Donald Glover Explains Why A Back To The Future Community Episode Will Probably Never Happen

With the new season of Community finally starting production this week, there wasn't much anyone in the cast could tell us during interviews at Comic Con over the weekend. Any details about the new season, beyond the awesome casting tidbits of Michael K. Williams and John Goodman as new guest stars, are being kept carefully under wraps, to the point that Gillian Jacob promised "a big reveal" for Britta and seemed to think she'd said too much.

But this being Community it's usually just as fun to talk to the cast about anything else. I'll be bringing a lot of details from my Comic Con roundtable interviews over the next few days, but let's start with Donald Glover, who revealed the one theme episode he'd like to see the show do, but also explained why it's not at all possible. Let's just say it would require a flux capacitor and a car capable of going 88 miles per hour, neither of which fit into the world of Greendale as they've set it up.

"There's one I really want to do, but it's not well-formed," Glover said when asked if he ever pitched ideas to the writing staff. "It's a Back to the Future parody." Reminded that he's brought this up before, he and Gillian Jacobs went on to explain all the reasons the idea could never work. Here's how that part of the conversation went:

Glover: It's really hard to do. Time travel is already hard.Jacobs: We can't actually break the laws of physics.Glover: We've never had actual magic on the show. Time travel is tricky. It would have to be some sort of, like, mistake. But a mistake big enough that it can sustain a whole episode, but also small enough that it doesn't fuck up the rest of the world. So it's hard. I had an idea, but it's not well-formed.

From the sound of it, both the Community cast and writing staff are pretty well versed in the rules of the show, which allows a zombie outbreak to happen thanks to tainted meat product and the cast to pretend to go into space thanks to a Kentucky Fried Chicken space simulator, but can't actually time travel. The latest news from Hong Kong scientists probably doesn't help matters, either.

Keep coming back this week for much, much more from the Community cast and staff.

Katey Rich

Staff Writer at CinemaBlend