A third-order story recognises the greater, more valuable, more actual truth: that every seemingly minor thing you do on every day absolutely definitely has such consequences. As a logical consequence of this, every single moment in history is of precisely equal significance.

All of this, though, is non-intuitive, and confuses the issue. It's

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Time travel is a difficult thing for a typical filmgoer to wrap their head around all in one go, and Back To The Future 's model is far from the simplest there is. But the model is unfolded gradually, revealed to the audience (through its surrogate, Marty) as a discrete series of new developments. Each bullet point arises intuitively and inevitably... See more

Well... I think hindsight is dangerous in its clarity sometimes