Marty meets his friend, scientist Dr. Emmett “Doc” Brown, late at night in the parking lot of a deserted shopping mall, where Doc reveals a time machine made from a modified DeLorean DMC-12. The vehicle’s time displacement is powered by plutonium, which supplies 1.21 gigawatts of power to a device Doc calls the “flux capacitor” Doc explains that the car travels to a pre-set date upon reaching 88 miles per hour; as an example to Marty, Doc enters the date November 5, 1955 the date he came up with the concept of the flux capacitor. Before Doc can make his first trip, Libyan terrorists, from whom he stole the plutonium, arrive and shoot him. Marty attempts to escape using the machine and inadvertently activates the time machine where he travels back to 1955 and finds himself without the plutonium needed for the return trip.
While exploring the 1955 Hill Valley, Marty meets the teenage George who is being bullied by Biff Tannen. As George is about to be hit by Lorraine’s father’s car, Marty pushes him out of the way and is knocked out by impact. Consequently Lorraine becomes in love with Marty instead of George.
Marty goes to find Doc, telling him he is from the future and wants to return to 1985. Doc explains that the only available power source capable of generating 1.21 gigawatts of energy is a bolt of lightning will strike the courthouse clock tower. Doc makes a plan to harness the lighting strike to power the DeLorean’s flux capacitor. When they examine a fading photograph of Marty with his siblings, they determine that Marty has