Frame of Mind

It's Mindwarp Royale for Riker in perhaps the greatest of all TNG episodes

It's "Frame of Mind"... if you don't know what this one is about, I'm not sure we can be friends any more.

Okay, maybe that was a bit harsh.

For those of you who are bizarrely reading a Substack about a TV show you’ve never watched, this one is about Riker rehearsing for a play called “Frame of Mind”, about an imprisoned man who is pressured to confess to a crime he didn’t commit. Or is it about Riker being stuck in an insane asylum where he imagines he is a bridge officer on a Federation starship…? Reality twists itself into a pretzel in this episode, and if we like to think we know what’s real and what’s twisted fantasy, this episode will certainly make us doubt what’s real by the time it’s done with us!

Words

It was late in the season six run, and the writing team were low on ideas and running on coffee grounds. Then, Brannon Braga had the slimmest of concepts:

I had a notion: What if Riker woke up in an alien insane asylum and had no idea how he got there and was told he was crazy?

Both Michael Piller and Rick Berman were sceptical, but when another story failed to materialise, they greenlit this one out of sheer desperation. As Jeri Taylor remembered:

We didn’t have time to do a new story, so we went ahead and ‘broke’ this...which is the most risky thing in the world to do. They’re painstaking, they take days, and if you lose it you’re doomed!

But after a gruelling three day session to break the story, the writers came up with a workable storyline that genuinely impressed Piller. For Braga, the use of dark, surrealistic imagery was the core of the appeal:

It was fun for me to do. One of my favourite films is Roman Polanski's Repulsion, and I think the influence will show through. I’ve always wanted to write something about someone doubting their sense of reality and I think it works.

But why Riker? Braga considered the character underutilised.

Riker’s a friendly character, he’s the one human you can do humour with, you can do action – and here you can jerk him around and drive him crazy!

Fun times! Owing to the hostile cultural winds blowing against the word ‘crazy’, Braga doubted whether to use the term or not. He stuck to his guns, and I’m glad he did - you don’t destigmatise mental illness by pussyfooting around specific words, but by changing the way people feel about mental problems. As Braga once put the matter:

People use this word, it’s a good word, and I decided to use it. When you get too ‘politically correct’ it shows, and what's ‘PC’ today won't be five years from now. Star Trek is a show that transcends time, and we try not to date it.

Well said!

No idea who the young guest in the Captain’s Chair might be, but this photograph was taken during the shooting of Frame of Mind

The director of this one was James L. Conway, who had not been brought in since the season one finale “The Neutral Zone”. He’d been busy working as a producer on the Western show Guns of Paradise and the police procedural Bodies of Evidence, but when that show ended, Conway came back to Paramount looking for work and landed this corker of an episode to direct.

If I wanted to be unkind, I’d complain that this was a mash up of “First Contact” (Riker’s covert away mission goes south) and “Future Imperfect” (layers of reality flip- flopping), but you’d have to be especially jaded to think that mattered in the face of what this story achieves. As Naren Shankar later said of this episode:

I think this is the best script Brannon has ever written for the series. It was a phenomenally cool first draft and it’s an incredibly great episode. It’s a darker season this year which is funny because, in general, we’re not a very dark bunch. Dark stories are very attractive, they’re interesting and the emotions they bring up are attractive because they’re powerful and off-putting. We have had some very intense episodes and gut-wrenching stuff. There’s not a lot of light moments in “Face Of The Enemy” and “Chain of Command”.

Pause for a moment to recognise just how amazing it is that season six has all these great Mindwarp episodes - and “Frame of Mind” is the glittering Empress of reality-bending.

Acting Roles

This is beyond a doubt Jonathan Frakes finest performance in anything. Braga agreed, calling his delivery here “a real tour de force”. Frakes was more modest about it all, saying little more than that “it was a terrifying show and was creepy to do” and praising Braga’s script for being “wonderfully dark”.

As well as getting good backup from the regulars (I love Brent Spiner as Data-playing-interrogator-within-the-play!), he also gets solid support from a variety of guest performers, most prominently David Selburg as Syrus.

Selburg played the doomed historian back in “The Big Goodbye”, and crops up again in Voyager and Enterprise. He also got a few small roles in the movies On Deadly Ground, Species, and The Bourne Identity - although you’d have to be paying attention to notice him.

Among the Tilonians, however, the performance I enjoy the most is Gary Werntz as Mavek, who mocks Riker in the cafeteria and appears as a sinister visage at several key points in the episode.

He was in two episodes of L.A. Law before landing this role, and has a host of bit parts all over the place. You might have spotted him in Deep Impact as Elijah Wood’s girlfriend’s father. Then again, maybe not.

Andrew Prine plays Administrator Suna/Lieutenant Suna, who isn’t asked to do much except appear repeatedly in situations that freak out Frakes’ Riker.

Prine pops up again as a Cardassian in DS9, and also had a recurring role in the mini-series V and the TV series of Weird Science. His career started in 1955, and he appeared in numerous Westerns - including the aforementioned Guns of Paradise. I do wonder if the director of this episode (who was producer on that show) recommended him to casting…

Lastly, although she only has one scene, I absolutely love Susanna Thompson as Jaya, who tries to contact the USS Yorktown using a spoon.

She gets to replace Alice Krige as the Borg Queen in Voyager, and you can see a breakdown of her rather impressive career in the WAM for “The Next Phase”, where she played a Romulan.

Finally, I note that although Worf does win a battle in this episode, it’s all part of Riker’s hallucinations and so it doesn't count for his score card. Better luck next time, Worf!

Models, Make-up, and Mattes

Incredibly, this is effectively a bottle show! The only SFX to speak of are the latex on the Tilonians and the set for Ward 47 of the Tilonus Institute for Mental Disorders (which doubles, of course, for the set of Dr Crusher’s play, also called “Frame of Mind”).

And to be frank, the set design is all about clever use of this one door!

Once again, the TNG team show that you don't need spaceships and big battle scenes to make a great sci-fi story. This is another bottle show that puts everything into the hands of the performers, and pays it off in spades. Jonathan Frakes’ finest performance, and the absolute pinnacle of the season six Mindwarps, this episode is as good as it gets. Bravo!