place, thus preventing the paradox of two Martys.
However it comes together, it’s also a very dark idea, adding an extra layer of madness to the mad scientist dynamic of Doc Brown. But no matter how wild Doc’s behavior might be, for Lloyd, killing his friend Marty, even an alternate version of Marty, would be a bridge too far for the character. Here’s how Lloyd responded to the idea in a 2018 interview with the CBC.
“Well you never want to meet yourself in another time because then the space time continuum, something will go wrong and the entire universe will collapse,” Lloyd said. “I mean that’s obvious. But Doc would never send Marty off to his death, in any kind of scenario. Doc couldn’t live with that.”
So there you have it: Doc Brown will con dangerous people out of plutonium, he will take bullets in pursuit of his science, he will even send Marty into dangerous uncharted time travel territory, but he will not deliberately kill an alternate version of his teenage best friend.
Back to the Future is available now from Universal Pictures Home Entertainment.
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