A BTTF2 Novelisation passa por cima desta inconsistência com uma mão magistral. Marty acha a coisa toda confusa e nós também. Tente não pensar muito sobre isso.
Doc pulled out his binocular card to get a better look at the courthouse, and what looked to Marty like a robot, with a USA Today logo on its back, taking a picture of the wreckage. Marty realised that very photo must be the one that appeared in the new version of tomorrow’s newspaper - the version they had right in front of them. But that was weird. How could something change when it hadn’t happened yet? Marty decided he still didn’t understand this time travel business at all!
Doc tucked the binocular card back in his pocket and grinned broadly.
‘Proof beyond positive that we’ve succeeded!’ he cheered. ‘Because this hoverboard incident has now occurred, Griff now goes to jail. Therefore, your son won’t go with him tonight, and that robbery will never take place! Thus, due to the ripple effect, the newspaper is now altered!’
‘The ripple effect?’ Marty asked.
Doc nodded. ‘Just as the past affects the future, the future reverberates into the past.’
Whoa. This was heavy. But Marty remembered something like this happening once before, when he had first messed things up in 1955.
‘Kind of like that picture of me and Dave and Linda,’ he asked, ‘where my brother and sister started to disappear?’
‘Precisely!’ Doc patted his young cohort enthusiastically on the shoulder. ‘Marty, we’ve succeeded! Not exactly as I planned, but no matter. Mission accomplished!' He took a step toward the alley. ‘Let’s get Jennifer and go home.’
A FAQ oficial do BTTF também oferece as seguintes informações (menos úteis). É certamente possível que o Doc sempre tenha se intrometido nesse evento, é que ele havia esquecido
There's a theory (we like to call it the "Self-Preservation Instinct of the Space-Time Continuum Theory") that says that the continuum is always trying to keep itself "on course," and when things happen to change it, it always tries to correct itself. It is much like a river, which tries to keep its overall course. Although earthquakes, fallen trees, floods, or other circumstances might disrupt it at points, the river would cut a new channel so that it would end up back at the same place. Thus, the overall physics (or metaphysics) of the space-time continuum would insure that any of Doc's memories of events that might create paradoxes would become hazy — or be erased.