Another Way I Wrecked Back to the Future for Myself

You know when you someone pokes a few holes in the logic of a movie, and in doing so, it makes you start to pull on some threads yourself.

Well, after I saw the After Hours analysis of Back to the Future, I started to think about that particular series in a little more depth, and now I've totally wrecked it for myself.

Because I started to think about this fact: Doc Brown in 1955 was against messing with the timeline in any way. However, the whole plot of the first movie is young Doc tinkering with the time machine he was going to build in 1985... so he basically he got to see exactly how he built it. So there wouldn't have been all that fumbling he did for 30 years up to the point of his first test. He would know after that point that it is indeed possible, and now he knows quite a bit about how to build it on both a theoretical and practical level.

So how could he not build the time machine earlier? Brown doesn't know the steps he took to put it together in the future, or what research he did in pursuing the goal of time travel, so his life would be radically different than it was before Marty arrived, and therefore, so would everyone in Hill Valley, because he would end up doing a series of different things to reach that same goal.

I mean, think about even one small aspect of the knowledge that Doc now has... he knows how much electricity it takes to power the flux capacitor... and he has 30 years to work on that particular problem. He can either come up with a way to generate that amount of power, or a more efficient capacitor that can work with far less energy. He had that option.

So this is a lesson to myself and to everyone else: don't start pulling on threads in things you like because you will only wreck them.