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

In Back To The Future III when Marty gets back to 1885, he is strung up almost immediately by Bufford Tannen, only for Doc to miraculously appear precisely as the rope is choking him.

Sure, it could have been a coincidence that he saw Marty from his workshop (even if he usually worked with his door closed on account of the weird futuristic inventions he was working on and his fundamental rule not to engage too much to preserve the timeline), but to be THAT precise, with his coincidentally available sniper rifle? He’s a peaceful man, why would he have such an impressive weapon if not for a very specific reason? It’s all very suspicious, frankly.

So where did the time machine come from at this point if the DeLorean wasn’t functioning? And if he had a working means to time travel, why not then just use the time machine at that point to simply take Marty back to his own time rather than going through the hassle of waiting for the train?

First, let’s deal with where the time machine came from. Think of it this way: once Marty was killed, Doc would have been singularly focused on time travelling to save him. It’s not like he didn’t have access to an (albeit broken) DeLorean nor frankly ludicrous inventiveness - after all, this was the same scientist who would SOMEHOW make a time travelling train that could fly in around 1895 with the technological limitations that supposedly trapped him in the past.

So in short, he simply did exactly what he would do after Marty got back to the future at the end of the third movie: he made another time machine using the parts of his original broken time machine. Then he went back in time to 1885 and saved Marty from Biff’s hangman’s rope.

And as for why he then didn’t just take himself and Marty back to the future at that point? Well, it’s important to think of Back To The Future as a sort of retelling of the It’s A Wonderful Life narrative, only instead of the morality tale being around George not existing, it’s about Marty McFly’s disastrous decision-making. Doc is essentially Marty’s Clarence, his guardian angel - guiding him not only to safety, but to a position where he will learn for himself how not to mess up his future.

Why else would Doc take him to the future to fix something that could be fixed in the present? He needed Marty to actively learn the lessons those events would teach him in 2015. He needed Marty to learn not to be provoked into self-destructive behaviour by people calling him chicken, he needed him to be more sensible so that when Needles offered him the race that would ultimately ruin his life, Marty would know what the right decision to make was.