Film Theory: Does Marty McFly Actually DIE In Back To The Future?

To accept this theory, you have to accept that Doc absolutely doesn’t care as much about the sanctity of the timeline as he claims. And that his claim that interacting with past versions of yourself is potentially catastrophic, since more time travelling would mean even more Docs in one place while he meddled with the timeline. But there’s nothing to his claims about meeting a past or future version of yourself: sure, it makes Jennifer faint, but literally nothing happens when Doc meets himself in 1955 and even hands him tools.

Fundamentally, time is NOT as fragile as Doc thinks, he just needs to control the rules so that he can control the outcomes for Marty and himself.

Doc says he won’t meddle and that doing so would have potentially grave consequences. So how come he reads the letter and saves his own life? How come he helps Marty stop his son going to prison in the future? How come he saves Clara from her intended death in the ravine? He might pretend that he’s not a meddler, but his actions say otherwise.

And he’d probably have done even more meddling, if he was able to.