act 2 neural apparatus softlock bug (help)

[Blitzer]

spoilerish so maybe dont read this if you havent gotten this far

so i'm in act 2, in the ithilid lair before the rest of the ketheric fight. if its important, my team consists of my player character (half elf druid), jaheira, shadowheart and wyll.

i'm in the tadpoling room, before the fight with the mind flayers, interacting with the neural apparatus and it starts a conversation but nothing happens. it says i'm in a conversation but the scene doesn't play, i cant use the character, exit the conversation, he's just frozen like that. i can move the other characters around but they're t-posing and if they interact with anything, the map goes dark and everything just kinda disappears(?)

before this, i successfully interacted with the apparatus and won the fight, but zevlor and the other two started attacking me, (i dont know if this is part of the bug or if i did something wrong, i think one of my characters auto-attacked him as he passed by and maybe that angered him, but anyway,) i had made a save before i entered the battle in case i died anyways, so i just loaded up the save to try the fight again and see if he still fights me after we kill all the mindflayers, but then this bug happened.

it does this every time i open the save, or any save in this location for that matter. loading up saves from before this, shadowheart t-poses and floats around and will not do any animations, sometimes jaheira does this too. i can have conversations with other things, for the most part, just not the apparatus, but i can't progress in the game at all, unless i let wyll die i guess. i haven't tried that yet, though.

my friend said this is soft locking, i'm not a really big gamer or well versed in stuff like this so i don't know what to do. i've done everything i can think of or that my friends told me to do, restarted everything, deleted the saves where the bug was present and started from the beginning of the lair, but it still happens and they're still t posing the whole time, and i can't find anyone saying anything else about this bug. please help ):