Warning: This article contains storyline and character spoilers from this week’s episode of Community.

This week’s Community is a bottle episode which finds the study group stuck in an RV driving an absurdly giant hand up a mountain pass. We talked with show creator Dan Harmon about the genesis of the idea, how the prop masters and set designers contribute to his mad world, and why Abed seems to be slipping back into his “Mork from Ork” persona.

Did the writing of this episode start with “giant hand on an RV”? Or did that come later in the process?

The way we did that is we decided that they should be in the RV and there should be something ridiculous tied to the roof that wouldn’t make any sense that it turned out the Dean bought. We didn’t say “giant hand”; we said to the prop master, “What exists out there that’s gigantic and just random?” He showed us a couple pictures of some things and I noticed this giant hand sitting in a lot somewhere. Actually, some of us had driven by it, I think. There’s actually two of them — a left and a right one. They were white and we painted them flesh color and all we needed was one of them. But you can see the pair of them now when you drive to the lot — there’s this place you drive past a giant pair of hands.

Did you ever find out what they were from?

I don’t know why they were made. We don’t know. We chose the one we did because it looked funnier with somebody sitting in the palm. The other one had more of a fist shape to it. We chose the more relaxed hand so the Dean could nestle in its palm.

The show’s cartoon logic — the idea of following an idea to crazytown and beyond, but still being logical — is something you don’t see anywhere else. Another show might have a guy who buys a giant hand, but what is it about your thought process that generates the giant watch and the boy dragged away by a giant kite?

I guess I’ve always been fascinated with the difference between what we call comedy and what we call drama. This year, with the tags, we’re exploring a lot. I’ve also been fascinated with what we consider to be the boundaries of what a story is about and how life never really obeys those boundaries.

Down every street, there’s a story going on. Your perception warps that to turn everyone else in the world into background characters. The same as when you’re driving, the place directly around you doesn’t seem foggy — it’s everywhere else in the world that’s just in a fog. So it seems like all other human beings aren’t important and — if you’re having a good time — it seems like the world is good.

Related: Read More of Our ‘Community’ Postmortems With Dan Harmon

So I always enjoy the random embers from the campfire, following one in particular that tots off, rolls somewhere, and starts its own fire. And also, I get nervous when all we did was tell a joke, because it feels like, “Why is the show a half-hour long? And why is it so expensive and why do we care? We can just tell a joke into a microphone, so why are we watching a TV show?” I just feel like the answer has to be because people are real. Every joke has this tragedy behind it and every tragedy has a joke within it; that’s why this is a larger form that’s more captivating to people, so let’s make good on it.

Story continues