“I may be surrounded by insanity, but I am not insane.”
I’d always had it in my head that I’d been somewhat unfair to “Frame of Mind” when I was younger. I quite disliked it, but I’ve heard it spoken of fondly over the years and was looking forward to giving it another go. No joy, however. This is an awful episode: misconceived, shoddily executed, and unavoidably silly.
The table stakes of Star Trek: The Next Generation are working against “Frame of Mind” right from the off. Stake 1: It’s not actually possible to convince the audience that Riker is crazy and the Enterprise doesn’t exist. Other shows have pulled this off (Buffy did quite a good one in its sixth season, and Deep Space Nine scored one of Star Trek’s all-time highs with “Far Beyond the Stars”). Next Gen, though, has neither the flexibility as a concept nor the dexterity among its staff writers to get anywhere near the target on this thing. So we have an episode based on tensions of reality and sanity that do not, in any convincing way, work as written.
Stake 2: Jonathan Frakes swings for the fences in the lead role, and achieves some surprisingly excellent results in some sequences… but whenever the script requires him to go flat-out raving mad, he just can’t get it done. Crazy Riker is so far over the top (and not helped by the ham-fisted writing) that there are about five scenes in “Frame of Mind” that are unintentionally laugh-out-loud hilarious.
Stake 3: This kind of Star Trek, which became increasingly frequent during the ‘90s, doesn’t actually work. It’s the “psychodrama” sub-genre, wherein the usual exploring of strange new worlds / seeking out of new civilizations is foregone in lieu of wandering around in one character’s Kafkaesque nightmare. But Star Trek is (in spite of some of its marvelously eccentric flourishes) the dramatic equivalent of vanilla, missionary-position sex. There’s nothing wrong with it, and it achieves everything you want from sex, but it has no room for anything resembling transgressive thinking. Psychodrama, on the other hand, is built on transgressive thinking: the inversion and perversion of rule sets around themes of madness, reliability, and body horror. In short: no one on Star Trek should have ever tried to make this show, or this kind of show.
In spite of all this, I must admit, I’ve always liked the final image, one of Next Gen’s only truly gothic, suggestive visuals: Riker, unable to sleep until it’s done, single-handedly tearing the “Frame of Mind” theatrical set apart all alone. There’s more expressiveness in those five seconds than in the preceding 45 minutes.
Blogging The Next Generation runs every Tuesday as I work my way through the episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation on blu-ray. Season Six is in stores. Season Seven will conclude the blog in early 2015 – you can pre-order the final season now.