Back to the Future: Doc's Unknown Origins

As important as he is in Robert Zemeckis' Back to the Future trilogy, Doctor Brown, aka Doc, remains a relatively secret character. However, thanks to the documentary Making the Trilogy (featured in the film's bonus features), we learn a little more about the surprising past of the mad scientist, thanks to the screenwriter of the films himself.

Doc, This Unknown

We recently told you how Marty and Doc met, according to what the screenwriter and director had imagined. If this meeting revealed a little more about the character of the mad scientist from Hill Valley, Doctor Emmett Brown nevertheless remains a relatively mysterious personality.Inspired by figures such as Albert Einstein and Leopold Stokowski, Doc is an iconic character of the 1980s, often considered the most significant role of the (yet prolific) career of its interpreter, Christopher Lloyd.Doc is primarily an archetype: a character who is a priori largely solitary and passionate about science. Women are for him the second greatest mystery in the world, after time travel. He calls all his dogs by the names of scientists(Copernicus and Einstein). However, he remains a big kid, easily excited, who likes to make models and is fascinated by the history of the conquest of the West and the books of Jules Verne. However, his greatest invention remains an enigma. How did Doc manage to know so much about nuclear energy so early on? This question finds an answer in the early writings ofBob Gale, the screenwriter, who had included some lines revealing the heavy past of the character.

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Doc' Manhattan

The vagueness surrounding Doc Brown's origins is extremely useful for the comic aspectof the film. Back to the Future is first and foremost a comedy, and a character whose past elements can suddenly emerge in the time of a quick and surprising joke, it is always as practical as it is effective. However, Back to the Future also gives us some extremely touching passages when it takes the time to settle downon the feelings of his characters, plunged into a whirlwind of space-time galleys. In fact, screenwriter Bob Gale had once considered a scene where Doc would clearly explain where his knowledge of nuclear energy came from.For the screenwriter of the trilogy, it was obvious that the brilliant Doctor Emmett Brown had been one of the prestigious scientists who, alongside the famous Oppenheimer, had taken part in the Manhattan Project,and thus contributed to the creation of the first nuclear bomb in history. When Bob Gale came up with this element of the story of Doc Brown working on the Manhattan Project before inventing the time machine, it also allowed for a potentially dark dimension to be introduced to the story of Back to the Future.

This connection with the invention of the atomic bomb, as in the film Oppenheimer,could have added nuances of regret and fatality to Doc's character. However, the film's team preferred not to include this past in order to preserve the film's family-friendly and lighter tone. Yet, in retrospect, this idea could have reinforced Doc's final choice to stay in 1885, the scientist thus preferring an era spared by war and nuclear technologies.And if you like paradoxes temporal, you can also discover our article Back to the Future: when Robert Downey Jr. and Tom Holland embody Doc and Marty.