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Back to the Future
Episode Studies by Clayton Barr

enik1138-at-popapostle-dot-com
Back to the Future: Biff to the Future (Part 6) Back to the Future
"Biff to the Future" Part 6
Back to the Future: Biff to the Future #6
IDW
Story by Bob Gale and Derek Fridolfs
Art by Alan Robinson
Inks by Alan Robinson & Jaime Castro
Colors by Maria Santaolalla
Letters by Shawn Lee
Cover A by Alan Robinson
June 2017

 

Biff begins a plot to run for President of the United States.

 

Notes from the Back to the Future chronology

 

This issue opens on February 4, 1986 and makes a detour to March 18, 1884 in the course of the story.

 

Didja Know?

 

Biff to the Future was a six-issue comic book mini-series published by IDW in 2017. It tells the story of the alternate timeline created when Old Biff from 2015 gave his teen self in 1955 the 2000 edition of Gray's Sports Almanac, resulting in the dark 1985 discovered by Doc and Marty in Back to the Future Part II.

 

This issue takes the alternate timeline created by Biff the 1985 date and events in Back to the Future Part II.

 

Characters appearing or mentioned in this story

 

Biff Tannen

Match

Skinhead

Richard Nixon (mentioned only)

Mr. Keller

3-D

German psychiatrist (unnamed)

Doc Brown

Otis Peabody

Einstein

Lorraine Tannen

Dave McFly

Linda McFly

Marty McFly

George McFly (mentioned only)

Joey Baines (mentioned only)

Buford "Mad Dog" Tannen

Creel brothers (mentioned only)

Goldie Wilson

 

Didja Notice?

 

In this issue, Biff plots to run for president in 1988. The wide-eyed reactions of the people who first hear of it bears a resemblance to those that initially occurred when Donald Trump ran for the office in the real world of 2016.

 

On page 4, Doc Brown is depicted as having been committed to the Hill Valley Insane Asylum. Otis Peabody is also seen there; he was confined there after reporting "mutating aliens" in the novelization of Back to the Future.

 

On page 4, Peabody is still talking about aliens who've mutated into human form, shouting, "Space zombies! From Pluto!" Besides his encounter with the time travelling DeLorean and its occupant, Marty McFly, Peabody has absorbed the title of his son's comic book story "Space Zombies from Pluto" (as seen on the cover of Tales from Space #8 in Back to the Future) into his confabulations.

 

When the psychiatrist tells Biff that Doc Brown is in a state between catatonia and suspended animation, Biff asks which cartoon cat is he, Sylvester or Tom. Biff's limited intellectual acuity is confusing "catatonia" with "cat cartoon"! Sylvester is a cartoon cat who appeared in various Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons from Warner Brothers Studios. Tom is a cartoon cat created by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera in 1940 for a series of MGM cartoons called Tom and Jerry.

 

On page 6, Lorraine tries to kill Biff by shooting him, but he is saved by his little black payoff book kept in his interior jacket pocket. The shooting by Lorraine in this issue was likely inspired by writer Bob Gale's own supposition that Biff vanished after returning in the DeLorean to 2015 in Back to the Future Part II due to his altered timeline self having been shot by a fed up Lorraine at some point between 1985 and 2015. (At the end of this issue Biff dies from a gunshot, but in a completely different way.)

 

Page 7 reveals that Marty's sister Linda is on her fourth divorce.

 

On page 11, nobody is smoking (or even holding a cigarette) in the Biff Tannen Museum, despite the smoking requirement depicted in "Biff to the Future" Part 5.

 

On page 11, the photo in the Biff Tannen Museum of Biff's parents on their wedding day has altered due to Doc's time travel to the day (in "Biff to the Future" Part 5) to show Doc in the background. But, for some reason, the captioning of the framed photo has also altered slightly, showing only the date at the top (without mention of the Church of the Heather) and adding the nickname "Terrible" to the beginning of Tom Tannen's name.

 

The painted portrait of Biff that hides his wall safe in his office seen on page 11 may be a different one than that seen in Back to the Future Part II. The coat and tie appear to be different colors and patterns than in the portrait seen in that film, though the pose is similar.

 

Einstein ran away and became a stray dog when Doc was committed. He was discovered at the Hill Valley Dog Center as part of Biff's plot to get Doc out of his self-induced catatonia.

 

On page 13, Marty reveals he'd been missing from the boarding school in Switzerland because he left it to tour Europe with a band.

 

On page 15, Doc's work on the time machine is kept under surveillance by a Biffview camera.

 

In the last panel of page 15, a can of Pepsi Free is seen on the nightstand next to Marty's bed. This was the caffeine-free variant of Pepsi-Cola from 1982-1987.

 

On page 18, Buford Tannen says "what in the Stan Hill" instead of the normal euphemism "what in the Sam Hill".

 

When Biff makes the mistake of calling Buford "Mad Dog", Buford says the exact same words he said to Marty McFly in Back to the Future Part III, "Nobody...I mean nobody calls me 'Mad Dog'! I hate that name! I hate it!"

 

Buford thinks that Biff in his gaudy 1986 tourist get-up must be the Creel brother that got away. In "Biff to the Future" Part 5, an exhibit in the Biff Tannen Museum depicted Buford as having shot and killed the three Creel brothers.

 

Biff is shot by his own ancestor, Buford Tannen, in 1884 and his dead body returns to 1986 where he receives a funeral.

 

With his death, Lorraine inherits Biff's fortune and begins using it to fix Hill Valley and make it once again, as the town slogan says, "A Nice Place to Live".

 

At the end of the story, Doc says similar words to those he said to Marty and Jennifer at the end of Back to the Future Part III, "Our future is whatever we make it, so let's make it a good one."

 

Unanswered Questions

 

How did Lorraine explain Biff's death by gunshot?

 

What happened to Biff's stooges Match, Skinhead, and 3-D after they were shocked into unconsciousness by Doc's trap?

 

Back to Back to the Future Episode Studies