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In the classic 1985 film Back to the Future, Marty McFly travels back to 1955 and accidentally interferes with the mishap that brought his parents together. With his mother suddenly lusting after his Calvin Klein-clad hiney instead, Marty spends the remainder of the film trying to bring his parents together, and it is strongly implied that his existence depends on it.

But does it? At the end of the film, Marty not only gets his parents together, he teaches them self-respect; travelling back to 1985, he wakes up in his bed and finds the next morning that his house is suddenly nicer, his parents and family are successful, and the high school bully is outside cleaning the family car. But if this is now Marty’s life, he would have changed when he first altered his parents’ timeline. He would now have a new upbringing and a new personality, and he would know about these changes because he would remember them happening. In fact, these changes to Marty’s backstory may have even altered the chain of events that brought him back in time in the first place, creating a time travel paradox.

The only viable explanation for Back to the Future comes from the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics, a prominent theory in physics and philosophy. The MWI posits that whenever a particle randomly decays, a new universe is formed for every possible outcome of that decaying process. This means that there is a separate, parallel universe for every possible quantum outcome. Marty hasn’t travelled back in time in his own universe – he has jumped into a parallel universe more or less identical to how his own was 30 years previously.

Unfortunately, this takes most of the drama out of Back to the Future. Marty doesn’t have to unite his parents because they aren’t really his parents – they’re just clones who inhabit a parallel universe. Similarly, when Marty travels to a dystopian version of his present in Back to the Future II, he doesn’t have to try to “fix” it – he can just say “well this universe is shit, let’s go find a better one.”

The real mystery of Back to the Future is this: whose bed does Marty wake up in at the end? It can’t be his (see above). Yet it belongs to someone called Marty, who is the son of the clones of Marty’s parents, who has a clone version of Marty’s girlfriend, and who has just mysteriously disappeared and vacated his bed. What the fuck happened to him? Did Doc figure out the paradox, and abduct clone-Marty before he caused a scene? Did Marty eat him? What? WHAT?!