Hill Valley Thunderstorm

GASP! No one should know too much about their own destiny.

Warning! This page contains spoilers from Back to the Future: The Game. Caution is advised.

The Hill Valley Thunderstorm was a highly electrical severe thunderstorm that hit Hill Valley, California on the night of November 12, 1955, the same night as the local Enchantment Under the Sea dance at Hill Valley High School. At precisely 10:04:00 PM, lightning struck the clock tower of the Hill Valley Courthouse, freezing the clock at that time for at least sixty years. Numerous attempts were made to replace the clock tower after the incident, but the Hill Valley Preservation Society intervened and collected donations to keep it standing.

Originally thought to be a clear night, the weather forecast for the area changed dramatically about one hour prior to the storm's arrival and a severe thunderstorm warning for Hill Valley was issued on the radio. The storm was powerful enough to take down several trees around the Hill Valley area, including a large one split by lightning at the construction site of Lyon Estates two miles from town.

Marty McFly and Doc Brown used the storm as a way to channel electricity, 1.21 gigawatts of it, into the DeLorean time machine's flux capacitor, rendering the vehicle capable of entering temporal displacement and allowing Marty to return to 1985. Doc came up with an ingenious plan to rig a cable to the clock tower and string it over the street where the DeLorean would intersect it.

When Doc and Marty returned to 1955 to retrieve the Grays Sports Almanac, they encountered the storm at Lyon Estates before it reached town. Lightning struck the DeLorean sending it back to 1885. After the violent bursts of lightning ended, there came a large downpour of rain, through which Western Union drove to give Marty Doc's letter.

Significance of the storm in time travelEdit

When Marty found another DeLorean parked outside Doc's garage in 1986, it was unclear exactly how another time machine had come to be. An imprisoned Doc in 1931 explained to Marty that on the night of the Hill Valley Thunderstorm, the moment the car was sent back to the future, a temporal duplicate of the DeLorean was created and sent forward seventy years to 2025. It is unclear whether this was due to a malfunction with the time circuits, or an substantial side effect of time travel.^[1]