What immediately bugs you when watching an episode? Mine is when they transport someone sitting down and they reintegrate in a standing position (or vice versa). Sure, the tech is near magical but my suspension of disbelief pretty much snaps when they do this.
The lack of continuity and consequences really started to bother me in TNG (especially after I started watching DS9 with its actual story arcs). Like with “Genesis” – the entire crew turns into animals and/or cavemen, it’s heavily implied that Worf literally mauls another crewman to death, and the entire thing wraps up with “Huh, that was weird. Oh well, let’s go get drinks at Ten Forward.” Don’t get me wrong, I’ll take any episode that features my boy Reg Barclay, but the happy-go-lucky episodic model seemed particularly egregious in this case.
I always found that frustrating too. I feel like it gets even worse in Voyager. There are things in DS9 that I think should have gotten some sort of follow-up mention, (“Hard Time” being a major one) but they normally did a good job keeping interesting story arcs without it becoming too serialized. Now I feel we’ve swung too far the other direction!
I got about twelve episodes into Voyager and I had to stop because the contrast with DS9 in that respect was way too much for me (I was watching concurrently 1990s style).
Oh, I imagine that swing would be wild! I just started into Voyager again, but I went into it after finishing TNG. It’s not quite as bad that way. I normally take some breaks or at least space out episodes a bit more when watching those two.