Transcript for MuggleCast Episode #691, I Declare Loyalty! (OOTP Chapter 13, Detention with Dolores)
Show Intro
[Show music plays]
Andrew Sims: Welcome to MuggleCast, your weekly ride into the Wizarding World fandom. I’m Andrew.
Eric Scull: I’m Eric.
Micah Tannenbaum: I’m Micah.
Laura Tee: I’m Laura.
Andrew: And this week we are speaking the whole truth and nothing but the truth, because we are talking about Order of the Phoenix Chapter 13, “Detention with Dolores.” And helping us with our discussion this week is MuggleCast listener and Quizzitch winner, James! Welcome, James, to the show.
James: Thank you very much. Great to be here.
Andrew: Well, and congratulations on first place in our most recent Quizzitch Live. You were telling me you joined in on the trivia night very last minute?
James: Absolutely. Yeah, so this was a Sunday, and I’m in law school. It was the day before my civil procedure final, so I was planning to get up, go on my phone for 20 minutes, and then pull an Ernie Macmillan; study for nine hours.
[Andrew laughs]
James: So I happened to see that Quizzitch Live was just starting; I said, “I’ll do this first and then go do the study for nine hours,” and so I just came in and hit a hot streak, and it ended up going well.
Eric: Amazing.
Andrew: [laughs] That’s awesome. Well, yeah, thank you for participating. And I was really excited to have a Quizzitch Live winner on the show, because you must really know your stuff if you’re winning Quizzitch.
Eric: That’s hard! Like we say often, we could not do it. [laughs]
Andrew: Yeah, exactly. So let’s get your fandom ID, speaking of knowing your stuff.
James: Absolutely. So my favorite book is Order of the Phoenix, so I’m very happy to be on today for this book.
Andrew: Yes!
Eric: Aww.
James: My favorite movie is Half-Blood Prince. My Hogwarts House is Hufflepuff. My Patronus is a wild boar.
Eric and Laura: Oooh.
James: And my least favorite character of the series is actually a tie, because it’s both of the Carrows.
[Everyone laughs]
James: I think they’re terrible. They’re really just awful, but they’re also just incompetent and really bad at everything. They’re the worst. I don’t like them at all.
Eric: That’s a good one. We don’t get enough hate for the Carrows.
Andrew: Yeah. Well, thanks, James, for joining us this week, and congrats again on winning Quizzitch. So listeners, speaking of things to wear, we are in the colder season right now, so be sure to check out the MuggleCast Cozy Comfy Combo Pack to stay warm this winter. And we’re offering this combo pack at its lowest price yet, just $20 for the beanie and socks together. Only a few of these remain, so act fast. And you can visit that overstock store by going to MuggleMillennial.etsy.com; we’ll have a link in the show notes as well. And while you’re there, check out other MuggleCast merch, like signed album art, 15th anniversary T-shirts, the Sweet 16 wooden car kit, or you can just purchase the socks. Our overstock store is just one way to support us. If you enjoy what we do, we would also love your support at Patreon.com/MuggleCast. Becoming a member is the best way to support us and will get you instant access to lots of great benefits, including bonus MuggleCast, and Eric, you’ve got one prepared for us today, right?
Eric: That is absolutely correct, and in fact, we have our listeners to thank because during our mailbag episode, one of the messages we read from Iris had a little suggestion at the end of it for what to do for a bonus, and who are we to say no? We have no plethora of great ideas to do instead. So we will be Sorting the Weasleys into different Houses other than Gryffindor, and maybe some other characters if we have time as well. But you’ve heard it before, that maybe they get Sorted too soon. This time, we’re Sorting them as they are now.
Andrew: [imitating Dumbledore] “We Sort too soon. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. We Sort too soon.”
Eric: Thank you, Dumbledore.
Laura: Well, does…? I mean, that means that we’re Sorting at least one person who’s dead, if we’re Sorting them based on who they are now.
Andrew: Oooh.
Eric: Maybe just the moment before death.
Laura: Ahh, okay.
Eric: Maybe right before death’s hand came and got him.
[Andrew and Laura laugh]
Laura: Can you imagine? Surprise, you’re actually supposed to be in Slytherin. Doesn’t matter, though.
Andrew: [laughs] Well, thanks to everybody who supports us on Patreon, and we really hope you can check out the membership and hope to see you there.
Chapter by Chapter: Time-Turner
Andrew: So now it’s time for Chapter by Chapter, and this week we’re talking about Order of the Phoenix Chapter unlucky 13, “Detention with Dolores.”
Eric: We last spoke about this on January 14, 2020 on Episode 449, which we named “Torturous Toad.”
[Ticking sound]
Dumbledore: Three turns should do it, I think. Good luck.
Ron: What the…?
[Bell dings]
[Whooshing sound]
Robotic voice: Episode 449.
Andrew: Also, I will just say I think she has the worst name out of any Harry Potter character in the series. “Grubbly-Plank.”
Laura: It just makes me think of a moldy piece of wood.
Andrew: I just think of a pirate walking on a plank.
[Whooshing sound]
[Ticking sound]
Dumbledore: Mysterious thing, time.
[Bell dings]
Eric: Now, there was substantive discussion about Dolores Umbridge on that episode.
[Andrew and Laura laugh]
Eric: Oh, believe me. We didn’t overlook Umbridge.
Micah: That was so much better than what I was expecting.
[Everyone laughs]
Laura: Yeah, same. I was like, “Whoa, did we really go that hard on Umbridge’s name? It’s not a great name, I don’t think.” But then… yeah, it was great.
Eric: No, we were also very hard on Grubbly-Plank. Andrew, it’s been five years. Does she still have the worst name, do you think? Grubbly-Plank?
Andrew: That was harsh. I don’t know.
[Eric laughs]
Andrew: That was January 2020; it was a whole different world. I think I’ve evolved in that time.
Eric: It was a different… [laughs]
Andrew: But I have to say, I’m looking at the runtime of the clip we just played, and it says it’s 2 minutes 40 seconds, the version I have. I mean, obviously it ended where it did, but I was sitting here scraping my dinner plate, being like, “Oh, I got time.”
[Everyone laughs]
Eric: Oh, no, it was the shortest one yet! It’s 35 seconds. You know what must have happened? So if you were to take that clip and go all the way to the end, it’s the AI doing the numbers.
Andrew: Oh, okay.
Eric: The ones that I cut and paste into the episode. [laughs]
Andrew: Got it. That’s funny.
Eric: I can’t believe it.
Andrew: That’s really funny.
Eric: Oh, my project file. Anyway. Lots of fun.
Chapter by Chapter: Main Discussion
Andrew: Chapter 13, like I mentioned. Is it just a coincidence that this terrible chapter is Chapter 13?
Micah: No.
Eric: Yes.
James and Laura: No.
Eric: I’m going to be the one to say yes.
Laura: Micah, you brought up something really interesting related to this.
Micah: So I thought it would be fun to take a look at the other Chapter Thirteens in the Harry Potter series, and so I went through the other six books and pulled the chapter titles. Andrew, thank you for going back and doing a little bit of summaries of each of these chapters. So in Sorcerer’s Stone, Chapter 13 is “Nicolas Flamel,” and what happens in that chapter, Andrew?
Andrew: Harry has nightmares about his parents dying, so I would call that an unlucky chapter.
Micah: Fair enough. In Chamber of Secrets, Chapter 13 is “The Very Secret Diary.”
Andrew: They find the diary, the Horcrux, so that’s lucky.
Micah: Is it? In the context of the story?
[Laura laughs]
Eric: Well, they come face to face with the real villain of the book. Could be unlucky.
Andrew: This is open to interpretation. We can…
[James and Laura laugh]
Micah: Prisoner of Azkaban Chapter 13 was “Gryffindor Vs. Ravenclaw.”
Andrew: And Harry wins the Quidditch game against Ravenclaw, and he fires his Patronus at fake Dementors that are played by Slytherins, so I put that in the lucky column.
Micah: Chapter 13 of Goblet of Fire was “Mad-Eye Moody,” so starting to compare DADA professors here a little bit.
Andrew: Yeah, and Rita Skeeter writes a bad article about Arthur, and Mad-Eye turns Draco into a ferret, so I just kind of found this one to be a wash. It wasn’t necessarily lucky or unlucky for Harry.
Micah: Half-Blood Prince Chapter 13, “The Secret Riddle,” so a tie to Chamber of Secrets, perhaps.
Andrew: Isn’t that crazy? That’s a crazy coincidence, if it is a coincidence. But yeah, Dumbledore takes Harry into the memory in which he invites Tom to learn at Hogwarts. I wrote lucky for this one, but now I don’t remember why. [laughs]
Laura: Yeah, it’s interesting.
Micah: Because he’s learning something? And then finally in Deathly Hallows, Chapter 13 was “The Muggle-Born Registration Commission.” We know who is a major proponent of that.
Eric: Yeah!
Andrew: Umbridge plays a big role in this chapter, just like she does in Order of the Phoenix Chapter 13. That’s crazy.
Eric: That is pretty interesting.
Micah: So that was fun.
[Andrew and Micah laugh]
Laura: Yeah, no, it’s really cool to go back and pick out those themes. I don’t know if I would classify all of those things as being lucky or unlucky, but I do feel like the common theme for Chapter 13 in each of these books is that there’s some kind of turning point that happens in Chapter 13, and I think we can definitely see that in this chapter for a number of reasons, first of which is that we’re getting to witness Hermione continuing to get radicalized. This was something that we brought up last chapter, but after Harry’s shouting match at Umbridge gets around the school in this chapter – this chapter pretty much picks up where we left off – Harry is continuing to not have a good time at school. People are whispering about him, there are all kinds of assertions about how he must be a nutter and Dumbledore is just basically asleep at the wheel, and it kind of feels like the entire student body is doubling down on the narrative that the Daily Prophet has shoved down everyone’s throats all summer. And it’s now that Hermione actually observes a really good point, a truth, something that Harry hadn’t yet considered himself, which is that the prior year, at the end of the third task, all anyone saw was Harry come back clutching Cedric’s dead body, and they didn’t get very much time to absorb the shock and the horror of that news before they had to go home and be fed disinformation by their government and their primary media source all summer. So it’s actually not that shocking, I don’t think, that people would feel this way.
Eric: No, we live in an era – and this is true even more now than it was five years ago – where the media goes really hard on certain things, and you can actually forget or see slip away things that are based on your personal observations. So however you felt in that moment when Dumbledore said to the school that this happened – maybe you even believed him – if you go home and subsist on a diet of the Daily Prophet for two months straight, it’s crazy, but you’re going to start to think and act and see and be more susceptible to the repeated messages that are completely false, but which are repeated to you from a corrupt or crazy media.
Micah: The repetition piece of it, I think, is really important. And let’s not forget Harry’s track record here, too. The Daily Prophet has doubled and tripled down, so it’s not surprising people believe what’s being printed. Harry doesn’t have the best track record here, Dumbledore doesn’t have the best track record here, so the fact that the Prophet is spinning these to the Ministry’s liking and that people are believing it, I don’t really think it’s that far of a stretch.
James and Laura: Yeah.
Laura: Totally. I mean, to that point, I wanted to ask all of us, have we ever gotten caught up in the news cycle and believed something that later turned out to be false, or maybe we made some assumptions about something with very little information when there wasn’t a ton of information available?
Andrew: Yeah, because I think sometimes it’s easier just to read the headline that you see on social media and scroll along and just assume that it’s true. And even media sources that we trust, we can read a headline from them and not be getting the whole story, so a lack of the full picture abounds. And I’m of the belief that if you hear anything enough times, you might start believing it. I once heard an interview – sometime in the past year, I think – with someone whose job it is to constantly watch a certain news network, and they were asked in this interview, “Because of all this time you spend watching this certain news network, have you found yourself starting to drink the Kool-Aid, starting to fall for it, starting to believe everything they say?” And this person said, “Yeah, because I mean, you’re in it all day, every day, so you just naturally become convinced of what they are saying. It’s warping your mind.”
Laura: Totally.
Eric: All of these kids who think that Dumbledore is a nutter, they’re just trying to keep a good wizard down for just keeping his head down, doing the quiet work behind the scenes at Hogwarts, and they are susceptible to believe that he’s incompetent and can’t do it anymore. Amazing.
James: Part of the problem is the information environment, right? It’s not like there are people out on both sides of this and they’re talking to each other and exchanging information, having conversations about what they think. You’ve got the Prophet that is sticking completely to this very hard line that “Dumbledore is wrong. This side is crazy.” And on the other side, you’ve got the Order, and they’re not going to say that in public because anyone who believes that is ostracized. They can’t get a job; they’re shunned. So there’s not really a way, until later in the book when we see Harry making personal connections with people and them starting to believe him… we’re not going to get there with just these two sides completely separate, no one crossing over to try to make the other side see reason in a productive way.
Eric: It’s a great point.
Andrew and Laura: Yeah.
Laura: Absolutely. But what’s so funny about this is Hermione, while she is simultaneously able to see the bigger picture of what Umbridge and the Ministry have in store for education and for the wizarding world at large, at her core, she’s still really ticked off about Umbridge being allowed to teach them, especially in their OWLs year when they’re taking their Ordinary Wizarding Level exam. She has this moment where she pounds the armchair that she’s in and she’s like, “How could Dumbledore let this happen?” And… same, girl.
[Andrew laughs]
Laura: I think we all ask ourselves that question at least once a chapter, so… relatable. It was a very meta moment. But I will say, to be fair, though, fifth years have always been subject to this kind of thing at Hogwarts, just with the high turnover rate of the Defense Against the Dark Arts position anyway, in addition to the sometimes trend of those professors using the position to help Voldemort, so no fifth year has had a good experience at Hogwarts in quite some time when it comes to this subject matter.
Andrew: At this current part of the book, Hermione doesn’t understand, I guess, that Dumbledore’s hands are tied here, but Dumbledore’s hands are tied here. It wasn’t up to him. You can’t blame Dumbledore here.
Eric: Yeah, right.
Andrew: For once.
Eric: [laughs] No, we don’t know exactly what the pressure is, or exactly… we find out in this book where the red tape is and what the strings are between the Ministry, the Board of Governors, the school, but we know enough about it to probably figure that, yeah, Dumbledore can’t really have made any decision. I mean, it’s interesting to me that the kids don’t pick up on it right away; they start speculating again about the role being cursed, and that there just must be a shortage of people wanting it. While I’m sure that’s true, the Ministry was always going to plant somebody here this year, and so whether it was to fill in for Hagrid or otherwise, this was always going to be Umbridge’s year.
James: I think Hermione’s reaction is interesting, because I feel like in past years she might have been a little more torn, right? Because Umbridge’s whole thing is “We are going to get you through the test. We’re going to get you these good grades. This is what we’re doing; it’s all about the tests.” And Hermione in past years might have sort of been about that. I think what’s changed is that Voldemort is back now; she’s suddenly like, “Okay, real world stuff. The test is about more than that.”
Eric: Puts it into perspective.
Andrew: Yeah, no time to waste.
Laura: Right, exactly. Yeah, we do get to see Hermione in this book make academic achievement a secondary goal, and granted, she still achieves it, but it’s very clear that she’s getting her priorities in order in this book, which is funny because I think Ron specifically says she needs to do that in Book 1. So it took her a few years, but she got there. But I think you’re right, James, and I think also up until this point, I think Hermione is a character who just had built-in respect for teachers as authority figures. Even if she didn’t like them, even if she didn’t think they’re the best teachers, they’re not very nice, she still approaches the classroom environment with a lot of respect, and I think maybe this is the first time that she’s experienced a teacher who has taken a stance of deliberately saying, “I’m actually not going to teach you anything,” and she’s like, “Okay, I can’t do this anymore.”
Micah: In some ways, though, I feel like it’s been a bit of a slow burn for Hermione, because we do see her in Prisoner of Azkaban really start to, especially with Trelawney, not necessarily think that all teachers are well-equipped in their professions. And not as much maybe necessarily in Goblet of Fire, but certainly in this book with Umbridge, and then we’ll get to it later on but initially she does not have many good things to say about Firenze, and we know that’s in the same class of Divination when he takes over for Trelawney. But yeah, she’s certainly starting to turn the corner a bit, and she recognizes Umbridge for what she is in this particular case, and it’s a plant by the Ministry. Now, in terms of the position being cursed, I wanted to ask – and we may have discussed this in the past – but I wondered, should this have been an indication to the larger wizarding community that Voldemort is alive? Because if he wasn’t, the curse would have been broken. Now, I don’t know how widely publicized it is that Tom Riddle cursed the DADA position. It probably is only something Dumbledore really knows, but…
Andrew: Might not be something he wants to broadcast.
[Eric and Micah laugh]
Eric: “Come to Hogwarts! If you accept this position, you will die.”
Andrew: “Just coincidentally, there’s all this turnover in this role, but we’re going to figure it out, y’all. Don’t you worry about it.”
Eric: No, I think Dumbledore does revel in the speculation about the job being cursed. It’s kind of fun to think about a jinx.
Micah: You’d think he enjoys it.
Eric: I’m sure he doesn’t enjoy having to do all that paperwork and all those interviews every year, but at the same time, I do get that…
Micah: You think he interviews?
[Everyone laughs]
Andrew: That’s generous, am I right?
Eric: Even if it’s just above the Hog’s Head, and the teacher faints in front of him and he hires them anyway. Looking at you, Trelawney.
[Andrew laughs]
Eric: But yeah, anyway, I do get the sense that when Dumbledore tells Harry about the curse and tells him that Tom Riddle came back to Hogwarts to apply for a job, that it’s something that he enjoys telling Harry but has told pretty much no one else.
Micah: Nobody.
Laura: Yeah. What I like about this point, Micah – and I don’t think that we ever get anything in canon to confirm this, but I would call it a headcanon moment – I like the idea that Dumbledore keeping tabs on the curse is how he knows that Voldemort is going to come back one day. Because if we think about it, he’s been saying this since before Harry even knew he was a wizard, right? From immediately in 1981, whenever it was that Voldemort fell, Dumbledore was immediately saying, “Hey, y’all, he’s not gone forever; he will be back,” so I wonder if this is how he kept tabs. Like, if he had to get a new Defense Against the Dark Arts professor at the end of every year, he was like, “Okay, well, I guess he’s still out there.”
Eric: I think that’s brilliant, actually.
Laura: I mean, do you want to declare canon before we run to an ad break?
Eric: Hell yeah.
[“I declare canon!” sound effect plays with thunder]
[Ad break]
Laura: We’re back, and we’re still on the topic of Hermione and her rebellious streak. I will say it does have its limitations; Hermione is still a stickler for the rules that she is entrusted to enforce as a prefect, and she’s going in for round two with Fred and George because they are now testing Fainting Fancies on first years after they already had their prior conversation about how they shouldn’t be doing this. And what I think is so brilliant about this moment… Hermione’s hair is described as crackling with electricity.
[Andrew laughs]
Eric: Oooh.
Laura: She just is filled with righteous indignation. She is on a mission for justice, and she goes to them, and they say, “Oh, yeah? What are you going to do about it? Give us detention?” And she’s like, “No, but I’m going to tell your mom.”
[Andrew and Eric laugh]
Laura: And they immediately go on the defensive and say, “No, you wouldn’t tell her,” because they know exactly what that means for them. We’ve seen what Mrs. Weasley will send to the school at breakfast time to explode in front of everyone, so they’re clearly fearing that. But I actually thought it was funny that Hermione realized that her usual arsenal of tools as a prefect aren’t really going to work on Fred and George, because they don’t care, so she went outside of the elevated role of responsibility that she’s given to just pick something personal to threaten them with, and it works.
Andrew and Eric: Yeah.
Eric: I don’t think anything could work better than this threat, because something that… so it’s been a few years since we last read this book. As I was reading this scene and reading Hermione’s rage, I assumed that she would take points from her own House, from Gryffindor, because the conversation is public enough that everyone in the common room would see that that’s why Gryffindor loses points. And you can hate Hermione, sure; you can absolutely be like, “What? Our own House prefect got rid of…?” scrutiny, but ultimately, no one can turn a blind eye as to why, and so it’s actually some social leverage if she starts to say, “If I catch you doing this again, Gryffindor is going to lose more.” Because one of the few things that every student in Hogwarts can care about is winning the House Cup, and even though you can blame Hermione for taking the points, that doesn’t really stick. You know what I’m saying?
Andrew: What surprises me about this is that Fred and George are just now realizing they need to bring their testing behind the scenes instead of doing it… they’ve been doing it out basically in public, in the common room. They know how Hermione is going to respond. They know how dangerous this is. Making kids faint on purpose? Oh my God! That’s abusive. You are drugging them. We’ve talked about the dangers of love potions and how… we read about that now and we’re like, “Whoa, this is weird.” So is these fainting things! What are they called again? Fainting Fancies.
Eric and Laura: Fainting Fancies.
Eric: You notice that later in this chapter Hermione is passed out, and Fred and George say to leave her. Do you think there’s anything untoward there going on?
Andrew: Oh. Well, yeah, because when you read it, she’s just exhausted, but that is… a coincidence?
Eric: I think Fred and George learned absolutely nothing from this confrontation.
James: Don’t we see later that she checked the rules, and then she goes, “Actually, they’re allowed, it’s fine; I can’t do anything”?
Laura: Oh, gosh. I’m trying to…
Andrew: If so, I guess that tracks with the rest of Hogwarts.
Laura: Yeah, I mean, James is the trivia master, so I definitely… James, I trust your expertise here.
[James laughs]
Eric: Yeah. If James says it happened, it happened.
Andrew: That’s true, yeah.
Laura: [laughs] But James, since we’re on you right now, do you think there’s a deeper reason that Fred and George might have been doing this?
James: Yeah, so I think it sort of goes back to earlier this day, right? We’ve seen them coming off of the speech that Umbridge has given at the opening feast. They’ve really just sort of seemed like they want to get out of here; they don’t want to be at Hogwarts anymore. They’re only here, basically, for product development, to develop Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes, and so it seems like maybe they’re ramping this up because of what they’ve already seen from Umbridge. They know that they’re not long for this place. And we’ve seen throughout the whole series, and we see more later, that their pranks, their tools for comedy, they regard those as tools of dissent, ways to speak truth to power, and so it works on two levels. “On the one hand, we want to get out of here. We’ve got to get this research done so we can start selling these products and make a living. But on the other hand, we need to give people the tools to fight back against this terrible person. We want to help people.”
Eric: Hashtag resist.
James: Exactly. Fred and George, they’re on top of it.
Eric: I wonder what Umbridge did. If she’s in their crosshairs already, I wonder what their first lesson with her was like. I think it’s the kind of thing where Fred and George are opportunists, so over the next month or so, as more complaints come in about Umbridge, I can see them catching wise and being like, “Oh, okay, we should focus all of our attention on there.” I tend to think of them being as more like their entrepreneur selves at this point, where fortunately, we can harness that energy for good later on when the school really starts to become a totalitarian state, but yeah, I just want to know everything about Fred and George targeting Umbridge, because when they set their mind to something, they are really good at it.
Micah: For sure.
Laura: Yeah, and we know they do eventually. We know they definitely get there where they are deliberately causing distractions and obstructing Umbridge in any way they can. I’ve just never… James, I love that you brought this up, because I’ve never considered when the breaking point was for them. When was the point that they were like, “Okay, we don’t like you”?
[James and Laura laugh]
Laura: So yeah, we’ll have to keep an eye out for that and see was this the moment? Or does it come at a different point? But it definitely happens.
Micah: Yeah. And just a couple things for me, I do think Hermione is the exact kind of prefect that would take points from her own House. I think if you were to compare her to somebody…
Eric: Her hands are tied! They’re being forced!
Micah: Well, I’m thinking of Draco, Pansy, unlikely that they’re going to be taking points from Slytherin anytime soon.
Eric: You’d have to do something real bad, yeah.
Micah: But I did want to talk also a little bit about the testing that’s going on here, because there is a theme of abuse in this chapter, and I think that you could call what Fred and George are doing to these young students abuse. Now, it’s mentioned that they’ve tested their products out on themselves, so they know how they will react to them, but they’re also quite a bit older than these first years, so they have absolutely no idea how they’re going to react to these Fainting Fancies. And okay, they’re paying their test subjects, but do first years know any better in this type of situation?
Andrew: No.
Eric: Yeah, why do you think it’s first years? It’s because they can’t really consent.
Micah: Exactly. Older, more mature students with more agency seem like they’re better fits for these types of tests.
Eric: Yeah, why isn’t Lee Jordan testing these instead?
Andrew: Because he’s going to say no.
Micah: I feel like that could be a stretch in analysis, but again, just given where we’re going in this chapter…
Eric: I love this, Micah, because you just talked about how…
Micah: We can’t absolve Fred and George of this.
Andrew: No.
Eric: Fred and George and Umbridge are very similar.
[Everyone laughs]
Eric: I’ve never thought that. They’re like…
Micah: Three pees in a pod, yeah.
Eric: Three peas in the pod!
Andrew: Well, and a first year, who’s 11 years old, is going to be like, “Oh, some candy? Helping fellow wizards experiment with this new product? That sounds fun.” And you know Fred and George could sweet talk them into it as well.
Eric and Laura: Yeah.
Eric: And Galleons in their pocket. They’re young. They’re poor.
Laura: Yeah, “You’re going to pay us with candy?”
Micah: Let’s not forget Dudley at the very beginning of Goblet of Fire. This is not that different.
Andrew: No, it’s not.
James: It’s great that we see Fred and George try to play this off like they’re doing science. Fred says something like, “We already tested on ourselves; now we’re just testing different dosages on different people,” as if Hermione is going to be like, “Oh, great. Scientific trial. Keep it up.”
Eric: “As you were.”
Laura: Right.
Andrew: Yeah, to test the side effects on different people, I think they said, as if that makes it okay just because they were all right when they had it.
Eric: I mean, at least do it to Slytherins, right? Am I right?
Andrew: Actually, yes. You’re very right.
Eric: Not fellow Gryffindors. Come on, guys. Seriously.
Laura: Listen, I’m sure Fred and George’s products are all GMOs and naturally organic and ethically sourced.
Andrew: Gluten-free, fair trade…
[Laura laughs]
Eric: Well, I don’t know about ethically sourced, because don’t they have to steal stuff from Snape’s potion stores and exotic animal parts?
Laura: Well, yeah.
Andrew: That’s Snape. Who cares?
Laura: But I mean, ethics… there is a matter of opinion, I think.
[Andrew laughs]
Eric: They’re more guidelines than rules.
Laura: [laughs] Right? I love, though… we talk a lot about how stuff like this makes Hogwarts a security nightmare, but James, would you say it also makes it a legal nightmare?
James: Oh, I mean, I have to think so.
[Everyone laughs]
James: There’s so much going on here, and the school is supposed to be in charge of all of it. I mean, all the security stuff, that all goes back to… that’s all legal problems. But even when it’s just these jokes that they’re playing… can you even imagine when a Muggle-born goes home for the summer and starts telling these stories?
Eric: Oh, God.
James: “I took nosebleed candy, and I got paid for it. It was hilarious.” Those parents!
[Everyone laughs]
Eric: “My nose didn’t stop bleeding and I turned very pale, but it was fine in the end. They found the antidote in time.”
Laura: I get the impression a lot of Muggle-born students don’t tell their parents very much about what happens at Hogwarts for these reasons. I mean, I would…
James: Probably for the best.
[Laura laughs]
Eric: Also, where’s McGonagall? I understand that she has classes to teach; I also understand that she has an office where she sleeps, or somewhere where she must sleep. But she doesn’t really pop into Gryffindor Tower that often. Can a prefect or any member of the House go over to her and tell her what’s going on and have her come and see it for herself? She doesn’t do wellness checks or something.
[Andrew laughs]
Eric: As a Head of House, you would think we would see her more often.
Micah: It’s the ’90s.
Andrew: That’s what the prefects are for, the wellness checks. No, I would like to think she has an open door policy and is happy to hear any concerns at any time.
Eric: Because Hermione could have threatened to go to her.
Micah: Sure, and that’s another theme in this chapter, of not going to adults about things that they need to know about.
Eric: [laughs] They’re empowered to handle it themselves, because that’s fine.
Micah: Or are they?
Laura: Well, definitely going to be touching on some interesting themes related to those two topics. But we want to close the loop on Hermione here, because Hermione is in this chapter… after that interaction she had with Fred and George, she resumes sitting in her spot with Harry and Ron by the fire and places these not very convincing-looking knitted hats on the hearth by the fireplace and covers them with bits of rubbish and trash in an effort to basically trick the house-elves into freeing themselves…
[Andrew laughs]
Laura: … and I was just wondering, how would we characterize what Hermione is doing here? She’s creating a mess to lure the house-elves to clean and then get the jump scare of, “Oh my God, I just touched clothes.”
Andrew: “I’m free. Thank goodness.”
Eric: She’s inflicting trauma. She’s not part of the solution, right?
Andrew: She’s really happy about it, though. She really thinks her plan is working. But then I’m wondering, if so many house-elves are suddenly being freed and then living out in… going on a vacation or whatever, wouldn’t there start to become operational issues at Hogwarts? Who’s cooking? Who’s cleaning if all these house-elves are suddenly being freed and disappearing?
Eric: Hermione knows she’s in the wrong, and that’s why she has to hide the clothes.
Andrew: But then the irony of it all is that, yeah, okay, so let’s say a lot of house-elves are being freed; then a smaller pool of house-elves are doing all the work and picking up the slack of the house-elves who have been freed, so now these poor house-elves who are still there are working more than ever!
Eric: Yeah, she’s creating a labor shortage. But no, I mean, again, she knows it’s wrong, because she’s hiding it. And Ron, at least… I very rarely agree with Ron, and I very rarely disagree with Hermione, but this chapter has the best of both of them. Ron takes the rubble off. I mean, at least give them a fair chance.
Micah: I think James has the right question to answer your question, Laura. Not to answer a question with another question.
James: Yeah, I mean, I’m just sort of wondering whether Hermione has fully figured out how this is working. I mean, can you free house-elves just by leaving clothes for them to pick up?
Laura: Right.
James: I feel like that would lead to… if you hand a house-elf a shirt and ask them to wash it, then they could be free. And it could be you have to leave it out with an intent to free them; it’s an intent to give them clothes, but it also seems like… should Hermione even be able to free Hogwarts house-elves in the first place?
Andrew: No.
James: She’s not the headmaster. She’s not in charge. It feels like a Dumbledore job.
Eric: Exactly. But the thing is, what if it worked? So maybe they avoid the clothes not because it would free them, but because they don’t know.
Laura: Maybe. It is interesting. I think about when Lucius freed Dobby unintentionally.
Eric: Yeah, he didn’t have the intent to do it.
Laura: Yeah, and so I wonder if the intent of the house-elf matters, because Dobby did want to be freed.
[Eric laughs]
Laura: He was kind of a rare exception to the current social trend that we see in the books, and Harry pulling a fast one by putting his sock in the diary, that basically planted the seed for what happened. So I guess really, it might just be case by case.
Andrew: Well, or…
Eric: I think we can call this a plot hole, right? Or an inconsistency?
Laura: Well, yeah.
Eric: I think we can.
Andrew: Okay, so Hermione doesn’t have the power to free them, I would say, because she is not the owner of these house-elves. Lucius was able to free Dobby because wasn’t it…? It was Lucius who handed Dobby the diary, right? Yeah, so it was like an acknowledgement. “Here, have this.”
Micah: But the sock was concealed within.
Andrew: It was.
Micah: So you could debate that point. But I agree with what James is saying; I don’t think Hermione has any position to free the Hogwarts house-elves. They’re not the… ultimately, they don’t serve her, they serve the school, and so it would have to be Dumbledore, or somebody at that level who would… and I’m assuming – and maybe this is the wrong assumption – that those house-elves are working at Hogwarts of their own free will. If they wanted to leave, I presume Dumbledore would allow any of them to leave, but I think the bigger question is why don’t they want to leave? And how they’ve been indoctrinated over probably decades of service. That’s a whole other conversation.
Laura: Right.
Eric: Yeah, well, but this does work because they do avoid the clothes, because only Dobby will clean all of Gryffindor tower by the end of this.
Micah: Yeah, well, we see that when he shows up with a million hats on in our next couple of chapters.
Andrew: I love that.
[Eric and Laura laugh]
Laura: And Hermione is so pleased with herself when she sees the hats are gone in the morning. She’s like, “Looks like they do want freedom.”
Andrew: “I was right.”
Laura: And it’s like, sorry, Dobby just likes bad clothes.
Eric: Dobby is just extra.
[Laura laughs]
Eric: I will say, it is fun also to see Ron kind of give Hermione crap about them not being very good hats…
[James laughs]
Eric: … but then she puts her head down and actually gets it done. She learns how to do it better. That’s what we hope; we always want to be bettering ourselves.
Laura: Yeah. Well, again, Hermione is, I actually think, a really big touch point in this chapter. Obviously, we’re about to talk a whole lot about Umbridge when we get to the next part of the discussion, but Hermione actually does a lot here. And in addition to Hermione helping Harry understand why it is that basically the entire student body does not believe him, Harry is actually approached by Luna Lovegood as the fourth years are leaving Herbology and the fifth years are coming in, and she loudly proclaims to Harry, “I believe that you saw Voldemort, I believe that you fought him, and I believe that he’s back.”
Andrew: “I declare loyalty! To you!”
[Everyone laughs]
Eric: This is no small gesture. If Luna had an ounce of social clout, she would have lost it in this moment. I don’t want to discredit that, but ultimately…
Andrew: No, it was… yeah, it was nice.
Eric: But she’s immediately discredited by everybody, by Hermione, by everyone.
Andrew: Hermione in particular is brutal.
Micah: But discredited in what sense, though?
Eric: Well, you believe in the Crumple-Horn Snorkack, too, don’t you? I mean, it doesn’t… Harry feels really, really pretty good about it, and then immediately after that, after a second, he doesn’t anymore.
Andrew: Yeah, because Hermione also points out that Luna only believes things that have no evidence, so that’s a roundabout way of saying she only believes you because, like so many other people, there’s not enough evidence.
Eric: You can’t prove it. Yeah, exactly.
Andrew: But then Hermione’s reaction, it was just inappropriate, especially when Harry is discovering somebody on his side, when they feel so few and far between at this point. And I’m just wondering if Hermione was feeling a little jealous of Harry and Luna even merely being friends, or is she feeling threatened in some way because another woman is paying attention to Harry? It just doesn’t make sense to me why she reacts like this.
Eric: Yeah, that’s a fair question.
Micah: Well, first off, Hermione is in no position to judge Luna because she doesn’t know her at all, so the fact that she makes those types of claims about the Crumple-Horned Snorkack and other things… she doesn’t know Luna as a person, so that kind of pissed me off, but…
[Laura laughs]
Eric: We’re at the point where we’re defending our own Houses.
Micah: I think it’s because of the fact of who it was. If it was anybody else in this situation who showed up besides Luna to substantiate Harry’s story, it would have been fine, but it’s because of how Luna is viewed as a person by other students that delegitimizes the entirety of the situation, right? And that’s unfortunate.
Eric: But the delegitimization is short-lived, because then we hear from Hufflepuff…
Micah: The dick?
[Andrew and Laura laugh]
Eric: Hufflepuff. Ernie Macmillan, who comes up…
Micah: He is a…
Eric: Listen!
Micah: Yeah, go ahead.
Eric: And Harry does the thing in the internal monologue too; he hasn’t always loved Ernie, but it actually… Luna starts the avalanche, right? Or starts the snowball off over the hill.
Micah: Make sure you say it in a very pompous voice, though, because that’s how he delivered it.
Eric: He just says that he believes him too, and that’s all.
[Micah laughs]
Laura: What does he say before he says, “I believe you too”?
Eric: I’d have to open the book. I don’t even know. But here’s the thing, it’s a bigger deal…
Laura: It’s basically like, “It’s not just weirdos that support you.”
[Laura and Micah laugh]
Eric: Yeah, okay, okay. Look, are Hufflepuffs perfect? No, and not a single one will ever claim to be, so anyway…
Laura: True.
Micah: But it is interesting that here we see representations from the two other Houses coming to support Harry in this moment, yet we’re all kind of sitting here criticizing how they’re going about proclaiming their loyalty. [laughs]
Eric: Yeah. Well, right, but that’s why I said it’s no small action, and Ernie Macmillan… I mean, not just because James and I both, “Hey, Hufflepuffs,” we love a fellow Hufflepuff doing the right thing, but they had Cedric Diggory last year. For any of the Hufflepuffs to get over the fact, or to align themselves with Harry, is to not see the division that has been so successfully wrought across the rest of the school. If anybody should maybe not believe Harry or be extra hurt by Cedric’s death to the point of being susceptible to lies about what happened, it would be those who cheered for him the most – Cedric – I think. So Ernie Macmillan does a real solid. I’ll never say a bad thing about him, until the next time.
[Laura laughs]
Micah: It is important, though, that you have Ernie from Hufflepuff, you have Luna from Ravenclaw, because we’ve already seen division within Gryffindor itself, and it comes up again a little bit later on in this chapter where Harry just walks past Seamus; they look like they’re going to say something to each other, but they don’t. So the House unity piece of it is starting to come together ever so slowly.
Eric: And isn’t Ernie a prefect too?
Micah: Oh, who cares?
[Everyone laughs]
Andrew: The Hufflepuffs do.
Eric: He has status! I care.
Micah: Well, look how that worked out for Cedric.
James: Ernie Macmillan I think is a prefect, although if there’s one person who doesn’t need to be intentionally handed a great big platform from which to deliver edicts from above, I think it’s Ernie Macmillan. But yeah, he is a prefect.
[Andrew and Laura laugh]
Eric: He didn’t ask for it; he had prefectness thrown upon him.
Laura: He’s the chosen one of Hufflepuff.
[Andrew and Laura laugh]
James: He’d make a great Shakespearean actor.
Laura: All right, well, now we’ve got to talk about this detention. Andrew, why is Umbridge’s quill legal? It should be illegal. How does this happen?
Eric: How do we know it is legal?
Andrew: Well, okay, so Umbridge invented it. I looked that up prior to this episode.
Eric: What?! No, she didn’t.
Andrew: Yeah, she did. She made it herself. Look on the wiki.
Eric: I mean, I believe… oh, wait, the wiki is where you…? No, I believe that even the author would say she made it. I just don’t think she’s that clever. Sorry. Go on.
Andrew: Oh. [laughs] No, I mean, it’s just mind-blowing that this type of device can exist and that she would actually inflict this type of pain onto a student at the school. It’s just… I’ve said before, there’s certain moments in the series that stick with you, and you might remember your first time reading certain things. I still remember the first time reading this chapter when the book came out. Just seeing Harry go through this, and for a teacher at Hogwarts to be doing this to him, kind of like it’s ordinary; it’s no big deal… Harry is trying to treat it like it’s no big deal, and Umbridge is acting like it’s no big deal. This is a big deal!
Eric: Yeah, yeah. And it’s insidious. This is where you get the real size-up of Umbridge, the lengths she’s willing to go to to prove her false point. Harry, I guess, is still trying to be a hero by not mentioning it, but it’s crazy. He’s shocked that this is occurring.
Micah: Do we feel like we got the precursor to this with Rita Skeeter in Goblet of Fire, where she has the Quick Quotes Quill and it’s writing lies about whomever? Or it’s writing whatever is probably going through Rita’s mind. Seems like a more extreme version of it, maybe.
Andrew and Laura: Yeah.
Andrew: And evidently, you can make quills have a lot of different types of power. I don’t think that one that Rita had was invented by her; it looks like it was used by multiple journalists. But apparently you can put a lot of magic into these things.
Laura: Yeah. Well, and I also love the… we could definitely draw some kind of comparison to how in the Muggle world – and I’m sure in the wizarding world, even – around any kind of paper that you might have to turn in, you get it back from the professor and you would say, “My essay was bleeding when I got it back from the professor,” because it’s all marked up in red ink.
Eric: Oh, man!
Laura: So it’s interesting that we get the literal representation of that here.
Eric: I’ve never heard that. That’s blowing my mind.
Laura: Well, maybe you’ve just never turned in a bad paper, Eric. That could be…
[Andrew laughs]
Eric: No. No, the only red is a big fat A, Laura.
Laura: [laughs] Well, James, you had a really interesting theory about how Umbridge might have invented this insidious quill that she’s using here.
James: Yeah, so it sort of reminded me of a tool that you might use in crafting if you can draw out a shape, a complicated pattern that you want to cut out of something – cut out of fabric or of wood or something – and then just by drawing it, this pen cuts it out of the material itself. And it does seem like Umbridge is that level of evil where she would modify it to, instead of cut leather or silk or something, just cut right into people’s skin. And then there’s also, more directly, what if this is just how wizards give tattoos, and Umbridge has just sort of spruced it up to take it to a whole ‘nother level?
[Andrew and Eric laugh]
Andrew: I love both of those points. I love that parallel. And yeah, maybe she just repurposed some magic to inflict pain on a human.
Eric: Yeah. Except I don’t want it to take 100 attempts for it to break through the skin. If I’m getting a tattoo, I want it one and done.
[Andrew and Laura laugh]
Eric: Do your worst. But the worst part of it is that the skin heals over, right? So you’re re-inflicting the cut. I mean, it would be bad if Umbridge gave him a regular quill and made him write five days in a row, “I must not tell lies” on things she knows are true, or can bet that are true. That would be bad enough. But this whole self-mutilation angle is just crazy, and shows how much she enjoys power and how much she enjoys inflicting pain. Yeah, it’s really not a far leap from… this Chapter 13 of Book 5 Umbridge, and Chapter 13 of Book 7 Umbridge, they’re the same character.
Andrew and Laura: Yeah.
Laura: Honestly, that’s very true. And yeah, I mean, she’s trying to silence Harry through inflicting physical pain repetitively against him. But the irony is, yeah, Harry is suffering as he endures five nights of this torture, but I think he’s being silent in a way that Umbridge herself didn’t predict, and it’s that he doesn’t want to give her the satisfaction of knowing that she’s getting to him, so he doesn’t protest; he doesn’t wince or show clear signs of being in pain. And to the point that was raised earlier, he doesn’t go to an adult for help. He won’t bring it up to his friends; he won’t bring it up to any professors who could do anything about it. Why is that?
Andrew: It really upsets me that Harry doesn’t want to speak to them. And he explains this in this chapter; he doesn’t want to give Umbridge what she probably wants, but I do think Harry should have told McGonagall or Dumbledore. This is really, really bad what’s going on, and maybe it’s just his age; he’s not fully thinking this through or realizing how bad this is to be doing this to a student. But it does break my heart that he didn’t want to tell one of them.
Micah: Yeah, so just hang with me here for a minute, because this is another time in the series – we see it with the Dursleys – where Harry is being physically and emotionally abused. And the truth is that nobody came to save him at Privet Drive when he was being treated this way by Petunia and Vernon, and the truth is that Dumbledore knew about it, and so why should he trust anybody now? We’ve already said that he didn’t want to go to McGonagall; he didn’t want to go to Dumbledore. So subconsciously, he may be drawing on past experiences and trauma, and we see this further his isolation, until Ron recognizes what’s going on. And sorry, but this was another movie moment that was given to Hermione, and it really showed how great of a friend Ron is in this particular chapter. And I also think there’s a little bit of battered wife syndrome, because he keeps going back for more and more of the same treatment, and he knows the pain that’s going to be inflicted, but he still goes, and more importantly, he’s refusing to seek help, so this is a really traumatic situation. And I also want to talk about Dumbledore in this, because the way he treats Harry in the months leading up are a direct… cause Harry to react the way that he does in this chapter, in not wanting to go to him for help.
Eric: Right. I mean, Dumbledore specifically… the suggestion to go see Dumbledore exhausts Harry every single time because he’s got beef specifically with Dumbledore, because, “Well, he’s ignoring me. Why would I go to him for anything?” He’s used to… so that I understand. But to your point, Micah, I mean, I think Umbridge’s intention is to very much demoralize Harry. She does end up galvanizing him instead, but that’s only until Harry’s best friends come up and give him purpose by starting the DA, so right now, he’s taking in this energy, this pain, and he’s just sitting with it, and that’s not healthy. It’s not great for anybody. It’s going to be a little while before he can really channel that, or until he can start feeling the rage that he felt on the first day of class and channel it into something altogether good and productive.
James: I think Harry may also sort of be aware, on a subconscious level, anytime he protests, or anyone else protests, he’s giving Umbridge a chance to take more power. I mean, we see this again and again. Umbridge shuts down all the organizations; McGonagall gets the Quidditch team back; Umbridge goes, “Bam, I’m going to take over all discipline.” So I think Harry is sort of aware that he has limited capital to make changes here, and if he goes up without planning things out, without having a way to actually make things change, what’s going to result is Umbridge is going to say, “All right, someone is trying to move against me. I’m going to shut that down, and in doing so, I’m going to become even more powerful,” and Harry doesn’t want that.
Eric: That’s wild. Yeah, I completely agree with that. I think it’s almost like you can’t reason with this person, the fact that she’s here and behaving in this manner with impunity. You’ve already lost the first round of resisting that you would want to do. You’ve got to try and plan something and be two or three steps ahead, but you can’t directly respond or you’re just going to get more detentions, because she’s in this position to dole out detentions and restrict Harry from all of this stuff that… yeah, absolutely.
Laura: Yeah. Well, he already knows that she has it out for him too, right? We can’t forget she tried to send Dementors… well, did send Dementors after him, and then tried to have him expelled, so…
Eric: I’m surprised he hasn’t guessed about the Dementors yet.
Andrew: And Fudge also knows how hard Umbridge is going to go. So to jump into Micah’s “What if?”…
[“What if?” sound effect plays]
Micah: Oh, I didn’t know I can make that noise.
[Everyone laughs]
Andrew: What if he did tell the truth? Would Umbridge have been sacked? I personally don’t think so. Let’s say he tells the truth; this gets back to Fudge. Is Fudge going to push Umbridge out? It’s not going to be Dumbledore who has that power to let her go, I don’t think.
Laura: No, because the Ministry basically appointed her, and presumably the Ministry still has some level of oversight of Hogwarts if they can do that.
Micah: Yeah. I think it would depend if… we see in the movie that she uses this on other students, and that’s where I think if it got back to the parents, she would be in a lot of trouble. And there’s not much that Fudge would be able to do to keep her in power, because we all know it’s about how he’s perceived by other people, and so if that were to be a mark against him, that he put a teacher in place who was abusing students, then I think he wouldn’t have a choice, that he would have to get rid of her.
Eric: Yeah, and she keeps from Fudge the fact that she sent the Dementors too. It’s not like she ever cops to that. I think there’s a scene in the movie where she’s like, “What the Minister doesn’t know won’t hurt him”; she puts his picture down or something like that. [laughs] The reason I bring that up is Umbridge is basically saying… or we can assume that what she’s doing is on behalf of the Ministry, but there are lines even with that. She’s doing what she wants because she’s on a power trip and she is sadistic, and if Fudge ever found out that she was the one that sent the Dementors, he would lose serious ground. Not if the parents found out, but if he found out, he would realize the type of people that are close to him are doing things that are actually wrong. I’d like to believe that if Fudge knew it, he would take her away from Hogwarts.
Laura: I think it depends on which kids get the detention, unfortunately. I think if you’re someone like a Draco Malfoy who has very connected parents, I think Umbridge is going to look the other way and not give you that detention. I think she’s going to go after the people that she knows she can go after, like Harry.
Eric: The weak and helpless and undefended.
Laura: Well, this detention is definitely criminal for the physical abuse that it causes alone, but I had a question in thinking about the evidence of this crime: Is Umbridge not thinking ahead here? Because she’s inflicting a punishment that is leaving a literal, very distinct scar as evidence. And we know that a bunch of other kids over the course of the book are going to land in the same kind of detention, so it just feels like an interesting choice to me that she would inflict something on that many students that actually leaves a mark to prove that she did it.
James: It seems like it’s the kind of thing where everything she does, you think she can’t possibly get away with it, but then she just gets away with it, right?
[Eric laughs]
Andrew and Laura: Yeah.
Eric: She also goes overboard.
James: Oh, absolutely.
Eric: Yeah, it’s not a permanent sort of thing on Harry’s hand the first four days he does it. It’s her greediness; it’s her wanting to inflict maximum pain and suffering that causes it to eventually be one of Harry’s two lifelong scars. All I see is excess when I think of the fact that this becomes a scar, because it’s healing over every time he writes the line and finishes it. It cuts him and then it heals, and so it’s only with tremendous abuse that he has anything to show for it.
Andrew: Maybe she’s banking on him never telling anybody and he makes up some excuse that doesn’t put the blame on anyone. But yeah, you would really think this is very damning evidence and highly risky, but maybe it speaks to just how badly Umbridge wanted to inflict this type of pain and suffering on Harry that she didn’t even care if she would get in trouble at any point.
Eric: There are also things he could do to make it better. He could probably use dittany; he could probably use some kind of numbing potion, if he were any good at Potions this year. He could numb the area beforehand, maybe save himself some of this pain instead of suffering with the full effects.
Andrew: Maybe.
Laura: Yeah. Well, Harry does mount his own small act of resistance on his final night of detention, and he’s doing this by surreptitiously watching Ron try out for Keeper through the windows.
[Eric laughs]
Laura: So anytime he hears Umbridge rustling in a drawer or a scratch of her quill, he quickly looks out the window to see if he can catch a glimpse of how Ron is doing. And I think we can spend a moment here on Ron, because there is this revelation that happens while Harry is partway through his week. There have been hints dropped throughout the chapter that Ron is doing something and he’s going somewhere and he’s doing something on his own but he’s not telling anyone, and it’s ultimately revealed that he’s been practicing to try out for the open Keeper position on the Gryffindor Quidditch team. So because Harry has this detention, he can’t go to Keeper tryouts, so at the very least, he’s trying to support his best mate at a distance, which I love. I think sometimes when people think about resisting or acts of resistance, they think that everything has to be a grand proclamation or something that has a huge impact, but oftentimes it’s the little stuff like this that really adds up over time, and I think this is the beginning of us seeing Harry on his resistance journey too.
Andrew: Yeah. It was giving a bit of, “Oh, Ron is nepo baby, isn’t he?”
[Laura laughs]
Andrew: Because it’s noted by Angelina that he’s becoming Keeper because of the other good Weasley players on the team, and she’s like, “Well, hopefully he’ll be able to get better,” because it seems to run in his bloodline that the Weasleys are good Quidditch players. But I will say, too, I thought there was a good life lesson here. So when we’re hearing about the other Keeper candidates, it looks like Ron’s passion and general energy – plus his family – got him the gig, and I think it’s a good reminder that you don’t necessarily need to be the best at something in the way that you expect. Maybe you’re not the best Quidditch player who’s trying out, but you do have other skills. You’re passionate about Quidditch. You showed up and really gave it your all, whereas these other candidates who Ron won out against, one of them was always complaining, and then the other was too busy with other commitments. So I thought it was just a good reminder.
Eric: Yeah, Ron is well-rounded, and it’s a credit to Angelina that she realizes that. She’s giving him some room to grow, essentially.
Andrew and Laura: Yeah.
Eric: So I don’t know. I wouldn’t necessarily say nepo baby or DEI hire or anything to Ron here in this moment…
[Andrew and Laura laugh]
Eric: I mean, but it’s worth saying and worth noting, as Angelina says to Harry, she’s not super impressed with any of the selection. Sometimes that happens, too.
Andrew: “They all suck. I’ll take Ron.”
Laura: Yeah, well, and sometimes you do have to make the best choice that you can, right? But yeah, I’m going to agree with Eric here. I feel like characterizing someone like Ron, who comes from an economically disadvantaged family… referring to that person as a nepo baby is a little rich.
[Everyone laughs]
Eric: I mean, I wasn’t offended by it at all.
Laura: Oh, no, me neither.
Eric: But it is funny. We know that this is Ron’s dream. This is what he saw in the Mirror of Erised when he was 11! He’s always wanted to be a Quidditch hero.
Laura: Yeah, it’s a big moment.
Eric: So he’s wanted it for a long time. Maybe Angelina also knows that they practiced in the summer, so there is probably some skill there that… and Ron tells Harry about this too in this chapter, but she must know that there’s more to Ron than she’s seeing. What she doesn’t know is there’s also something worse to Ron, which is that once his nerves set in… but we’ll get there in due time.
Micah: Well, but for James, no nepo baby, for you, right?
[Andrew laughs]
James: No, I actually love this moment for Ron; he comes off just so hardworking and dedicated. He’s terrified; he won’t even tell anyone what he’s doing, which… I mean, he has to go out and try out eventually, so I’m not sure what the end game is there…
[Eric and Laura laugh]
James: … but he’s so scared, and he just wants it so badly that he gets through all that and just makes it happen. He’s the opposite of Harry; he doesn’t have the natural talent, but he’s got Quidditch players on his walls. He loves Quidditch more than anything.
Eric: He loves Quidditch more than Cho Chang. I’ll tell you that.
[Andrew and James laugh]
Micah: Well…
James: No, I mean, he goes out and makes it happen, and he replaces Oliver Wood. Now, Oliver Wood is a Gryffindor legend; he leaves and immediately becomes a professional Quidditch player, and Ron is trying to be the first guy since him to play Keeper. They literally have to shrink Wood’s robes down to fit Ron because Wood’s arms were so broad. Ron is stepping into this huge role, and it has to be terrifying. He really… it takes a lot to make that happen for him.
Eric: That’s such a good point.
Laura: Yeah, especially with all the self-doubt that he has, and we’re going to get to see in the chapters ahead.
Andrew: I am happy for Ron, to be clear, and it is cute that he was hiding his practicing from Harry because he didn’t want the word to get out too quick, and he wasn’t too sure of himself. But then he crushed it, and not just because he’s a nepo baby.
[James and Laura laugh]
Laura: I was going to say, Andrew, I don’t know how sincere that “I’m happy for Ron” comment was.
Andrew: No, I am, I am.
Laura: [laughs] Well, again, this is Harry’s final detention with Umbridge for now, and there is this moment at the end where Umbridge touches his arm so that she can get a glimpse of how much the message has literally and metaphorically sunk in with Harry, and when Umbridge touches him, Harry’s other scar – the one on his forehead – becomes painful, and…
[Andrew imitates a Voldemort exclamation]
Laura: [laughs] I’m sorry, is that how you page Ralph Fiennes?
[Andrew and James laugh]
Micah: He’s going to be joining soon.
Laura: [laughs] But I was wondering if any of us remember any of the theories that had to have been circulating at this point. I mean, any time Harry’s scar hurt, I remember – back before the series was finished – when we would get into theorizing we would immediately jump into, “Okay, well, why did his scar hurt this time? Was the Horcrux acting up at this…? Was it in response to Umbridge touching him, or was it just a coincidence that his scar just so happened to hurt when she touched him?”
Eric: It’s got to be a coincidence, right? As evil as she is, and in fact maybe more evil than some Death Eaters, she is not aligned with Voldemort; she merely benefits from everything he’s doing to the world later. I’m inclined to say coincidence. I don’t remember exactly what this amounts to, if it does.
Micah: I think it’s fair to be suspect here. Look at last year when we had a Death Eater in disguise, or go back to year one when Voldemort was literally on the back of the Defense Against the Dark Arts professor’s head. So we have been taught to be very wary of DADA professors, so of course we should be skeptical here. I was curious, though – and maybe this comes in later on when we learn what Voldemort has been up to – but does this map to a particular victorious moment for Voldemort? Maybe something happened right at that moment where he was feeling really good, and it just so happened that that’s when Umbridge touched his hand.
Andrew and Laura: Yeah.
Eric: I think a new season of his favorite TV show finally premiered.
[Andrew laughs]
Micah: Or was this the scar…? It was like the scar finally had a brother, so maybe that’s what it was.
Andrew: [laughs] Well, and I mean, sorry, Harry, but you’re having a really rough year in general, so there’s a high likelihood that your scar is going to hurt during a bad thing, because a lot of bad things are happening. But I see Harry’s reason for being concerned.
Eric and Laura: Yeah.
Eric: And the scar has always sort of been a self-defense mechanism to Harry to let him know he’s in danger, so maybe that is why it got a surge. Also, maybe the part of Harry that is the Horcrux that is a piece of Voldemort’s soul is also reacting defensively. Harry didn’t just mutilate himself; he mutilated this Horcrux, this Horcrux’s right hand, in a way, so maybe that is rage that is coursing through Harry, and he doesn’t know how to deal with it so he freaks out. It does leave Umbridge with the impression that she’s done a good job, though, so it also ultimately benefits Harry.
Micah: It would have been really interesting if Umbridge had the locket Horcrux at this point, because then… Horcrux touching Horcrux, in a way.
Andrew: Yeah, that’d be cool.
Laura: Yeah. Well, before we move to some odds and ends, there was a fun fact here, Andrew, that you and Micah included.
Andrew: Yeah, I just wanted to mention that in the Cursed Child, if you go and see it, you can actually see the scar is still on the back of Harry’s hand. And I thought that was a really interesting touch for them to add because unless you’re sitting in the very front of the audience, you’re probably not going to notice that, but they did it.
Micah: They did. And Andrew, when you do news for so long, it never really leaves you, so I thought that it was important to investigate this story a little bit further, and so I have it on good authority… a source has told me that they can confirm that they do paint on the scar every night.
Andrew: Oh, okay.
Laura: Wow.
Micah: So this is still very much a real thing that happens in Cursed Child.
Andrew: That’s cool. Yeah, I thought they may have done away with it because they seem to be wanting to run the show for cheaper; they keep making it shorter and shorter. So I thought that’d be an easy budget cut.
[Micah laughs]
Eric: “We can’t keep affording the personal makeup artist that does the hand tattoo!”
[Andrew laughs]
Laura: Hey, I love this investigative journalism happening from the MuggleCast studio. I hear the White House is accepting applications for new media.
Eric: Don’t do it.
[Laura laughs]
Micah: Well, in fairness, credit to Joel Meyers – who was on the show a couple months ago – the last to play Albus Severus. He’s no longer in the role, but he was able to confirm that, so…
Andrew: Micah giving away his sources. Mm-mm.
Micah: It’s a shout-out to appreciate his contributions to the show.
Andrew: Of course.
Eric: Absolutely.
Odds & Ends
Laura: All right, well, we are going to get into some odds and ends, so first odd and end: Hagrid watch. That’s how I am labeling this. Our favorite groundskeeper is still missing; Harry notes this multiple times throughout this chapter.
Andrew: Flitwick assures the students that Summoning Charms will definitely be on their Charms, OWL, so good thing Harry mastered this already.
Eric: Ah, such a good thing. I feel like this is a deliberate break. It’s like we keep getting this barrage of other assignments, and then we hear Summoning Charms, knowing full well that Harry can do it already. Oh, I don’t know about you guys, but I breathed deeply when I saw that. I was like… [sighs] Because you’re with Harry when he’s having to learn all this stuff. Another odd and end: Professor McGonagall tells Neville there’s nothing wrong with his work, apart from lack of confidence.
Laura: Aw.
Eric: Yeah, I don’t know if I believe that…
[Laura laughs]
Eric: … but if you are the sort of person that believes that, then you could see this as an overall turning point for Neville. Little things like this and the bigger things that happen later – thinking over Christmas break – to focus on Neville really do show that he is a character who we’re going to be paying more attention to, and actually, at the end of this book, too, we learn about the prophecy and who else that entails. So it’s his book; we’re all just reading it.
Micah: Well, you wouldn’t know it from Fantastic Beasts, but we learn in this chapter that Bowtruckles can be quite violent, to the point of poking people’s eyes out with their sharp fingers, and I just can’t see Pickett doing this.
Andrew: No.
Micah: I feel like he needs an evil twin brother that we meet later in the series that perhaps has a penchant for poking people’s eyes out, maybe eating them. But it was fun. It was actually… and talking about Hogwarts classes, Grubbly-Plank – going back to our time machine – she did a good job in this chapter. She was a good professor.
Andrew: She did, and you know what? I would like… where’s my camera? Right…? I would like to say, Grubbly-Plank, I am sorry for the comments I made about you five years ago. New year, new me.
[Laura and Micah laugh]
Eric: You’re kind of still thinking of pirates though, don’t you? Whenever you read her name?
Andrew: Yes.
Micah: Her name sounds like she’s a pirate.
Andrew: Yeah, it does. But it’s cool.
Eric: [in a pirate voice] “Grubbly-Plank.”
Laura: Honestly, that’d be a cool pirate name. And last thing we wanted to call out is that seven people tried out for the role of Keeper on the Gryffindor Quidditch team, so there’s that number again.
Superlative of the Week
Laura: And now we’re going to get into our MVP. This week’s question for the panel: Inspired by the revelation Hermione makes to Harry about the experience of the entire rest of the student body seeing Harry come back from the maze with dead Cedric, what would we have thought, and how would we have reacted, if we had been onlookers to the third task and seen the way that it ended up?
Andrew: I’d just be looking around; I’d be like, “Are you all seeing this?”
[Eric and Laura laugh]
Andrew: “What the F just happened in there? This is a security nightmare. Are you joking?” No, but I would also believe what Harry had to say, because he’s the one who carried Cedric’s body out.
Eric: Yeah, you would see the emotions on Harry’s face; you could tell in that moment that he knew it. I would just be staring shocked. I don’t think I’d be able to say anything; I don’t think words would come. I think I’d just be exhausted and crestfallen because my hero, the champion of the school, died. He didn’t have to die. He could lose. He could come in second, fine. But nobody was expecting death.
Micah: I would probably say something like, “Who knew this was the prize for winning?”
[Everyone laughs]
Andrew: “Pretty dark, Dumbledore.”
Laura: That’s dark. I would immediately start a true crime podcast to investigate the murder.
[Eric laughs]
Andrew: I would love to listen to that.
James: I think I, unfortunately, probably would have followed the arc of most of the wizarding world.
[Andrew gasps]
James: If I’m Harry’s close friend, and I know him and I can talk him to him daily, and seeing what he’s going through, then I’m think I’m believing him. But if I’m just watching from the stands, I think I’m probably at first believing what the Ministry is saying. But then we go forward and the Ministry is clearly not telling us everything; I’m going to start to see Harry’s inside of the story, see that there’s more going on here.
Andrew: Thank you for your honesty, James.
Eric: Yeah, that’s very refreshing.
Andrew: That’s not the cool thing to say, but it’s the true thing.
Laura: I mean, honestly, your answer, James, is the answer that would be true for all of us too, I think.
[James laughs]
Eric: Agree.
Laura: So really appreciate that.
Lynx Line
Laura: And speaking of things we appreciate, we’re moving on to our Lynx Line. This is our newest benefit on Patreon. Thank you so much to those who support us at Patreon.com/MuggleCast for answering this week’s question, which is: What would you do to resist the Umbridge regime at Hogwarts? No matter how big or small, we all have a part to play in the resistance.
Andrew: Sam said,
“I went back to watching Archer recently so this is definitely influenced from that, but I would leave crumbs of food in her office, or at least by her desk, so that she would get ants.”
[Laura laughs]
Andrew: That’s some good trouble.
Eric: Right. Yes, the little, little ways of annoying her, I think, are the way to do it. Tipsy Elf adds, “I’d steal all of her cat portraits. She doesn’t deserve them.”
Andrew: Oooh, that would hurt.
Eric: And Mayelin also suggested replacing the cat plates with centaurs.
[Everyone laughs]
Andrew: Yikes.
Eric: I can only imagine the photoshoot of trying to get centaurs to wear a bow. But also, yeah, again, just something to get under her skin.
Micah: Ashley said,
“I would become an Animagus (taking cat form) simply to get close to Umbridge so that once she trusts me, I could begin taking a dump in her left shoe and hide all her hair ties under the fridge.”
[Laura and Micah laugh]
Eric: Oh my God.
Laura: This is oddly specific. I think Ashley has a cat.
Eric: And I’m just making a mental note to myself to check under our fridge for hair ties that Martha has lost.
Laura: Well, check your left shoe too, apparently.
Eric: Oh no! [laughs]
Laura: Kathleen says,
“I would create situations in her class that specifically require the use of magic, like releasing a boggart, pixies, or other creatures, or bewitching objects in the classroom that would be real annoying until you’ve dealt with them.”
Eric: Oh my god, I love this.
James: ThatBatLady says,
“I would sneak into the laundry room and dye her clothing, subtly over time so she doesn’t notice immediately. Put shrinking and growing charms on them, have them intermittently go wet and dry… animate them so they dance at random intervals, etc. I would also try to convince Dobby to enhance her food with weird additions like rose water and licorice. Lastly, I’d get messages and letters going between Filch and Umbridge which imply that they have romantic feelings for one another – Parent Trap style! I almost felt too sorry for Filch to say that, but then I remembered how giddy he was with Umbridge’s pledge to mandate corporal punishment.”
Andrew: Our listeners are so creative.
Laura: I know. I love this.
James: This belongs in the TV show.
[Andrew and Laura laugh]
Eric: It really does, yeah.
Andrew: He said it! Max that!
[Laura laughs]
[“Max that” sound effect plays]
Eric: There we go.
Andrew: Fer said,
“The natural disposition of Hogwarts to defend itself against outside threats could’ve started to be leveraged earlier in a more intentional and organized way – namely against the common enemy that is Ministry interference through Umbridge. I would’ve tried to bring the issue into the open, name it, identify it, and raise awareness. A counter-campaign against Ministry interference at Hogwarts could do that. From that, follow the acts of resistance. Organized and big ones, sure, but also small and organic ones as sentiment shifts against Umbrige. How will she navigate the castle if the stairs simply won’t move towards where she needs to go?”
[Eric and Laura laugh]
“If the subjects of portraits that give access to places are always mysteriously absent when she needs access to wherever they guard? Or what if the food on her plate is just always mysteriously moldy or inedibly salty? What if she can’t walk the grounds outside without tripping with a tree root or getting pooped on by a bird?”
Andrew: There’s poop again.
“What if her decorative plates just will not stay on the walls and keep crashing down into a billion little porcelain pieces as soon as she steps out of the room? What if she somehow simply cannot walk into a room without walking into a ghost at every turn? Much like a body, Hogwarts has its own immune system – you just need to make it aware that it is in danger.”
[Everyone laughs]
Eric: Wow.
Andrew: So many ideas.
Laura: Yeah, mic drop. I love that.
Eric: Mev says,
“I would be scared to do anything, especially if my parents were working for the Ministry. I am not the rebellious type. I would cheer my friends who are rebellious, though, and keep their secret until Umbridge made me drink Veritaserum, of course.”
And I actually probably most honestly fall into this category, too. I’d be very scared of resisting, and so would be Sara, Rachel, and Carlee. We’d just have to find a very small way to resist. You would still do it, but you’ve got to also look out for yourself, because Umbridge is pretty dangerous.
Laura: Yeah. Hey, passive resistance work.
Micah: Sherry says,
“I was an adult when I read all the books back in the 2000s, and as an adult, I was horrified at the lack of action by the staff. So thinking that way, I’d go to the media about Umbridge and her blood quill. The reason I can’t read Order of the Phoenix again after the first time is that the torture, the interference, it is too agonizing to reread. If Fudge wouldn’t stop her, then go to the media. I would hope parents would scream over what was happening at their children’s school.”
Laura: Yeah. And finally, Monet shared a story about creating annoying noises as a preschooler in protest of nap time to disrupt it, so that’s kind of the basis for this.
[Eric laughs]
Laura: And Monet goes on to say,
“I’d do the same for Umbridge, but amped up times a hundred. Music, beeps, screeches, nails on a chalkboard coming from a dozen different sources in her classes, sometimes a single beep every seven minutes, and sometimes an unending annoying ad jingle. She can’t figure out where it’s coming from or stop it, and would eventually spend every class running around trying to figure out what was going on.”
[Eric laughs]
Laura: Beautiful. These are all amazing. Thank you so much, y’all.
Andrew: Yeah, and don’t forget, you can participate in the Lynx Line every week by becoming a patron at Patreon.com/MuggleCast, and if you have any feedback about today’s episode, you can email or send a voice memo that’s recorded on your phone to MuggleCast@gmail.com. Send in those voicemails; we love hearing you all.
Quizzitch
Andrew: And now it’s time to hear this week’s Quizzitch question.
[Quizzitch music plays]
Eric: All right, this week’s question: Which US fast food chain was the first to add savory biscuits to their menu? Which was in the 1970s. I’ve got a savory biscuit with me right here; I’ve been waiting all episode to munch on it, but first I have to read the correct answer…
Micah: You have to heat it up.
Eric: Well, it’s kind of lost its heat. Yeah, you’re right. Okay, well, anyway, the correct answer was Hardee’s. Hardee’s was the first chain to have the savory biscuits. They look like this, if any British viewers happen to be watching; they are not very cookie-like, but they are delicious. Correct answers were submitted to us by Buff Daddy; Carl Jr.; Elizabeth K…
Andrew: That’s funny because Hardee’s is called Carl’s Jr. in some parts of the country.
[Laura and Micah laugh]
Eric: Carl’s Jr., yeah. Ravenpuff from Sweden; Rupert Grint’s Accountant; Sssssneaky Ssssnape; The honey in the biscuit at KFC would like a word; The kids that fail because of Umbridge’s awful teaching; Tofu Tom; and “Would you like fries with that?” “Yes, I lived in the ’70s.” Okay. 48%, by the way, say they did not look that up; they knew that Hardee’s was a thing. And here is next week’s Quizzitch question: So in this chapter, Harry is tasked with completing an illustration of a Bowtruckle. What English children’s book author started out as a biological illustrator, a subject matter which certainly influenced the animal characters of their books? This is going to be a good one. I’m very happy with this one. Submit your answer to us on the MuggleCast website, MuggleCast.com/Quizzitch, or you can find “Quizzitch” at the main nav bar if you’re on the site doing other stuff.
Andrew: And check out our other weekly podcasts, What the Hype?! and Millennial, for more pop culture and real world talk from the four of us. In our latest episode of What the Hype?!, Laura and Pam are reviewing the latest season of Outlander, and in the next couple of weeks, we’ll have episodes in which we review Onyx Storm and discuss cozy video games. And then over on Millennial, we ask the question… forget the boomer complaints; what are our biggest millennial complaints? So we got a lot of great feedback from probably some people who are listening tonight. All of these shows are brought to you by Muggles like you; listener support is the only reason we’ve been able to podcast for 20 years and counting. And you could support us by going to MuggleCastMerch.com – not to be confused with the overstock store – to get official MuggleCast shirts, hoodies, glassware, hats, and more. Apple Podcasts users can sign up for MuggleCast Gold, which gets you ad-free and early releases of MuggleCast, plus two bonus MuggleCast installments every month. And then the best way to support us is by pledging at Patreon.com/MuggleCast, and you get all the benefits of Gold, plus our livestreams, our yearly stickers, Lynx Line participation, another physical gift every year, a video message from one of the four of us made just for you, and the chance to cohost MuggleCast one day, just like James did today. Thanks, James, for joining us today.
James: Oh, absolutely. What a great time.
Andrew: You did great, and we can see why you took the top prize during Quizzitch Live. Well done.
James: Thank you very much. Yeah, it’s been amazing.
Andrew: Awesome. Glad you had a good time, and thank you so much for all your contributions today. And listeners, if you enjoy MuggleCast and think other Muggles would too, tell a friend about the show, and please leave a five star review in your favorite podcast app. And last but not least, visit MuggleCast.com for transcripts, social media links, our full episode archive, our favorite episodes, and everything MuggleCast. Thanks, everyone, for listening. I’m Andrew. [laughs] Eric is eating the biscuit…
Eric: I’m more biscuit than person right now.
[Everyone laughs]
Eric: This is delicious. I’m Eric.
Micah: I’m Micah.
Laura: I’m Laura.
James: And I’m James.
Andrew: Bye, everyone.
James and Micah: Bye.