Frame of Mind
- Commander Riker is in the midst of preparing for the performance of a play; in the play Riker is playing a patient in mental institution who murdered someone and Data plays the doctor who is treating him; Dr. Crusher is directing the play; whie taking a break from rehearsing Riker is informed that he is needed for a search and rescue mission
- before taking off on the mission Riker and Data perform the play for a small audience; Riker begins to have hallucinations of a crew member that isn't on the Enterprise; then he is in a mental institution and can't remember his name, then he back on the Enterprise; the story whips back and forth between the two locations making it very difficult to determine what is real and what is not
- this is a done-in-one, there is a resolution which resolves the question of what actually happened
- this episode really messed with my head; it was a wild ride; it kept me guessing right up until the reveal at the end
- Susanna Thompson didn't have a very big role in this story and looks nothing like she does on Arrow; she plays an alien and is wearing a fair amount of prosthetic makeup
- Jonathan Frakes was great in this episode, very convincing even when he was rehearsing for the play at the beginning of the episode
- this episode made me think of Existenz, a virtual reality film written and directed by David Cronenberg in which similarly it became increasingly difficult to tell if the main characters were still in the VR environment or not
- a little background on what brought me to watch this episode; I listened to a recent episode of the Daily Rios yesterday in which Peter was talking about the back half of Season 1 of Arrow; one of the subjects that came up was some of Susanna Thompson's (Moira Queen) previous roles; he mentioned an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space 9; I decided to look her up on imdb and found that she had also appeared on The Next Generation and Voyager, playing different roles on each show
- she appeared on two episodes of TNG but this is the one that I chose to watch, in part because it reminded me of a story I heard about on a recent episode of Word Balloon from an original series novel or fan film which sounded a bit like the one sentence description of this episode that I found on Netflix: Riker begins to question reality when he finds himself in an insane asylum and faces the prospect that his life on the Enterprise is a delusion
- I started watching the episode thinking I would just dip my toe in the water and finish watching it later; I quickly got sucked in and felt compelled to stick with it
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