Enlarge / Star Trek Beyond might be good or it might be bad, but either way it belongs in the canon. (credit: Paramount Pictures)

Some other sci-fi movie is stealing most of the thunder this week, but Star Trek fans got some table scraps in the form of a trailer for Star Trek Beyond, the third film set in the revised Trek universe established by J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek (2009). The fan reaction was generally unkind, citing everything from the song choice to the lack of sci-fi to the presence of director Justin Lin, veteran of The Fast and the Furious.

Slashfilm published a nice interview with Lin that should at least partially mollify upset fans (he didn’t love the trailer either, nor did co-writer and costar Simon Pegg), and I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, but let’s assume for the sake of argument that the movie isn’t great, or that fans don’t love it (which is not the same thing). I’m okay with that, because bad Trek is just as big a part of the franchise as good Trek, and an essential part of being in love with the franchise is hating parts of it.

Star Trek‘s unevenness goes all the way back to “The Cage,” the first pilot for the original series. Later chopped up and reused for the two-part TOS episode “The Menagerie,” the episode tells a conceptually interesting but plodding story that struggles without a substitute for the Kirk-Spock-McCoy dynamic that developed over the course of the first season. And the entire third season of TOS, suffering from budget cutbacks and reduced involvement from a frustrated Gene Roddenberry, is incredibly bumpy and unmemorable (and when it is memorable, it’s for clunkers like “Spock’s Brain”).