http://ftw.usatoday.com/2015/10/back-to-the-future-2-doesnt-predict-cubs-will-win-world-series-timeline-1985-2015
Sorry to burst the bubbles of Cubs fans, Back to the Future fans and fans of sheer randomness, but I’ve got some bad news for you: The second movie in the trilogy doesn’t actually predict that the Cubs would win the World Series in 2015 (something that’s growing less likely in our current year, but is still technically possible). Oh, it predicts it in the 2015 to which Marty and Doc originally travel, but if you’ll bear with me through some high-level nerdery, you’ll see why said prediction was only made within a timeline that no longer exists in the world of the film.
Okay — and you’re going to have to bear with me here (Cubs pun!) — so Doc, Marty and Jennifer go to 2015 from 1985 because something has to be done about their kids. Doc knocks out Jennifer and then tells Marty to go into the Cafe ’80s to stop his son from making a disastrous pact with Biff’s grandson, Griff. Marty looks around, sees the hologram news feed of the Cubs beating Miami in a sweep, meets the old guy who wants to save the clock tower, discusses the baseball news in which Marty is surprised by Miami’s existence, not the Cubs winning, to which the old man says the line that sets the whole plot in motion: “I wish I could go back to the beginning of the season and put some money on the Cubbies.”...
They of course end up doing just that, but while they’re celebrating, the DeLorean gets hit by lightning, Doc goes back to 1885, Marty realizes 1885 Doc is eventually killed by Buford Tannen over a matter of $80 and Marty decides he has to go to the old west and save Doc. So, back to 1885 he goes, there’s all that nonsense with Mary Steenburgen and, eventually, Marty gets pushed by the train to 88 mph to return to the regular 1985 whereupon the DeLorean is immediately crushed by a real train. While on his way back to the tracks with Jennifer, Marty avoids the drag race with Needles that would end up affecting his entire life....
At the end of the film, with Marty and Jennifer milling about the destroyed time machine, Doc comes back in the time-machine train with Clara, Jules and Verne and says that since the time machine is smashed and Marty didn’t get hurt in a drag race, he has altered history in such a way that the future isn’t written. We leave the films with a 2015 in which anything can happen. The history is unwritten. So all that stuff that happened in the beginning — Marty’s kid hanging around with Griff, the crash through the clock tower, the release of Jaws 19 and, most importantly, the Cubs winning — doesn’t necessarily have to happen in this new timeline. It’s life a butterfly effect thing.
= new reply since forum marked as read
