To continue our celebration of Star Trek's 50th anniversary, we've decided to resurface a few of our favorite Trek stories from the Ars archives—like this one from December 2015. Star Trek Beyond has since debuted and, predictably, disappointed. But as Andrew Cunningham points out, having gripes with the franchise is part of true love.

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").

But throughout its many incarnations, Trek has always had the most trouble with beginnings. The first seasons of The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise were consistently less entertaining and engaging than the seasons that followed. Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the first attempt to revive the series after its cancellation (The Animated Series aside), is a poorly paced mess with little action and even less chemistry between characters.

And even once the movie franchise was up and running (kickstarted by franchise high-point The Wrath of Khan), it could spit out some incredibly embarrassing outings. The Search For Spock undercuts Khan's emotional gut-punch but is still at least a reasonably fun adventure; but Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home looks more goofy and dated with every passing year and the less said about Star Trek V: The Final Frontier the better. Of the four movies to feature the cast of The Next Generation, only First Contact truly shines. I am a Star Trek (2009) apologist but completely hated Into Darkness for squandering the first movie's canon-resetting premise (and for some completely gratuitous objectification of women that felt out of place).

And yet.

I have a soft spot in my blackened, hollowed-out heart for all of this bad Star Trek. Part of it is because even substandard Trek has flashes of greatness—individual scenes or little character moments that help to redeem the whole. And part of it is because art is subjective, and I am sure there are all kinds of Star Trek fans who will take umbrage at one or more of the opinions I stated as facts up above.

Having those (generally good-natured, sometimes heated) arguments is part of the fun of being intimately familiar with the franchise. For instance, our own Senior Technology Editor Lee Hutchinson likes Star Trek III better than Wrath of Khan, and Technology Editor Peter Bright thinks "Darmok" is a terrible episode of The Next Generation. They're both truly, deeply wrong; the enormity of their wrongness is beyond human comprehension. But it's a lot of fun to talk about it, unpack why certain moments resonated with one person but not with the other, and depart understanding the other person just a tiny bit more.

Trek at its best is cerebral but not boring, a little funny but not silly. It's adventurous. It's got action but it's also got character-driven lulls where the viewer can take a breath. And above all, it's deeply human. It's a complicated mixture, and no creative team is going to get it right every time.

Trek at its worst is campy, goofy, inaccessible, unbelievable, and dull. It is, above all, inconsistent, and even the very best casts and writers on the very best Treks miss a step sometimes. For every peak like "The Inner Light," there's a valley like the one where Dr. Crusher... has sex with a ghost I guess? The wonderful, frustrating thing about Star Trek is that those good and bad qualities are all encoded equally deeply in its DNA.

So bring on Star Trek Beyond. Good or bad, I'll watch it. And then I'll argue with you about it.