I don’t try to maintain the mystery box… [but] I do think it’s a mistake to ruin stories for audiences,” the director said. “In [Into Darkness], fans of the series are aware that he’s either Khan or not, so it was probably a mistake not to just say he was Khan and get past it.

But the problem in the movie is that there’s an hour in the film that the characters don’t know, so I thought, ‘If the audience was told will it ruin the experience?’ But the truth is it probably wouldn’t have made much of a difference in that regard.