The Fast and Furious saga is officially coming to a close with the tenth and eleventh installments and, crazy as it may sound, time travel is the best move for the franchise’s closing chapters to take. Beginning with 2001’s The Fast and the Furious, a comparatively realistic (and comparatively boring) thriller set in the world of high-stakes street racing, the Fast and Furious series has gone on to spawn spin-off films, theme park rides, and no fewer than ten sequels, the final three of which are yet to be released.

It’s been confirmed that Fast and Furious 10 & Fast & Furious 11 will bring the franchise to a close, but viewers who missed out on the series’ more recent installments may not recognize the franchise's transformation. What began as a fairly grounded set of chase movies started to explore heist and spy themes in 2009’s fourth installment, Fast and Furious, and the Fast and Furious series has since thrown caution to the wind and started incorporating elements of sci-fi into the mix. Screenwriter Chris Morgan claimed back in 2017 that the Fast and Furious franchise would never include "space... time travel...[or] dinosaurs." [via Collider].

Related: Fast & Furious Movies Ranked Worst To Best

Now the first of these dominoes has fallen with the news that F9 will send Dom Toretto and co into space, shocking many fans of the franchise who can recall a time when the series was the simple story of some drivers who wanted to drag race. With this development underway, the possibility of time travel is now the most logical route for the Fast and Furious franchise to take next. It may sound insane, but a series rooted in characters running from their past could make great use of the storytelling device, not to mention the possibilities for high-octane old-time chase sequences.

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Since its inception, one of the consistent themes that recur throughout the Fast and Furious films, alongside family, is time and the eternal attempt to outrun its forward-forging arrow. For a start, the lead characters are adrenaline junkies trying to beat the clock during every race, heist, and mission. But in terms of individual characters Fast and Furious is also a franchise obsessed with the past, with almost every character having some tragic backstory or a mysterious history motivating them. Time travel, or even some sort of Inception/Tenet-influenced sci-fi-inspired time heist, is one of the best ways to return the franchise to being about racing without having to abandon the silliness that has become so popular with its fandom. It’s fair to admit that no one comes to a Fast and Furious movie expecting pure racing action anymore, sure, but there's only so much the family’s story can be mired in international intrigue and increasingly complicated double-(and-triple-)crosses and fake-out deaths.

After space, time travel should be the next frontier the films tackle as a time heist could let the series hit the reset button, bringing the central cast back (literally) to their origins without having to worry about how to incorporate the Fast and Furious franchise's ever-growing supporting cast. There is also an obvious opportunity for the movies to utilize this set up to pull off some insane set-pieces with vintage cars that would not only be a petrol head’s dream, but also a nifty way to work around the fact that the series is running out of impossibly fast vehicles to race.

Returning to an earlier, less refined era of motoring would give the trademark Fast & Furious chase sequences fresh material to work with, especially after Fury Road proved that an action film doesn’t need the most advanced tech to make chases thrilling and revolutionary. And outside of all these reasons, there's also another compelling reason the Fast and Furious series should pull off an audacious time travel stunt post-space: it's about the only way to explain Han’s return without a mess of headaches and plot holes.

More: Fast & Furious 9 Theory: Why Dom Goes To Space (It’s Like James Bond)

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