Written by Old Bluffer 3rd Jan 2007

Kindly Submitted by Kooshmeister

A death scene riddled with pathos which leaves a deep and lasting impression on young Marty McFly when he time travels back to 1955, Dr. Emmett L. Brown, a brilliant but highly eccentric scientist and inventor better known as "Doc", has just created a working time machine from a Delorean. He and Marty, his friend and part-time assistant, are testing the vehicle out in the parking lot of the Twin Pines Mall at night.
After a successful experiment wherein Doc's dog Einstein becomes the world's first time traveller, Doc reveals to Marty (who is videotaping the event) that the Delorean runs on "something with a little more kick. Plutonium."

Marty, taken aback, asks Doc to clarify that statement just a little bit: "Are you tellin' me that this sucker is nuclear?!" and points out that you "don't just walk into a store and buy plutonium!"
Doc explains that he paid a group of Libyan nationalists, in exchange for a bomb. But rather than actually assist a gang of terrorists, Doc pulled a fast one on them: the "bomb" he gave them is actually a dud, filled with used pinball machine parts. Apparently Doc doesn't seem concerned about them exacting revenge once they discover that they've been duped, but wouldn't you know it, that's exactly what ends up happening.

A short while later, Doc is preparing to use the Delorean himself to travel into the future and see how things turn out for Hill Valley in abouty twenty-five years. Suddenly Einstein the dog begins to bark at something, and Doc and Marty turn to notice a Volkswagon van pulling into the parking lot, and a horrific realization dawns on Doc: "Oh my God. They found me. I don't know how, but they found me. It's the Libyans!" With a cry of "Run for it, Marty!", Doc, intending to draw the terrorists' fire as they come speeding up with machine guns blazing, goes for a revolver he keeps in his tool kit (demonstrating that he does at least have some sense of self-defence).

Unfortunately for Doc, the pistol jams. Panicking, he turns and runs off with the Libyans chasing him. The Libyans in their van swing around and get in front of Doc, cutting off his escape. One of them, sticking out of the van's sunroof, points his machine gun at him threateningly. Doc resigns himself to his fate, tossing down his revolver and lifting his arms in surrender. As Marty looks on helplessly from his hiding place over by the Delorean, the Libyan opens fire on the inventor, blowing him backwards off his feet as bullets rip through his chest. He dies instantly.

Marty screams "No! Bastard!", drawing the attention of the terrorists. However thanks to the fact the main Libyan's gun jams, Marty's life is spared, allowing him to jump into the Delorean and speed off. Despite being a teenager in a powerful sports car, he still doesn't manage to shake off the determined Libyans though, who somehow manage to easily keep pace in their unwieldy camper van.
With thoughts only of escape, Marty therefore floors the Delorean, completely forgetting Doc's earlier demonstration... When this baby hits 88 mph, you're gonna see some serious s***!!!
So, as soon as his speedo hits 88mph, the plutonium is activated and 1.21 Gigawatts of energy is used to hurtle Marty back in time, to the year 1955.
[The Delorean had previously been set to this date as Doc was reminiscing that he recalled the exact day that he first had the idea of how to build a time machine]

Marty, meanwhile, is stuck in 1955 without any plutonium to get back to his own time.
His immediate priority is to find the younger Doc so he can help him return to 1985. It takes some time to convince the younger version of the scientist that he is in fact from the future, but after a while Doc is willing to assist the friend of his future self. It is while doing so that he begins to worry about what happened/what will happen to the older Doc in 1985, and Marty begins to try and tell him about what will happen on that fateful night in an effort to warn him. However Doc doesn't want to hear too much about his own destiny, for fear of disrupting the timestream unintentionally. Noble, yes, but Marty, having actually witnessed him being brutally killed becomes increasingly fretful about it even as he attempts to avert his own death after he accidentally interrupts the first meeting of his teenaged father and mother, which will lead to him and his siblings possibly not being born.

But after helping get his parents together and even inadvertently altering history just a teensy bit by getting his bookworm dad to stand up to the school bully for once in his life, Marty is ready to return to 1985. But the fate of Doc weighs heavily on his mind, and after his repeated efforts to verbally convey the information to him fail, Marty opts to instead write him a letter. Sitting down in the local diner on the night he is to go back to the future, Marty writes, "On the night that I go back in time at 1:30 AM, you will be shot by terrorists. Please take whatever precautions are necessary to prevent this terrible disaster." Encasing the letter in an envelope that says "not to be opened until 1985", Marty slips it into Doc's coat pocket. However upon finding the letter, Doc tears it up, repeating his earlier rationalisation about not wanting to know his own destiny, good or bad... even if his life depends on it. Marty, with no time to argue, gives in but sets the Delorean's time circuits to go back to before Doc was shot so he can warn him then.

Despite some complications with the lightning storm that permanently damages the clocktower of the town courthouse, Marty successfully returns to 1985, but far from where the mall is (and unknown to Marty it is now called the Lone Pine Mall, due to his accidentally running over one of the famous twin pine trees in 1955 that were the mall's namesake). The Delorean is out of plutonium and won't start. As he tries to get the vehicle going he sees the Libyans drive past in their van. Desperate to save Doc, he runs after them, but the terrorists easily outdistance him, and he arrives at the mall too late.
He is therefore forced to watch Doc being shot all over again, and bursts into tears at the injustice of it all. After all, Doc spent his personal fortune and thirty years of his life to experience time travel, and to be gunned down minutes before he could finally explore the future is a cruel blow.

After witnessing his other self escaping from the Libyans in the Delorean all over again, as well as finding out what became of the Libyans after he'd left before (they crash their van after the Delorean warps out), Marty runs down to where Doc is laying sprawled on the asphalt, apparently dead. As he weeps over the body of the friend he couldn't save, Doc suddenly blinks and sits up. Marty is surprised, to say the least. "You're alive!" he gasps. Wordlessly, Doc unzips his lab coat and shows that he is wearing a bulletproof vest. This time around, the gunfire stunned him but did not kill him. When Marty asks him how he knew to protect himself, Doc hands him the torn-up letter he'd written in 1955, taped back together.

"What about all that talk about screwing up future events?" Marty asks after examining the letter. Doc simply smiles and says, "Well, I figured, what the hell."

It's rather good news that Doc's life is saved, as he soon blasts off to see the future, paving the way for two highly enjoyable sequels!

Editor note:
Doc's death has been classed as Resurrection as in one timeline he does indeed die, and although he is saved, he is no longer the same person - he has lived his life from 1955 onwards with knowledge of his own future.