btothef:

LAST PAGE, EVERYONE 

Doc shoots Marty down about trying out his car (“That can wait.”) and says to bring her along anyway, since this concerns her too!  

Marty felt a strong surge of apprehension.  ”What do you mean?” he demanded.  ”Does something happen to her?  To us?  Do we turn into assholes or something?”

Doc gets his big “no, you and Jennifer turn out fine.  But your kids!  Marty something’s gotta be done about your kids.” line, only with a period at the end instead of the way Christopher Lloyd exclaims it, so I guess it’s not that big of a deal after all.  And Jennifer, oh Jennifer, you are so sheltered, so naive:

“Our kids?” Jennifer asked, her head swiveling between Marty and Doc Brown. “What kids?  We aren’t even engaged yet…”

Marty asks if she would like to come along to 2015, Doc interrupts to say “We better hurry” (why, Doc?  You’ve got a time machine - you’ve got all the time in the world!).  Jennifer accepts the fact of this time machine incredibly easily and says, “Sure.  Why not?” and they get into the DeLorean.  Unlike the movie, where Doc’s got his crazy glasses and is refuelling the Mr. Fusion as he talks, here they’re just standing around talking at each other, so props to the movie for making this scene visually exciting!

When Doc Brown jumped behind the steering wheel, Marty reached over to touch his arm.  

“You’d better back this thing up, Doc,” he cautioned.  ”We haven’t got enough road to get up to eighty-eight.”

And right now you’re all saying this:

or this

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-WQ8FgkAfo

But give us one last messed up line for old time’s sake, Gipe!! 

“Where we’re going, we don’t use roads,” Brown smiled. 

Perfect!  Now cram in the Mr. Fusion in the last second after all, and take us home!

He pointed to a new switch on the dashboard labeled MR. FUSION HOME ENERGY CENTER, hit it, and grinned with satisfaction as the DeLorean rolled about a hundred yards down the street, blased off into the sky trailing a thin flume of silver smoke, and then disappeared.

 

THE END.

… 

Thank you all for reading this book with me.  If you go back to that first page eight months ago, you’ll see my plan was to hit the 20 or so dog-eared pages and be done in a month.  But as I read I kept noticing new crazy things and so we ended up hitting every page in the book to one degree or another over the better part of a year!  This was among the craziest books I’ve ever read, and I’m glad we could go on this journey together.  

Those of you who haven’t seen the movie: GO WATCH IT NOW.  Send me your feedback, and I’ll post some updates here!

Our final tallies for our “Doc!” and “Butthead” and “Great Scott!” counters were pitifully small, but the counter that I never actually started but let’s pretend I did for the number of brand names Gipe namedropped is EASILY in the mid double digits.  We’ve all hopefully learned something about storytelling and writing, or at least how the natural charm of Michael J can save a script which could so easily tip into terribleness.  And I’ve learned that a careful reading is its own reward!

Just now I’ve put up a reformatted ebook version of this site up for sale (only $2.99! which is as cheap as Amazon would let me sell it for because it’s so big because of all them crazy pictures!).  I’ll make a post about this shortly.  This is from Amazon, so you can IN THEORY buy Gipe’s book and my Crazy Reading Guide side-by-side and it’ll make kinda the best present ever if I do say so myself!

Up next: I dunno!  The novelizations for Part 2 and 3, as I said, are way less crazy and written for a much lower reading level.  For all his faults, Gipe didn’t talk down to his readers like the sequel novelizations do, and that’s what makes this book interesting and those other books hella boring.  For a taste, here’s how Book 2 (written by Craig Shaw Gardner, a man who isn’t dead, which means I’d also feel bad about tearing his work to shreds so publicly) describes some of the scenes we’ve already gone through with Gipe:

Everything - but everything - was different now!

The truck was a clincher.  It was a new Toyota Four-By-Four, jet-black and gorgeous.  And his parents had said it belonged to him!

Marty McFly still couldn’t believe how much had changed.

That’s how the book begins.  The jump in style and in how the book talks to the reader like they’re six years old is jarring, especially when you consider how Gipe started his book by KILLING EVERYONE IN A NUCLEAR EXPLOSION.  Hot damn.

Here’s the Jennifer bit, again holding our hand to make sure the six-year-olds aren’t left behind: 

“Marty—” she said with a bit of a frown, “you’re acting like you haven’t seen me in a week!”

“I haven’t!” Marty answered without thinking.

She looked at him even more strangely.

“Are you okay?  Is everything all right?”

That’s right!  Marty realized there was no way she could know about everything that had happed to him.  He had spent a whole week back in 1955, but he’d actually come back to 1985 at almost the same time he had left.  So, to somebody who had stayed put in 1985, instead of jumping around in time like Marty and the DeLorean, it was like he hadn’t been gone at all.

How do you explain something like that to someone without sounding absolutely crazy?

And finally:

Marty leaned over the top of the door just enough to see the wheels were rotating ninety degrees to flatten beneath the bottom of the car.

That meant the tires were no longer touching the ground.

That meant they had to be flying!

Doc gunned the car into the sky.

Marty and Jennifer looked at each other.

Nobody would ever believe this.

AHHHHHH, please oh please give me striving and failing for greatness any day over “shooting low and nailing the target”.  George Gipe also wrote the novelization for Gremlins, but I’ve never seen that movie nor have I spent my formative years thinking about it, so the book to movie comparison blog is a task I leave to one of you.  I wish you luck!

My name is Ryan North.  I write Dinosaur Comics at qwantz.com, I write the ongoing Adventure Time comic book series at Comixology and your local comic book store WORLDWIDE, I co-edit Machine Of Death whose sequel book is coming out next summer, right now I’m buying things with Andrew Hussie’s credit card and he with mine, the awesome shirts I designed are here and my main tumblr is here and my Twitter is here.  I’ll have some more exciting projects for you soon!

Thanks everyone!!

btothef:

Jennifer (“as gorgeous as ever”, Gipe assures us) interrupts Marty’s car sex scene with her “How about a ride, mister?” and Marty says “Jen!  Are you ever a sight for sore eyes!  Let me look at you!”

In the movie, Jennifer says “Marty, you’re acting like you haven’t seen me in a week!” and hah hah it’s because he’s been gone for a week!  That worked out really well!

Okay Gipe, let’s mess this up for no reason!

Jennifer was somewhat taken aback by the unexpected display of emotion.  It wasn’t as if they had been separated for a long time, having seen each other only the evening before. [Editor’s note: wiiiiiiiiiiiiiink]

“Are you O.K.?” she asked.  ”You’re acting like you haven’t seen me in a year.”

As a writer, why would you do this?  Changing “week” to “year” ruins the gag of him actually not seeing her for a week and you gain nothing by it.  It’s just bad writing!  But it turns out there WAS a reason:

“I feel like I haven’t seen you for thirty years,” Marty smiled.

“That’s a long time to be deprived,” she smiled back.

Oh it’s because he travelled thirty years but it’s still stupid because from Marty’s POV has only been a week, so this thirty years thing is demonstrably a worse version of the same idea!  Once again, it’s like this book takes place in a crazy alternate universe where everything sucks just a little bit more than it needs to??

ANYWAY at this point they are kissing and OH SNAP remember when Marty got clockblocked?  This time he’s… 

DOCBLOCKED.

In contrast to that picture, Doc’s book outfit is different from the movie: rather than Future Clothes and Trademark Opaque Future Shades, he’s got all sorts of different time periods going on, which I kinda like because it hints at all sorts of different adventures we haven’t seen!

Inside sat Doc Brown, wearing a cowboy hat.  When he got out of the car, it was possible to see that he was dressed in a bizarre mixture of clothing types that included striped plastic pants, a cape and a strange variation on a Roman tunic.  

 

Then he delivers his wham line of “Marty, you’ve got to come back with me - BACK TO THE FUTURE!” (it’s the title of the story, see) but the book entirely deflates it with what comes next.  Seriously, this is right after the big dramatic “Back to the FUTURE!” line:

“Why?” [Marty said.]

“It’s important.” [Doc said.]

Haha yep there goes that momentum!  Marty whines that he doesn’t want to go (“But I’ve got Jennifer here.  I was just gonna try out my new wheels.”) and every kid who ever wanted to see the future (yes I am raising my hand here) is wanting to punch Marty for being more interested in a STUPID CAR FROM THE PRESENT when he could go drive FUTUREMOBILES.  It’s Luke Skywalker whining about power converters all over again!  (That is from a different movie called “Star Wars” and if you haven’t heard of it, he’s a dude who fights another dude, I dunno)

btothef:

Another short update today!

On this page Marty asks Doc what his plans are, and Doc says he’s gonna wait till the cops are gone from the parking lot, go back to his van, pick up the plutonium pellets there and take a look at the future.  How far?

Doc shrugged.  ”I figure I’ll take it slow at first,” he replied.  ”Maybe I’ll go about thirty years, just to get my feet wet.  Then maybe I’ll take a look-see at the 22nd or 23rd centuries…”

“Well, good luck,” Marty said.

The 22nd and 23rd centuries part stands out as being weird, but whatever, maybe it’s cool that the temporal expanse of Back To The Future can get enlarged a bit! The time machine is good at travelling through all through time, we don’t need to limit ourselves to within a claustrophobic plus or minus 100 years of 1985!

Doc says “It’s funny, isn’t it?  I had to wait thirty years to catch up with you.  Now you’ve gotta wait thirty years to catch up with me.  Ain’t life weird…” and then he winks and closes the door and drives off.  

Then Marty presumably walks home and goes to bed and the next morning wakes up and thinks it’s was all a crazy dream!  But then he pinches himself and it’s not!  So he pulls out his record company submission form from the trash and puts it in a mailing envelope (“Why not?  My music has been wowing them for three decades.  I’m a cinch to win.”) and then goes downstairs his house and family is all different!¹ Weird!

END OF UPDATE

FOOTNOTES:

1. So! Let’s talk about Marty. Specifically, let’s talk about this sequence of events:

1. The Marty we’ve been reading about (Marty Prime) goes back in time at the Twin Pines Mall. 
2. Marty Prime has some adventures that change things (the name of the mall, the circumstances of his parents meeting, his family’s history) 
3. Marty Prime goes back to the present, goes to the Lone Pine Mall, and watches himself go back in time again. 

See the problem? Whether or not you buy my meta-time explanation of Back To The Future’s time-travel mechanics (though you TOTALLY SHOULD because it TOTALLY WORKS), Marty has returned to a future where at least SOME things have changed: we know for sure the name of the mall has, and we know for sure that Doc’s spent the past 30 years trying to act natural while knowing he’s totally going to invent a time machine and meet Marty and wear a bullet-proof vest someday! And if you don’t buy my theory of changes to the timeline themselves take time, then you’re arguing that EVERYTHING in 1985 has already been altered, and we’re already fully in this Improved 1985 that Marty created for himself.

Either way, the world we’re in isn’t identical to the one that Marty left at the beginning of the story. And that’s a problem. It’s actually a huge problem, because it means the Marty going back in time NOW isn’t the same Marty that left at the beginning of the story, and time travel is basically the poster child for sensitivity to initial conditions.

This new Marty has had different experiences, from things as small as the name of the mall to as large as what his family does for a living and whether or not they hire their old high-school bully and sexual assaulter to wax their car (yes this happens, no I dunno why).  Due to different life experience, this Marty is a different person than the one we met at the beginning of this story. Let’s call him Marty 2.

Marty 2, being that different person, is absolutely going to have different adventures in 1955 than Marty Prime did. There’s a few ways these adventures could turn out, especially considering how narrowly Marty Prime avoided disaster when he was running through them:

1. Marty 2 doesn’t get his parents back together, and so he ceases to exist. RESULT: Marty 2 and Marty Prime were never born, which causes major damage to the space-time continuum. 
2. Marty 2 does get his parents back together, but slightly differently, as Marty 2 would interact with Doc differently, blabs about the future differently, steps on different bugs, etc). This results in a new, again altered 1985 where Marty 2 watches Marty 3 go back in time. RESULT: a loop, potentially infinite.  The timeline may never stabilize into a solid reality ever again, and Marty 2212626 could watch Marty 2212627 go back in time.  This is probably a bad thing.
3. Marty 2 doesn’t mess with his parents meeting at all, and so has a different adventure in 1955! At the end of this, either he returns or he doesn’t.
   • If he DOESN’T return, then no Marty returned to 1985, INCLUDING THE MARTY PRIME WHICH CREATED HIM. RESULT: Paradox, Marty 2 ceases to exist (and maybe the entire universe does too? I dunno)
   • If he DOES return, then he still altered 1955 as he must interact with Doc to get the machine to work, and we’re left with the again-altered 1985 where Marty 2 watches Marty 3 go back and all the potential for infinite loops that presents.

So either Marty is never born, Marty’s successful trip back to 1985 gets erased (undoing all the work Doc and Marty have put into it and maybe destroying the universe in a paradox), or the timeline starts looping, never reaching a stable new reality. Those are really the only options we’ve got, and none of them are great! They all kinda suck, actually!

“But Ryan!” you’re saying, “The movie doesn’t show any of these catastrophes happening!  So there’s got to be a different way.”

And this is true. When we reach a conclusion from a set of facts that doesn’t match up with reality, our only option is to look at our reasoning and find the flaw in it. And I totally slipped in an unfounded assumption earlier on you guys when I was talking about the sequence of events. It’s this part:

3. Marty Prime goes back to the present, goes to the Lone Pine Mall, and watches himself go back in time again.

Here’s the thing: we only saw Marty 2 travel through time. We never were told his destination. And I submit to you this hypothesis, this wham-bang anagnorisis that changes everything now and forever:

Marty 2 didn’t go back in time.

At least, not like Marty Prime did.  

Doc’s a smart guy, and he’s had thirty years to work out the consequences of what happened during that week in 1955. He would’ve gone through this reasoning and made all the same conclusions we did here. So what’s the third way? How do we solve this? There’s two solutions:

• Option 1
  • Step 1: Kill Marty McFly.
• Option 2
  • Step 1: use these thirty years to design a different time machine, one which rather than travelling within one timeline, allows you to also travel sideways to a different timeLINE.
  • Step 2: (Optional) Kill Marty McFly.

Option 1 is the cleanest, but it’s pretty clear why Doc didn’t chose it. If he had, all he had to do was send Marty 5 billion years into the future, when the sun’s a red giant. Poof: Marty McFly killed instantly in a causality-free way, he never goes back in time, and we avoid the undesirable outcomes of “Marty never born/universe destroyed” or “Timeline constantly in flux”. Instead, Marty dies, Doc never got warned about the terrorists so Doc dies too, and the timeline stabilizes at the cost of both Doc and Marty’s life.

Option 2 is trickier, but it’s the only thing that gets us to what we were shown happening in the movie and book, so it must’ve been what happened. Here’s how it goes down.

Doc uses the thirty years head start he has to design a new DeLorean, one that looks the same but operates slightly differently. Rather than go back in time along one timeline, it takes a step sideways and sends you back in time in a parallel timeline. That means that Marty 2 goes to Hill Valley X, and Doc doesn’t have to worry about Marty anymore. Our Doc’s timeline has finally stabilized, with Marty disappearing and, a few months later, presumed dead by his family who misses him terribly.

But he’s not dead! Marty 2 is in 1955 in Hill Valley X, where he can mess up all he wants and it’ll only affect the future of Marty X, who is causally unrelated to him. This is the critical part. Marty 2 no longer can mess up his own birth, only Marty X’s birth. Let’s say he ends up keeping Marty X alive and then makes it back to 1985. When Marty 2 arrives in 1985 in Hill Valley X2, he’ll watch Marty X2 (as both the town and Marty X himself were altered by Marty 2’s actions) travel through time.

The problem is this: if Doc X lets Marty X2 go into ANOTHER new parallel timeline, this whole mess repeats, only instead of a constantly-shifting timeline we now have a messy and potentially-infinite explosion of parallel timelines. That’s probably not wise. So instead Doc X (perhaps informed by a note Bulletproof Vest Doc hid in the machine) punches in a different demonstration date of 5 billion years in the future, and Marty X2 quickly burns to death in the heart of our dying sun.

And that’s it! Both timelines are now stable AND we’ve eliminated the chance of them being altered by killing off an alternate Marty as he makes his first trip in time. Things are stable, the timeline avoided both catastrophic destruction AND an infinite series of Marties, and all it cost us was the life of one Marty X2 McFly.

I’d say that’s worth it, and it seems like both Doc and Doc X agreed with me.

(It’s worth noting that the book and the movie both gloss over this point and skip right to the scene of Marty 2 arriving in 1985 Hill Valley X2, which I can only assume was for time concerns.¹)

END OF FOOTNOTES

FOOTNOTE FOOTNOTES:

1. “But Ryan,” you’re saying, “if that’s true, why does Marty 2 react to Marty X’s family with such surprise?” and the solution is obvious: as we skipped over Marty 2’s household (recall we only get to see Marty X2’s family), we can conclude that his family life was different from the X2 universe too, hence his surprise.

END OF FOOTNOTE FOOTNOTES

CRAZY ADDENDUM:

OH SNAP I JUST REALIZED YOU COULD TOTALLY ARGUE THAT THIS IS WHAT THAT STUPID “DOC FLIPS A MYSTERIOUS SWITCH” SCENE ON THE LAST PAGE WAS ABOUT!!  Doc’s putting the time machine back to “travel within one timeline” mode in preparation for his trip to the future, because he wants to be able to return to the very same timeline he departed from. It all fits!  HOT DAMN, GIPE! YOU WERE ONE STEP AHEAD OF US ALL THIS ENTIRE TIME!!

MY BALLS ARE BEING SO TRIPPED!!

btothef:

Page 239

Marty watches Temporal Experiment Number Two again until The Terrorist Van Driver (that’s what he’s called in the book dudes, all I did was capitalize it) crashes into “a Fox Photo stand” (last chance for needless brand-name dropping, Gipe!) and lands door-side down, “trapping the terrorists inside”.

Goodbye, The Terrorists!  You exit this story as you entered it: as The Terrorists!

Hey, remember how Doc got shot to death?  Because Marty just did! 

Suddenly remembering Doc Brown, [Marty] turned and ran toward the sprawled figure, still lying face down on the asphalt.  There were tears in Marty’s eyes as he turned his friend over.

What’s interesting now is that Doc delivers TONS of crappy lines.  Seriously, each one is a line that is crappy.  And just as Marty stayed mercifully silent in that movie version of dinner scene at the beginning of the story, we bookend it nicely with Doc staying mercifully silent in the movie version of this scene!  Here’s what happened in the movie:

MARTY:  Doc!  Doc!  

(Marty flips over Doc)

MARTY (quietly): No, no! 

(Doc blinks and sits up)

MARTY: You’re alive!

(Doc opens up his jacket to reveal the vest he’s wearing)

MARTY: Bulletproof vest? How did you know? I never got a chance to tell you.

(Doc shows Marty the taped-together note he wrote)

MARTY: What about all that talk about screwing up future events?  The space-time continuum?

DOC: Well… I figured, what the hell?

And massive props to whoever it was (an editor?  Christopher Lloyd maybe refused to say them?  WHO CAN SAY?) that decided to drop out every single one of Doc’s lines in this scene but one, because MAN they are terrible!  Let’s ruin an intense dramatic moment with wacky laffs RIGHT NOW!

Check out the different mood here in Booktopia:

“Doc… please don’t be dead, Doc…”

“Well, all right, if you insist,” the apparently dead man replied, opening his eyes and smiling.

“You’re alive!” Marty shouted.

“Of course I’m alive.”

“But you were shot - I saw it!” Marty cried.  ”I saw it twice!”

“On instant reply, as it were?” Doc smiled again.

Marty nodded.

“The explanation is simple,” Brown said.  

He ripped open his radiation suit to reveal a bulletproof vest.

“It’s the latest fashion in personal protection,” he explained.  ”Guaranteed to stop a slug from an elephant rifle at thirty yards.”

“Were you wearing that all along?” Marty asked.

“Sadly, no,” Doc Brown replied.  ”The first time around, I must have been taken by surprise.  No, my boy, it was your warning that saved me.”

With that, he reached into his pocked and pulled out the letter that Marty had written in 1955.  It was yellow and brittle, the scotch tape holding it together withered and ready to fall apart.

Marty smiled and shook his head.  ”What a hypocrite,” he said. 

Yes and may i be the first to say weaaaaaaksauuuuuuce

btothef:

Pages 235-236

Books can be better than the movie, but MAN the movie is so much better than this book (in general, obvs, but in this scene in particular)!  This whole action bit which lasts for minutes in the movie gets disposed of in a couple of paragraphs.  DISAPPOINTING.

So we’re back with Marty and the stalled DeLorean, which won’t start, and then he tries it again and then it starts, so - that was easy?  This “it didn’t start but then it did” solution sidesteps the “Marty slamming his head on the steering wheel and then it starts” gag in the movie which was nice and baffling and cute.

Marty drives towards the wire but doesn’t notice Doc messing with it (Gipe again pretends he’s from medieval times when he writes this as “So intent was he that he failed to see the figure of Doc Brown as he raced towards the lamp post”) which means we don’t get Marty anxiously whispering “Doc…” as he speeds towards him: another nice character moment.

And here’s the craziest part: in the movie, just as the lightning strikes, Doc reaches the wire and connects it and gets blasted backwards by the shock (that is how electricity works in movies, did you know that?)

Clearly they had that in the scene description for the script!  And CLEARLY GIPE DIDN’T UNDERSTAND WHAT HE WAS READING AT ALL:

Less than a second before the spectacular bolt of lightning struck, Doc plugged the cable in, spin around, and fell backwards.  Glancing at his speedometer, Marty saw that the car was moving at eighty-eight miles per hour.

Then there was a terrific crash of simultaneous lightning and thunder. 

Yep.  In Gipe’s version - which presumably he thought made perfect sense - Doc plugs the cable in and then JUST SPINS AROUND AND FALLS OVER FOR LITERALLY NO REASON AT ALL.

It’s amazing. 

Inside the DeLorean Marty thinks “My God, I’ve been nuked” which makes exactly this much sense: none, and then “the DeLorean kicked forward as if it had been thrust into orbit, and blackness descended.”

We’re left with Doc who just saw the car disappear, “seemingly enveloped by a yellow mist” (guess they hadn’t quite nailed down the time travel effect yet) the sight of which “made him leap to his feet and let out an Indian war whoop.”  He shouts “We did it!  It was impossible but we did it!” and Gipe confirms that for us by saying “It was true.  As if swallowed up by the earth or a giant hand from above, the DeLorean was gone.” and yes every time the narrator confirms what a character we have no reason to doubt just said, an angel gets its wings.

“Good luck,” Doc Brown breathed.  ”I’ll see you soon enough… I hope.”

And that’s it for the chapter!

So what makes the movie version better?  Besides the action being better realized and more exciting (so exciting that the movie cheats and has Marty flooring it in the DeLorean… twice) and the lack of the crappy lines (after the DeLorean disappears, Doc doesn’t say anything, he just cheers and runs quietly down the street), it’s a terrificly put-together scene.  The music builds and builds until the lightning reaches the car, and then the car’s gone and the music’s gone and all we hear is burst of the time-travel sound effects and the ambient noise of the wind (suddenly much more still) and the Doc’s footsteps as he runs down the road.  It’s a terrific, quiet ending and the contrast works really well with the thunder and lightning and temporal explosions we just had. 

And then that last shot!  The music comes up again, quietly, and Doc smiles and looks up to the clock tower with his crazy happy grin, and we get a POV shot of the clock tower seen from where he’s standing!  We assume we’re seeing what Doc’s seeing, but then a second later a helicopter flies into the frame, over the tower, and out again, and we realize we’re back in 1985.  It’s a terrific cut that takes us out of 1955 and into 1985 so smoothly you barely even notice it.

Great work, movie peeps! 

Pull up your socks, book peeps!! 

btothef:

Pages 234-235

We cut back to Doc, struggling on the rooftop.  This crosscutting follows the movie, which is great, because it’s building suspense nicely!  Show a problem and then cut away to ANOTHER problem before the first one can get resolved.  Shit is going foul for our two heroes!

Doc’s on the ledge of the clock tower and almost falls off (check this out: he “had his foot poised to take another [step] when he heard the sound.  It was the crunch of rapidly disintegrating stone”) but catches himself by hanging from the clock tower’s minute hand, which, if you watch closely, is foreshadowed in the very first scene of the movie where there’s all them crazy clocks:

 

He catches the cable with his foot, pulls it up, and gets to safety.  But when he tries to connect them suddenly the cable isn’t long enough because there’s a tree branch on it using up all the slack.  ”How the hell did that happen?” Doc groans.  Gipe describes this tree branch as “the cause of his dilemma” but hah hah oh Gipe that word doesn’t mean what you think it means, there’s no dilemma here.  A dilemma is a problem with two equally unsatisfactory solutions!  DI-lemma.  The nearest dilemma I can see is whether to to leave the cable stuck or… not?  It’s a real puzzler, that’s for sure! 

Anyway Doc solves this puzzle by pulling on the wire hard (he does!  He “gives the cable a tremendous yank”!) and the cable pops out, and he can connect it at this end, but it’s now disconnected at the other end!

“Good!” he yelled, and then: “Damn it!”

Doc then realizes his only chance is to slide down the wire to connect them at the other end: he doesn’t have time for the stairs!  And so he slides down.  Unlike the movie, dude’s not wearing gloves, so “he felt his hands burn but held tight until his feet struck the solid earth.”

Pretty badass, Doc!  Screw the pain!! 

btothef:

Doc reaches the top of the clock tower and looks down to Marty, who has finally found the end of the wire.  And given how difficult this task was for poor Marty, I kinda imagine his waving to be less “hey look I found it” and more the kind of hands up in the air waving that Kermit The Frog might do if he just won the lottery:

Looking down, he saw Marty, five stories below, waving the paddle plug which he had just located.

Doc throws down the rope, Marty ties the cable to it, and Doc pulls it up.  So far, so good.  Marty still wants to warn Doc about The Terrorists (and yes he is still referring to them them as The Terrorists; it’s amazing) so he tries again:

Marty cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted as loudly as he could.  ”I gotta tell you about the future, Doc!  Please listen to me!”

The words were lost amid a new rush of wind which nearly tore the rope from Doc’s grasp.

“The future!” Marty yelled.  ”On the night I travel back in time, the terrorists show up and get you -“

“Terror-what?”

“Terrorists!  They—”

Bong!  Bong!!

That’s the clock tower!  It’s tolling ten o’clock, and Marty is so pissed that Doc can’t hear him anymore that he expresses his anger at reality exactly how Miss Piggy would:

Kicking angrily at the ground, Marty waited, knowing he hadn’t a prayer of being heard.

Hahah Book Marty, the more you act like Muppet Marty the more I like you!!  Keep kicking that ground!

Anyway in the movie Doc yells “Go!  Look at the time, you’ve got less than four minutes!” and Marty takes off in the car.  In the book, Doc just “gestures wildly towards the DeLorean, then at his watch” and then finally yells “Run, boy, run!!”  Then Marty drives off and instead of Doc cheering “Yaaaay!” and kissing his hands like he does in the movie (which always struck me as an adorable and sincere response) Doc stands around and talks to himself because everyone in this story talks to themselves because whoever wrote the screenplay thought that’s the only way to show what a character was thinking:

“Good,” he whispered.  ”Now all I have to do is make sure he’s not barreling down the street for nothing.”

Doc creeps along the clock tower edge and has some time to talk some more to himself:

“I’ll be alive in 1985,” he said, realizing even as he said it that he was whistling past the graveyard.  ”I’ll be alive in ‘85 - so I’m safe now.”

The words came out but he knew they were fallacious.  His being alive in 1985 was predicated on his not climbing clock towers in 1955.

“Well,” he gasped.  ”Let’s just get it done.”

And I can see why they didn’t include that in the movie: it’s a line that raises a lot of questions about time travel that you don’t really want to be distracted by right now.  Plus, it phrases them in a “I’m gonna survive” way, when a more dramatic way to present them is in a “if I fall and die it’ll be a paradox and the timeline gets destroyed” way instead, so it’s not even an optimally-phrased distraction!

IDIOM KORNER: “whistling past the graveyard” is an expression that means “trying to stay cheerful in difficult circumstances”.  I have heard this expression used by my parents and grandparents and not once by a radical teen, but that may just be the kind of teen company I keep, so I am HOLDING BACK on the old man itis tag… THIS TIME. 

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Marty decides to just tell Doc straight out about The Terrorists, but then a tree branch gets knocked down and takes out the cable Doc’s run from the top of the clock tower down to the lamp post with it.

“Great Scott!” Doc yells!

“Good Lord!” Doc Brown yelled. 

Oh yeah I forgot they hadn’t invented that Great Scott thing yet.  Well, “Good Lord!” is better than the “Holy cow!  Jumping Jehovah!  Wow I’d better go paint” thing they did before.  Doc and Marty run over and see the damage.

“Great Scott!” Doc Brown shouted as they ran.  ”Kid - find the end of that cable.  I’ll throw the rope down to you!”

Oh okay well I guess here is where they invented that Great Scott thing?

There’s some weird fake tension as Marty scrambles to find the end of the wire (this can’t be THAT hard, there is literally a line leading you from the clock tower directly to it) but Book Marty has trouble with this toddler-level spacial-reasoning task:

Marty gulped once and then set to work.  In the semi-darkness, it wasn’t easy to locate the end of the cable amidst the tangle of limbs and leaves, but he leaped into the pileup of debris and started searching.  As he did so, he could feel the wind pick up even more.  Long rolls of thunder warned him that time was running out; the storm was increasing in ferocity; only a few minutes separated them from 1985 and the blast of lightning that would carry him there.

“Damn!” he yelled.  ”Where the hell are you?” 

Oblivious to the branches tearing his skin, he continued to tear into the pile.

Gipe (mercifully?) cuts away from Marty’s Puzzle Of The Wire Hidden Under A Branch to Doc running up the stairs, and friends, it is time for WRITING.  The page ends thusly, and check check check it out:

Doc Brown, meanwhile, raced up the courthouse stairs like a madman, taking the rough-hewn steps of the ancient belfry three at a time.  Arriving at the clock tower room which opened to the ledge directly below the clock, he saw pigeons scatter as he invaded their inner sanctum of safety.  His hair blowing wildly in the wind and his rough features illuminated by flashes of lightning, Doc Brown truly resembled the stereotypical mad scientist on a mission that would shake the world.

Here’s what we get: alliteration!  Sanctums of safety!  And character description that relies on simply referencing another stereotypical character’s description, which is a new level of straight-up-telling-instead-of-showing crappy writing that I’ve never even considered before!  There are so many possibilities:

“Captain Kirk truly resembled the stereotypical competent starship captain on a mission that would shake the galaxy.” 

or

Conan the Barbarian truly resembled the stereotypical sword-and-sorcery barbarian guy on a mission that would have him use his sword to cut things and also accomplish goals.

or 

The mobster truly resembled one of the stereotypical mobster gangster fellas from The Godfather.  You know the kind I’m talking about?  Quiet talking, wrinkly face?  Dangerous.  They make you offers which you are unable or unwilling to refuse.  I think this dude kinda resembled those dudes.  

I heard they were gonna remake that movie but I dunno.

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Remember how Marty wrote that note to Doc warning him about “the terrorists”?  Wait - was there even a note?  I mean, I kinda think I remember one, but man, why’d Marty write that note in the first place?  I for one can’t keep simple plot details straight in my frigging head, but luckily Gipe’s here to stop everything and remind us both of the note and Marty’s motivations in writing it, which is a relief!

Once again Marty thought of Doc Brown’s date with the terrorists and hoped that the letter he planted would help bring about a happier ending to his friend’s life.

Conveniently, right after Gipe reminds us of the note, Doc pats himself down, discovers that very note, and asks Marty what it is. 

“Just a note, from me to you.” Marty says, which is such a bad explanation that I actually kind of like it.  Like in the movie, Doc says “It’s about the future, isn’t it?” but instead of Marty yelling to Doc over the storm that his life depends on this note, he instead lies and says “No.  It’s just a thank-you note.  It’s kind of gushy.” and again: hilariously terrible.  Doc quite logically points out that people don’t write thank-you notes to be opened in thirty years, Marty now says Doc’s life depends on it, and Doc and tears up the note while screaming “I refuse to accept the responsibility!”

I mean, in the MOVIE Doc screams “I refuse to accept the responsibility!” while thunder rumbles and wind whips around them in these few minutes before the storm finally breaks.  But why have a dramatic confrontation in a storm when you can mutter your way through it?

“Well, I’m not going to accept the responsibility,” Brown muttered.

With that, he tore up the letter and tossed the pieces into the ashtray of his Packard.

SUCH GREAT DRAMA

SUCH GREAT CAR BRAND-NAME POSITIONING

btothef:

So we learned that Doc (or maybe… George Gipe/Bob Gale/Robert Zemeckis themselves?) has no idea how conception works, and Doc’s just finished telling Marty that when he gets back to 1985 he could well be 12 years old: 

Marty shook his head in awe.  What his friend and mentor said definitely made sense.

This is AMAZING.  It’s like Gipe realized his “you will be five years younger when you arrive back in 1985” explanation is sucky, so he AGAIN has his characters suddenly get obsessed about how much they agree with him.  It’s amazing.  I love it.

And yes, I’m saying this writing is so bad it’s good!  WE HAVE LOOPED AROUND, everybody!  It finally happened!!

Anyway Marty starts telling Doc that George coldcocked Biff and how crazy it was and Doc totally doesn’t care about anything this teen has to say, which is hilarious:

“Fine,” Doc Brown nodded.  ”Now get in there and set your destination time.  We’re rushed as hell.”

Doc pounds in the exact time Marty left 1985 (to the nearest minute, anyway) and explains that he’s done the calculations and painted a white line on the road and as long as Marty floors it when the alarm clock goes of, he’ll be fine.  

In the movie there’s that really sweet scene I put up top where these two friends thank each other and then they hug and say “see you in about thirty years” and oh my gosh you guys it’s such a good hug!  In the book, they just… shake hands.  That’s all they do!  Doc says “it’s been a pleasure” and then “the two men shook hands” and that’s it.

That’s it!  Come on Gipe, I want to see FRIENDS HUG, damn it!!  Did you know: CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF HUGS IS THE ENTIRE REASON I EVER ENGAGE IN ANY NARRATIVE, FICTIONAL OR OTHERWISE??

HUGS PLEASE