Note: If you're not all caught upon on Community , you're about to be spoiled!

Last week’s Community was an integral episode, as the gang returned from Piece Hawthorne’s funeral and ended up discovering what Pierce had left each of them. Pierce’s gift to Troy was a huge one; his remaining shares in his company, worth millions of dollars - with the caveat that Troy first had to sail around the world to receive the money.I asked Community creator Dan Harmon how they came to decide to kill off Pierce, in the wake of Chevy Chase departing the series. [Yes, Chase cameoed as a hologram in the season premiere, but it was under the condition he not return to the set of the show ]. Harmon also previewed this week’s episode, which will see Troy saying goodbye, as Donald Glover leaves Community.

Donald Glover and Danny Pudi as Troy and Abed in Community.

Yeah, I mean, the truth is, I just don't think it was ever in the cards for Chevy to make a return to the show. So if you have a character that's no longer on the show and was the old fella of the group, it's a handy narrative device… Because Chevy will be missed on that screen and that character was Chevy at his best, in my very humble opinion. So it was nice to be able to have that character still affecting things from beyond, because Chevy did leave such a vacuum. So to acknowledge that Pierce Hawthorne left a vacuum and that he's still affecting them from beyond, we thought was an interesting thing. I don't know, there was no real strategy to killing off his character. It just felt like a good way to tell some grounded stories and to sort of symbolically combine the departure of Troy with the departure of the other guy that left. It felt poetic to us.We wanted to make sure we did it in typical Community fashion and give Troy and Abed some fun stuff to do. We didn't want to just spend 20 minutes crying and hugging goodbye. We make it a point of the story that the saddest thing about Troy leaving is how much fun Troy and Abed were together and how that feels like a terrifying thing to have to walk away from. We actually make that part of the story, that they have a tendencancy to be in denial about facing these things when they happen. So it becomes one of our bigger fun episodes. But then, toward the end of it, it uncontrollably turns into a three-box-of-Kleenex tearjerker. There was no way around that. At a certain point, Troy has to say goodbye to Abed. I watched that part in the director's cut, and there's just no getting around crying if you're at all a fan of the show at that moment. But we make a meal out of those tears. We put 'em in a sandwich and serve 'em up. We put a little American flag on a toothpick on top.Yeah, it's pretty satisfying. I'm proud of how we handled it. I think one of the worst crimes that you can commit, and it's the one we commit constantly for the best intentions, is just dishonesty. We just don't face the things that we're scared about. We don't admit that we're scared about them. We've been trained to be strong and that being afraid is a bad thing, and that you won't be afraid if you don't say you're afraid of them. I'm proud of our show because it flies in the face of that theory. If you admit that you're scared, that's actually how you can get through stuff. If you connect with other people and are just honest about who you are, you'll find out that it's not a crime. So Troy leaving, there were a lot of ways to skin that cat, and I think we did it in the most honest way possible. I think people will be satisfied with it.

Community: "Geothermal Escapism " airs Thursday, January 23rd on NBC.Eric Goldman is Executive Editor of IGN TV. You can follow him on Twitter at @EricIGN , IGN at ericgoldman-ign and Facebook at Facebook.com/TheEricGoldman