While Doc and Marty’s Back to the Future friendship is famously strange, any familial link between the pair would have made the trilogy much creepier. As standup comedian John Mulaney noted in his 2015 special The Comeback Kid, Back to the Future has a pretty odd premise. While the adventure comedy is now seen as a classic sci-fi hit, Back to the Future’s storyline still sees a young man travel back in time to intervene in the budding relationship of his future parents, and one of the movie’s biggest laughs comes from his unwitting mother’s attraction to her own son.
Also, Doc and Marty’s intergenerational friendship is also a little weird in retrospect. While there is a canon explanation for Doc and Marty’s Back to the Future friendship (and it does fit the escapist tone of the series), it is still a little weird to see a teenager hanging around with a disgraced physicist who is seemingly his closest friend. However, this is the best choice that the trilogy could have made when setting up the series. Later hits clarified that a family connection would have only made Doc and Marty’s relationship weirder.
Doc & Marty’s Strange Back To The Future Friendship Explained
According to screenwriter Bob Gale, Doc and Marty’s Back to the Future friendship began when Marty snuck into Doc’s lab a few years earlier out of curiosity. This is about as normal an answer as viewers were ever going to get. It fits Marty McFly’s familiar character, a rebellious underachiever with a heart of gold under his big ego and short temper. It is still strange that Back to the Future doesn’t mention this backstory but, if Doc and Marty were related, Doc intervening in the marriage of Marty’s parents would have been immeasurably creepier.
Back to the Future never points out how strange it is for these two characters to be so close when they don’t have much in common. This would have been easy to explain if the pair were relatives, but from a plot perspective, Doc couldn’t be related to Marty. As proven by six seasons of Rick and Morty, Doc and Marty’s dynamic becomes much darker and more ethically questionable when the young hero and his older mentor are related. If Doc were Marty’s grandfather or uncle, he would have been changing the fate of his own granddaughter or niece, which is much dicier.
Doc & Marty Being Family Would Have Actually Been Worse
Doc and Marty’s unlikely cross-generation friendship seems odd, but establishing that the pair were blood-related would have made the movie’s plot so much more uncomfortable. The story of Marty intervening in their relationship is already pretty weird, but Marty naively wants his parents to be happier and doesn’t know any better. Until Back to the Future Part III, Doc avoids using the DeLorean for his own interests, which means the original movie's story is Marty’s character arc. This would not have been the case if Back to the Future's heroes were related, thus over-complicating the movie’s simplistic morality.
