Back when we did interviews for Star Trek Into Darkness a few weeks’ back, we got to have a chat with Damon Lindelof. He kindly agreed to answer a very spoiler-ific question, on the proviso that we held it back until after the film had been released wisely around the world. Which it now has. Hence, this article. If you have, though, then you’ll know just what we’re about to talk about. The question we put to Damon Lindelof was thus this: why choose Khan in the first place, and how important was it that his identity was protected so much in the build up to the release of the film? And here’s his answer: Most importantly, we did not want the audience going into the movie to be ahead of the crew. So if they just came across the Botany Bay, for example, Trek fans would go ‘I know who’s on that ship, and if they wake them up, it’s going to be a bad thing’. So we were like, we can’t do the story that way. So we had to introduce Khan to those characters in the same way we’re introducing them to the audience, which is ‘who is this guy, and why is he behaving the way he’s behaving?’ And that mandated that the story itself hid his identity. We were like, why would he be called something other than Khan? And that was the impulse by which our other story decision came”. Our original, non-spoilery interview with Damon Lindelof is here. Follow our Twitter feed for faster news and bad jokes right here. And be our Facebook chum here.
