Disregarding Stevelin's unfounded "celestial chess game" theory, they do bring up an interesting point relating to something in the OPs post, specifically about how the Emperor may scold us, but he never tries to dominate us when we do something like go to the creche. Can he actually do that? Is that something he's capable of given the effects of the prism itself? It's stopping us from being dominated by the Absolute, so really we should be free from being dominated by a lesser illithid. Though I suppose we do see from act 1 in the crashed nautiloid that we can at least be controlled. But really I think we shouldn't be, just from a logical standpoint. But then the prism seems very inconsistent in howits protection works anyway. Correct me if I'm wrong but it doesn't seem as though Moonrise Tower is the place where the tadpole mindcontrol is actually "activated" as best I can tell, it seems like as soon as you're tadpoled, you're under the absolute's control, so there's no clear reason why most of the party, save Lae'zel and maybe Shadowheart, would be entirely free from the tadpole's control when we meet them. But I may be misremembering, I haven't played the game in a long while at this point.