6x21 Frame of Mind

[7.4/10] Psychodramas have a certain appeal to them. We’re so used to stories where the conflict is external, the threat comes without, that when the only enemy is yourself, or your own mind, it stands out. When Commander Riker thinks he’s losing his marbles, that his entire life could be a delusion of grandeur, it’s unmooring, for him and for the audience.

That’s my roundabout way of saying that “Frame of Mind” messed me up a little when I saw it as a kid. It was the first time I realized that we take the stability of the mind for granted, and how disturbing and unraveling it would be if your brain was no longer an honest broker. We think we see the world, see reality, as it is. But in reality, it’s mediated through a hunk of meat sitting within our skull that picks and chooses what’s important and how we perceive it. If that wrinkly lump of neurons were suddenly no longer a reliable filter, our entire world would fall apart.

It happens to Will Riker. For the third time, an alien surreptitiously abducts him, messes with his memories, and forces him to question his reality. (It’s almost as common as Deanna getting possessed by someone or something!) But the twist here is that Riker is destabilized from the beginning, unable to tell where his real life aboard the Enterprise begins, a seemingly real confinement to an alien mental institution ends, and why the play he stars in, conveniently one about a mental ward denizen losing his grip on reality, keeps factoring in.

The episode succeeds as a mindscrew. Savvy viewers can probably figure out the twist. For all The Next Generation’s willingness to presage “Normal Again” from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and suggest the events of the whole show might all be a disturbed hallucination, chances are that no ongoing series is going to confirm that the events of the show have all been in the head of one mentally disturbed individual. (Give or take the occasional 1980s medical drama.)

And yet, “Frame of Mind” does well with the premise. Even if the truth of Riker’s reality isn’t hard to settle on, even if who’s frying his brain and why isn’t hard to guess, the presentation makes it easy to slip into Riker’s hospital-issued shoes and feel the disorientation he feels in the moment.

Much of that comes from a virtuoso performance from Jonathan Frakes, arguably his best on the show. It would be easy for such an outsized set of emotions to come off as a cheesy or overwrought. But while there’s the occasional sour note (mostly his “Noooooo!” when the guard accuses him of murder), Frakes does a remakable job of communicating the senese of a man losing his identity and ability to discern what’s true and what’s false.

At the same time, the editing team and director James L. Conway does a fantastic job of conveying that disorientation through clever cuts and unnerving images. Watching Riker start in one room, or even one world, and turn the corner into another, captures the mercurial reflexes of the mind and evokes his inability to tell what’s real and what isn’t. The pretzel logic of Riker’s experiences amid his procedures keep the viewer on their back foot, forced to guess the veracity of a given moment much as Will must.

That said, the visual presentation has its flaws too. I’m not one to slate television made decades ago for unconvincing effects, but the “glass shattering” transitions between scenes and when Riker “kills” various people in his vision is unbearably corny. Similarly, the score goes overboard here, playing discordant notes to try to hammer home for the audience that something is amiss here, when the plot and acting do a good enough job without having to elbow the viewer in the ribs for minutes at a time.

More to the point, “Frame of Mind” basically has one move -- Riker might be crazy!!! There’s no real sense of escalation or progression once he pops into the alien mental hospital. From there, it’s just a back and forth and back and forth between the Enterprise and the hospital without anyone knowing what’s real and what’s fake. The plot doesn’t advance, beyond the occasional sense that things might be coming to fruition with a “trial” in alien land and the possibility of escape. It’s just more of the same for a solid thirty minutes or so.

The one exception is that the episode manages to pull a solid fake out in there. When Worf and Data show up to rescue Riker from the mental hospital, and transport him to the Enterprise, you buy it as a real possibility. (Savvy viewers might note that the final act had just started, so it was unlikely that was “all she wrote” given how much time was left in the episode.) It’s plausible enough that when things suddenly stop adding up, it works as a crescendo for all of the strange, unreliable experiences RIker has been going through all this time.

And yet, there’s a certain sense of anticlimax here. It turns out Riker’s mind has been resisting the ambiguous efforts at mind control or thought extraction from the aliens, and this waking nightmare was a means of putting up such resistance. A desperate act in the delusion wakes him up and he just beams back. The end. There’s some catharsis in him tearing down the set of the play (which itself sets up a good red herring of whether Will might just be falling too deep into his art), but the whole thing’s wrapped up a tad too tidily without much in the way of resolution or meaning.

“A Frame of Mind” isn’t the most brilliant rendition of what TV Tropes calls the “Cuckoo Nest” archetype. There’s some visual panache and great work from Frakes, but the episode has essentially one note that it plays over and over again. Still, the combination of Hitchcock-like tension (see: Mr. Suna staring when everyone else is clapping) with a One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest-like setting pays dividends. And the concept alone is enough to compel, making you wonder what lies your brain could be telling you as much as Riker’s does to him.

Or maybe that’s just me. So much of Star Trek is exploring the grand possibilities of the unknown through the vast reaches of space. It’s rare that the show looks so inward, suggesting that the same exploration could be done within, with things no less surprising or life-altering there to be found. As it did in “Remember Me”, The Next Generation capitalizes on the more grown-up fear that we can no longer trust our senses, that what we thought we knew has slipped away. Even when “Frame of Mind” stumbles, the terror of that persists, making it one of the franchise’s all-time most chilling episodes.