Back to the Future: The Plot Hole That Should Have Destroyed the Universe

How many versions of the same person does it take to unravel the fabric of time? Apparently lots.

Back to the Future has surely got to be one of the greatest movie trilogies of all time. It€™s got it all there in spades; comedy, action, peril, great characters and most importantly, a time-bendingly off the wall plot. To watch them all once is to like them; to watch them twice is to love them; to watch them five times is to adore them€maybe a little too much. Then we arrive at me. I€™ve watched the Back to the Future movies in their entirety so many times in my twenty-six years on Earth; I love them so much, that I almost want to kill them. And therein pretty much lies the purpose of this article. I noticed€something niggling about the plot, on a recent watch through this year. I wasn€™t even sure it was a plot hole at first but the more I thought about it, the more erroneous and potentially all life destroying a problem I could see it being for someone who travelled through time. The inconsistency is this (and this is based on the series' own logic): when someone travels through time, a copy of that person is left in the period they departed from, presumably in an ever repeating time loop. This tenet of time travel is basically laid out for us in simple terms in Back to the Future II, when Marty travels back to 1955 to secure the Sports Almanac from Biff and he must avoid himself from the first movie, who€™s busy trying to hook his folks up. There€™s a lot of time travelling going on through the Back to the Future Trilogy and that got me to thinking: just how many of these copies are littered about time? And surely, if the fabric of time and space is as fragile as the good Doc. Emmet Brown would have us believe, surely left unchecked this time duplication effect could have some pretty serious implications for the state of the Universe. Let me just make something clear at this point. I€™m no theoretical physicist and so this article is based entirely on my own observations of the rules of time travel laid out in Back to the Future. So without further time wasting, double check the time circuits, hold onto your hoverboard, we€™re about to go back in time to figure out just how many versions of the same characters are created throughout the Back to the Future trilogy.
Contributor
Contributor

Stuart believes that the pen is mightier than the sword, but still he insists on using a keyboard.