igh Bester.

and who might want weapons that don’t turn get picked up by weapons scanners? who might be interested in a drug that let’s non-telepaths do telepathic crime? who might have an interest in Dust…unfortunately, unavoidably, and predictably:

G'Kar.

there are no non-telepaths, which is an established thing, and will come around to be Important, so the Narn have a vested interest in telepathy. they also have a hell of a time getting weapons to the resistence. annnnd have a good reason to want to use anything available to fight the Centauri off their homeworld.

thankfully Kosh intervenes, in his own way.

and frankly Dust is an interesting thing, the whole explanation for it in terms of how it works is typical of B5’s attempts to be sci-fi about telepathy and unfortunately failing slightly because it would make wayyyyyyyy more sense for telepathy to be controlled by multiple genes to start with. and I’d have to check but I don’t think this explanation makes sense even if telepathy was a one gene deal.

but the WHAT and the WHY are interesting.

Dust is a drug that briefly allows the user to experience a kind of telepathy, a brief intense thing where they can essentially mind-rape other people and live their whole life in a matter of moments. it’s of course very addictive because what’s a good street drug if it’s not addictive. also damaging and bad for the target. plus as seen in this episode the user can lose touch with reality and essentially be stuck in the other person’s experience which can lead them to become violent in the experience is too intense or traumatic.

non-telepathic victims recover (physically anyway) in a few days but telepaths who are victims of Dust users almost never recover. Because telepaths are so rare, burn out so easily, Dust is something that the Psi Corp particularly doesn’t want out there.

and while Dust was created to work on humans, now we have a Dust dealer interested in selling to aliens which means unpredictable effects and general badness…

“A Darkness carried in the heart cannot be cured by moving the body from one place to another. I don’t think there is anoything that can be done for him now.”

“That’s because you don’t know him. Someday he’ll surprise you.”

they’re both right.

oooooooooooooh see now this is something neat, this episode also addresses the Centauri ~buffer zone~ issue with the Drazi which is something that, in my alternative universe without this episode was kind introduced as a background thing that was technically occurring but we didn’t really here about.

though the negotiations did not…go well.

here, have a Frosted Flake

politijohn:

Originally posted by creating-tabs