When they start talking about real stuff, but are a bit off-target in their understanding, that's where it's an issue for me. The nature of dark matter and VOY having to "mine" deuterium are two that immediately come to mind.
I’ve been going through a sort of Trek trek through personal highlights/stuff I’m interested in revisiting/stuff I’ve never seen tour since December, so I can’t claim perfectly representative samples, but one of the things that really sticks out with VOY in comparison with the other series is that they really like to throw real science words in the technobabble, which ends up changing the meaning from “nonsense” to “actually wrong” (VOY seems uniquely bad with units, too); it’s also striking since I didn’t choose particularly technobabbly episodes to rewatch! Maybe ENT’s the same (I’m not revisiting it), but it really sticks out, even in comparison to later TNG and I can’t give any exploration VOY specifically did that other than carelessness.
I recently rewatched “Schisms” and it’s a nice example of “good” technobabble—subspace isn’t real, manifold is a topological term, so we get the idea that “tertiary subspace manifold” (Braga liked the word “tertiary, didn’t he”) is some kind of realm of existence that might be hard to visualize. Tetryons are completely fake, but all we need to know about them is that they’re associated with subspace (and that’s really all they’re used for). Gravitons might be real, but we’re so far from detecting, much less harnessing, them, that all we need to know that they’re associated with the structure of our, real space and that’s how they’re used. There’s no actual science, but it all fits together intuitively enough that there’s a tight little mystery that both the audience and the protagonists can ratiocinate through it.
Branching off this I guess my niche controversial opinion is that warp drive isn’t something like an Alcubierre Drive, with seems to be a popular tech-fandom opinion today. It involves interactions that the mechanism involves subspace, which is something exotic to our real physics (well, more exotic than negative energy), and the “warp” of warp drive might have some superficial similarities to something like an Alcubierre Drive it really is something fundamentally different (usually TrekLit has talked about the discovery of dilithium to harness M/AM reactions as the essential thing, but to my mind something involving the invention/discovery of warp coil material—verterium, associated with verterons, another fake subspace particle—would be the actual thing).
Season 2 takes that crown for me because the story arc and motivations are just so terrible, but season 3 isn’t far behind. It’s so shallow and underbaked.
I honestly don't see what's so terrible about Pic season 2. I'm not head over heels for it and it made choices I disliked - most notably the sidelining of original characters from season 1 - but I pretty consistently had fun with it.
I am a sucker for the “oh wow we’re in the past/audience present” highjinks (“yellow means speed up”) and thought the young Guinan actress was very good, but thought the treatment of mental illness was pretty bad and clichéd. What I really disliked, though, was that they felt the need to explain Picard’s personality wiht a trauma plot. Beyond that being its own cliché, it’s not like there’s anything wrong with Picard’s personality—the guy’s a pretty great role model, generally—that needs explaining with childhood trauma (I’m guessing this is a case where the tension between Picard the character and Patrick Stewart the man made its way to screen).
