“Frame of Mind” (6×21)
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On paper, this feels like a mishmash of two fourth season episodes: “First Contact”, in which Riker’s undercover mission goes south on an alien world), and “Future Imperfect”, in which Riker is trapped in a complex simulation that challenges his sense of reality.
What sets this one apart is the real horror movie quality it brings to the table, and the ways it destabilizes the audience’s understanding of what is going on, starting with the opening scene: We appear to be picking up with Riker in medias res, in a climactic showdown between him and his jailer. But then we hear Data’s voice as the psychiatrist, which hints that something is wrong, and indeed it is shortly revealed that the whole scene is a performance in Dr. Crusher’s play, her take on a Suddenly, Last Summer-style play. But what neither Riker nor the audience will learn until the end of the episode is that in fact, our initial assumption was correct: In actuality, we are picking up with Riker in medias res, days after his away mission went terribly wrong. But he is not equipped to realize that because he has been drugged, placed into a simulation, and had brain damage inflicted upon him.
The one way the episode plays fair with the audience is that it continues the convention of not having an exterior establishing shots of the Enterprise during the scenes when Riker is unconscious. Other than the the credits sequence, I’m pretty sure the only exterior shot of the ship is the final shot of the episode.
There were moments of brilliance in Frakes’s performance in this episode, but also quite a bit of overacting. It’s a hard thing to calibrate; when you don’t know what’s real and what’s not, hysteria is a natural response and it’s hard to get the balance of that right. One thing his performance did well was keep us in Riker’s headspace; Television, and episodic procedural television in particular, is very plot-driven and external. But this episode was almost entirely character-driven, and very internal. And it did a good job of ensuring that that stakes were real, even if the events unfolding were not.
The most powerful scene for me was the concluding one, in which Riker violently tears down the play’s sets; it felt like a viscerally true response to what he had endured, to assert control over an environment that had deprived him of control, and tear down this awful experience to put it behind him. The simulation would never have allowed him to do that; in fact, it was only when he started burning everything down with the phaser that he was able to shake loose of the simulation and regain consciousness.
The creepiest part was the way Suna kept appearing and staring at Riker silently, in the science uniform that was just a shade or two off from the other science uniforms. He reminded me in those beats of the highway patrol officer in the first half-hour of Psycho.
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