“Dust to Dust”
Written by J. Michael Straczynski
Directed by David J. Eagle
Season 3, Episode 6
Production episode 306
Original air date: February 5, 1996
It was the dawn of the third age… A security guard, who also is with NightWatch, is attempting to shut down a store that’s selling merchandise that is anti-President Clark in the wake of the revelation that he helped orchestrate the death of President Santiago. Sheridan shows up and makes it clear that freedom of expression is still a thing, despite the guard’s insistence that this is sedition. Sheridan warns the guard that if these attempts to strangle free expression will not be tolerated.
A man in downbelow is ranting, raving, and breaking things and people as he screams about a mountain falling on him. He’s eventually taken to medlab, as is a woman who was injured. A medtech notes that the woman was nearly killed in a rockslide on Mars—a mountain fell on her. Franklin immediately tests the man for Dust, an addictive drug that temporarily gives a person telepathic powers.
Bester contacts Garibaldi to let them know that he’s on his way and will be there in a few hours. The war council immediately meets and panics about Bester’s arrival, as there’s no guarantee that he won’t read folks’ minds without their permission, and if he finds out about the Rangers or the Army of Light, they’re all fucked.
When Bester is on approach to the station, Ivanova clears CnC and activates the defense grid. Sheridan, however, talks her down, insisting that Delenn’s plan will work. When Bester finally arrives—rather pissed at the radio silence that greeted him on approach, as Ivanova deliberately ignored his hails while activating the defense grid—he enters Sheridan’s office only to discover that every member of the senior staff is being shadowed by a Minbari telepath. Sheridan’s stated reason for not trusting Bester is the fate of Winters, which prompts Bester to imply that Winters was dissected by Psi Corps, which pisses Garibaldi off until Ivanova calms him down.
Sheridan gives Bester an ultimatum: either take sleeper drugs to suppress his telepathy for the duration of his visit, or the Minbari stick around. Bester chooses door #1. Franklin administers the sleepers, and Bester agrees to meet in a couple hours once they’ve taken full effect.
Vir arrives from Minbar to report to Mollari on how he’s doing in his new post, and also to prepare a report for the Centaurum, which Mollari wants to read over first. Vir’s report is even-handed and pleasant and philosophical, and all of Mollari’s notes are to instead make it more cynical and paranoid and tactical. In addition, Delenn and Lennier attempt to negotiate an accord between Mollari and the Drazi ambassador, which fails utterly due to Mollari’s intransigence.
Bester is on B5 to stop the trafficking of Dust. He has it on good authority that a dealer is trying to expand to non-human markets. Proving his point, we cut to G’Kar’s quarters, where a dealer named Lindstrom is selling Dust to G’Kar. He gives G’Kar a sample packet, which the Narn will test before finalizing the deal. Lindstrom warns G’Kar that they don’t know how it’ll work on non-humans.
Garibaldi and Bester interrogate Ashi Van Troc, a merchant who has his fingers in pretty much every black-market deal on the station. Bester lies about being able to read his mind and says he knows Van Troc is prevaricating. This gets the criminal to admit that he was approached about dealing Dust, but turned the dealer down, as he doesn’t get involved in that stuff. Van Troc’s intel leads them to Red Sector, where Garibaldi and Bester arrest Lindstrom and his suppliers and confiscate an entire shipment of Dust.
G’Kar takes the Dust sample, which has a very nasty effect on him, as he’s suddenly telepathic. He makes a beeline for Mollari’s cabin, taking out Vir and kidnapping Mollari. His telepathic interrogation of Mollari reveals that the latter got the assignment to B5 because nobody else wanted it; given the fate of the previous four attempts at a Babylon station, it’s a post nobody on Centauri Prime wants, so it’s dumped on Mollari by Emperor Turhan. G’Kar finds this hilarious. He also sees Mollari’s memory of several of the ambassador’s conversations with Morden, making it clear to G’Kar who, exactly, was responsible for the destruction of Quadrant 37. Mollari insists that he no longer works with Morden’s associates, but G’Kar doesn’t believe him and wants to know who they are.
However, before he can tear Mollari’s mind apart, he starts to see other visions: his father being tortured by the Centauri, and another Narn who is definitely Kosh the way Narn see him. Kosh urges him to break the cycle of hatred and try to build something better for the future. If he stays on the violent course he’s on now, it will result in the destruction of the Narn as a species.
G’Kar wakes up crying next to an unconscious Mollari, while behind him, Kosh wanders off, unseen by either.
In court, G’Kar pleads guilty and is sentenced to sixty days in prison. Sheridan tries to speak on his behalf, but the ombuds doesn’t buy that he was out of his mind from the drugs, as he went directly to Mollari’s quarters—that’s premeditation. Garibaldi tries to give G’Kar back the Book of G’Quan that G’Kar gave him last time, but G’Kar tells him to keep it.
Garibaldi escorts Bester off the station. G’Kar sits in his cell and thinks.
Get the hell out of our galaxy! Having previously been at least been willing to give Bester the benefit of the doubt, not having dealt with him in the first season, Sheridan is now fully part of the ever-growing We Hate Bester A Lot Club.
Ivanova is God. Ivanova comes this close to blowing Bester up to prevent any chance of him finding out their secrets. It’s obvious from the way she talks to herself that she’s trying very hard to self-justify this horrid act of murder, and shows just how deep her hatred and mistrust of the Corps is. Sheridan is barely able to talk her down.
The household god of frustration. After Bester pretends to still be telepathic in the interrogation of Van Troc, Garibaldi angrily confronts Bester about still being able to use his psi powers, because Garibaldi apparently skipped the class about how to conduct an interrogation in security school and didn’t realize that Bester was bullshitting Van Troc. Seriously, lying to the perp to get a response is Interrogation 101, and Garibaldi should know that, and the only reason he didn’t is because the script needs to let the viewer know that Bester is lying. It would’ve been much better—and not made Garibaldi out to be spectacularly incompetent at his job—if Garibaldi very reluctantly complimented Bester on his technique, especially since Van Troc couldn’t possibly have known that Bester was on sleepers.
If you value your lives, be somewhere else. Delenn is able to scare up a room full of Minbari telepaths in a remarkably short time. She also fails to negotiate a peaceful solution to the growing Centauri-Drazi crisis.
In the glorious days of the Centauri Republic… Vir’s report is that the Minbari are a lovely people interested in culture and art, they have cities that are thousands of years old, and that they’re a deeply spiritual people.
Mollari’s counter to this is that they are decadent and soft, out to impose their views on everyone else, and their lack of new construction is a sign of their faltering economy, and it may make them aggressive. However, he says Vir should leave in the part about how they’re deeply spiritual—it always scares people.
Though it take a thousand years, we will be free. G’Kar takes Dust, even though he doesn’t know how it will affect him, since the drug was designed for humans. It does give him telepathy, but also makes him susceptible to Kosh’s manipulations.
We live for the one, we die for the one. One of the things the senior staff fears is Bester finding out about the Rangers.
The Corps is mother, the Corps is father. At the end of the episode, Bester meets up with another Psi Cop so he can talk in incredibly clumsy exposition about how Dust was actually created by the Psi Corps as a method of finding new telepaths (at which it has been somewhat less than a howling success) and he was really just here to keep it from being sold to aliens.
The Shadowy Vorlons. Kosh sets G’Kar on the more spiritual path that he will continue to follow for the rest of the show by inserting himself into G’Kar’s mind.
Looking ahead. G’Kar gets flashes of some of the future events Mollari has had dreams and/or visions of, including being crowned emperor and seeing the Shadows flying overhead on Centauri Prime.
Welcome aboard. Recurring regular Walter Koenig is back from “A Race Through Dark Places” as Bester, as is Judy Levitt (Koenig’s wife) as an unnamed Psi Cop. Koenig will return later this season in “Ship of Tears.”
Jim Norton plays the image of G’Kar’s father, having previously played Ombuds Wellington in “Grail” and “The Quality of Mercy,” as well as Dr. Lazarenn in “Confessions and Lamentations.” Perhaps because he was busy playing this role, a different ombuds is seen in this episode, played by Dani Thompson.
Trivial matters. G’Kar will next be seen still serving his prison sentence in “Messages from Earth,” though he will be released early by Garibaldi in “Point of No Return.”
Vir was made Centauri Ambassador to Minbar in “A Day in the Strife.” The evidence of Clark’s role in the assassination of Santiago was found and made public in “Voices of Authority,” which is also when G’Kar gave Garibaldi his copy of the Book of G’Quan. Winters was revealed to be a sleeper agent for Psi Corps in “Divided Loyalties.” G’Kar described his father’s awful fate at the hands of the Centauri in “And Now for a Word.”
G’Kar telepathically sees the conversations that Mollari had with Morden in “Chrysalis” and “Revelations.”
Kosh similarly inserted himself into Sheridan’s thoughts in “All Alone in the Night.”
The echoes of all of our conversations.
“And if I had a baseball bat, we could hang you from the ceiling and play piñata.”
…
“A piñata, huh? So you think of me as something bright and cheerful full of toys and candy for young children? Thank you, that makes me feel much better about our relationship.”
—Garibaldi making it clear how much he hates Bester and Bester taking the piss in order to annoy Garibaldi even more…
The name of the place is Babylon 5. “The great and powerful Londo Mollari got his job because no one else was stupid enough to take it!” It’s hard for an episode that heavily features Mollari and G’Kar to be bad, ditto for an episode that guest stars Walter Koenig as Bester, and this episode lives up to that promise, as it’s very well done, despite some clunky scripting.
G’Kar getting to see inside Mollari’s head is very provocative, mainly because Mollari is much more complicated than G’Kar is likely to have ever given him credit for. G’Kar has always seen the Centauri ambassador as a tiresome buffoon at best and a vicious representative of a vicious people at worst. G’Kar’s telepathic invasion of Mollari raises the question of how much of Mollari’s emotions does he also feel? When he sees Morden’s response of “One thing at a time” to Mollari’s joking comment about destroying the Narn homeworld, does G’Kar also feel the obvious discomfort Mollari had with Morden’s serious response to his jocular query?
As ever, both Andreas Katsulas and Peter Jurasik are superb. I especially love the way Jurasik plays Mollari’s verbal evisceration of Vir’s report, which is told with his usual bombastic semi-folksy humor. (He claims Vir shows the most political naïveté since Lord Jarno, whose speech was so pathetic it was considered that he be sterilized so there was no danger of him reproducing. Then they remembered who his wife was and realized it wouldn’t be an issue.)
Which makes it hit that much harder when G’Kar drops Vir like a sack of potatoes and tortures Mollari.
Meanwhile, we have Koenig continuing to kill it as the telepath you love to hate. It’s especially fun to watch as he pokes everyone with a stick, being deliberately provocative and/or deliberately obtuse in order to get a reaction out of the mundanes. In addition, Bester actually accomplishes his goal, reminding us that he’s a force to be reckoned with. While our heroes were able to keep their secrets from him, the end result of Bester’s mission was a complete success for Psi Corps.
The only thing that holds back the episode are, as I said, some bits of really clunky scripting. There’s Garibaldi’s misunderstanding of Bester’s interrogation technique, done to provide exposition at the expense of character, making Garibaldi look incompetent in order to spoon-feed the viewer. There’s Kosh’s fortune-cookie nonsense to G’Kar in his telepathic vision. There’s the awkward negotiation between Mollari and the Drazi and its aftermath, which very clumsily tells us that Vir still believes in Mollari even though he’s a dick. And there’s Bester’s infodump to his fellow Psi Cop, the latter of whom is solely there so Bester can tell her things she already knows but will spoon-feed the viewer some more.
On the other hand, you also have Ivanova talking herself into blowing up Bester while alone in CnC, which is well-written and phenomenally performed by Claudia Christian. You’ve got Bester’s banter with Garibaldi (the piñata bit quoted above is epic). And you’ve got the interactions between Mollari and G’Kar, which always sing.
Next week: “Exogenesis.”