In this case, it wasn't re-watching for the most part, it was watching for the first time, as I hadn't seen upwards of 95% of TNG. I didn't have access to a TV during school that wasn't already dedicated to Friends or PTI. And sometimes... sometimes you just have to acknowledge your roots.
As for my complaint about believability, it comes down to the quality of storytelling. We live in a culture of cynicism, and on top of that, my brain has a bad habit of voraciously flagging logical inconsistencies when it's running on idle. This doesn't mean I can't or won't enjoy a story despite its flaws, but it certainly makes things harder when I have to work uphill to constantly say "Ok, fine, I have to accept this." The quality of a story, I feel, is directly proportional to how hard I have to work to overcome bad storywriting.
As a (bad, amateur, bloggy) writer myself, overcoming these things takes an additional path: "If I was the writer, could I have done better?" Sometimes I say no, as I recognize that certain plot points, certain character choices, certain points of inconsistency are kept because of the decisions of other writers, other points of "canon" that are in direct conflict with a potentially more interesting bit of storytelling.
But other times... other times the violations of the rules of storywriting are hard to accept. I've said these somewhere else, but I'll say them again:
Take for instance to concept of the pattern buffer for the transporters in TNG. In earlier episodes, people are brought back to life because an informational copy of a person is stored in the computer after transport. However, in later seasons, this is absolutely forgotten, ignored, or brushed under the carpet with treknobabble. And in some cases this is fine: if everyone could simply be brought back to life based on your most recent transporter trip, there wouldn't be a case for half of the episodes. The stakes for any away mission would mean nothing, and the show would become less interesting.
All it would take is something like Geordi to say "the storage it would take to store that many atoms would overload the ship's computer," or explain how the pattern buffer is meant to be temporary storage and has an inherent "decay" after more than a few minutes after transport. That way, the pattern buffer is a limited "power," and can be sanely used in some cases, and not in others.
Otherwise, somebody like me constantly asks why the pattern buffer isn't used everywhere. And the actions of every character following makes their decisions and actions all the more unlikely. We know it's impossible with today's technology to have something like transporters, but we can be told "There is such a thing," and we'll believe it. But have an entire episode about suicide, and have characters feeling grief and confusion when there's such a thing as pattern buffer recovery, and everything becomes contrived.
I feel storywriting is as much plot and dialogue as it is world building. World building is important because it defines the rules by which the characters can act and interact. When the rules are inconsistent, or poorly thought out, the... poignancy of some of the plot points can be undermined. It's the writers job to make sure this doesn't happen, and when they do, I feel this represents poorly on the overall product.
Better stories and writing are more air-tight, or at the very least, less inconsistent. There's also how certain things are introduced. For instance, take the introductory sequence of Serenity. In the span of maybe 5 minutes, it introduces the world, the characters, most of the major plot points, and some of the backstory that was brought together over the course of 13 prior episodes. It does this very skillfully. In Star Trek, we would have had Data explaining that a number of ship's systems were degraded as a result of repeated abuse, damage, misrepair, and lack of replacement parts. In Serenity, Captain Reynolds asks "Did the primary buffer panel just fall off my gorram ship?"
The more effective the storytelling, the more consistent the world, the less inclined I am to wonder why, in a universe where most people can speak fluent Chinese as well as English, there are so few Asian characters, primary or not. When Star Trek gets "explain-y," it becomes less effective.
Yes, my standards are high. Because my brain thrives on logically consistent systems, because those are the ones that my imagination has the most fun with. And has problems with things to the contrary.
