Happy Back to the Future Day

Happy Back to the Future Day..... and be thankful we don't live in that horrible future.

Flying cars, self-lacing sneakers, hoverboards, self-drying clothing, weather control, lots of cool stuff was depicted for the world of October 21, 2015 in Back to the Future II. However I haven't heard any mention of the most terrifying thing about this bright and colorful future; the lack of lawyers. Doc said: "The justice system works swiftly in the future now that they've abolished all lawyers. " That future is a terrible tyrannical world.

Lawyers get a bad rap. Sometimes they really deserve it. However in a free society lawyers are needed to help protect the innocent (and guilty) from the power of government. A world with instant justice and lack of police investigation of crimes is an evil place. Griff Tannen is a bully, thug, and was planning a crime but he ended up being imprisoned just for damaging the courthouse. Prison seems to be a harsh sentence for accidentally breaking some windows.

A totalitarian police state is not my idea of a great future, even with hoverboards.

I wish I could point to some things that show the alternate 1985 where Biff controlled Hill Valley wasn't as bad as it seemed. There was not enough information to show if the rest of the world was in a similar state. Who knows Marty's in that timeline off in boarding school might have led to a much better future. At least gambling was made legal in California.

The timeline changes in the trilogy were always fun and interesting. However the most terrible one for Marty was never addressed. That being the one at the end of the first movie. His entire life was changed. All of the memories of his family were no longer accurate and he now lives with complete strangers who inhabit the bodies of the family he loved. His name really shouldn't have been Marty anymore, his parents would have named their eldest son Marty. When our Marty became a teenager his father may have even divorced his wife after seeing that his son looked a lot like that Calvin Klein fellow they knew back in the day, and assumed that Lorraine had cheated on him with Klein. His mother would have then slipped back into alcoholism and possibly died sending the teenage Marty into foster care never to meet Jennifer...... In Star Trek Commander Spock would have been from some other planet and Star Wars' Darth Vader would have had a different name all because some writer named George McFly wrote a novel about Darth Vader from the Planet Vulcan in 1962.

Of course I'm over-thinking things a bit. I'm also drifting from the original point of the post: be thankful we didn't end up with the future portrayed in Back to the Future II.