MARTIN SEAMUS MARTY McFLY, alias CALVIN KLEIN, alias CLINT EASTWOOD (Michael J. Fox), in the Back to the Future series of films, is a highly successful, five-time Grammy Award-winning American Top Forty artist. Despite his success, he has never forgotten his roots in Hill Valley, California, where he was born and raised. And where he changed the time line in ways that have kept the town the friendly place it was meant to be. In the process, he has changed himself. Contents [hideshow] 1.1. Timeline 1: Primary History 1.2. Timeline 2: Nobody Calls Me Chicken 1.3. Timeline 3: Hell Valley 1.4. Timeline 4: Success If you ask him to whom he owes his success, he will, of course, mention his lovely wife, Jennifer. (Unlike most American Top Forty artists, he does not encourage groupies, and certainly does not accept intimate favors from any.) But he will also mention Dr. Emmett L. Doc Brown, another denizen of Hill Valley.Brown invented time travel in November of 1955. A series of accidents led Marty to test time travel in ways even Doc Brown never imagined. Today, no one knows where Brown is. Correction, Marty says: you don't know when he is. He is when-ever he wants to be, when-ever he wants to be there. He is beyond time. Some-times, if you'll pardon the pun, he looks me up. I'm his anchor. I'm following a time-line that he hopes will be the last. I am the one constant in his life. I don't mind that. Because he, more even than my own father, helped me make myself what I am today. Timeline 1: Primary HistoryMarty McFly was born in Hill Valley to parents George McFly and Lorraine Baines McFly. He has an older brother named Dave and a older sister named Linda. He is an avid musician, who started a band called the Pinheads. But when, on October 25, 1985, we see the Pinheads auditioning for a talent show, the Battle of the Bands. , they fail. The judges say their music is too d____d loud! But in this timeline, Marty loses that audition because he lacks self-confidence.Principal S. S. Strickland of Hill Valley High School is irrltated with him. You are a slacker! he says. You remind me of your father; he was a slacker, too. No McFly ever amounted to anything in the history of Hill Valley! But Strickland doesn't really mean that in a bad spirit, however bad that sounds. In fact, Strickland knows Marty can be better than he is, and is immensely frustrated that Marty, like George in 1955, never applies himself.Marty himself is not an outcast among teenage high school hangouts. But his family is the most uncool family one can imagine. George McFly is a weakling and gets consistently harassed by Biff Tannen, latest in a long line of Tannens who were always the bullying banes of Hill Valley since its Wild West days. In this timeline, Biff is George's boss. But how he got to be that boss is ironic, as Marty will only later discover. Marty does get one hint: Bill relies on George to write his reports, and knows that if he ever turned in a written work product in George's handwriting, he would lose his job in a heartbeat.Marty's mother, Lorraine, while being quietly discontent with her husband being such a loser, is at the same time not doing anything about it. Nothing, that is, but overeating. Marty's brother David (who works at the local Burger King) and sister Linda are way too weird, which makes Marty the only cool one in the family.Marty's hobbies are music and playing with technological gadgets. His passion for latter makes him find a lot in common with Doc Brown..Brown's life, in this timeline, is largely secluded from the local community of Hill Valley, and many consider him a strange man. He is, however, nothing but an unappreciated genius and is ahead of his time in his scientific aspirations due to his unconventional approach.Marty's biggest weakness is his inferiority complex, which results in badly damaging Marty's life in other timelines. It is very easy to challenge Marty to take part in the the most ridiculous fight by calling him chicken , which he cannot stand and negatively responds to right away. This weakness of his becomes well known and his peers try to take advantage of it very often.But on October 26, 1985, all that begins to change. Doc Brown, as mentioned, invented time travel. On the early morning of October 26, 1985, he unveiled his creation: a working time machine, that he built from a customized DeLorean DMC-12 that he had acquired two yeard earlier, just before John DeLorean had to shut down the assembly line for good. He asked Marty to meet him at Twin Pines Mall, the former Peabody Farm, so he could test it. The test was successful, and that's when Doc revealed the machine's power source: a mini-nuke powered with plutonium. The problem: he acquired this plutonium from a Libyan terror cell who had wanted him to build a nuclear device. And on that fateful night, the terrorists traced him to Hill Valley, attacked him, and shot him to death.Marty jumped ilnto the time machine and, in an effort to escape them, propelled himself back in time--to November 5, 1955, the last date Doc had set by way of demonstrating the controls. One instant, Marty was driving on a paved parking lot; the next he bowled over a scarecrow in a cornfield. In short, Twin Pines Mall was once again Peabody's Farm. Old man Peabody chased him off his farm--and he bowled over one of the two pine trees Peabody kept on his land.Marty's first twenty-four hours in Hill Valley of 1955 were a comedy of errors. Finding out that the Lyon Estates, his neighborhood, had not even had ground broken on it, threw him for a loop. The machine didn't want to start, for reasons he only learned later, so he hid it behind the billboard advertising the to-be-built subdivision. But then he managed to interfere with a key event in his family's history. He caught his future father, George McFly, spying on Lorraine Baines from atop a tree. And when George fell out of that tree, Mr. Baines came at him in his car on the street. Originally, Mr. Baines hit George. But now Marty pushed George out of the way, and he got hit himself. And he, not George, was taken into the Baines house, where Lorraine tended to him.Marty did find a much younger Emmett Brown, and convince him that he had a time machine, that an older Brown invented, and needed help to return to 1985. The younger Brown agreed to help him. But Marty had another problem: he had to kindle the romance between George and Lorraine. A romance he had, unknowingly, aborted.To do that he had to be part motivational speaker and part stage manager. He almost lost his life several times. But he discovered that Biff Tannen had taken advantage of George all their lives, even to making George do his, Biff's, homework. He also ran into Goldy Wilson, a young black worker in a cafe, who would one day be Mayor of Hill Valley, a thing most in Hill Valley 1955 found hard to believe.In the end, he rekindled that romance, but with this key difference. Partly through misadventure, Marty managed to set up George to have a climactic meeting with Biff, and to challenge Biff to a fight after Biff tried to assault Lorraine on the night of the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance. George, in a desperate move, swung a left haymaker and decked Biff with one punch! And with Marty to witness it (taking the place of Marvin Berry, leader of the Starlighters band), George shoved aside someone who rudely cut in between him and Lorraine. So they really kissed for the first time at the ball. But George was far more confident than he had been.This was the setup for Marty to return to a far different timeline:Timeline 2: Nobody Calls Me ChickenWhen Marty returned to 1985, several things were different. First, Twin Pines Mall called itself Lone PIne Mall, because when old man Peabody had to sell his farm, he had only one pine tree on it, not two. Second, Doc Brown had at last heeded a warning Marty had given him, about falilng victim to Libyan terrorists, and wore a flak vest when doing the time-machine test. Thus, the Libyans did not kill him and succeeded only in killing themselves when they collided with a Fox Photo kiosk when Marty got away from them the first time.And third: Marty's home life, and attitudes, were much changed. First, Marty sent in the audition tape he had, in the Prime Line, been afraid to send in. In every time line forward but one, Marty sends in this tape--and it marks the beginning of his present success. But much would happen in-between.To return to Timeline 2: George is now a successful author of science fiction. Biff runs an auto detailing business. George drives a BMW, and Marty is the proud owner of a Toyota 4x4 that in Timeline 1 he had only dreamed of owning. David has a respectable office job, and Linda has lots of boyfriends. And Lorraine is in much better shape, and she and George play tennis together.But in this timeline, Marty's crippling weakness remains: if anyone calls him chicken, his ego demands a response. A classmate known only as Needles throws that name at him and challenges him to a drag race on the street. Result: Marty rams a Rolls Royce Silver Phantom. He breaks his hand, and that destroys his musical career. Worse, the owner of the Rolls sues him. The judgment nearly breaks the McFly family. Marty marries Jennfer in a cheap wedding chapel in Las Vegas, Nevada, which is all he can afford. Marty becomes an office drone, just another suit in a Japanese-owned company. Thirty years later, fellow executive Needles will challenge him again, and Ito Fujitsu, his boss, will summarily fire him as a result. His son will get involved with Biff's grandson, Griff, and go to jail. And his dear wife will space herself out on tranquilizers to the point of becoming a legend to the Hill Valley Police Department.Marty, Jennifer, and Doc all went forward in time, this after Doc had redesigned his DeLorean with cold-fusion technology (available as a household appliance in this universe) and enabled it to hover with another discovery: total gravity manipulation. Marty got his son out of trouble and saw Griff and his gang jailed for reckless travel in hoverboards, which now have replaced skateboards as a toy of choice. But Marty and Doc were careless. Biff, in 1985, saw them take off. Thirty years later, Biff spotted them and stalked them. And when Marty bought a copy of Gray's Sports Almanac, which had the results of every match in every sport up to 2000, Biff saw the possibilities. So he fished the discarded copy of Gray's Almanac out of a trashcan and, when Doc and Marty took Marty's son to his home in Hilldale (another failed housing development, once called The Address of Success and now called The Address of Suckers ), Bill stole the time machine, went back to 1955, gave the almanac to his younger self, then came back to 2015 and walked away as if nothing had happened.Not knowing this, Doc and Marty and Jennifer (who had fainted after seeing what became of her and Marty in 2015) returned to 1985, and would not realize until much later how horribly the timeline had now changed.Timeline 3: Hell ValleyIn this timeline, Biff made himself rich by speculating in sports, and build a high-rise casino and hotel. He could then afford to equip his gang with real, for-keeps weapons. He murdered George McFly so that he could marry Lorraine, and sent Marty to a boarding school in Switzerland. (What becomes of Dave and LInda in this timeline, no one tells.) Biff is monumentally abusive: he knocks Lorraine around, but also arranges for her to have silicone breast implants.Nor does the timeline affect Marty alone. Doc Brown is supposedly in an insane asylum, another thing that Biff arranged. And Goldy Wilson now lives in the Lyon Estates house where the McFlys lived in Timelines 1 and 2. And the town effectively rates the name Hell Valley, and is overrun by biker gangs that would make Marlon Brando of Wild One fame blush.In a desperate attempt to thwart this change, Marty and Doc travel back to November 12, 1955 to intercept Gray's Sports Almanac. As before, after one misadventure after another, Marty succeeds. As he burns the almanac, he sees evidence of Timeline 2 reasserting itself: George is not murdered, Doc is honored and not committed, and Biff's Casino is no more, and Biff's Auto Detailing takes its place.But the same thunderstorm that enabled Marty to go back from Timeline 1 to 2, now strikes the new, souped-up DeLorean and sends it, with Doc aboard, more than seventy years into the even more-distant past. Almost at once, two employees of Western Union hand-deliver him a letter--from Doc! Dated September 1, 1885.Marty has no choice: he must contact the 1955 Doc Brown and ask his help. Again.Marty and the younger Doc find the DeLorean, hidden in an abandoned mine driftway. Using instructions from the older Doc, they fix it up. With it, Marty can return to 1985 and then destroy the DeLorean so no one else can ever change the timestream again.But then they reconnoiter the town cemetery, and find the older Doc's grave! And not only did the older Doc die; he was murdered, shot in the back over a matter of eighty dollars. So Marty takes another decision: to follow the older Doc back into time.And so he does. There he meets the original Seamus McFly, his ancestor, an independent homesteader who lived in the outskirts of Hill Valley of 1885. He also finds Doc, who by now has invented a blockhouse-sized refrigerator, and has become the town blacksmith. And he learns about the eighty-dollar dispute: Buford Tannen, Biff's ancestor, had that dispute with him.Marty succeeds this time in stopping the murder of Doc, but now becomes a target himself--this after Buford goads him by calling him yellow, the 1885 version of chicken. He equips himself with a furnace door that he uses as an armor plate, an idea he borrowed from the Clint Eastwood film A Fistful of Dollars. Thus armored, he survives a duel-to-the-death with Buford. Who then is placed under arrest by Marshal James Strickland, the ancestor of the long-serving principal of Hill Valley High School in 1955 and 1985.Marty and Doc have to inprovise another solution to get the DeLorean up to speed to make the time run. The problem: the DeLorean, when it emerged in California of 1885, ran over a high-thrusting sharp rock and opened its fuel tank. So Marty and Doc hijack (by deception, not by force) a steam locomotive and use it to push the DeLorean, now equipped with flanged wheels, along the developing railroad track, toward the soon-to-be-built trestle over the Shonash Ravine--called the Clayton Ravine in 1955 and 1985, because Clara Clayton, in the main timeline, plunged over it to her death. But Doc won't let that happen, because he has fallen in love with Clara. So at the final moment, Doc and Clara are saved alive, and Marty vanishes and leaves two fiery streaks in mid-air going over the Shonash Ravine.Timeline 4: SuccessMarty emerges onto the metal trestle that spans a ravine now called the Eastwood Ravine--because Marty took the name of Clint Eastwood in his time travels to the Old West. After he coasts to a stop, he has to get out in a hurry, because a fast freight, headed right for the car, hits it and disintegrates it. Marty will never travel in time again.But Marty will not definitively change the timeline, other than renaming Clayton Ravine to Eastwood Ravine, until later. He reunites with Jennifer, who has no memory of Timeline 3 but still remembers her own trip through time. The two are together in Marty's 4x4 when Needles challenges him to the fateful drag race.But this time, Marty refuses the challenge. As Needles gives the signal and rushes forward, Marty calmly puts his 4x4 back into park. 'Nobody calls me chicken'...and he's definitely nobody, he calmly tells Jennifer.And the Rolls Royce rushes out and brakes short to avoid hitting Needles. I would have hit that Rolls Royce! Marty cries, shocked at what almost was.And Jennifer takes out a FAX that once had the words YOU'RE FIRED on it, printed in 2015. Only now the paper is blank.And this, therefore, is the most important change in Timeline 4: Marty is not injured, is not involved in a lawsuit over drag racing on the street, and does not become a salaried office drone. Instead he becomes the American Top Forty artist the world came to love, even giving Michael Jackson a run for his money. Ten Platinum Records, five Grammys (Best Male Artist, Record of the Year, etc.), and hearing his music in elevators even to this day, testify to that love. Nor does he marry Jennifer in a cheap wedding chapel in Las Vegas. Instead he marries her in the old Hill Valley clock tower, after he has bought it, restored the clock to working order, and given it back to the town of Hill Valley in perpetuity, with an endowment to make sure someone will always keep it up. When I saw Doc in 1985, after he built a time machine out of another locomotive, he told me: 'Your future is not fixed. No one's is. So make it a good one.' I hope I can truly say I have done that, he says. Jennifer, smiling, assures him he did.He took time to remember Hill Valley in a big way, in 2006. When the long-serving Mr. Strickland finally retired, Marty found out about it in an odd way: his publicist brought him a request to provide live entertainment for his retirement bash. Any American Top Forty artist gets those, and most of the time, their publicists give those the Deep Six. Not this time, however: Marty jumped at the chance. He came back to Hill Valley and, in the Goldie Wilson Gymnasium, played a selection of tunes that, to his certain knowledge, had been heard in Hill Valley from 1885 onwards. The record he and his band cut of that selection went Platinum inside of a month and even made Record of the Year at the next year's Grammys. Show less «