Original air date: May 3, 1993
The episode opens with a sweaty and haggard Riker sitting in a chair, and he seems to be in trouble. An unseen interviewer probes him with questions as Riker desperately tries to tell him what he wants to hear, defending himself against a supposed murder he committed in a fit of psychosis. The exchange grows more heated... until Riker flubs a line. He's rehearsing a play, Frame of Mind, with Data as his evil psychiatrist and Crusher directing. She decides it's time to call it a night.
The next morning, Picard briefs Riker about an urgent situation on the planet Tilonus IV, which is experiencing massive civil unrest following the collapse of the local government. A Federation research team, now a prime target for unscrupulous factions looking for intel and technology, needs immediate extraction. Riker will be going down alone and undercover once they arrive. But not to worry, Picard says, because there will be plenty of time for the play before they arrive.
Worf briefs Riker on the details of his mission, including the latest intelligence and the disguise he will be using to blend in with the locals. Riker's flippant sense of humor doesn't get any laughs from Worf, who chides him for not taking things seriously. Then as Worf is demonstrating how to use a ritual dagger that will be part of the disguise, he accidentally nicks Riker across the temple.
Crusher fixes Riker's cut with ease — reminding him that it won't get him out of the play tomorrow — though strangely Riker still feels some pain. Crusher finds nothing else wrong, but her attention is then diverted as a badly burned engineer is brought in, crying in pain. Then, for apparently no reason, he stares accusatorily at Riker...
Shaken by this strange turn of events, Riker has a talk with Troi in Ten-Forward. He admits that he has felt unusually paranoid for the past few days, not unlike his character in Frame of Mind. Troi isn't concerned, though — it's a disturbing play filled with dark psychological themes, and it's not necessarily unhealthy for Riker to explore those feelings within the safe context of fiction. Riker then notices an unfamiliar alien officer, whom he had run into earlier in the corridor, staring daggers at him from another table. He gets up to leave and Riker shrugs it off.
The next day, Riker and Data are performing the play in front of a small audience. They close the final scene perfectly. Riker receives a standing ovation from the entire crowd, except for that same strange crewman staring stoically at him. One final bow for the audience, and suddenly everything has changed. The fake set has been replaced by a real hospital; Data has been replaced by an alien psychiatrist (the same species, but not the same person, as the creepy Lieutenant).
The doctor, Syrus, explains that Riker is a patient at the Tilonus Institute for Mental Disorders, and that his life onboard the Enterprise is a chronic delusion. Though Riker is incredulous at first, he starts to remember pieces of his history at the hospital.
Riker spends some time in the common area with the other patients in his ward. One of them claims to be an abducted Starfleet officer, which certainly gets Riker's attention, until she pulls out her "makeshift communicator"... an obviously ordinary spoon. According to Mavek, one of the orderlies, Riker found his way there after committing an especially violent murder against an unnamed man. In contrast to the friendly Dr. Syrus, Mavek seems to delight in taunting Riker, to the point that Riker ends up lashing out in a rage. They drug him, and then...
...Riker wakes up in his quarters aboard Enterprise. Though shaken, he dismisses the event as a dream and assures a worried Dr. Crusher he is ready for the real play.
A premature reaction, unfortunately. The play is going well until hallucinations from his dream start intruding, causing him to lose his nerve. Again, Riker notices the suspicious alien in the audience, so he grabs him and demands to know who he is. But it's just Lieutenant Suna, who seems as frightened as everyone else by Riker's sudden outburst.
In sickbay, Crusher can't find anything wrong with Riker apart from his obvious mental exhaustion, and with no other witnesses to what he saw, Riker has no choice but to get some rest and hope for the best. On his way back to his quarters, he once again finds himself back at the hospital, shouting in panic through the window of his locked cell.
After he calms down, Riker speaks with Dr. Syrus, and admits that his life aboard the Enterprise no longer feels real.
Riker agrees to try a form of psychoanalysis called reflection therapy, where elements of his subconscious are represented holographically for him to interact with. Troi, Worf, and Picard appear and describe a memory of him being attacked in a dark alley. Then another figure appears, the alien Lieutenant from before.
Back in the common area, Dr. Crusher comes in dressed as an inspector and sits down at Riker's table. Riker, convinced he is hallucinating, does his best to ignore her as she tells him that something went wrong during his undercover mission on Tilonus IV and that there is a conspiracy to keep him there. That night, Data and Worf break into his cell to rescue him. Riker resists them, but they manage to return him to the Enterprise.
Unsurprisingly, Riker is not doing so great by this point. Crusher checks on him in sickbay while Picard explains more about what happened during his mission to Tilonus IV. Riker's temple suddenly starts bleeding again for no reason, once again throwing his reality into question. The others try to calm him, but he cold-cocks Worf, steals his phaser, and turns it against the others.
Riker turns the phaser on himself and fires. Reality shifts back to the mental hospital where Syrus, Mavek, and Suna are discussing his deteriorating condition, implying his earlier "capture" was another hallucination. Riker asks why he still has the phaser. Suna tells him it's actually a table knife he stole — a claim that is immediately undercut when Riker shoots Mavek, shattering him into a thousand pieces.
Enough of a Mind Screw for you yet? It is for Riker, who has realized now that neither of the two competing realities makes sense. He turns the phaser up to maximum and shoots again, and the room is once again replaced by the Enterprise stage. The audience stares expressionlessly at him... and Suna, who still remains.
Suna makes some vague remarks to try to calm Riker, but he's not having any of it. He shoves Suna with a Big "NO!", earning him applause from the audience. He shoves Suna again, and the applause from the audience intensifies with cheering. He strikes the set with his bare hands and finally, finally the real world returns.
Riker lies on a medical table with a device attached to his temple. The real Suna (if that is his name) tries to have him sedated, but Riker fights back, grabs his communicator nearby, and signals Worf for immediate beamout.
Once back aboard the real Enterprise, they piece together what happened. During his mission on Tilonus IV, Riker was attacked in an alley and abducted by one of the hostile factions mentioned at the start, who were trying to forcibly extract information directly from his brain. His entire experience, Troi believes, was his mind attempting to resist and wake itself up, fastening on the recent memory of the play, but interposed with details from the present: his abductor's face, the device on his temple.
Before he gets some rest, for his own peace of mind, Riker goes to the set of the now-finished Frame of Mind play. Dr. Crusher tells Riker that her and a crew were going to take down the set in the morning, but considering what Riker had gone through, he would not be able to sleep knowing it was up. Crusher departs, and Riker begins his recovery from his ordeal by taking down the set with his bare hands.
Tropes:
- All Just a Dream: Not the cop-out it usually is, because we learn Riker has been taken prisoner and is being subjected to a brainwashing procedure. He may have been "dreaming" in a narrow technical sense, but his choices still mattered, and in fact were key to his mental self-defense against what's really happening.
- Big "NO!" : Several times, particularly when Riker is torn from one reality to the other.
- Chekhov's Gun:
- During the briefing for Riker's mission to Tilonus IV, Worf nicks Riker in the side of his head with the nisroh. When Crusher fixes the wound, Riker notes that it still hurts. That wound would play a significant role towards the latter part of the episode.
- The same briefing has Worf give Riker a communicator concealed in a Tilonian pendant. Said pendant is able to help Riker escape his capture at the end of the episode.
- Chewing the Scenery: Riker, big time, when he's acting in-universe."YOU BET I'M AGITATED!!!"
- Cuckoo Nest: A textbook example. Commander Riker unexpectedly finds himself in a mental asylum where his experience aboard the Enterprise fades away like memories of a dream, and the asylum personnel treat him like a mental patient and tell him that his life in Starfleet is a delusion. At times, Riker himself seems to believe it is true.
- Diagnosis: Knowing Too Much: Subverted once as a shipboard play, then later played completely straight. Riker's role is playing a frazzled asylum patient who is seemingly being abused. Riker's character thinks that he has made enough progress to finally go home and leave the asylum. The doctors there (one being played by Lt. Cmdr Data) drug him (also seemingly) whenever he shows a glimmer of independent thought. Later in the episode, Riker starts to seemingly have hallucinations that suggest that he is not actually a commander aboard a starship, and that he has been delusional in a similar mental asylum this whole time, with an equally-abusive staff.
- Dramatically Missing the Point: During the "reflection therapy" scene, in which the holograms of Troi, Worf and Picard describe what is later confirmed to be Riker's abduction during the mission, the Picard hologram states that Riker saw the face of one of his captors. Riker asks what he looked like, and a fourth hologram appears — that of "Lt. Suna". This is, of course, his own subconscious directly answering the question, but he fails to pick up on this at the time, having already been mentally and physically brow-beat into submission, instead asking an equally baffled Syrus what part of his mind Suna represents.
- Dream Emergency Exit: When Riker realizes that neither world is reality, he first shoots a barrier in one and then smashes the wall of the second, which wakes him up and he escapes.
- Epiphanic Prison: The aliens are trying to get Riker to reject the Enterprise as real. It works for a time, as Riker admits that the hospital is where reality makes the most sense, but he eventually realizes that neither world makes sense. Once he accepts this, he is able to wake up from his drug-induced sleep and escape his captors.
- Fake-Out Opening: In the cold open, Riker is seen arguing with a figure while in some sort of prison. One would think (based on the preview of the episode) that he was already captured, but we then cut to see Dr. Crusher and realize that Riker is only acting.
- One thing that gives this away prematurely is that the voice of his 'abductor' is clearly Data.
- Foreshadowing: The fact that the Enterprise just happens to have a new Lieutenant who is the same species as the planet they are visiting is exactly the kind of
Fridge Logic one might encounter in a dream. - Freudian Trio: When Riker is undergoing a psychiatric procedure in the mental institution, a hologram of Worf represents his id, Troi represents his superego, and Picard his ego.
- Gaslighting: The aliens try to brainwash Riker by making him think he's insane.
- Hope Spot:
- The female patient Riker meets in his ward claims to be an abducted Starfleet officer just like him. She then also claims that her metal spoon is an improvised communicator; Riker's reaction makes it clear what his opinion of that is. Of course, the Federation does have impressive technology, but not even they have achieved that level of miniaturization even in purpose-built electronics.
- Riker's rescue by Worf and Data seems to play this way as to imply that he is finally being rescued, but things go downhill from there with regards to his nagging head wound.
- How We Got Here: It's implied that the first act of the episode represents events before he undertook the mission to Tilonus. Once Riker is freed, a clearer picture of what happened occurs.
- Mind Screw: Just how much of the story actually happened and how much is Riker's delusion is never really made clear. It's implied that a large portion of events before the mission during the episode's first act occurred precisely as they did before Riker started switching realities, with the only exceptions being Worf nicking him with the nisroh, the engineering crewmember staring daggers at Riker, and the appearance of Suna himself.
- Percussive Therapy: Two different variations occur here.
- An inside-your-mind example: Riker's repeated shoving of Suna and the audience reacting are a form of therapy to restore Riker's mind from the Tilonian's influence. It works and allows Riker to wake up.
- Originally, Dr. Crusher was going to have a crew take down the set the morning after Riker's return. But considering what Riker had just gone through, she allows Riker to do it himself as a means to provide closure. He does proceed to do so, albeit with his bare hands and without any tools.
- Shattering the Illusion: At the climax of the story, Riker realizes his recent experiences haven't been real. This culminates with some characters and scenery literally appearing to shatter into small pieces as Riker manages to escape the dream has become trapped in.
- Shout-Out: The entire episode is one big one to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
- Show Within a Show: The plot of the episode is interwoven with the play that the characters are putting on.
- Spotting the Thread:
- A wound keeps mysteriously reappearing on Riker's right temple, which is revealed to be where his interrogators placed the IV.
- Riker notices one alien who keeps appearing in both "realities". Riker doesn't consciously recognize him, but it turns out he is one of the abductors.
- Trash the Set: At the end of the episode, Riker tears down the set for the play by hand to make sure he's no longer in a hallucination. As he put it, he wouldn't be able to sleep knowing it was still up.
- What Happened to the Mouse?:
- Though we get to see several variations of Data and Riker's Frame of Mind performance, the ending reveals that they were all part of his subconscious delusion. The actual play happened before Riker's capture, so the audience never finds out how it really went. It's implied that Riker's first representation of the play seen in the episode is the correct one, as Troi explains that his subconscious used the elements of the play to allow Riker to figure out what was real or not.
- In addition, it's never revealed what happened with the missing team of Federation scientists who Riker was sent in to rescue in the first place, as the last time they come up is when the delusional inmate makes Riker think she might be one of them. Presumably they were rescued offscreen, though how and when is unknown.
- Wrongfully Committed: Played with. Riker joins a presentation of a theatre play on the Enterprise where his in-play character is committed to a mental asylum. His character is increasingly agitated at his treatment in the mental asylum, where he claims he is being abused (saying they were controlling his meals and his speaking and thinking habits, as well as suppressed his free will with drugs and confinement when he shows it). The in-play doctor, portrayed by Data, brushes it off as a delusion. Throughout the episode, Riker himself is bombarded with multiple delusions that make him question whether he really is himself, or his experiences on the Enterprise have all been a fantasy.
