Lindelof Talks Spoilers, Trek Big Bad

In a new interview with Hero Complex, Star Trek Into Darkness writer Damon Lindelof talks about a goal to stay true to Star Trek and the efforts to avoid revealing spoilers, especially the real identity of John Harrison as played by Benedict Cumberbatch. Its pretty much assumed that is an alias for the true character's name.

“If the first movie was about meeting and introductions, this movie is about becoming a family,” Lindelof said. “The title of the movie is not just about the mission that the Enterprise is going on but what happens when you get to know each other a little better and the hurdles you must jump over in order to truly become family.”

“If anything, we’ve become more terrified,” he said. “We kind of got it right the first time, [we thought], ‘Let’s really not screw it up this time.’ You really have to honor the 40-plus years of canon and legacy that this amazing franchise had before we put pen to paper.”

“The audience needs to have the same experience that the crew is having,” Lindelof explained. “You’re Kirk, you’re Spock, you’re McCoy, so if they don’t know who the bad guy is going to be in the movie, then you shouldn’t know. It’s not just keeping the secret for secrecy’s sake. It’s not giving the audience information that the characters don’t have.”

“I feel like I’m constantly planning the surprise party — instead of it just being for one person in my life, it’s for all these people,” Lindelof said. “I’m working on a bunch of different projects, and I even have to keep secrets about one project from the people I’m working with on the other project. They’ll say, ‘So, seriously, who’s Benedict playing?’ I’ll say, ‘Do you really want to know?’ Then they go, ‘No, no, no, I don’t.’

“They know that if I said it to them,” he continued, “they would have a five-second rush of exhilaration followed by four months of being completely and totally bummed out that they can’t tell anybody else and that when it gets revealed in the movie, it will have been spoiled for them. That’s why they’re called ‘spoilers,’ they’re not called ‘awesomes.’”