Some thoughts and questions
There are so many questions that boggled me since buying the game and playing it through.
First things first. Let's look at the timeline: Doc goes to 1931 to get the album for Marty but gets blamed to be the arsonist while DeLorean goes back to 1986. Marty goes to 1931 to rescue Doc until they realize that Arthur has been killed and they rescue him and return to 1986 only to realize that the Tannen family runs Hill Valley. They again return to 1931 and fix everything except Emmett Brown decides to not watch Frankenstein and marries Edna, thus Doc disappears.
Marty again manages to fix everything, but here's what I don't get, how did Doc get back in 1931 after Emmett failed the rocket car showing? The only DeLorean that there was left was with Edna who was escaping the cops with it, where did Doc get his DeLorean all of a sudden?
Also, while that might just be a plot hole, this question has been boggling me more.... how much does Doc remember or know? He remembered why he returned to 1931 and he remembered being in jail, but did he remember disappearing in front of Marty? Because that's kinda weird, because technically he would have the newspaper in his mind still when he read the crime rate is at an all time low... it's so confusing, especially more so when Doc returns to 1931 and isn't angry to Marty at all that he was the one broke up him and Edna. How did Doc even get back to 1986 after disappearing in 1931?
This is something that's also been on my mind... was Citizen Brown evil? Reason why I call him as Citizen Brown is because Episode 4 ending kinda makes this twist that maybe this alternative Doc is not as nice person as the real Doc. Can Citizen Brown in the game be considered as an evil character while Doc was the positive and good one while the young Emmett was still in the middle because of Episode 4 picture (choosing one science over another). That's something that I also pondered about whether Citizen Brown was actually even a good person, I mean he was with Edna starting this whole Big Brother thing.
Comments
It's an alternate Doc, who came from the day that he got the key to the city. This Doc didn't use his trip to 1931 to try to discover who the arsonist was, as it wasn't a mystery in the new timeline, so he wasn't accused as the arsonist (as evidenced by the fact that he had no idea why the DeLorean retrieval feature brought Marty to 1931). That's why Edna's DeLorean disappeared from time, as it was a DeLorean from a timeline that had been overwritten (the series has shown that time travelers take longer for the ripple effect to catch up to them than those who haven't traveled through time).
Doc told Marty that he had no idea why the DeLorean retrieval feature brought Marty to 1931, so he didn't realize that the Doc from the previous timeline was in jail, or that the version of himself from the Citizen Brown timeline disappeared from existence. He only knows that he came to 1931 because he came there to find out about Marty's grandmother in his timeline. He never was arrested in his timeline, which is why he was able to travel from the future to pick up Marty. He's not the same Doc as the Citizen Brown Doc (this Doc is technically at least the sixth version of Doc - the first died at the beginning of Back to the Future when he was shot by terrorists, the second died in 1885 when he was shot by Mad Dog Tannen, the third died in 1931 when he was killed by Kid Tannen's gang, the fourth died when he was erased from time along with Einstein when they arrived in the Citizen Brown timeline, and the fifth (Citizen Brown) died when he was erased from time after the truth was discovered about the arsonist). The Doc from this timeline doesn't have any feelings at all for Edna in his old age. He wouldn't be mad at Marty for breaking them up, as he's had over 50 years at that point to get over her.
Citizen Brown is not a bad person. He was just manipulated into using his science to control people. He didn't even know that Edna was using his watch as mind control, and Edna was purposefully hiding the fact that the people were unhappy from him since she knew that he would actually care about how the people felt. He also tried to convince his younger self to not go into science so that he wouldn't be manipulated to use science to control people. He didn't like the idea that Edna ended up lonely and sad because he still had strong feelings for her, despite what she did to him.
The fact that he was able to be manipulated into controlling people's lives to supposedly better them does show that Citizen Brown is definitely morally questionable. But, honestly, Doc has always been morally questionable. In the first scene we ever saw of him, we learned that he manipulated terrorists to steal plutonium for him by telling them that he'd build them a nuclear bomb but gave them a box filled with pinball parts instead.
Thanks for the reply, that gave a lot of info! Yeah, I never figured that yeah he's a Doc from different timeline of course.
For the most part I agree with you I just have a slightly differing perception; at the end of episode 2, doc disappears from the delorean as the doc at his age is likely deceased due to never going to 2015 and receiving a rejuvenation (as that doc would likely be pushing 100 with all his time travels) allowing citizen brown to exist
Yeah, that is the most likely reason that both Doc and Einstein were erased from existence when they arrived in the Citizen Brown timeline. In Back to the Future Part II, Doc said that his treatments added 20 or 30 years to his life, and in It's About Time, he stated that he was almost 100. Plus, Marty stated in Get Tannen! that Doc and Einstein have been working together for decades. The latter is obvious, since a dog can't naturally live for decades, and the second is very likely, since most people don't live to their late 90s naturally.