Transcript for MuggleCast Episode #383, She Existed (HBP Chapter 5, An Excess of Phlegm)
Show Intro
[Show music plays]
Andrew Sims: Welcome to MuggleCast, your Harry Potter podcast. I’m Andrew.
Eric Scull: I’m Eric.
Micah Tannenbaum: And I’m Micah.
Andrew: Just the three of us this week. We’re going to dive into Chapter 5 of Half-Blood Prince, “An Excess of Phlegm.” One of the grossest chapter titles, I think, in the series.
[Andrew and Eric laugh]
Andrew: And we got some news. We’ve got a pretty straightforward episode for everybody this week, so let’s just dive right into it.
News
Andrew: Last week was Back to Hogwarts excitement; that’s on September 1. And I guess we forgot to bring this up, but we wanted to include it. It seemed like one of the big elements of last week’s Back to Hogwarts campaign was that we actually are going back to Hogwarts in Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald. So this featurette was released, and let’s watch it, because J.K. Rowling appears in it and says a few things.
Eric: Oooh, okay.
[Audio clip plays]
J.K. Rowling: I loved going back to Hogwarts. Of course I did. It looks very familiar to anyone who saw the Potter movies, but obviously the teaching staff are different.
Eddie Redmayne: Those names, the stories, the histories that sit in the back of our mind from the Potter series begin to weave their way into Beasts.
Ministry wizard: “I have some questions for you, Dumbledore.”
Christian Manz: To actually be shooting here at Laycock, where three of the films were shot, it’s quite amazing, really. When I walked on and saw all the trunks and Hogwarts stickers and things like that, it’s pretty amazing.
Zoë Kravitz: It’s like the ultimate childhood fantasy to play witches and wizards.
Jude Law: But it was a slightly odd out of body experience, because I’ve watched with everyone else those classes, and suddenly to be in it, you’re in there doing it, but then you look back as yourself and realize how special it was.
Dumbledore: “Go ahead, Newt.”
Young Newt Scamander: “Riddikulus.”
J.K. Rowling: I felt quite sentimental going back to Hogwarts.
[Audio clip ends]
Andrew: So J.K. Rowling is in that, Zoë Kravitz is in that, Eddie Redmayne, Jude Law, and some set guy. [laughs] But yeah, and I think the most interesting part of that clip was actually two things: A) J.K. Rowling mentioning that we are going back to Hogwarts, but it’s a whole different teaching staff, so I’m curious if we’re going to learn about other teachers other than Dumbledore. And just seeing the footage of the students running around Hogwarts. It’s pretty cool.
Eric: Yeah, what are they running to or from? Or what’s going on there? [laughs]
Andrew: I was wondering that as well. What’s with all the running?
Eric: At the 38 second mark. By the way, it’s Christian Manz, who’s the visual effects supervisor, is your “set guy.”
Andrew: Oh, thank you. [laughs]
Eric: Yeah, but the children are… they’re rounding a corner. It’s crazy; you always knew that parts of Hogwarts were filmed in multiple different castles across the country, but this area where they do… the courtyard, I guess it is, looks nothing like Hogwarts, necessarily, but they’re using just this one corner of it that these children are turning and running, and it’s extremely cool to see it all broken apart like this.
Micah: Right. I think it’s possibly the moment where the Ministry shows up at Hogwarts. The kids may be running to get a glimpse at the Minister, and if anybody else is there.
Eric: Oh, I love your idea of they’re running, but it’s for a good reason. Not like, “Po-po! Po-po! Everybody run!”
Micah: We know that they’re headed there, at least, to interrogate Dumbledore on some level about Newt, so I wonder… but that would be two different timeframes, almost, right?
Andrew: Oh, that’s true.
Micah: I mean, are they running in the timeframe where Newt is at school? Or are they running at the timeframe in present day where the Ministry is interrogating Dumbledore?
Eric: Well, here’s a takeaway: The children rounding the corner are Hufflepuff and Slytherin, which are the two classes in the Defense against the Dark Arts room with the boggart scene.
Andrew: Also, though, if you look at this Dumbledore scene and you see all the kids lined up, there are some really young kids here. They’re mixing first years with fourth or fifth years. There’s a solid one foot, two feet in height between some of these students. [laughs]
Eric: That is pretty noticeable, yeah. It was a different time, Andrew.
Andrew: Yeah, I guess maybe they were accepting even younger kids at Hogwarts back in the day.
[Andrew and Eric laugh]
Andrew: Could that be what this reveals? Because these kids don’t look older than eight.
Eric: You’re actually exactly… compared to Dumbledore in the middle here, when he’s walking down the line of these students, there are very young kids.
Andrew and Micah: Yeah.
Andrew: So that’s kind of interesting. But so yeah, it’s cute. Jude Law really does look fantastic as Dumbledore. He just seems happy. He’s a happy professor. Do we ever see professors that are happy? McGonagall was always kind of, “I’m a teacher. I’m strict.” Umbridge obviously sucked. Snape sucked. [laughs] Any happy teachers at Hogwarts? Sprout, I guess, kind of?
Eric: Well, they got rid of Peeves. Oh, he’s not a teacher.
Andrew: Dumbledore just gives off a happy vibe in these scenes.
Micah: Maybe Sprout, yeah. Flitwick sometimes. Hagrid is always happy to teach Care of Magical Creatures; he just doesn’t do a very good job.
Andrew: Yeah, yeah. I don’t know, there’s something that Jude Law is giving off that I’m just like, “Damn.” And not in a “Dumble-damn” way, just like, “Damn, he’s friendly.”
Eric: Yeah, I agree.
Andrew: Anyway.
Micah: Do you think, though, we’ll get a trailer before the movie is out?
Andrew: Uh-oh.
Micah: Or are we pretty much set there?
Andrew: No, I think we’re due one more trailer, probably next month.
Eric: Yeah, the movie is only two months away. Gosh, saying that out loud, it’s crazy.
Andrew: Yeah, I think one more. Let the trailer speculation begin. Here we go again.
[Andrew and Eric laugh]
Andrew: But speaking of Back to Hogwarts, I just want to jump ahead to this story. As far as we knew up until a couple days ago, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone was published in America on September 1. That’s what all of the Internet, including Pottermore, has said. But then weirdly, on Wednesday, September 5, J.K. Rowling, Scholastic, Pottermore all were celebrating Sorcerer’s Stone being published on that day, September 5. So it was a little weird. And when I started looking into it, it doesn’t seem like there’s one clear answer as to when it was actually published. There was no specific day where it was like, “Okay, on sale in America.” The J.K. Rowling bibliography actually says it was October.
[Eric laughs]
Andrew: So there’s a lot of different opinions on when the book was published, and I just found that interesting. To me, it seems like they picked September 5 because they didn’t want it to overlap with all the September 1 Back to Hogwarts excitement, which I actually found kind of interesting, that they didn’t want the two to butt heads.
Eric: [laughs] So they’re just kind of spacing out the advertisement week, the news week, with rewriting history, claiming that this book 20 years ago – nobody remembers the exact day – was on the fifth instead of the first.
Andrew: Yeah, they just made up a new date.
[Andrew and Eric laugh]
Andrew: And then they had Scholastic ring the stock market bell in New York on September 5 to celebrate, and there’s a big sign in Times Square. It was the whole thing that they did on September 5.
Micah: Somebody has to know the real date, though, because I just feel like… maybe since it wasn’t that big of a deal when it was published here the first time, right? It was still not as widely known as it has obviously grown to be today.
Andrew: Right. You would think there’s some documentation on when it was allowed to hit bookstore shelves, right?
Micah: Right, it’s got to be there somewhere.
[Andrew laughs]
Eric: They know; they’re just not telling us. It’s a conspiracy.
Micah: No, it’s consumer ploy.
Andrew: It is.
Micah: I’m just kidding. I don’t really know what the real reason is.
Andrew: No, well, it kind of is because they didn’t want it to be on the date that the entire Internet says it was because they didn’t want it to interfere with the Crimes of Grindelwald Back to Hogwarts promotion.
Eric: I mean, the Internet was more or less… some of those websites probably have the same web page from 1999, a couple months after the book was published. So I see no reason to believe that the websites and all of the Internet, as you said, were wrong.
Andrew: Right. Yeah, exactly.
Eric: I don’t know. It’s weird.
Andrew: Anyway, just kind of an interesting thing I noticed, and I know some other people noticed that as well.
Eric: So when I say, “J.K. Rowling official website, back in the day,” what springs to mind?
Andrew: The glory days of her Flash-heavy website.
[Micah laughs]
Eric: Flash-heavy, yeah. Do you remember the “Do Not Disturb” door? I remember… for me, it’s the cell phone that’s sitting on the desk, and you type in the numbers to get to the Ministry of Magic, and then you win a certificate thing. The reason I ask is it’s back.
[Andrew gasps]
Eric: J.K. Rowling’s website is back, but maybe not in the way we’d expect. So JKRowling.com has changed over the years. The Flashlight by Lightmaker is long gone, but for years – from 2004, I think it was, to 2010 – that website was the number one source for info coming directly from Jo, before Pottermore, and before even the good Pottermore, the Flash Pottermore. I guess maybe I’m a fan of Flash. The Rowling Library and the people at the Rowling Library, which is TheRowlingLibrary.com, have painstakingly reconstructed – this is news – J.K. Rowling’s old site and brought it back to life. And the way that they’ve done it is they’ve included pretty much the entire history of all of the posts. So when you go to J.K. Rowling’s site, you’d find whatever was currently up there; it was the news, and it would go away after a while. The FAQs, I think some of the older FAQs went away. This is all of them, and they brought it back and they got it to work somehow. Bless coding people for getting it to work.
[Andrew laughs]
Eric: And it works, and you can find it over there. They made a big deal about it. But for September 1… this was their Back to Hogwarts, was let’s go back to the days of waiting for that door to open and chasing the animated fly around J.K. Rowling’s desk. Can you remember the fly? Because I forgot about the fly, and then within two seconds of getting on the website, it was like, “Oh my God, that fly.” [laughs]
Andrew: I just had to pull a key out of the fly to get into the door because I just jumped back in time. But yeah, this is really cool. I mean, we all loved this website because, like the Harry Potter series, it was very whimsical. There were hidden secrets within this Flash site, and the design of it is reportedly… I remember J.K. Rowling saying it was inspired by her own desk. You click on the eraser; that’s how you get to the door, which revealed a couple of book titles and several other important moments in the Harry Potter series. But yeah, it’s cool. I’m playing with it right now. It’s definitely a cool thing. I wonder, too, how they brought this back. It’s pretty impressive.
Eric: I think it was a combination… the article that’s linked to in our doc, the first part, talks about how they used screen grabs, and people in the year or on the day could somehow save the files that were being used. I’m assuming that if your computer plays it, it’s secretly saving it somewhere, so people extracted the files that way during the website days. And then the Rowling Library had to compile… for all the languages and stuff, they had to get people from France who had grabbed the website to get some of the French stuff… really cool, long process.
Andrew: Yeah. Worth noting that J.K. Rowling’s current website is actually inspired by that original website; it’s now an overview of her desk.
Eric: Oh, that’s cool.
Andrew: Yeah, and it’s even got an old iPod on there, just like the classic website, and it’s got a piece of crumpled up paper that you can click on to get to the rumors page. [laughs]
Eric: Okay, that’s kind of cool. I mean, she did it right. It’s just so personal. This is… the website, when she launched it, she said, “Call me Jo.” Just really intimate insight into her brain. And being able to listen to the wind blowing and a doorbell ringing and a dog barking again is all very, very special and nostalgic.
Andrew: By the way, she did update her FAQ page on her new website a couple days ago, but she didn’t really say anything interesting, so we’re not talking about it.
Eric: That’s all reserved for Twitter, I guess.
Andrew: Although I guess if you’re into writing, you might want to check out her new post because she talks about her writing process and stuff.
Eric: Oh, okay.
Andrew: Yeah, we’ll see if her website lasts. I wouldn’t be surprised if J.K. Rowling’s people was like, “Hey, Rowling library, can you take that down, please?”
Eric: Yeah, I guess in that case, we’ll just issue a “Everybody, go play on it right now” kind of a thing. [laughs]
Andrew: Right, hurry up. Enjoy it while it lasts.
Eric: I mean, you could take the WOMBATs again, and I failed those miserably the first time, so maybe I’ve gotten better.
Andrew: All right, before we get to Chapter by Chapter, it’s time to hear from one of our sponsors.
Micah: Yeah, and how appropriate that we are talking about socks, and this is an episode I’m sure that will feature Dumbledore prominently.
[Andrew and Eric laugh]
Micah: But today’s episode is brought to you by Bombas.
[Ad break]
Chapter by Chapter: Seven-Word Summary
Andrew: Okay, so it’s time to get into Chapter by Chapter. This week, we’re discussing Half-Blood Prince Chapter 5. Like we did a couple of weeks ago, we’re going to do this group summary again, where we each contribute a word to the seven-word synopsis for this chapter. So we’re going to go in a different order this week; we have the list here. Go ahead, Micah. You kick it off.
Micah: Fleur…
Eric: … was…
Andrew: … entering…
Micah: … Harry’s…
Eric: … room…
Andrew: … and…
Micah: … existed.
Andrew: [laughs] What?
Eric: That was a failed attempt. Let’s actually redo it and pretend that the first time never happened.
Andrew: Why? No, that’s the fun of it. That’s the game.
Eric: “Fleur was entering Harry’s room and existed.” Okay, all right. You know what? I guess that’s a little bit more of a neutral take than the book, so I like it.
Andrew: Yeah. I would have said “intervened,” or…
Micah: “Interrupted.”
Andrew: “Interrupted,” yeah. Maybe “interrupt.”
Eric: I would have ended “with breakfast,” because she really does that.
Andrew: [laughs] “Harry’s room…” Oh.
Micah: Well, I mean, we’ll get into this, but her whole existence seems to bother pretty much everybody except Harry and Ron.
Andrew: [laughs] Oh, I wonder why.
Eric: Oh, that’s unfair. We’ll get into that.
Chapter by Chapter: Main Discussion
Andrew: So I’ll start off with this chapter. Upon Harry’s arrival at the Burrow, Dumbledore says something interesting, that they arrive sooner than expected because Slughorn was easier to persuade than he thought. Because Molly was like, “Oh, I thought you were going to come in the next morning,” and Dumbledore said, “No, no, it took less time.” I’m wondering, what else did Dumbledore have up his sleeve with Slughorn? Because he was walking out of Slughorn’s house banking on Slughorn doing the classic, “Wait!” What would he have done after that? What would Dumbledore have done if Slughorn didn’t go “Wait!”? Would he turn around and go back and be like, “Are you sure?”
Eric: That’s a good question. I don’t know. Maybe he would have set Harry down and said, “Hey, wait here,” and then gone back and threatened Slughorn with the wrath of all of his magic.
Andrew: Oh, there you go. Or been like, “Look, I brought Harry because he loves you so much, and he’s out there crying right now because you’re not coming back.”
[Eric laughs]
Andrew: “Can you please come back for Harry? He’s had a rough life.”
Micah: Even though you’ve never met him.
[Andrew laughs]
Eric: Help an orphan in need, Slughorn.
Andrew: Yeah, right. [laughs] I don’t know. It just seems like that didn’t really add up to me. That didn’t make sense to me.
Eric: Yeah, Dumbledore kind of miss-estimated to Molly when they would be back. Maybe he just really likes messing with people’s plans. [laughs] He’s going to bring Harry the night before. He’s like, “Eh, probably won’t take all night, but just in case, we’ll say the morning.” Maybe he also didn’t want to worry Molly, in case it did last till morning.
Andrew: He’s Dumbledore. He do what he wants.
Eric: Yeah, for sure.
Andrew: But Dumbledore also mentions that “We were lucky,” in regards to Slughorn, and that plays into the Felix Felicis theory, right?
Eric: Yeah, Miss Currie, who wrote in a couple episodes ago, said, “Hey, this line is suspicious. Can we apply it back to the earlier chapters and suggest that Dumbledore was taking some Felix?” And three episodes later, I still like this theory. I still kind of think maybe that Dumbledore disappearing in the last chapter – just randomly, “Oh, I’m going to use the bathroom” – leaving Harry and Slughorn to it, and Harry has the natural ability to charm Slughorn, and Slughorn easily goes along with this whole coming back to Hogwarts thing, I think was very lucky indeed. So Dumbledore, if not directly referencing the fact that he just took some Felix, is certainly correct in suggesting that it’s been fortunate for them.
Andrew: They also got that task finished with sooner than expected because they happened to know exactly where Slughorn was living at the time.
Eric: Somehow.
Andrew: Dumbledore could have spent days searching for him, but instead, basically went exactly the right way. Thanks, Felix.
Eric: [laughs] Thanks, Felix. Yeah, so I like that theory. I think I’m going to say it’s confirmed. What do you guys think?
Andrew: I wouldn’t go that far, but I mean, I’m willing to entertain it.
Micah: Yeah, I’m not totally sold on the Felix Felicis theory just yet. I don’t think somebody as powerful as Dumbledore would need luck.
Eric: Why not just take the help you can get?
Andrew: So what else happens?
Micah: So we also learn that Dumbledore has to leave – he can’t stay and chat with Molly, Tonks, and Harry – to go attend business with the Minister for Magic. And so I’m curious, just given what we learn in the first couple of chapters about the relationship that exists between Dumbledore and Scrimgeour, what could this possibly be? What could they have to talk about?
Andrew: Yeah, I don’t know, but it would probably be an awkward meeting, whatever it would be. Just a tense meeting.
Eric: I’m guessing it’s more of the same of what we know, or we’re being sort of… something’s going on that we’re being hidden. But I think Dumbledore has already once intervened to prevent the Minister from contacting Harry?
Andrew: Yeah. Maybe a progress meeting, just like, “Hey, here’s what’s been going on. Here’s what we’ve heard. Here’s where the giants are. Here’s what we’ve got ready at Hogwarts.”
Eric: That’s true. I mean, there is an actual reason for the headmaster of Hogwarts to communicate with the government, and that is, like you just alluded to, protections around Hogwarts, and assuring him that the country’s students will be safe, and going through some of the protections for sure. And then again, maybe it’s also Dumbledore fulfilling his role as member of the Wizengamot, because we don’t know what he does for that. Maybe he’s just… maybe he has a court date, an appearance.
Micah: Okay. And mentioned that Tonks was there as well when Harry arrives, but she is visibly upset and seemingly not herself. We’re not entirely sure what’s going on here. We get a bit of an explanation later on in the chapter. But Eric, you were saying earlier that that’s complete misdirection.
Eric: Well, yeah, this chapter begins the book-long mystery of what exactly is going on with Tonks. We love the idea of Tonks, to see her as this excitable, spunky individual with bright pink hair, but that’s not the case. She’s described as just looking down. Her appearance is less colorful than usual without her customary shade of bubblegum pink, and she’s got this mousy brown, I don’t know, kind of thing going on with her hair. And leaves immediately upon their arrival; she’s just like, “Thanks for the tea, Molly. Gotta go.” And Dumbledore says, “Don’t let my presence cause you to leave,” and she’s like, “Nope, nope, heading out.” And Molly is trying to get her to come to dinner the next night, and she’s like, “No,” and just leaves, and we don’t know why. And then later in the chapter, like you said, Hermione and Ron kind of have something to say about it, but it ends up being wrong. We have the benefit of knowing what the real reason is that she is so down, and I just don’t know. It’s sad to see the ones we love be sad.
Micah: Right.
Andrew: Yeah, well, I think it’s an important thing to include in this series. Everybody is kind of as uppity as they can be during this dramatic time, but there also need to be confused and saddened people because of what’s going on.
Eric: I agree with you. Grief over loss is real, and I think even Harry maybe has an inkling that it’s… his suspicions are confirmed, that she’s upset over Sirius’s death. But when it turns out not to be that, then I get confused, because his response to them later in the chapter is “But she barely knew him,” or Ron says that or something, and Harry is like, “Yeah, I know that.” But… trying to figure out what I’m trying to say here. The whole thing, that it’s just she’s in love with Lupin and Lupin is having a difficult time accepting it, is not cause, necessarily, to stop being yourself. I don’t know. I don’t want to judge somebody else on their…
Andrew: Love is tough, Eric. Love is tough.
Eric: It’s just she goes through the whole book believing… she’s in such grief that we totally think it really is the death of her cousin who she barely knew, and it turns out it’s, I don’t know, just this other thing. I’ve never known what to feel about Tonks in this book, so rereading these chapters will hopefully give a fresh perspective, and with the feedback of our listeners, of is this a positive character choice for Tonks, to have her be the vessel of this information that love can affect magic?
Andrew: Yeah. I mean, look, Tonks was in this situation where it was unrequited love, which can be one of the worst kinds of love, when you love somebody else but they don’t love you. It sucks. And Tonks is going through that right now, plus all the drama going on with Sirius, losing Sirius, and this wizarding war… it’s just a whole mess for her. There’s nothing really good in her life at the moment. “Love me, Lupin.”
Micah: Yeah, and it’s clear that it’s a bunch of different things that are affecting her so much that she would be at the Burrow at midnight, 1:00 a.m., talking with Molly. I mean, it’s pretty late.
Andrew: Molly. [laughs] It’s Beauty and the Beast all over again.
Micah: One interesting piece of information that we get once Harry is inside and sitting down and Molly is making him food: Slughorn taught both Arthur and Molly and started around the same time at Hogwarts as Dumbledore. So this leads to the question, shifting gears a little bit, talking about Crimes of Grindelwald: Can we expect to see Slughorn at Hogwarts? We know that he was there during the time of Tom Riddle, which isn’t that far away, and if he started around the same time as Dumbledore, there’s no reason to think that he wouldn’t have been there at the same time as Newt.
Andrew: That would be cool. If J.K. Rowling has all this type of timeline information written down in an encyclopedia that she refuses to release…
[Eric laughs]
Andrew: … hopefully she’s looking at that kind of information and being like, “Okay, I do need to at least put him in for a quick cameo.” On the other hand, I feel like we would have heard about it by now. But maybe they’re keeping it a surprise; I mean, they kept the Johnny Depp Grindelwald thing a secret for a long time.
Eric: Yeah, for sure. I would guess that it’s just a shout-out. If Dumbledore is having the Slytherins in his class, maybe there’s a throwaway line about, “Oh, talk to your Head of House, Professor Slughorn about this” kind of thing. A throwaway name shout-out, only because the movie is so crowded already that I’m just like, “They couldn’t possibly fit another recognizable character in this.”
Andrew: Yeah. Well, maybe in Movie 7.
Eric: [laughs] You mean 5?
Andrew: No, 7. I’m convinced they’re going to add more movies.
[Andrew and Eric laugh]
Eric: But yeah, I think it’s important to remember that Slughorn should be present in the timeline that we are with in the films. So that’s a super cool timely reference for this chapter to produce.
Micah: Yeah, and you have a bunch of reference points here that he served as Potions Master, according to the HP Lexicon, until 1981, and of course, we know that he was there when Tom Riddle was in school in the ’40s, because he is the one who lets Tom get a little bit more insight into what exactly Horcruxes are and what they do. So I’m eager for a Slughorn cameo. Maybe not Jim Broadbent. Eh, maybe.
Andrew: [laughs] No.
Micah: Maybe if we get to the ’40s, they could pull it off. They did those flashback scenes.
Eric: Yeah, I guess.
Andrew: Yeah. They’re recasting everybody else, though.
Eric: Yeah, yeah. And it was nice, in this little bit of research, to get a refresher course on how old Molly and Arthur are versus Lily and James. Presumably, both Arthur and Molly, according to HP Lexicon, were born in 1950, and then Harry’s parents were both born in 1960. So Ron’s mom and dad are ten years older than Harry’s mom and dad would be. And that’s the difference of Hogwarts, what teachers are there; that kind of flips around like that. So just as a matter of perspective, as far as the aging goes. And then Snape would also be ten years younger than Molly and Arthur.
Andrew: “You asked, and we listened. Colin Farrell is back as Professor Slughorn.”
[Andrew and Eric laugh]
Eric: I don’t know that I would cast that. I would watch it. [laughs] It’s Colin Farrell.
Andrew: No, but Google has “People also search for,” and Colin Firth is here, and I’m thinking, “Oh, he could be a good Slughorn, Colin Firth.”
Eric: Yeah, I don’t disagree.
Andrew: Gotta bald him up a bit, but other than that, he’d be good to go.
Micah: One of the big underlying themes throughout this chapter… because all in all, not a whole lot happens in this chapter, and I know I was texting with both of you before we recorded during the week, and I said, “Hey, you know what? Not too much happens in this chapter; it’s a little boring.” We don’t have the same level of excitement that we get in the previous chapters. There’s a lot happening; there’s introductions of new characters. But here, security really seems to be at the forefront, right? We have heard in the last few chapters about the importance of security and all these measures that the Ministry are encouraging the wizarding community to take, but now we actually see them put more into practice. And we see the interaction between Molly and Dumbledore, and then of course, Molly and Arthur, and the clock, which we’ll talk a little bit more about. Arthur’s new job has much more of a secure feel to it, not from a employment standpoint, but from his actual role and what he’s doing, so now we’re starting to get a little bit more of a sense of just how dangerous things could potentially be.
Andrew: Right. It’s such a big change from earlier books, and it’s kind of made light of in this chapter, because Molly – which is actually kind of surprising – she’s hesitant to go along with these security measures. Like, “Ask me our security question.” Which is actually kind of surprising, because Molly is obviously a mother, and you would think she would want to be looking out for the family at all times, whether or not Voldemort is back, and yet, she’s not really interested in following along with the question game. Is it just to make light of the situation?
Eric: It’s a good question. Considering the clock hands put all of her children at “Mortal peril,” [laughs] you would think she would observe the passwords and the securities a little bit more willingly.
Andrew: Right, yeah. And that clock, it obviously has gone on in fandom to become one of the most popular objects, I think. I remember a couple years ago, there was a story about somebody built a real Weasley family clock, and everybody was freaking out about it. But in this chapter, Molly says she doesn’t know why exactly it puts everybody in the “Mortal peril”; how exactly it determines that. I was wondering, do we have any ideas for how it could determine that? Because one of the things she says is that nobody else she knows has the clock, so she can’t tell if a clock like this would say that for everybody.
Eric: I just want to know where she got it, in that case. How they came by the clock. And did it…? Whether or not adding… say when Ginny was born, was a new hand just magically added? Does this follow the Weasleys around, and every time there’s a new Weasley, is there a new hand of the clock? Or was there some manual…? There’s a clock aspect. Did Arthur Weasley have something to do with this because he loves Muggle machinery, and did he have anything to do with it? I’m just so, so curious.
Andrew: Yeah. You would think it… there’s a very firm rule with it that it must only stick to your family, because if I was Molly, I would want to add other people like Harry and Hermione and other people she cares about, and yet she can’t. But I think you raise a good question, the very first thing you said: Who made the clock? That would help Molly figure out why it keeps saying “Mortal peril.” [laughs]
Eric: Yeah, send him an owl. Be like, “Hey, this is stuck on…” Or where’s the grandfather clock repair man? Repair wizard?
Andrew: “Uh, ma’am? Do I have to state the obvious? Voldemort is back; that’s why it says ‘Mortal peril.'”
[Eric laughs]
Andrew: And I mean, ultimately it kind of ends up being right, for at least one of the Weasleys.
Eric: Yeah, nobody’s safe. Especially when Molly doesn’t do the password.
Andrew: So could the clock actually have known that one of them was going to die, but maybe it didn’t know which?
Eric: I think that might be a stretch.
Andrew: I need a clock for Lavender Brown, to find out what’s going on with her.
[Eric laughs]
Andrew: I need a clock for you two. I need to see what you two are up to most of the time.
Eric: Probably just traveling. Mine would say traveling, traveling through life.
[Andrew and Eric laugh]
Micah: Why the need for all the extra security measures, though? Because doesn’t Dumbledore say to Harry when they first arrive that the Burrow has been given every possible protection by the Ministry?
Eric: Yeah, he does say that.
Andrew: So is that why Molly could be rolling her eyes at the words? I think, given how many unknowns there are right now… they don’t really know what Voldemort is up to, how many followers he has. It’s just they’re living in the moment. They just need to take all precautions, every precaution that they can. There’s no such thing as being too safe.
Eric: Well, the weak spot is always the people, right? Any perfect system is made imperfect by people. And you can make sure that the wizards going to and from the Burrow are protected, or people are safe when they’re at the Burrow, but ultimately, it comes down to the people – who could be imposters; we’ve seen it before in these books – and that’s why the security question, right? So it’s like there’s protection around the area, there’s protection around the house and maybe even the people within, but the security question is not just a formality; it really will determine whether or not a bad seed enters the Burrow.
Andrew: Yeah, agreed.
Micah: Okay, and then we briefly mentioned Arthur’s new job. He’s been promoted to the Office for the Detection and Confiscation of Counterfeit Defensive Spells and Protective Objects.
Eric: Yeah. I mean, it’s so interesting. You said when we first started this chapter, the darker perspective on what new jobs exist, Andrew, in this world. The concept that wizards would – what’s the word? – abuse or exploit the general fear level rising when Voldemort is back, and use it to sell bunko knockoff items, products that don’t work, is kind of a crazy and sick concept. It talks about human nature in not the most positive light here, that there’s people profiteering off of the misery and shame of others, and now that’s Arthur’s job, is to police that.
Andrew: Right, right.
Eric: So it is a very much darker take on the world than existed before, but I think it’s time for it, given the experiences of Book 5 with Umbridge and all that. The Ministry is changing, and Arthur is one of those whose job is the lens through which we can see what the government is up to.
Micah: Right. And I just made a joke here that clearly he does a great job on the Vanishing Cabinet front.
[Andrew and Eric laugh]
Eric: That’s the thing; it was hidden inside Borgin and Burkes all along. Why not go straight to the source of where you think there’s going to be the most Dark stuff and round them up? But I guess that’s probably prejudice.
Andrew: By the way, maybe I’m just stupid, but his job title is one of the most confusing job titles. When I was reading this the other night, I had to reread it five times to wrap my head around it. “Office for the Detection and Confiscation of Counterfeit Defensive Spells and Protective Objects.” There’s a lot happening in that title. Can they have made it a little more straightforward? That’s not even an elevator pitch; that’s beyond an elevator pitch. You don’t have time to explain that, to say that job title in an elevator.
Eric: Even the acronym would be, what, ODCCDSPO? [tries to say ODCCDSPO phonetically] Yeah, I can’t do it.
[Andrew tries to say ODCCDSPO phonetically]
Eric: “I work for the Bunko Objects Department.” That’s what I would call it.
Andrew: There you go.
Micah: The other side, though, to all of this… I think there’s a bit of tension diffused by the Weasley twins, even though they’re not physically present in this chapter. The chapter starts out, there’s Tonks, she’s upset, there’s a lot of security in place, a lot of just overall feelings of indecision and tension. But when Harry finally turns in for the night, he does sleep in the Weasley twins’ room. He finds something in the pillowcase – I forget what it is – but I feel like those types of moments just bring a smile to your face as you’re reading the chapter, because you’re thinking, “Oh, Fred and George are doing so great for themselves, despite everything that’s going on.”
Andrew: Yeah, it’s much needed relief. And something that stuck out to me here is that Molly is in support of what Fred and George are doing. Remember, Harry just last book in late Goblet of Fire wanted to keep his funding of their joke shop a secret because Molly and maybe others would have been pissed, and now we see Molly making a turnaround I don’t think any of us might have expected, seeing her sons run a successful joke shop. She’s very proud of the things that they’ve created, even though the hijinks that they create are not necessarily something any parent would want their children to be buying, let alone creating and selling.
Eric: [laughs] I think she says in this chapter, “It turns out they have a real knack for business,” and I’m just… it’s kind of cool. It’s that parent thing where you may not have always seen eye-to-eye with your kid, but you’ll be damned if they’re not creative in some unexpected way that isn’t all bad.
Andrew: Yeah. And I think you could argue that Fred and George might be the most successful members of the family, including Arthur Weasley.
Eric: Well, maybe.
Andrew: And Bill.
Eric: Charlie is an expert in his field, and Bill is probably one of the few men who the goblins don’t want to kill on sight.
Andrew: Yes, but I just mean money-wise. They’ve got to be making a lot of money at that joke shop. I’ve been to the Wizarding World; I see a lot of people in there all the time.
[Eric laughs]
Micah: We’re talking about what kind of jobs exist in the wizarding world outside of the government jobs that we see, and this would be a perfect example of that, them going into business for themselves. And I tend to agree; I think there’s a certain almost stigma that may be associated with taking a government job. And Charlie is studying dragons, and Bill is off working for Gringotts. So I mean, the dragons piece has a cool feel to it, but by and large, if you look at some of the other professions, Fred and George seem to be in an area that is interesting, and it makes people laugh, right? It’s a completely different element to what we’re experiencing throughout the early part of this chapter. And I think it’s even showcased more in the movie by when they go to Diagon Alley and it’s really the only bright spot in the entire street; everything else is boarded up and destroyed.
Andrew and Eric: Yeah.
Eric: That’s a good point. The movie did that really well.
Andrew: I bet they could open up more shops around the world, too. Create more jobs. Jobs, jobs, jobs.
Eric: You’re right, Micah. The mention of the Weasley twins, they’re not even physically present, but the mention of them brings a smile to your face as a reader, and even when Hermione gets punched in the eye – which is really weird, and whatever – it’s still a remnant of this kind of more whimsical, simple time. And Molly is unable to remove the bruise, even though she’s an expert at healing bruises. Just the idea that there’s this sort of chaotic force for positivity in the Weasley twins is supposed to be, I think, reassuring. There’s a lot that’s a little bit tonally off in this chapter, I think, and I don’t know; Hermione getting punched in the eye… I’m just feeling like, “Ouch.” As a reader, I’m just… I feel very sorry for her, but it’s meant to be…
Andrew: It is rough.
Eric: Yeah, yeah.
Andrew: It’s like, “Oh, boom, surprise. You’ve just been punched in the face, woman.” Like, wow.
Micah: I think, though, that traditionally, that wouldn’t be something that Hermione would do, and what I mean by that is she wouldn’t be fooled by something that Fred and George put together. She probably wouldn’t even come close to touching something like that, but she’s so overwhelmed by the OWLs that she’s not focusing on what she’s doing, and I think that’s why this happens, right? Because she’s just not paying attention.
Eric: That’s good insight.
Andrew: Or could it speak to the craftsmanship of Fred and George Weasley’s work that they can surprise somebody like that?
[Eric laughs]
Andrew: I mean, really, they make good stuff. Molly is impressed.
Eric: Well, why was she putting it…?
Micah: Doesn’t Ron say “I wouldn’t touch that”? Or Harry? One of them tells her straight out, “If it’s sitting over there, it’s likely not a finished product. I wouldn’t touch it.”
Andrew: Oh.
Eric: What was she doing with the telescope anyway? Putting it to her eye, squeezing it, and she gets punched. I mean, I’m not saying it’s her fault for getting punched in the eye. Look, that’s problematic too, but anything in Fred and George’s room should be off limits, and this is where everyone has decided that they are going to coalesce the next morning, after Harry is at the Burrow.
Micah: Well, let’s talk about that for a second, because people just showed up in his room unannounced. That’s a little bit of an invasion of privacy, isn’t it?
Andrew: Absolutely.
Eric: [laughs] Sort of. He’s in their house, and he’s… I don’t know. They come in to bring him breakfast, or breakfast is on its way…
Micah: He’s 16 years old, though. Knock before entering.
Eric: I mean, this isn’t the beginning of Prisoner of Azkaban, the movie. He’s not fooling around under the covers.
Andrew: Well, and they’re excited to see him. The Burrow has always given off the vibe that it’s a open environment. I don’t know. It’s just a very… it’s a family affair.
Micah: What does that mean? Molly walking around just wearing an apron?
Andrew: Yeah, yeah, nude. Just an apron. No, I think it’s just a very open environment that they have there. [laughs]
Micah: No, I know.
Eric: You have a point, Micah, and nobody’s saying you don’t have a point. But also, maybe it’s that he slept in? Because he slept pretty late, I guess? Is it just like, “We have to go find Harry, because otherwise he’s really going to ruin…”
Micah: I think that’s probably the safe answer to give, yeah.
Eric: Okay.
Andrew: I’m thinking back to being in my house; in the mornings, somebody might poke their head in. God, even a year ago, when I was temporarily living at home, my dad would open the door to let Brooklyn in or out of my room.
Eric: Did your door have a lock?
Andrew: Yes, but that’s another question I was just going to bring up. Did Harry’s door have a lock on it?
Eric: I mean, he’s in Fred and George’s room, and they were always locking themselves in their room on purpose so nobody could go in, because they’re experimenting on… I think it was the last book where Harry is at the Burrow and you hear all these explosions, and they’re just like, “Yeah, we’ve gotten used to it.” Even now there’s this residual smell of gunpowder, which Molly is unable to purge completely from the room, which is delightful.
Andrew: So let’s talk about Fleur.
Eric: Yeah, let’s.
Andrew: She’s back. She’s beautiful. She’s… well, I won’t blame her. The guys are drawn to her.
Eric: It’s so weird. Here’s the intro line for Fleur – you’ve just got to laugh reading this now, because it’s even worse than I thought – “A young woman was standing in the doorway, a woman of such breathtaking beauty that the room seemed to have become strangely airless. She was tall and willowy with long blonde hair and appeared to emanate a faint, silvery glow. To complete this vision of perfection, she was carrying a heavily laden breakfast tray.”
[Andrew laughs]
Eric: I was like, “Okay, food and sex. Harry’s basic two needs. There we go.”
Andrew: Well, remember, she’s part-Veela, so this is part of being a Veela. The guys are just – and I guess women, if you are into fellow women – you are just drawn to her. So it doesn’t really surprise me that Harry is describing her this way. She just emanates beauty, right?
Eric: Yeah, but it’s like, this gorgeous woman bursts in with a tray of breakfast and then proceeds to get zero respect from nearly everyone in the room. Everyone at the Burrow is tired of her, and even the title of this chapter, “An Excess of Phlegm,” it’s sort of a crude take on this girl who… the whole reason she’s bringing breakfast to Harry is because she wanted to see him, because she’s so grateful, still, that he saved her sister’s life in the Triwizard Tournament when she failed to two years ago. And it’s just kind of a… she wants to see him. She has every right to see him the same way Ron and Hermione are barging in, and they aren’t even bringing breakfast; she at least has a reason to be there. And nobody gives her the space. Ginny is just… everybody says something nasty about her, either while she’s there or as soon as she leaves, and it sits a little uncomfortable with me.
Andrew: Yeah, this happens in the real world, too, where a family member starts dating somebody and no family member likes this new person. [laughs] So I read this chapter now, and I’m like, “Oh, that’s actually kind of relatable.” I’m lucky I haven’t really had… well, actually, my brother has dated some questionable people that none of my family members have liked.
[Eric laughs]
Andrew: But it’s just… this is a scenario that comes up in the real world, and I wouldn’t base it solely on her beauty. Is that what you’re suggesting?
Eric: Well, it’s her accent, too. I really feel like J.K. Rowling uses Fleur’s accent against her because she writes it like it sounds, which, that’s a literary technique; it’s a very good one. She does it with Hagrid, too. But it kind of makes Fleur… if you’re reading it, it makes her seem less intelligent, that she’s speaking sort of a broken English. She says, “Eet was no trouble… I ‘ave been longing to see ‘im. You remember my seester, Gabrielle?” It’s just kind of… oh, “Bill is very busy at ze moment, working very ‘ard, and I work part-time at Gringotts for my Eenglish, so he brought me ‘ere for…” You just get tired, right? You’re just easily exhausted, the same way that Mrs. Weasley is very vocally exhausted. And I just feel like it’s a bad rap. We got an email – or it was a tweet – I really tried to find it and find who sent it, but people are writing in. Fleur gets a lot of crap, but let’s not forget, she was her school’s champion two years ago. The Goblet of Fire, the omniscient Goblet of Fire, picked her out of the sea of boys and girls from Beauxbatons.
Andrew: And now she’s been turned into a joke.
Eric: And now it’s a punchline.
Andrew: Yeah, it’s sad. I was also just thinking, especially in this Me Too era, how bad it would be for Veela in the real world. I mean, women already receive enough unwanted advances in the Muggle world as it is, so imagine being a Veela where guys are extra drawn to you. It would be incredibly horrific.
Eric: Yeah. I can’t even… [laughs] Yeah, I think it’s sort of a problem. This is maybe one of the treatments of women… this doesn’t age well, I don’t think, necessarily.
Andrew: Yeah, I can see what you’re saying.
Eric: J.K. Rowling hasn’t done anything wrong. Your perspective, Andrew, on having a family that really doesn’t like a new member of the family or potential new member of the family, I think is helpful and kind of excuses it a little bit, because of how this is family relations. We do know all these other characters better than we know Fleur.
Andrew: Right. To play devil’s advocate, I think this is just a situation where a new person has entered the family and nobody can accept them, and that happens.
Eric: And Ginny says, “Mum’s going to put a stop to it if she can.”
Andrew: That’s pretty rough. [laughs]
Eric: Yeah, Molly is on a vendetta. And Molly even says that the reason she doesn’t approve is because she thinks it’s too soon, but I think there’s something underlying there, where if she really had taken to Fleur and likes Fleur, it wouldn’t be a problem, right? Molly would look past the time. The time in which they knew each other, got to know each other, is a clear excuse for an underlying Molly just does not like this woman. But even Ron, who tries to defend her… Ron and Harry both are trying to ebb the tide back the other direction, and Ginny says something really bad to Harry, and everyone’s just crapping on Fleur, and Ron and Harry are not able to turn it around a little bit.
Micah: There’s definitely a bit of xenophobia going on, I feel like, particularly when they’re targeting the way that she speaks, because that’s a little bit of fear of somebody from another country, another culture, that maybe you don’t fully understand. I mean, that to me, that’s taking it to a new level. They’re not necessarily attacking what she’s saying, but how she’s saying it.
Eric: Ginny says… oh, yeah, it’s that line.
Micah: But you are right, Andrew, I do think there is also a bit of a new person in the family, and it’s your traditional kind of guys versus girls, right? The guys are completely enamored by her because of how she looks, and the girls can’t stand her for maybe that exact same reason. We don’t know.
Andrew: Right. Yeah, there’s a little jealousy.
Eric: Well, the girls just can’t see past her beauty. And Ginny says to Harry – completely uncalled for – “I suppose you like the way Phlegm says ‘Arry,’ do you?” Like, come on, man. Give her a damn shot. And that is xenophobia, and Book 4, where Fleur was a school champion, is all about not being xenophobic and why that’s bad. We’ve gone backwards on it.
Micah: Right, and think of all of the different types of people from different backgrounds and cultures and even creatures that have been at the Burrow, or will be at the Burrow, have come there over the years, and yet Fleur is the one that’s taking the brunt of all this. You’d think that Molly would be happy that Bill found somebody with all the time that he dedicates to working at Gringotts with goblins and others, so I’m kind of surprised by this. I know it kind of reverses course after he gets bitten and that leads into the whole Tonks and Remus finally formulating a little bit better relationship between the two when they see how that relationship unfolds, but it’s just surprising to me that it takes that specifically to make Molly more willing to accept her.
Eric: I guess the problem I have is that Fleur seems more like a caricature of a character than an actual character here. We don’t have really a one-on-one with Fleur. She’s being reduced to this pejorative “Phlegm,” this bad name for her, and it’s not like the Fleur that we saw in Book 4. She’s not having many successes; she’s just getting crapped on by her future in-laws right now. So that’s the problem, is we don’t really know… there’s not the other shoe that drops that’s like, “Oh, actually, she’s cool.” The other shoe that drops is, “Oh, she’s not shallow, after all, like only one person – Molly – thought that she was. Oh, okay, great.” That’s her whole character arc in this book.
Micah: She’s back after a book and change, and this is our first time seeing her. You’d think that the introduction would be a bit different than the reaction that she receives.
Eric: And can I admit to being, I think it was 17, and not knowing this word, “phlegm,” produced this way?
Andrew: [laughs] Yeah, no, I don’t think I did either.
Eric: That was really isolating as a… reading this, I didn’t at first get the joke, because calling Fleur “Phlegm,” since it’s spelled differently, I didn’t understand as a reader that it… and there’s no moment where it’s very easily – what’s the word? – spelled out phonetically the way that J.K. Rowling does with “Hermione.”
Micah: That’s xenophobic, the title in and of itself, because you’re referring to the way that she speaks.
Andrew: Yeah, yeah. Pretty bizarre, now that we’re talking about it.
Micah: This is what being older does when you analyze.
[Eric laughs]
Andrew: Exactly. Well, that’s why we’re revisiting this, and it’s fun to revisit it all these years later.
Eric: Although I would say, too, about the comment that this is a boring chapter, I think what it is is that this is the first chapter that doesn’t have drastic implications on the series as a whole. Every chapter up to this point has been really important for series reasons. This is that first chapter that’s just like, “Okay, the things that are happening here are specific to this book and this book alone, and just kind of living in the world.” Everything else is setup and stuff for later, but this is just kind of living and breathing, and maybe that’s why it’s boring.
Andrew: So let’s jump through these next couple things kind of quick. So we mentioned Tonks being sad. She blames herself for Sirius’s death; she was fighting Bellatrix and should have finished her off. And Sirius was also Tonks’s cousin, so we get some insight into why Tonks may be feeling the way that she is, even though that’s not the whole picture. And then, per Dumbledore’s encouragement, Harry lets Ron and Hermione in on the lessons he’s going to be having with Dumbledore and the truth about the prophecy. And Ron and Hermione say, “We expected it was something like that.” Tough conversation for kids to be having. Kind of surreal.
Micah: And it’s also clear throughout this conversation that there’s something Ron and Hermione want to tell Terry… Terry. That’s what I’m going to call him now.
[Eric laughs]
Micah: … Harry, but they never get around to, so that’s just something to keep an eye on.
Eric: Do we know what that is? I forget what that is. Do we know what that is?
Micah: I thought it was prefects, but I could be wrong.
Andrew: No, that was Book 5, wasn’t it?
Micah: Was it?
Eric: Are they prefects in Book 5? Yeah, I think they are, aren’t they?
Andrew: Yeah, I think so.
Micah: I don’t know; there’s something that Harry can kind of tell that Ron and Hermione want to say to him. At least that’s the sense that I got. I don’t know.
Andrew and Eric: Yeah.
Eric: I read your notes and then I read the chapter, and I was like, “Yeah, there is something there.” So hopefully we’ll find out what it is. The big takeaway about him telling them about the prophecy, though, is that he notes that they still stay with him. He notes that they’re not running for the hills immediately when he says that he is the Chosen One, and it’s a kind of a moment for Harry where he’s like, “Huh. I guess I am loved.”
Andrew: “They still like me.”
Micah: Right. Doesn’t she say something like that? That she figured that that was the case?
Andrew: Yeah, she did. So the OWLs arrive, and everybody kind of gets the results that they expected. Hermione was hoping for absolute perfection, but she did get one E. But she had O’s, Outstanding, for everything else. Harry got Poor in Divination and Dreadful in History of Magic. Other than that, he did pretty well.
[Eric laughs]
Andrew: Outstanding in Defense Against the Dark Arts, so that was good. But he also comes to the realization that, since he got an E in Potions, that it won’t be enough for him to pursue his NEWT-level classes in Potions and thus become an Auror. There’s a line here that I thought was interesting. He says, “Wouldn’t he be living up to the prophecy, and giving himself the best chance of survival, if he joined those highly trained wizards whose job it was to find and kill Voldemort?” I found that interesting because it seems like Harry thinks it’s going to take a few years before Voldemort is taken down. He thinks he’s going to get out of Hogwarts, he could have become an Auror, and then at some point during his Auror career, take down Voldemort. Now, I know Harry doesn’t know that this is a seven-part story, and it’s going to end after the seventh book…
[Eric laughs]
Andrew: But still, I’m kind of surprised that at this point he thinks it’s going to take several years, and I wonder if many people in the wizarding world felt the same way.
Eric: Yeah, yeah. I think it’s a convenient out for the writer to put that Harry expects it’s going to take more than just the next summer to defeat Voldemort. I like it a lot for that reason.
Micah: Yeah, I totally agree. And he seems a bit downtrodden. He definitely wants to become an Auror; there’s no question about that. But it seems like between the end of the last chapter… what is it Dumbledore says? “Don’t count your owls before they arrive,” or something to that effect.
Eric: [laughs] Yeah.
Micah: But to me, it was also just interesting to watch Hermione freak out, as the typical nerd would, waiting for their exam results, because I know I was in that position as well. If I would take these big exams in New York… I don’t know if they still have them anymore, but we used to take these Regents Exams, which were kind of the culminating exams in different subjects, and obviously they played a big role in determining where you would apply to college and things like that. So I definitely have been in that kind of a situation. I don’t know if I freaked out as much as Hermione did, but it showed a lot of her character in this chapter.
Eric: It’s actually a really good Ron line when he goes over to Hermione’s paper and reads it and is like, “Oh yeah, see? There’s nothing to worry about after all.” It’s so sweet. But do you guys actually understand how the OWLs work? So it looks like… my theory is you can get an Outstanding or an Exceeds Expectations, that that is a passing grade, and that counts as getting an OWL, or maybe also an Acceptable. Yeah, because pass grades are here, fail grades are here. So if you get a passing grade, that is considered getting an OWL, and then you count up your OWLs to figure out how many you have. That’s completely different than, as we find out, being able to go into the NEWT program, because certain teachers, like Snape, are allowed to have certain requirements to move forward in your teaching, and I guess you’d get more of a gen ed experience if you weren’t specifically going for a certain NEWT-level class, if you didn’t have the grades to back it up. But what Molly says is that Ron – who Harry notices quite aptly did not get any Outstandings – still got seven OWLs, which I assume seven out of the ten courses at Hogwarts that are listed on the sheet. Harry has the sheet; it’s ten classes. Ron gets seven OWLs. Molly says that that’s more OWLs than Fred and George combined. Now, Fred and George, we know, aren’t necessarily the schooling type, the test-taking type, but the idea that each of them would only have three or four passing grades out of ten subjects is completely impossible; I’m just going to say it.
Andrew: That does seem pretty bad, but maybe they purposely didn’t try because maybe they were set on just going their own way, on being street smart instead of book smart. They thought… I don’t know how long they were thinking about opening up a joke shop, but maybe they decided very early on that they weren’t going to pursue traditional careers that required great OWLs or great NEWTs, so they didn’t bother to study properly.
Eric: But I mean, Fred and George are brilliant wizards, and they clearly know their stuff when it comes to Charms or Transfiguration. Unless they were constantly absent from class because they were cavorting around the castle, which I think there’d be more of a… we would have heard about more discipline for them. It just doesn’t really add up, the whole system that J.K. Rowling is doing here with the testing.
Andrew: I think they’re street smart. They just want to educate themselves their own way. They went through Hogwarts because they had to.
Eric: Yeah, it’s like that famous saying that Einstein failed math. He did. He was thinking outside the box.
Andrew: Right.
MVP of the Week
Andrew: So MVP of the Week!
Eric: Yes.
Andrew: I’m going to say the clock. It’s so important in this uncertain time; everybody should have one of these clocks. I don’t know why more people don’t have these clocks. All of Molly’s friends should have them, and she should be able to look at these clocks and know if everybody’s in mortal peril. MVP of the Week: the clock.
Eric: And I’m going to give it to Arthur Weasley for a very funny moment when he checks the security question, or when Molly checks his and then opens the door to let him in. He holds it shut from the other side and refuses to enter, [laughs] because he insists that Molly read him his security question. And I thought it was amazing, because Arthur Weasley is sticking to the rules and does not care, because the security of his family is too important. So MVP to Arthur.
[Andrew laughs]
Micah: And mine go to Fred and George, for all the reasons that we previously discussed. They’re not physically present in this chapter, but they bring a smile to the reader’s face, and I think a bit of levity to a very tense chapter at times. So they get my vote.
Patreon Question of the Week
Micah: We also asked this question over on Patreon as our question of the week for our patrons to give us their MVPs of this chapter, and I’ll just read a couple of them here. Heather Green says, “My chapter MVP is the owl that brought Hermione her OWL results. Poor thing had no idea the importance of the letter it carried.”
Andrew: [laughs] Clever.
Micah: Danielle says, “Fleur, because she is unapologetically herself, even though her future family obviously doesn’t like her (which is pretty awful of them, actually).” Nicole Outlaw says, “Definitely Mollywobbles. ‘Want to stay at my house? Sure, and bring your cat too. Show up in the middle of the night? No problem, I’ll have soup ready when you get here.’ She’s the bomb.”
[Andrew and Eric laugh]
Andrew: It’s like a hotel there. Hotel Weasley.
Micah: Erika Downing also gives it to Fred and George, “for having the sickest jobs and a rad apartment. (Plus, they owned Hermione without having to even be at the Burrow.)”
Andrew: [laughs] Is “own” a good way to put it? It was kind of mean, but okay.
Micah: Omar gives it to Ginny. “I love how much more developed her character has become. I love her sarcasm and sassiness in this chapter; it speaks to me! Shame that we never got to see this side of her in the films.” And Olivia Cantrell also gives it to Ginny. “This was really one of the first chapters I felt like she and Harry might be an actual match for each other. She had way more confidence around her ‘celebrity’ crush than I’ve ever had around a regular crush.”
Eric: Aww.
Micah: And finally, JY says, “Harry for being the most level headed person about the Fleur situation.”
Andrew: [laughs] One more from Daisha, who’s listening live. She says, “Fleur is my MVP. She was shit on by the ladies of her future husband, and still managed to remain cheerful and nice.” I know somebody else suggested Fleur earlier, but…
Micah: What if she showed her Veela side? The aggressive Veela side with the way everyone was treating her?
Andrew: But instead she was nice, because she’s a good person, unlike all these other meanies.
Eric: She rose above it.
Rename the Chapter
Andrew: So let’s rename the chapter now.
Micah: All right.
Andrew: I’m keeping it simple, but this was an iconic moment that people just ended up loving for years and years to come. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince Chapter 5, “Mollywobbles.”
Eric: Aww.
Andrew: A classic J.K. Rowling word.
Eric: Yeah, it’s a great J.K. Rowling word. That’s a good point. I took a more ominous route. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince Chapter 5, “Tick, tock, death.”
Andrew: [laughs] I like it. Not suitable for children.
Micah: Mine? Or Eric’s?
Andrew: Both of yours. [laughs]
Micah: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince Chapter 5, “[censored] off, Fleur.”
[Everyone laughs]
Eric: Perfect.
Andrew: We just defended her for 15 minutes, and then come up with our chapter title.
Eric: That’s our penance for Micah’s renaming.
[Andrew laughs]
Quizzitch
Andrew: All right, to wrap up the show today, it’s time for some Quizzitch.
Eric: Yeah, so this question was asked on our last chapter episode, and I mentioned it’s a little bit harder. People do like a challenge; everybody always rises to the challenge when this happens. But very specifically, here’s the question as it was asked: The night Harry arrives at the Burrow, which characters does he spot who aren’t in the film adaptation, and which characters does he not interact with that he does in the movie? This is a bit of a trick question from the onset, because in the movie, Dumbledore is not with Harry when he arrives at the Burrow. Harry is deposited in the swamp; he’s a couple of feet in water. And so Dumbledore is the first character in the correct answer that is in the book but not in the movie. So that…
Micah: You said last week there’s three and three, right?
Eric: Yeah, I did say that there are three characters that are in the book and not in the movie, and then three that are in the movie that are not in the book.
Micah: You’re talking about when he first gets there, though, right?
Eric: Yeah, and the night of, too, not the next morning.
Micah: Okay, so in in the book, there is no Ginny, Ron, or Hermione.
Eric: Yeah, who are in… those are the three, yes. That’s correct.
Micah: Now going to the other side, there’s Dumbledore, which you already mentioned, who’s not in the movie…
Eric: Yes.
Micah: … Tonks, who’s not in the movie…
Eric: Yes.
Micah: … and Arthur, who’s not in the movie.
Eric: Correct.
Micah: What do I win?
[Andrew and Eric laugh]
Andrew: I enjoyed hearing Micah work this out.
Eric: We shout your name out on the show. Congratulations to Micah for being the…
Micah: You can use my Twitter handle if you want.
Eric: Oh, @mjtbaum on Twitter suggested that he wins. You know, we have only five winners this week, except six with Micah. But Joe T., Count… well, Count Ravioli, I think I gave it on a technicality…
Andrew: Micah can be Count Spaghetti-Os.
Eric: [laughs] I think Count Ravioli said Mr. and Mrs. Weasley in their tweet, which doesn’t count because Molly is in both. But Joe T. points out that Hedwig is also in the book at night. So Hedwig isn’t a person, and I didn’t… I said, “Who’s he bump into?” But Joe gets the correct answer and adds that Hedwig was also in the book and not in the movie, so that’s good. But didn’t we hear…? We might have. Does she screech in the movie? And “Is that an owl?” says Hermione? Or was that in 5 with Order of the Phoenix?
Micah: Yes, it is. You’re right. Somebody says it; I forget. It’s that staircase scene where they’re all kind of looking over the banister. Somebody says, “Did I hear an owl?”
Eric: Yeah, Movie 5 and Movie 6 does a staircase scene, and it’s in this chapter. Because Molly shows up… when Harry gets here in the movie – and we’re going to watch this movie pretty soon; we’ll mention that later – but Ginny is downstairs, and she looks up, “When did Harry get here?”, and Molly shows up over the banister, and then Ron shows up and is like, “Did somebody say Harry?” kind of thing. So anyway, the winners who successfully gave us all three characters from the book and then from the movie were Muggle Zoologist, Sean Brady, and Amelia, with again, Count Ravioli did say the Weasleys, so they get it too, and Joe T. Now I’m going to give a shout-out to the people who were close, just because there’s so few winners this week. Chelsea, Jazzy, Ally, Laura, Pranvi, and Andrea all got really close. So I’m actually just going to take responsibility for maybe not being as clear. My goal was to be vague to make the question harder.
Andrew: You’re fired from Quizzitch.
Eric: But as always, there were winners, and as always, you can submit.
Micah: You don’t have to give runners-up trophies here, Eric.
Eric: Okay, okay.
Andrew: Yeah, that’s the fun.
Eric: Not a fan of participation?
Micah: You asked a question, and a few got the answer right, myself included.
[Andrew laughs]
Micah: No, I’m just saying, you had, what, four or five people that got the answer right? Then those are the ones who win for this week. You said it was a tougher question.
Eric: Okay.
Andrew: So Eric mentioned Half-Blood Prince movie. We are going to do a commentary for the Half-Blood Prince movie, because on Patreon a couple of weeks ago, as part of our 777 challenge from a few months ago, we asked, “What will our next movie commentary be?” And Half-Blood Prince was actually the winner, only by a few votes. I can’t remember who got in second place, but it was a pretty close…
Eric: It would have been Sorcerer’s Stone.
Andrew: Yeah, I think you’re right. It was a pretty close race. So because we completed the 777 challenge, we will be doing the Half-Blood Prince commentary in the weeks ahead, and that will be available for all, but we’ll probably livestream it on Patreon while we’re recording it. Yeah, so we’re going to be doing that, and then we’re going to be doing the holiday commentary later this year in time for the holidays, probably around Thanksgiving time. And then, as part of the 777 challenge, we will also be doing a two-hour live episode with call-ins. We’re going to do that around Crimes of Grindelwald; the release of the movie lends itself to a live call-in show. So we’ll be doing that, and that’ll be a lot of fun. We’ll have to plan some fun segments for that. MuggleCast.com is our website; that’s where you can get access to everything you need, including our Twitter, our Facebook, our new Chapter by Chapter archive, our wall of fame, our advertiser deal links… if you heard an ad on the show and you want to know, “Oh, what was that promo code that I needed to get a discount?” There’s an advertiser deals link at the top of the website. And I think that’s about it. So we’ll be back next week…
Eric: We have next week’s Quizzitch question.
Andrew: Right, the thing I always forget.
[Andrew and Eric laugh]
Eric: The thing I bolded, put in red, and raised…
Andrew: I was looking on the website. I was not even looking at the doc.
Eric: I know. [laughs] This week’s question has to do with Chapter 6, “Draco’s Detour.” And the question is: What classic children’s game gets a magical upgrade in Chapter 6? So there you are.
Andrew: Okay. Cool.
Eric: And submit your… oh, we do take answers exclusively on Twitter, or if you’re a cohost of this show, apparently you can enter very last minute.
Andrew: Enter via voice, yes.
Micah: But speaking of reaching out to us, I would encourage people to email us at MuggleCast@gmail.com with any questions that you have for Chapter 6 of Half-Blood Prince.
Andrew: Yes, yes. Use our voicemail line if you’d like, or email like Micah said, or the contact form on the site. There’s lots of ways to get in touch with us. Thank you so much for listening, and thanks for your support. I’m Andrew.
Eric: I’m Eric.
Micah: And I’m Micah.
Andrew: We’ll see you next time. Peace!
Micah: Bye.