The past few days have seen the long-discussed third Bill & Ted film move closer to reminding everyone that the '90s were a very long time ago and that phone booths may as well be cotton gins to today's kids, what with Galaxy Quest director Dean Parisot signing on to tackle the script from Bill & Ted series creators Ed Solomon and Chris Matheson. But besides creating an impressive assemblage of WASP-y first names, this news hasn't brought us any closer to knowing what the movie will be about, other than 90 minutes of awkward sidestepping around the fact that George Carlin is dead. So GQ—stomping all over MTV's Josh Horowitz's beat—asked Keanu Reeves himself, who reiterated his previous statements that the movie would find his and Alex Winter's characters nearing 50 and still no closer to writing their world-changing song, despite already traveling throughout the millennia, traversing heaven and hell, and yanking a couple of dead aliens out of the everlasting peace of the afterlife and forcing them to play the bongos just to do so.
"Everybody is kind of like: 'Where is the song?'" Reeves says of both the characters in the movie and the audience who thought they'd resolved this already, twice. "The guys have just drifted off into esoterica and lost their rock. And we go on this expedition, go into the future to find out if we wrote the song, and one future 'us' refuses to tell us, and another future 'us' blames us for their lives because we didn't write the song, so they're living this terrible life. In one version we're in jail; in another we're at some kind of highway motel and they hate us." Reeves did not explicitly say so, but it seems as though having two alternate timelines actually could address the Carlin issue—perhaps by having one where Rufus, frustrated that he's given Bill and Ted ample, reality-bending opportunities to write one goddamn song, finally just kills himself. Reeves did explicitly say "esoterica" a few more times.