When screenwriters Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman first took on the challenge of rebooting Star Trek half a decade ago, they understood they needed to serve two very different masters. The first: the non-geeks who enjoy big-popcorn summer movies but have maybe seen part of a Star Trek movie once years ago on cable — and it was the one with the whales.

The second: hardcore Trekkies who are hungry to see their beloved franchise revived but absolutely do not want their beloved sci-fi universe destroyed.

With the 2009 reboot, at least no one had ever seen how Kirk, Spock, Bones, Uhura, Scotty, Sulu, and Chekov first came together as the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise. That undiscovered country, along with the crafty decision to reset the Trek timeline thanks to some time-traveling Romulans, allowed the screenwriters to largely please both Trek newbies out for a good time and Trek faithful eager to have their obsession finally given the full-throated Hollywood treatment it deserved.

The sequel, however? That's a tribble of a different color.

Joined this time by screenwriter Damon Lindelof (Prometheus, Lost), Kurtzman and Orci had a much trickier needle to thread. Not only did they have to live up to the first film, but they were also writing under the shadow of the first true Trek sequel: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, universally regarded as the best Trek movie ever made.

Rather than run away from The Wrath of Khan, however, the Star Trek Into Darkness filmmaking team chose instead to embrace it, peppering the film with references both small and quite large to the 1982 Trek blockbuster. BuzzFeed spoke with Kurtzman and Orci about these "Easter Eggs" — as well as some knowing winks to the original Trek TV series.

Just one example: In the opening sequence of Into Darkness, Spock (Zachary Quinto), sitting in the middle of an erupting volcano, tells Kirk, "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" — which is a direct quote from Wrath of Khan. Orci, however, insists he, Kurtzman, and Lindelof were never trying to reverse-engineer a classic Trek line, trope, or character into their script for Into Darkness.

"I think that would be Spock's philosophy in just about any universe, so it doesn't necessarily portend Wrath of Khan," he says. "The trick with these things is not to chase them. We weren't looking for a place to put that line in, but if you know Star Trek well enough, you just try and tell the story you want to tell, and if you find the spot where it fits, you put it in. Spock in a volcano [is] entirely different context than the original [film] in which you heard that line. Yet, it's still about sacrifice."

Adds Kurtzman, "We always think of this version of Trek as playing in harmony with [established] canon. By creating an alternate timeline, we are allowing familiar characters to come into the world and have very recognizable traits, and yet have their stories be somewhat different, and therefore unpredictable. The whole point of the alternate timeline was so that an audience can watch the movie and not know where it was headed. The jeopardy could always be real."

No more so than with the biggest nod to Wrath of Khan in Into Darkness...