Transcript for MuggleCast Episode #441, Brian? (OOTP Chapter 8, The Hearing)
Show Intro
[Show music plays]
Andrew Sims: Welcome to MuggleCast, your weekly ride into the Wizarding World. I’m Andrew.
Eric Scull: I’m Eric.
Micah Tannenbaum: I’m Micah.
Laura Tee: I’m Laura.
Andrew: And on today’s episode, we are joined by a special guest: Mike from Potterless podcast. Hey, Mike.
Mike Schubert: Hello! How’s it going?
Andrew: Good. Great to have you on.
Mike: Thanks for having me.
Andrew: Can you tell us a little bit about your podcast?
Mike: Sure, so I never read the Harry Potter books as a kid, so Potterless is the journey of me reading them for the first time as an adult. Started in my mid 20s. I very recently just finished the books, but every episode, I just go through a chapter or a couple chapters chronologically through the book. And I did it as a way to try to point out some things that maybe as kids, we don’t think about, like when there’s a murderer running through the school, they just don’t send the kids home, and stuff like that.
[Laura laughs]
Mike: So just trying to point out things that don’t make sense here or there. But eventually I came to just absolutely fall in love with the series, and it’s been really fun. So yeah, that’s called Potterless; you can check it out anywhere. I just finished the books, and now I’m doing the movies, and then I’ll do all the spinoff stuff. And I saw Curse Child, which was… a play.
[Andrew and Laura laugh]
Mike: So it’s been fun, and now that I’m a spoiler-free boy, I can do things like guest on podcasts and talk about Harry Potter and not be worried about getting spoiled! So it’s great.
Andrew: Yeah, that’s great. Why didn’t you get into Harry Potter earlier? Because you’re about the same age as we are.
Mike: Yeah, it was a couple different factors, the first of which was that I have an older sister; she’s four years older than me, and she was really into magic type books and more fantasy stuff. So she, I remember, read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and then my mom tried to get me to read it and I absolutely hated it, and she told me that Megan liked it. So then when my sister became really into Harry Potter, I was like, “No, no, no, no, no. I’ve seen this happen before. Megan likes a magic book; I hate the magic book. I will not read this. I will be reading my sports books instead.”
[Andrew laughs]
Mike: So I just avoided it because it wasn’t really my cup of tea genre-wise, and then it became so popular that it felt like the only reason I would read it was out of peer pressure or to go along with what everyone else was doing, and that felt super gross, so I’m glad that I had the foresight at age 10 to be like, “Don’t just do things when people think it’s cool to do. You can define your own path.” So I’m glad I was a hipster little 10-year-old. But yeah, it just became a thing of just if I was going to read them, it was because people told me to. And then I waited so long that I was waiting for some reason to read them, so I told myself, “Oh, maybe if they make the Harry Potter TV series or something, I’ll read them,” but then I came up with the idea for Potterless, and here we are. Now it’s my job. [laughs]
Andrew: Yeah, awesome. I was thinking this morning, you are the opposite of Pottermore. Pottermore, Potterless.
Mike: I mean, that is the reason for the name.
Andrew: Oh, is it?
Mike: Yes. Yeah, so when I was coming up with the idea for it, I wanted it to be some sort of fun pun. So I was like, “Oh, Pottermore; I can be Potterless, which is the opposite of Pottermore, but then also, I’ve lived a Potterless life.” And I remember texting my friends who were into Harry Potter, saying, “Here’s my idea for the title. Is there a better pun out there that I just don’t know because I’ve never read Harry Potter?” and they were all like, “No, no, that’s a pretty good one.” But now Pottermore doesn’t exist anymore; it’s just Wizarding World.
[Eric laughs]
Andrew: But now you’ve read the book, so you can become Pottermore.
Mike: That’s true. Oh, I should… yeah, I should buy Pottermore.com.
[Everyone laughs]
Andrew: Good luck getting that from WB.
Laura: I was going to say… [laughs]
Eric: But yeah, Mike, it was great seeing you at at LeakyCon recently.
Mike: Yeah, it was super fun. LeakyCon is absolutely delightful. Everyone is just their truest, happiest self, and I love it.
Eric: I wanted to point out you did a panel with Chris Rankin that I caught that was… the situation… the roles were reversed. It turns out… and when did you find out? He had never read The Tales of Beedle the Bard.
Mike: I didn’t know until right backstage, because he was a very late addition. I was supposed to have a different guest, but then due to a medical emergency, he filled in, which was great. But backstage, I was like, “Yeah, we’re doing Tales of Beedle the Bard.” He’s like, “I’ve never read it; is that okay?” I was like, “Yeah, it’s actually better, probably.”
Eric: [laughs] It was perfect because you had read, he had not read, and hilarity ensued. It was awesome.
Mike: Yeah, I think it’s a fun element of what happened in my show early on, and even now, like when I’m doing the movie episodes, I intentionally have one guest who has read the books and seen the movies, and then one person who’s only seen the movies. I think just having an element of someone that is new to the thing is fun, because then you get genuine reactions, which is always fun.
Andrew: Now that you’ve finished reading the books, was there one moment that truly shocked you in the Harry Potter series? What was the biggest moment?
Mike: Oooh, there’s a lot. The first one that really shocked me was just how quick and sudden Sirius’s death was. He falls through a veil, and you’re like, “Okay, he teleported somewhere.”
Andrew: Right.
Mike: Or, “Okay, he’s in a pocket dimension or something.” And then what’s very funny is that the next page – it’s the very beginning of the next chapter – is Lupin telling Harry, but basically the narrator, “Yo, no, he’s really dead.” [laughs] And it’s multiple paragraphs of Lupin being like, “No, no, no, he’s gone.” So I think that was the biggest one. And then also one that really shocked me was that both Tonks and Lupin died in Book 7, because that felt excessive. Like, okay, we’ve just had Teddy Lupin be born, and I wouldn’t be surprised if one of them dies, but now both of the parents are dead, so it’s just rough.
[Andrew laughs]
Mike: But I will sit on my sneaking suspicion that J.K. Rowling is currently writing the Teddy Lupin spinoff series and just hasn’t said anything.
Eric: Ooh.
[Andrew laughs]
Mike: Because he wasn’t in Cursed Child…
Andrew: Yes.
Mike: … but he was in the epilogue. Literally almost everything else from the epilogue made it into Cursed Child, except for him, and how do you leave him out of that play? So I think she’s writing her own story and didn’t put it in Cursed Child so that no one else got their hands on it, and she didn’t have to keep it to some other story.
Eric: I’m kind of glad he wasn’t in Cursed Child; that way she doesn’t make him a secret Death Eater or something.
[Laura laughs]
Eric: Justice for Cedric.
Mike: [laughs] “My boy!”
Eric: Oh, God, don’t do that. Don’t even.
[Laura and Mike laugh]
Eric: Thank you.
Andrew: Actually, it’s funny you mentioned Teddy and Cursed Child because there’s a new Cursed Child book out, a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the…
Mike: Ugh, it’s so bad.
Andrew: Wait a second, wait a second. You think the play is bad? Or the story?
Mike: Oh, I think the play is bad. The real problem is the plot is garbage, but everything else is really cool. But that would be like if you ate a hamburger and you were like, “The meat is really bad, but the lettuce is awesome.”
[Andrew and Micah laugh]
Mike: Great, but the plot is bad. It’s so important.
Andrew: Yeah, it’s still so good to see. But anyway, there’s this new behind-the-scenes book that is out, and there’s actually talk of Teddy Lupin at the beginning of the book, because they were trying to get him into the play. But they were talking about how hard it is to get all these different characters in because it’s such a big show, and they already have so many characters involved. So we’ll talk about that more next week, because they were talking about getting Luna in there as well.
Mike: Oh, right, she wasn’t in it either. Huh.
Andrew: Yeah, they tried. They tried. [laughs]
Laura: Eh, I’m glad they didn’t do that, because I love Luna, and I also have a lot of feelings about Cursed Child.
Micah: I was just going to say, with Teddy, didn’t J.K. Rowling say that it was so that the series came full circle? That it started with an orphan and ended with an orphan?
Eric: That’s a great excuse to murder somebody’s parents.
[Everyone laughs]
Eric: “Oh, it’s poetic. Okay, great.”
[Andrew laughs]
Eric: Here we go.
Mike: I just think it’s silly that we’re making a book about making a play. It’s just so… it seems like there’s so many… “We’ve got to get as much money out of this thing as possible.”
Eric: Well, wait for the tie-in podcast. There’s going to be a Cursed Child official…
Andrew: No.
Mike: [groans] Gosh.
Andrew: No, that’s not allowed.
Chapter by Chapter: Seven-Word Summary
Andrew: Anyway. All right, so we are going to jump straight into Chapter by Chapter this week. We’re going to discuss Order of the Phoenix Chapter 8, “The Hearing.” So as always, we will start with our seven-word summary, and how this works, Mike, is we’re each going to contribute a word to a seven-word sentence, and we don’t plan it beforehand, so we just see how it goes. Usually it goes bad.
Mike: Love it.
Micah: That’s a great way to set it up.
[Everyone laughs]
Eric: It goes bad, but humorously.
Mike: Yes, which is what we’re all going for.
Laura: Yeah. Also, guys, I’m the last word this week, so please set me up for success.
[Eric laughs]
Andrew: Well, you’re also in the middle.
Mike: Oh, we’re doing it one word at a time! Oh, I thought we were each making seven-word summaries. This is good; I love it.
[Andrew and Mike laugh]
Eric: No, yeah, word by word as it were.
Mike: Oh, amazing.
Andrew: All right. Harry’s…
Eric: … attacked…
Micah: … by…
Laura: … Fudge…
Mike: … but…
[Andrew and Laura laugh]
Eric: … Dumbledore…
Laura: … prevails.
Mike: Yes!
Andrew: Nice. I was going to say “rocks.” Dumbledore rocks.
Eric: I was going to say “intervenes,” but yeah.
Mike: That’s great. I was thinking of “prevails.”
Laura: Hey, at least we didn’t end it with “Hooray!”
[Everyone laughs]
Eric: There have been some winners.
Laura: That has happened. [laughs]
Eric: Yes, that’s happened.
Micah: Yeah, there’s been some good ones.
Eric: It turns out seven words is actually… I know we came up with the segment because seven is the most magically powerful number, but it works. When it’s good, it’s really good.
Chapter by Chapter: Main Discussion
Andrew: So obviously, this chapter focuses solely on the trial. It is completely focused on the trial. And I thought in light of that, I wanted to know, has anyone here ever been before a judge?
Laura: I’ve had something dismissed before it went before a judge. [laughs]
Andrew: Okay.
Mike: I’m in the same boat. I had a traffic violation once that was complete shenanigans. I was pulled over for speeding, but there was a thing that I never passed a speed limit sign on my route, so I had no idea what the speed limit was.
Andrew: So you just went 100 anyway.
Mike: I went back with my dad, driving the car, and I filmed… oh, I went like, 55 and it was 45!
Andrew: [laughs] Okay.
Mike: And the guy was like, “Oh, no, no.” So I went back with my dad driving and me in the passenger seat on a little flip video camera, filming the whole thing, and I went into iMovie and made a whole thing that I was bringing as my evidence to my court case…
[Laura laughs]
Andrew: Oh, nice.
Mike: … which was set during finals in college, so that was a whole stress ball, that I took a final, had to go to court, and then go back to finals. But then my police officer never showed up, so my case got dismissed.
Eric: The same thing happened to me! I’ve been to traffic court, y’all. I stood in front of a judge, and I had to wait for him to say, “Okay, is anybody present to prosecute?” or whatever the whole thing is, and because it wasn’t… and you just kind of look down at the floor, hands in your pockets, go, “Yes, sir. No, sir,” and hopefully they sense the fear of God.
Andrew: Right.
Eric: I don’t know. I do get little flashbacks to that, once I saw this question in the doc, thinking about this chapter.
Micah: Hah, traffic court. I’ve actually been arrested.
Laura: What?!
Eric: Whoa!
Andrew: No, you haven’t.
Eric: Really?
Micah: No, I just wanted to see the reaction.
[Andrew laughs]
Laura: I was about to be like, “Micah, there’s a story here.” Geez. My crime was rear-ending somebody in a BMW.
Andrew: Oh. Well, yeah, that is pretty evil.
Laura: And by rear-ending, I mean a little tap on the bumper.
Eric: Just a love tap.
Laura: And the driver insisted on calling the police and filing a report and making a whole thing out of it.
Andrew: Oh, man.
Laura: Yeah, and so I went to court, and they were like, “Okay, is anybody here, like the police officer or the ‘victim’ to speak about this?” And they weren’t, so they were like, “Okay, pay a $50 court fine and you can go home.”
Mike: Nice.
Andrew: I went before a judge too. I thought I would be the only one who had something to say about this, but we’ve all been baddies, so go us.
[Eric and Laura laugh]
Andrew: I ran a stop sign.
Mike: Well, I was not a baddie. There was no speed limit sign posted from Allen Parkway to Highway 6.
[Everyone laughs]
Andrew: “I have an iMovie to prove it.”
Mike: I did! It was so funny because this was in 2012 or something, so I couldn’t just put it on my phone; I had to make it in iMovie and then put it into iTunes so that I could download it onto my…
[sirens in background]
Mike: Hold on, there’s an ambulance coming by.
Micah: They’re coming for you.
Andrew: Yeah, they’re coming for you right now.
[Eric and Mike laugh]
Mike: I had to download it in iMovie and then put it onto my iPod Touch…
[Andrew laughs]
Mike: … so that I could walk up to the judge and be like, “Look, I made a movie!”
Eric: I love that the New York Police Department is listening live to MuggleCast right now and is on their way.
[Mike laughs]
Andrew: Yeah, I didn’t realize they were patrons. That’s pretty cool.
Eric: To prosecute this felon.
[Andrew laughs]
Laura: It’s funny because I feel like they have a lot more to deal with this weekend than MuggleCast, but okay.
Micah: Yeah, there’s a marathon going on.
Laura: There’s been some protests as well, from my understanding.
Mike: Oh, I saw that! Man, that was bonkers.
Micah: But I’ve been before a judge, though, for jury duty. I don’t know if anybody here has been on jury duty as well, but you do actually have to sit down with the judge and they talk with you.
Eric: Huh.
Micah: But nobody like Fudge.
Andrew: [laughs] Right. So Micah, take us through this chapter.
Micah: All right, I wanted to start off… this was something that I thought about as soon as I read the first couple sentences of the chapter, and Harry is just sent into this room by himself. It seems a little odd given that he’s being charged for using underage magic, but he has to go into this courtroom by himself without Arthur. Does anybody agree with that?
Andrew: No, yeah, it does seem unfair. But also, when I went before a judge, I don’t think I could have a parent there either, so I guess I understand both sides of the… [laughs]
Laura: Andrew, were you an adult when that happened?
Andrew: Yeah.
Laura: Well, that explains it.
[Everyone laughs]
Andrew: But I still wanted my mommy there. [laughs]
Eric: Yeah, for a wizard, he is still underage.
Micah: Right.
Laura: Well, they’re clearly trying to set him up. I mean, we see that throughout this whole chapter.
Eric: It’s a smear job.
Laura: With that in mind, this is not surprising.
Micah: No, not at all. And Harry apologizes for being late, and Fudge tells him, “That’s no excuse; we sent an owl.” And I want to know where was the owl sent, because I don’t think they know that he’s at Grimmauld Place. So did it go to the Dursleys? Is it pecking at Vernon’s window?
[Andrew laughs]
Mike: Yeah, this feels like one of those things when an important document is sent to an apartment you lived in a year and a half ago.
[Eric and Laura laugh]
Mike: That happened to me once with tax stuff. It was my W-2 or I-9, whatever – one of those forms when I had a normal job – was sent to some old address that I lived in two years ago, because I was in this rotational program for engineering so I moved every six months, and I was like, “Hey, I need this tax form,” and they were like, “Oh, we mailed it to you,” and I was like, “Where?” and they were like, “Texas.” I haven’t lived there in two years. If you wanted to give me this very important document, send me an email. What are we doing? It’s 2019; don’t send me mail. I don’t open mail.
Eric: I do think that they probably picked the slowest owl. If an owl exists, if what Fudge said, they picked… they asked Percy to borrow Errol or something.
Mike: Yeah, absolutely.
Andrew: I don’t even believe that they sent a letter. I think that might be BS too.
Mike: Oooh.
Eric: At some point you really have to acknowledge that owls are inefficient when you’re talking about a time span of within three hours. Even the fastest owl, even the Speedy Gonzalez of owls, is not going to get there in time for you to do anything about it, unless you’re able to take magical means of transportation and Apparate, which they darn well know Harry can’t do.
Mike: They’re also wizards; how are there no wizard DMs, where you just…? I don’t know, you just use a spell to be like, “Hey, Harry, your court thing is here now.” I don’t know.
[Eric laughs]
Mike: Why are we still writing owls? I get that this is in the ’90s, but I still had AIM in the ’90s.
Andrew: Well, I mean, wizards don’t have technology, so there’s that. But yeah, there should be… like in Deathly Hallows, they use the coins, right, to communicate?
Mike: Right.
Eric: And Patronuses.
Andrew: Yeah, and Patronuses, yes.
Mike: Oh, yeah, someone should have sent a Patronus!
Andrew: Yeah, so there should be more modern ways of getting messages across. And obviously, owls aren’t very secure, too, and that’s a reason why Ron and Hermione don’t get to write to Harry very often. So they definitely need a more secure and more reliable mode of delivery.
Laura: Well, they can also call through the Floo Network. That’s another option they could have used.
Eric: Oh, yeah!
Andrew: Yeah. But like Laura said, they’re setting him up for failure here, and they don’t really care if the letter actually gets to Harry or not, so maybe they did send the worst owl. But I would think they didn’t send the letter at all, to be honest.
Eric: And here’s the other thing: At some point, your method of communication is more disruptive than what Harry is being charged for. The Dursleys have a boarded-up fireplace, we find out, or we found out in Book 4, and so anyone who came by Floo Network would just destroy their living room just coming through. And then an owl, again, in broad daylight in a Muggle neighborhood, a strictly, very Muggle neighborhood, also is a little worrisome to the protection of the wizarding world.
Andrew: Yeah, yeah.
Micah: And this lends to what I was thinking about as far as think about the number of people that are at this trial. Harry said there must have been 50 people there. You’re telling me that you notified 50 people the morning of the trial that it was going to be changing its time and location? This thing was definitely figured out at least the night before.
Eric: Oh, yeah, because otherwise you’d have some of those people would be sneaking in last minute with a coffee. They’re normal people too, and none of them were late.
Andrew: So I thought it was cool that J.K. Rowling kind of secretly introduced Umbridge. She said, “On Fudge’s right was another witch, but she was sitting so far back on the bench that her face was in shadow.” So please hold for reveal; she will come about at the perfect moment.
Mike: Also an important note is that the other witch sitting next to Fudge on the other side is wearing a monocle, and that witch we need to know more about. I want to learn about monocle witch.
[Eric and Laura laugh]
Andrew: Well, isn’t that Madame Bones? That was the impression I got.
Laura: Yes.
Andrew: Okay.
Mike: Oh, okay, okay.
Andrew: She’s the good one.
Mike: I like Madame Bones even more now; she has a monocle!
[Everyone laughs]
Andrew: She’s in the light; she’s the good one. Umbridge is in the dark; she’s the bad one.
Mike: Ahh, symbolism.
Eric: There is symbolism here that I wanted to point out, because Umbridge is at Fudge’s right hand, like you said, Andrew.
Mike: Ooh.
Eric: The right hand of Fudge, like she’s his main enforcer in this campaign of evil.
Andrew: Yeah. Shout-out to all the righties out there.
[Eric laughs]
Mike: It’s also very important to note we haven’t discussed that Fudge is not wearing his trademark lime green bowler. He’s very serious for this trial, so he’s not wearing it. [laughs]
Eric: Hats off.
[Andrew laughs]
Micah: I want to know who Dumbledore’s fan club is, though; those two witches that wave hello to him when he walks in.
Andrew: Well, yeah, he’s the best.
[Eric laughs]
Andrew: Madame Bones really likes him too, I think. And we’ll talk about this more throughout the chapter, but she’s really… she takes the whole trial very fairly. She protects Harry here.
Micah: She does.
Andrew: But I also thought it was kind of funny that… so Harry takes a seat, and then as roll call is taking place, Dumbledore strides in with “a perfectly calm expression.” And I thought if this was going to be adapted for the movies, he should have come in a lot more angrily and done a big old “Witness for the defense!”
[Laura laughs]
Andrew: “I am not calm!”
Micah: Is he witness, though, or is he Harry’s lawyer?
Andrew: He is Harry’s lawyer. He is Harry’s lawyer. Dumble-lawyer.
Mike: But he does call himself a witness, which is strange, because he wasn’t there.
Andrew: Well, I assume he’s kind of just following Wizengamot procedure. He’s allowed to bring a witness for the defense, but in this case, he is a lawyer.
Eric: I love that Dumbledore’s sort of clout, which is touched on in this chapter – just the fact that he strides in and is able to join the proceedings sort of officially – means that he’s a witness wherever he goes. He’s a witness to his own life. He just can speculate openly about somebody else’s experience, and the whole Wizengamot is like, “Hmm, yeah, interesting. Okay. Cool, that’s a matter of law now, or public record.”
Micah: You mentioned Amelia Bones before. Dumbledore mentions that he got to the Ministry three hours early, by luck. I’m just curious, do we think maybe she tipped him off?
Eric: Given the events of this chapter and how well Madame Bones and Dumbledore play off of one another, I would say yes, absolutely. I don’t for one second buy that Dumbledore just happened to be around three hours soon. Dumbledore expected this, and even though he’s spent most of the year so far avoiding Harry, he is still, as we find out, really, really up to date as to what bull crap the government is trying to pull as it pertains to Harry.
Andrew and Laura: Yeah.
Andrew: That was the impression I got too. Dumbledore knew that they were going to do this, and that line actually made me laugh out loud.
[Eric and Laura laugh]
Andrew: That he arrived three hours early.
Mike: It was very good.
Andrew: One hour seems like enough, but three is just extreme. [laughs]
Laura: And we also know that he has a minimum of three fans on that panel, so I think it is safe to say that at least somebody gave him a hint. A nod and a wink.
Mike: I would love if it was a completely innocuous thing, like Dumbledore did just happen to be there early for some other meeting, and then he was walking through the hallway and then one of his fans was like, “Hey, see you at the trial in three hours.”
[Andrew and Laura laugh]
Andrew: “By the way, love your work.”
Mike: “I thought that was supposed to be tomorrow!”
[Andrew and Eric laugh]
Micah: And Laura, you touched on this, but did they think that providing Harry this late notice, that it would get him to use magic and would get him into even further trouble?
Laura: Oh, I think so. I mean, we can see that they are scolding him for being late, even though it’s really not his fault. And so had he been on time, I think they would have scolded him for arriving using magic.
Eric: And that is something that Arthur Weasley tried to prevent against, right? Arthur had the… I mean, sure, maybe somebody told him, but Arthur had the good sense of “No, we should come by the underground, use the visitor entrance. It’ll look good.” But by the time they get here and they find that the meeting has been changed, and it’s in this different court and this different floor, and this different time and everything, I just… it’s shocking and very jarring how far ahead the Ministry is thinking. It’s sweet that Arthur was like, “Oh, we shouldn’t use magic, and try and make it look good,” but they don’t care about any of that. They are here to screw Harry up, to actively change his wellbeing, and to arrest him and expel him and get at his livelihood. This is so insidious.
Micah: And let’s not forget that the chapter opens up – and he’s only 15 years old – he’s walking into a room where he knows that Death Eaters have been tried, and he’s made to sit down in this chair that has shackles on the side of it that he’s worried at any time are going to come up and secure him down to the chair.
Eric: And they tremble; they jiggle a little bit when he sits. [laughs] It’s just crazy.
Andrew: Yeah, they’re ready to bite. This whole book just makes you feel sick, with Umbridge’s detentions and Dumbledore ignoring him and the Ministry setting him up for failure. This is just one of those perfect chapters that the chapter is perfect in that you feel for Harry so badly and you just feel sick to your stomach, and I still remember how awful I felt reading this book for the first time, and yet I loved it.
Mike: I mean, I think what makes it feel so gross is that I think this book has the most relatable form of evil in the whole series. Everyone in their life at some point has been through an abuse of power, or even not evil, just the Dumbledore situation; being ignored by someone you love. I think that that’s what makes Umbridge such a compelling villain, is that we all know an Umbridge; we all know someone that used some sort of position of power, importance, whatever, to be unjust towards other people, whereas Voldemort is a little harder to relate to, because not everyone knows a Voldemort, hopefully? So I think that’s what makes this book really compelling in certain ways, is that you can really feel for Harry, because a lot of people have been through a similar feeling that he’s going through. And especially with this, yeah, sure, we haven’t been in unjust trials, but we’ve all been in situations where you feel uncomfortable or out of place or unease, and then thankfully, Dumbledore comes in and relieves that stress from his life.
Eric: Yeah, and I wanted to mention the book says, “A powerful emotion had risen in Harry’s chest at the sight of Dumbledore,” so it’s like a chest monster precursor.
Mike: Ooh, yeah.
Eric: It says, “a fortified, hopeful feeling, rather like that which phoenix song gave him.” So here’s another connection connecting Dumbledore to the phoenix, to what Fawkes does probably back in Chamber of Secrets, when Harry is loyal to Dumbledore. There’s something very weird going on between Harry, Dumbledore, love, and phoenixes.
Micah: Are you going to write that fan fiction?
[Andrew and Mike laugh]
Eric: I’ve got a long list of fanfic to write now, but yeah, probably will. But I mean, given the new recent Crimes of Grindelwald/Fantastic Beasts connections between the Dumbledore family and phoenixes, it’s not a coincidence. There is something going on with Harry and Dumbledore.
Andrew: Yeah. And when the trial begins – and this goes back to what I was just saying about the Ministry setting Harry up for failure – Fudge states the charges, but he never tries to guess why Harry was conjuring a Patronus in the first place, and that bugs me so much! He’s just ready to prosecute him without trying to even guess why he was doing it. I guess the assumption is that Harry was just conjuring a Patronus for fun?
Laura: Which makes no sense.
Mike: I mean, maybe they just thought it was a big flex. They’re like, “Oh, Harry learned how to do a Patronus before people normally can do it, so now he’s showing Muggles.”
Andrew: Right.
Mike: Which is such a weird situation, because no Muggle is going to know what magic is hard to do or impressive to do. [laughs] It’s very silly.
Andrew: And they know he was with his cousin who hates magic, so he would not be doing it in front of him.
Eric: Yeah, that’s the other thing, is Dudley… okay, breaking the Statute of Secrecy, sure, sure, sure. That’s totally a thing, should be a law, right; it’s on the book. But Dudley kind of gets a pass because Dudley already knows about Harry. Dudley has already been on the receiving end of a spell a couple years ago that another wizard performed on him. The Dursleys… their memories are not wiped. They are, to some reasonable extent, tangentially associated with the wizarding world because they house this wizard every year, and so certain Muggles that you do magic in front of shouldn’t count against breaking the Statute of Secrecy. Right?
Mike: Oh, yeah. That makes sense. Yeah, no harm is being done.
Eric: Well, and legally they… nothing can be done. The Ministry has decided not to actively wipe their minds after every summer visit that Harry… to make them forget they even have a nephew or a cousin. So the logical thing is like, well, they already know the magical world exists, are very, very close to it, so doing magic in front of them isn’t as big of a deal as the Ministry is making it seem by prosecuting Harry here.
Micah: Yeah, that’s a really interesting point, because if you go back to the last two times, right, the magic was used in front of Muggles who weren’t the Dursleys. You had the Masons, and then you had Aunt Marge.
Eric: Right.
Micah: So this time, though, it’s just Dudley. There’s no one of his friends that are around or anything like that. So that’s actually a really interesting point that Harry shouldn’t have really been reprimanded in that case.
Laura: But again, they were looking for any reason to get him, so I don’t think it would have mattered what it was. They were probably just waiting most of the summer for Harry to do something. Whether it was another emotional outburst like Aunt Marge in Book 3, or something like this that was more deliberate, I think they were waiting for their opportunity to pounce.
Andrew: And Harry wasn’t doing anything, so Umbridge said, “Let me send the Dementors to town.”
[Andrew and Mike laugh]
Micah: And what was ultimately her goal? Was it for Harry to use magic, or was it for Harry to die?
Eric: I mean, yeah.
Andrew: I wouldn’t go as far as dying, but I think for this exact situation to occur, so they could prosecute him, so they could embarrass him, and get him kicked out of Hogwarts and to continue discrediting him.
Eric: I just love that Umbridge’s reckless plan to create a catastrophe that would discredit Harry and serve in the Ministry’s favor comes so close to being undone by Dumbledore’s pointing out the mere fact that the Ministry still says they control the Dementors, so if there was a Dementor, that it was sent.
Andrew: Right. It’s a perfect argument.
Eric: Oh, yeah. It really is.
Andrew: And to that point, so Dumbledore comes in and he’s serving as Harry’s lawyer here, and it’s fantastic to see because Dumbledore is ready, whereas Harry – we’ll talk about this in a moment – but would probably not be able to win this without Dumbledore’s help. [laughs] So thank God he’s there. And he introduces his witness, Miss Figg, and she starts off with a weak description. She doesn’t seem very confident during her testimony, but she gets the feelings right, and that seems to convince most of the panel that she is legitimate. But she’s not registered.
Eric: I feel strongly about this, because Laura made this amazing point when we were discussing the first two chapters about Figg and the fact that the Ministry doesn’t seem to have a record of her, and I didn’t remember that until getting to this chapter, and I was like, “Oh, yeah, they actually say this; the Ministry didn’t know she was living on Privet Drive.” And my question is, so a Squib is somebody with wizard parents who by all accounts should have magic but doesn’t. Therefore, why isn’t the Ministry aware that a child of magical parentage has been born? What about the quill that writes your name down and then sends you a Hogwarts letter when you turn 11? Is it just not turned on? Do you know somebody is going to be a Squib the second that they’re born, that they have no magical blood in their veins after all? And if so, what are things like Kwikspell courses playing at? Because somebody like Filch can never, ever… I mean, if his name wasn’t even written down in the book when he was born… so my question is when do you become a…? When is it sure that you’re a Squib? And how can you still see Hogwarts and stuff? Neville talks about his parents thought he was a Squib because he waited until, I don’t know, 10 years old to really display some magic, but I just… now I’m all in on figuring out the nuance of how the Ministry treats their non-magical magical family counterparts.
Laura: I think at best, it’s unconscious bias, sort of playing out the hierarchy that the Ministry has established in terms of magical beings and who they think is important, and at worst, it’s just straight up bigotry. They don’t think Squibs are important, so they don’t register them.
Eric: It’s just crazy because Squibs seem to bypass all the can see magical things. You could take a Squib to Hogwarts; Argus Filch is there every day. So there is kind of a security breach by ignoring these people.
Andrew: There should be a Sorting Hat or something to determine if somebody is actually a wizard or not. You shouldn’t have to wait around for them to accidentally cast a spell through some wandless magic.
Eric: I did think it was just so interesting, though – getting to Figg’s testimony – that J.K. Rowling should make it so that she pretty much did not, in fact, see the Dementors.
Andrew: Yes.
Eric: That’s a weird choice, because you could have it where Figg saw the Dementors and they just don’t believe her because she’s batty and old or whatever, but the idea that Figg would come to the rescue in Chapter 1 and go, “Oh, put that thing away, boy, I know all about your world,” to then have her actually not having been able to have seen them is just a weird flex on J.K. Rowling’s part to make a little bit more things stacked against Harry.
Andrew: So I’m kind of undecided on this; did she see them, or didn’t she? Maybe she did see them, but she’s just so nervous that she’s screwing up her testimony.
Laura: Yeah, I tend to think that’s the case. Also, just because she’s somebody who grew up in the wizarding world but she never had the ability to exercise any kind of power, so whereas she might be able to see things, it could just be that it’s harder for her to conceive of them and how they work, because she would never have the ability to, for example, fight a Dementor. So she’s just doing the best she can to describe what she saw, and I think the biggest tripping point for her was where she said the Dementors were running.
[Andrew and Mike laugh]
Laura: And that was probably in a moment of nervousness. She’s trying to convey they were moving rapidly.
Mike: Honestly, though, a running Dementor I think is scarier than a gliding Dementor.
Andrew: Yeah. Ew, those ghosts have legs?
Mike: Imagine that big thing running. [laughs]
Eric: Okay, but take the Scream movies and have Mr. Ghostface gliding instead of running, and that’s scarier.
Micah: Right.
Mike: Yeah, I think it’s more of subverting your expectations. If you’re taking a human who is supposed to run and you make it glide, that’s creepy. If you take a thing that you know that glides, and now you’re making it running, now it’s creepy because it’s more frantic.
Eric: Right, yeah, kind of like The Ring or whatever.
Andrew: And they just have, what, night black legs and shoes? Or are they running barefoot?
Micah: They wear Nikes.
Eric: Definitely Vans.
Micah: It has to be special Nikes.
Andrew: I was going to say they have Crocs. They would wear Crocs.
[Everyone laughs]
Mike: They have orthopedic, really comfortable shoes. Like, “We have to cover so much ground. My back is killing me.”
Laura: Have you ever seen a Dementor sit down? They need comfortable footwear. [laughs]
Mike: That’s true. They’re on their feet all day.
Andrew: Sucking out all the souls.
Laura: Giving all the kisses.
[Andrew laughs]
Mike: Speaking about shoes and stuff, the fact that Dumbledore comes in and he’s going to be the lawyer… it’s always important for me to remember that he was the head of the Wizengamut, so they all have to be so terrified. And this is why Fudge is so shook, because he was the top dog, and then now he’s coming in as the lawyer. It’d be like if you were playing pick-up basketball and then LeBron James shows up, and he’s like, “Yeah, I’m going to play with Harry,” and everyone’s like, “Oh no! You’re the basketball guy!”
[Andrew and Eric laugh]
Eric: That’s a good point. He’s Supreme Mugwump of the International Confederate of Wizards. Ins and outs, Dumbledore knows the government, knows the way that they work, and that’s something that’s not entirely… I mean, it’s conveyed by his actions, but there’s no follow-up scene where he’s talking to Harry and going, “I know how they work. I know how their minds think. I got you.”
Micah: Right. I don’t know, and then maybe this is influenced too much by the film, but I’ve always felt that Mrs. Figg’s testimony was rehearsed…
Andrew: Yes.
Micah: … and that she didn’t really see the Dementors. Though, I also wonder, are there varying degrees of Squibs? Because you mentioned Filch earlier, who works at Hogwarts; clearly he can see Peeves. He is working at a magical school. So it’s hard to say, but I just don’t buy her testimony, and quite honestly, I’m surprised that Fudge and/or Umbridge let it go on for as long as it does, because it’s just not all that convincing.
Mike: I think what I always got out of it was that she knows what happened, but I always imagined it as she knows enough about magic to know what Dementors are, and when she felt the cold and saw what Harry did and everything, she knew what was happening, but she couldn’t see them. But I think… I agree that I think that her description of them is a lie, and it’s more of she was told… because that’s even what Harry says, is that her description sounds like someone who read about Dementors but has never seen one. So I could believe that her parents or someone else in her life told her what they were like, so she for whatever reason thought it would be more convincing if she described them from what she’s heard, rather than just say, “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t see them, but I felt it, so I know it was happening.” That’s how I always saw it.
Eric: It’s kind of disastrous for Dumbledore, though, too, because he could have prepped her better.
Micah: But maybe he did. And to the other point that was raised earlier, maybe she’s just really, really nervous to be in the setting, though.
Eric: Sure.
Micah: I mean, I would almost argue that Petunia makes a better description of a Dementor in the first chapter than Figg does here.
[Andrew and Eric laugh]
Laura: That’s true. Although, I will say I think that courtroom dramatizations set us up to think that everybody’s really good at testifying, and that’s just not the case.
[Eric laughs]
Andrew: No, you’re right.
Eric: That’s a good point.
Laura: So I actually really appreciate that J.K. Rowling showed us this side of what it’s like to be really, really nervous when you’re testifying in a case where you really don’t have a choice but to be there.
Andrew: Get ready, kids. It’s not easy when you have to go through this.
[Andrew and Laura laugh]
Eric: The other thing that maybe, I think, exacerbates the situation is that I think it’s clear that Figg is a plant by Dumbledore on Privet Drive. The idea that the Ministry had no inkling that she was there, and now she’s being called to testify on Harry’s behalf by Dumbledore, speaks to a kind of shadow in… I don’t want to say a shadow government… a shadow arrangement, that Dumbledore is very clearly watching Harry of his own accord, using means that the Ministry wouldn’t have thought of. This is very incriminating to Dumbledore, not that Dumbledore is committing a crime, but it’s actually pretty dangerous for Dumbledore, I think, to trot Figg out because it shows that he’s actively subverting… the Ministry can’t be their own people at watching Harry; he is inserting himself and his own agents in there. So I think maybe Dumbledore does lose something; this might come at a little bit of personal cost for him to reveal some of the behind-the-scenes orchestrations of what he’s got going on with Harry’s protection.
Laura: Yeah, but the alternative is that Harry gets expelled from Hogwarts, and he can’t keep a close eye on him for most of the year.
Andrew: But also, Dumbledore just knows that Harry was wronged here, [laughs] so he needs to right this horrible wrong.
Eric: Yeah, but it’s just such a love/hate relationship, because he’s trying to avoid Harry at the same time all year. He’s a real dick to Harry this year, but he shows up to work his magic now.
Micah: Right. But Fudge mentions, though, that he’s going to go check and make sure that Squibs can, in fact, see Dementors.
[Eric laughs]
Micah: Not that it’s going to matter.
Laura: Well, and he was also like, “You’ll leave your details of your parentage with my secretary; we’re going to verify that you’re a Squib.”
Andrew: Yeah. Well, he was caught off guard by Dumbledore introducing his witness, and now he’s just grasping at straws here.
Micah: So there’s a lot of back and forth between Dumbledore and Fudge, particularly as it relates to Hogwarts and what Dumbledore has the authority to do or not to do, and so I was wondering, did you all think that Fudge made the decision to implement Umbridge at Hogwarts before or after this trial?
Andrew: I think right in this moment, because Fudge says, “Ohoo, not our business; you think so?”
[Mike laughs]
Andrew: That’s a tease. Dumbledore just poked the Pillsbury Doughboy, and he’s not happy. Yeah, I think it was exactly in this moment.
Mike: Yeah. I think it was probably just the interaction between how Umbridge and Dumbledore went that he came up with the idea.
Andrew: And then moments later, Dumbledore says there is no law yet – yet – in place that says the court’s job is to punish Harry, so Dumbledore was tempting them.
[Andrew and Eric laugh]
Micah: Right.
Laura: Yeah, well, and this is also Fudge’s way of being like, “Okay, well, I’m going to have somebody on your turf keeping an eye on Harry as well.”
Andrew: And it’s the woman in the shadows. Come on out.
Laura: How you like that? Take that, rewind it back, Dumbledore.
[Andrew laughs]
Micah: Yeah, I mean, there’s a number of references to the second of August and what Fudge tried to do to Harry, which was not within his authority to do, right? It wasn’t within his authority to expel him from Hogwarts, nor was it within his authority to take away his wand, so it just shows you the level of which the Ministry is willing to go to to really delegitimize Harry and make him feel isolated very, very early on.
Laura: I have a question for the panel related to the Ministry thinking it has the ability to expel Harry from Hogwarts. So we remember in Book 2, Harry received the letter telling him that if any more underage magic was performed at Privet Drive, he would be expelled. And then the following year, the whole debacle with Aunt Marge happens. Fudge gives Harry the pat on the back and says, “Oh, my dear boy, we don’t send people to Azkaban for blowing up their aunts. How silly.” It makes me wonder if Dumbledore intervened between Books 2 and 3 to remind Fudge, “You can’t do that. You can’t threaten to expel our students.”
Andrew: Yeah, possibly. But wasn’t Fudge in Book 3 also trying to be nice to Harry?
Laura: Yeah, but I’ve got some connecting the threads that make me question his motivations there, and we’ll talk about those at the end of the episode.
Andrew: Okay. I’ll get my spool ready.
[Eric and Laura laugh]
Micah: So Andrew, you wanted to know would Harry have won without Dumbledore there? It seems highly unlikely.
Mike: Yeah, that’s going to be a big no.
[Everyone laughs]
Mike: I think a big factor… what helped Harry is that Fudge is absolutely shook by Dumbledore being there. From the moment Dumbledore walks in, I don’t think Fudge says a single sentence without an em dash in there. He stutters and stammers and can’t get over it, and he jumps from point A to point B and all these other things, and he’s trying to jump at any morsel of information that makes them look good, which even comes to bite him in the butt when they talk about the Dementors being sent by the Ministry. And then the only other thing Dumbledore can say is, “Oh, unless the Ministry isn’t controlling the Dementors, and it’s Voldemort,” and now Fudge has to choose between which is worse. So yeah, I think so much of the success was that Dumbledore knew exactly how to poke Fudge’s buttons, which got him all stressed out, which then made Harry get off.
Andrew: Yeah. And right before the verdict comes down, Harry is thinking to himself, “Oh my God, this trial moved way too fast. I thought it was going to last longer. I should have told them about…” He said, “He had expected the hearing to last longer. He was not at all sure that he had made a good impression. He had not really said very much. He ought to have explained more fully about the Dementors, about how he had fallen over, about how both he and Dudley had nearly been kissed…” So I thought we could go through these. First of all, this defense: He wanted to tell them that he fell over. How does that help explain anything? [laughs]
Eric: [in a whiny voice] “I skinned my knee.”
Andrew: You know that you don’t fall over unless a Dementor wearing shoes is coming towards you; there’s just no way.
[Eric laughs]
Andrew: And then what did the Dementors look like? Okay, so Figg kind of went there, and that helped. His other defense was “They almost kissed me,” which, would he have reenacted the kissing noises? I’m thinking they sound like… [makes breathy kissing sound]
[Everyone laughs]
Eric: Oh, gosh.
Laura: I thought they sounded more like a sucking sound, right? Because they suck the soul out.
Andrew: Okay, so… [makes sucking sound] Like slurping the end of a milkshake. [laughs]
Mike: Pretty great that every single person is now unsubscribed from this podcast.
[Everyone laughs]
Mike: Pretty impressive that you guys managed to do that in just seven seconds of audio.
Andrew: Oh, we’re into ASMR. That’s our thing.
Mike: [laughs] That would actually be a great parody video, like, “Here is the sound of a Dementor sucking the soul.”
Andrew: [laughs] Just the worst thing you’ve ever heard.
Eric: Just end up being our Hannibal Lecter impression from Silence of the Lambs. [imitates Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs]
Mike: Oh, that is 1,000% how they kiss. [laughs]
Eric: Yep, there you go.
Andrew: I haven’t seen that, so I’m glad I kind of got it right with the tongue flipping.
Eric: Oh, you should.
Mike: We basically recapped the whole film. That’s all you really need to see.
[Andrew and Eric laugh]
Andrew: So yeah, okay, we’re all in agreement that Harry would not have won without Dumbledore there. [laughs]
Mike: No way. [laughs] Oh gosh, no.
Andrew: We asked patrons; they said the same thing. Michael also commented that “Harry needs the D,” which I agree with.
[Laura laughs]
Mike: Ahh, all right.
Micah: What does that stand for? Defense?
Andrew: The Dumbledore.
Micah: Got it, all right.
Eric: Because it’s not even his fault. I’m the first person to laugh at how incompetent and ill-equipped Harry Potter is to face the reality, just the most basic world surrounding him, but the government wants him gone, and there’s nothing that one boy can be expected to do. So I don’t blame him at all, but this is just awful.
Micah: What about a bit of Veritaserum? Couldn’t that have solved this whole thing?
Eric: Yeah. There’s got to be… I feel like, okay, if this were the real world, and if this were 2019, there would be a group of anti-vax people but they’re anti-Veritaserum, that are fighting for how Veritaserum is inhumane because it bypasses human’s free will. And so this tiny little technicality would happen to work in the Ministry’s favor, because then they’d be like, “No, we can’t just give him Veritaserum to prove that he was right, because it’s now being viewed as inhumane, and those talks are still ongoing, so we can’t do it.” But otherwise, yeah, use magic to give him some actual truth serum.
Mike: This is what I’ve never understood. I feel like I think J.K. Rowling has said something about Veritaserum, whereas maybe it’s just a poor analogy of a polygraph test where it doesn’t always work. I feel like she said something where you can use magic to overcome it. But regardless, I’ve said this on my show, on many other podcasts, is that there should be a wizard CSI that uses Time-Turners to just observe crimes, so not necessarily go back in time and change the past or whatever, but immediately after a crime happens, because with this, they see the alert and they know that, “Oh, Harry has used magic in a Muggle town.” Get some wizard to go back an hour and travel there, and then hide so that no one can see them…
Eric: Yeah, trench-coat, glasses.
Mike: … and then watch it, and then you go back and go, “Oh no, no, I went back an hour and there was a Dementor. It’s chill.” I don’t understand why they didn’t do that for this. I don’t understand why they didn’t do this for the Sirius Black/Peter Pettigrew situation. There’s so many instances where it boggles my mind that Time-Turners exist, they won’t use them for this, but “Yeah, oh, there’s this 13-year-old girl that wants to take multiple classes at the same time. We can’t just change the schedule; let’s give her a Time-Turner.” I just don’t understand.
Andrew: [laughs] The Ministry would not have given Harry Veritaserum because they didn’t want to know the truth, but maybe Dumbledore could have brought Veritaserum there and just forced it down Harry’s throat.
[Mike laughs]
Laura: Yeah, but then they wouldn’t have trusted it.
Andrew: You don’t think so?
Laura: Because the Veritaserum came from Dumbledore, they would have been like, “Oh, that’s fake news Veritaserum.”
Andrew: [laughs] Fake Veritaserum; it just makes Harry say what Dumbledore wants him to say.
Eric: No, really. I mean, something like Veritaserum would ruin the court trial and proceedings, because it would be flawless, presumably. But I’m interested; I think maybe there is something J.K. Rowling said once about overcoming it, but it’s lost.
Andrew: Or maybe in trials like this, you have a right to defend yourself without Veritaserum. Maybe that’s just a law. [laughs] “We can’t force the truth.”
Eric: Yeah, but if you suck at it so badly, it’s like, “Okay, I’ve…” It’s like requesting trial by combat to prove your guilt or innocence. Like, “Oh, I request Veritaserum will clear my name.”
Andrew: Yeah, yeah.
Micah: One of the things I was wondering, though, is do you think he’s acquitted because they don’t believe that the punishment fits the crime, or they actually believe what Harry is saying? Because again, just going back to Mrs. Figg, going back to some of the things that Fudge brings up… I mean, let’s face it; these aren’t that compelling of stories. Harry is like, “Oh, back in Chamber of Secrets, the house-elf did it. And Prisoner of Azkaban, I accidentally blew up my aunt.” It sounds like things a 15-year-old kid would make up, so I’m not overly compelled by Dumbledore’s argument here, and I’m wondering if the Wizengamot is really too.
Laura: I guess I wonder as well if those of them who have more common sense would think, “Well, if these infractions were such a big deal, why was nothing done about them at the time? Why are we holding him accountable for past behavior now? That’s not how trials work.” Also, I think Dumbledore probably still holds some clout with most of the board. I have a feeling that it was a few higher ranking members that pushed him out at Fudge’s urging.
Andrew: And it was noted, Eric mentioned, earlier in the chapter about Dumbledore coming in and Harry being really excited about this, and I wanted to talk about this again because it’s noted twice that Harry’s heart has swelled to an unnatural size. He’s so happy that Dumbledore is there, and Harry is speaking romantically about him. He’s talking about Dumbledore striding serenely, and the long, midnight blue robes, and he’s perfectly calm, and his hair gleamed in the torchlight…
Eric: Sounds like you have a fanfic you would like to write, Andrew.
[Laura laughs]
Andrew: It’s like, “Ah, Dumbledore is here!” But then by the end of this chapter, it feels like a date gone wrong…
[Mike laughs]
Andrew: … because Harry is so happy, they’re back together, “This is going well, Dumbledore just saved my butt,” and then at the end of the date, Dumbledore pulls the rug out by reminding Harry that he’s actually going to continue avoiding him, because he peels out of there really quick, and Dumbledore gives him a kind of “I’ll call you, Harry. See you later.”
[Eric laughs]
Andrew: It’s just so sad because Harry is ecstatic in this moment, but then also bummed out again because Dumbledore is gone again without even looking at him.
[Ad break]
Andrew: So we’re keeping track of how many times Umbridge sucks throughout the book. We’re currently at four times so far, but this tally is going to go up by two today, one for changing the time of the trial. We didn’t talk about this, but I feel like she’s probably to blame for that, right?
Laura: Yeah.
Andrew: Okay. What’d you say, Laura?
Laura: Oh, I said yeah, I accept it.
Mike: I believe it.
Micah: Does she get one for time and location? Or is that two?
[Eric laughs]
Andrew: Sure.
Micah: Let’s just add another.
Andrew: I want this number as high as possible.
Eric: No, no, no, she commits so many horrible things in the future; we can keep it a little lower now. I think two is…
Andrew: Eric, such a buzzkill. [laughs]
Micah: But it’s only… I mean, come on. She’s at four already, and this is the first time we even see her.
Andrew: [laughs] Yeah, she’s been in the shadows.
Eric: Yeah, but we can’t actually pin… she definitely got the ball rolling here, but we don’t know… there are so many corrupt intentions coming from the Ministry en masse that I don’t think you can actually pin this strictly on Umbridge.
Andrew: All right, so we’ll split the difference, so just one there.
Micah: No, no, let Mike decide, please.
Andrew: Okay. Mike?
Mike: I think let’s just keep it at one because it’ll be more dramatic to see how sharply it rises. Graphs are always fun when they explode up, so if you keep it lower before we get to Umbridge being the worst, then you’ll see a huge increase in the slope of the line graph. So I say keep it low for now; don’t grasp at straws.
Andrew: Okay. And then one more point for pretending that she didn’t send the Dementors to Little Whinging. She did shudder a little bit when Dumbledore brought that up because she is guilty, so that’s an extra two points.
[bell clanging sound effect]
Andrew: That’s one.
[bell clanging sound effect]
Andrew: And that’s two. Okay.
Connecting the Threads
Andrew: So Laura, won’t you connect some threads for us? What did you find?
Laura: Yeah, so Mike, we like to do this segment on the show called Connecting the Threads, where we believe that in the Harry Potter series, Goblet of Fire is sort of the centerpiece and there are threads that correspond to Books 3 and 5, 2 and 6, and 1 and 7. So since we’re doing Order of the Phoenix right now, we’re looking back to Prisoner of Azkaban for threads to connect. One of the first ones that I found was Fudge’s sudden changes of heart in these books. So in Prisoner of Azkaban after Harry arrives at the Leaky Cauldron on the Knight Bus, he’s going back and forth with Fudge about what punishment he’s going to get for blowing up his Aunt Marge, and he says, “Last year, I got an official warning just because a house-elf smashed a pudding in my uncle’s house! The Ministry of Magic said I’d be expelled from Hogwarts if there was any more magic there!” And then Fudge, being all reasonable, says, “Circumstances change, Harry… we have to take into account… in the present climate… surely you don’t want to be expelled?” And then in this trial in Order of the Phoenix, Fudge blows up and goes, “I suppose you’ve forgotten the Hover Charm he used three years ago…”
[Andrew laughs]
Laura: To which Harry says, “That wasn’t me, it was a house-elf!” And Fudge freaks out and goes, “YOU SEE? A house-elf! In a Muggle house!” And then in Prisoner of Azkaban, he’s kind of talking Harry down off of this whole high on blowing up his Aunt Marge, and he says, “Oh, Harry, we don’t send people to Azkaban just for blowing up their aunts; don’t be silly!” And then in this trial, “He blew up his aunt, for God’s sake!”
[Everyone laughs]
Laura: And then this was really interesting: There’s some great dialogue between the trio in Prisoner of Azkaban when Harry is filling Ron and Hermione in on everything that happened with Aunt Marge and his conversation with Fudge, and Hermione says, “Honestly, I’m surprised Harry wasn’t expelled.” Harry said, “So am I. Forget expelled, I thought I was going to be arrested. Your dad doesn’t know why Fudge let me off, does he?” And then Ron says, “Probably ’cause it’s you, isn’t it?” What I find interesting about this is that because it’s Harry in Order of the Phoenix, Fudge is doing the exact opposite thing now.
Andrew and Eric: Yeah.
Eric: And I mean, the whole “We don’t send people to Azkaban for blowing up their aunts” is to cover up for his own gross incompetence, that they’ve lost a prisoner who actively wants to murder Harry.
Laura: Yep.
Eric: They know that there’s this huge criminal who straight up… the one thing he has publicly vowed to do is kill Harry Potter now, as far as they know, and they’ve let him loose in the world and can’t find him, and that’s why Fudge is nicey-nicey. And now, on the flip side of things, their one goal is to discredit Harry because it serves them politically to do so, and that’s why Fudge is just ruthless. But bringing up the blowing up aunt, bringing up the house-elf is completely… it’s untouchable because each case was viewed on merit at the time, and the Ministry made the appropriate decisions to deal with that how they did each time. You can’t bring up the past in this way.
Laura: Right.
Mike: Yeah, I mean, it’s just Fudge always doing an abuse of power for whatever he’s looking to do. He stretches the rules in the third book to keep Harry safe so that they can get to Sirius, etc. And then now it’s the reverse; it’s that he’s trying to be overly stringent on rules that is something that… people should be allowed to fight off Dementors if they attack them, but now he’s trying to go the other direction. So I think it’s just consistent that Fudge is corrupt, and just tries to use his position, the Ministry, etc., to get to an end. And in this particular book, the end is anti-Harry, whereas in Book 3, it’s the flip and it’s pro-Harry.
Laura: Right, and this all just goes back to Fudge being insecure in his position.
Mike: Oh, yeah.
Laura: We know that he has always felt really insecure about Dumbledore because so many people wanted Dumbledore to be the Minister of Magic, and so he’s always felt kind of upstaged by Dumbledore and he’ll do anything he can to discredit whatever the number one undesirable is at the moment; it just so happens that in Book 5, Harry is undesirable number one. And then finally, what I thought was interesting – and this is a smaller one – but in Prisoner of Azkaban, the Ministry actually provides cars to transport Harry and everybody else to King’s Cross for Harry’s safety. And then here in Order of the Phoenix, we see Fudge deliberately working to undermine Harry and get him expelled from Hogwarts, possibly – and, well, definitely – compromising his safety.
Andrew: Yeah. All right, thanks for finding those for us.
MVP of the Week
Andrew: And now it’s time for MVP of the Week. I’m going to give it to Madame Bones for being the one fair one up there. It was nice seeing somebody who looked like she was on Harry’s side and just taking the whole trial seriously, other than Dumbledore.
Eric: Yeah, she’s the first person who was like, “Wait a minute, stop. Hold the show. You can do a full Patronus? That’s impressive.”
Andrew: Yeah, good stuff. “Oh, and yes, Dumbledore, he does have the right to have a witness here. Totally. Go for it.”
Mike: And I love that Fudge even tries to put it down when they’re giving Harry praise for doing the full Patronus. Fudge is like, “Well, the fact that he can do it is actually worse.” Like, shut up, Fudge. Get out of here.
[Andrew and Laura laugh]
Micah: Well, you mentioned earlier giving Harry the D? Doreen Figg coming through in the clutch.
[Eric and Laura laugh]
Andrew: Yeah, Harry needed that D-oreen Figg for sure.
Micah: Yep. She helped save the day for Harry.
Andrew: I think Michael meant Dumbledore, but sure.
Micah: You never know.
Laura: That’s the best kind of humor, that can still be funny to kids if they don’t totally get it.
[Everyone laughs]
Micah: Yeah, we’re a family show, Mike; I don’t know if we told you that, but…
Mike: I’ve gotten that vibe.
Andrew: Can you tell? I don’t think it’s very obvious in this episode.
[Everyone laughs]
Mike: It’s always fun to see the words that start as a curse word and then thankfully develop into other things. I believe someone at some point said, “Yeah, he’s up to these… shenanigans.”
[Andrew and Mike laugh]
Laura: Yeah, I’m going to give it to Dumbledore’s fan club. I just really appreciated that they showed that support for him when he came into the courtroom, and I think it helped thaw the atmosphere enough to move the needle a bit.
Andrew: And they may have helped him make the meeting in time, so that’s good, too.
Laura: Yep.
Eric: I give my MVP of the Week to karma.
[Andrew laughs]
Eric: They’re putting some real energy into the world here, and we know that it kind of… although it’s a slow, long, arduous process, this book, to some kind of actual resolution, and by the time you get there, there’s a bad taste in your mouth because Sirius has just inexplicably died, J.K. Rowling is keeping track of the points here, and I think that it’s very fascinating to watch the administrations of each of these characters’ arcs work and serve the purpose and the greater overall plot. I like reading a chapter like this that’s very meticulously designed to show you these characters in the moment, living, trying to do what each of them thinks is best.
Micah: Who’s that you have? I didn’t know. Do you… Yusuf Kama? Is that what that says?
[Andrew laughs]
Eric: No, Karma.
Laura: Karma.
Micah: Oh.
Eric: The concept of karma.
Micah: I was like, “I didn’t even know he was around.”
[Andrew and Mike laugh]
Laura: Definitely not a person named karma.
Mike: Maybe there’s a house-elf named Karma.
[Eric and Laura laugh]
Eric: Yeah, oh my God, in the hippiest pure-blood house of all time.
Mike: [laughs] Yeah, Xenophilius Lovegood’s house-elf is named Karma.
[Eric and Laura laugh]
Eric: Well, his wife is named Pandora.
Andrew: Oh, yeah.
Mike: So I picked for the MVP… Micah will be familiar with this, but I’m a huge basketball fan, and I like to take MVP very much in the light that they do, where you think of “If you remove this player from the team, how will the rest of the team fare?” And if you take Dumbledore out of this trial, it’s much like if LeBron left the Cavaliers when the second best player was Zydrunas Ilgauskas, and that’s basically Mrs. Figg, where LeBron can come in and he can make these scrub level basketball players look good. I think Dumbledore has done the same thing where he comes into the mix. He is great on his own; he elevates the game of Harry and Mrs. Figg, and without him, they would have stumbled and be awful. Look, at even their their moments where Harry is like, “Oh, I stubbed my toe,” and Mrs. Figg is like, “Yeah, they run…”
[Andrew laughs]
Mike: … so Dumbledore, without him, this would have come crashing and crumbling down, and it would have much been like anytime LeBron was not on the Cavaliers.
Rename the Chapter
Andrew: All right, and now let’s rename the chapter. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix Chapter 8, “Dumbledore Versus Wizengamot.” And I think it would just be so cool if you turn the page and you see this chapter title and you’re like, “Oh, shenanigans! Dumbledore is coming back. Going to be a big old battle.”
[Everyone laughs]
Micah: I went with Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix Chapter 8, “Why did I wake up early for this [screaming goat sound], Cornelius?”
[Everyone laughs]
Laura: Andrew, do you have my thing queued up?
Andrew: I’m ready. I’m ready, Laura.
Laura: Okay, cool. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix Chapter 8…
[Law & Order theme song plays]
[Everyone laughs]
Eric: I went with something similar: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix Chapter 8, “Wizard Court.”
Andrew: Law & Wizard.
Mike: Very, very good. Yeah, I went a little different direction. I’m calling it Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix Chapter 8, “His middle name is Brian?”
[Andrew laughs]
Eric: Nobody talked about this?
Mike: What a… Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore. I need… I have a list of if I ever talk to J.K. Rowling, there will be… I will only ask her the most ridiculous questions, and right at the top is, “Okay, what bet did you lose that you had to make his second from the last name Brian?” [laughs]
Andrew: It keeps him down to earth. Keeps him grounded. [laughs]
Laura: You know how parents will sometimes give their kids… if they give their kids a really ridiculous first name, they give them a more normal middle name so they can fall back on it if they want, maybe?
Andrew: If they need to use it. [laughs]
Laura: Yeah, they were like, “You know what? He might need a normal name at some point, so somewhere in this list of six different names he has, let’s just give him a normal Muggle one.”
Eric: The people I talked to, the authors of The Ultimate Unofficial Guide to the Mysteries of Harry Potter, seem to think it was a Monty Python reference.
Andrew and Mike: Ohh.
Mike: Life of Brian.
Laura: Oh, you know what? I bet it is.
Eric: Pretty convinced. The Messiah… he’s not the Messiah; he’s just a naughty boy born next door.
Laura: [laughs] Well, also, there are a number of Monty Python references throughout the books, so I think that checks out.
Mike: And there’s Monty Python actors in the films.
Andrew and Laura: Yeah.
Mike: Here’s a question just timeline-wise, since I was not in the fandom at this point: When did the third movie come out? Was that before or after this book?
Eric: 2004, and then Book 5 came out in 2003.
Mike: Okay. Because I’ve been doing the movie episodes of Potterless, and I think they talk about Brian being his name in the third movie. I think there’s some point in the film where they bring that up, which is very interesting because we know about it, yes, timeline-wise, but if you’re going by the book thing, we didn’t learn it in the book until Book 5, but it’s brought into Movie 3. So I was wondering… it would have been very cool if the book wasn’t out yet and maybe J.K. Rowling in the writers’ room was like, “Hey, guys, guess what? I’m going to do this cool thing in the fifth book where his fourth name is Brian. Feel free to use that if you want to.”
[Everyone laughs]
Eric: “This is really important. This is super crucial to later books,” she said, and Steve Kloves is like, “Okay, I’ll work it in.”
[Andrew and Mike laugh]
Micah: Do you think it was given by his parents, or do you think that he gave it to himself? Because it always seems like it’s a Muggle name, right? Or it’s the one that stands out the most from all the others. So I’ve always thought, just given who Dumbledore is or who he becomes, that it would be very Dumbledore-esque to take a Muggle middle name.
Andrew: Yeah. Maybe he…
Laura: Maybe in the Fantastic Beasts franchise he’s going to go through a period where he’s moonlighting as a Muggle and his name is Brian.
[Andrew and Laura laugh]
Mike: That’ll be way better than the crap movies we’ve been getting from this series.
Laura: Oof. You’re preaching to the choir.
Andrew: [laughs] He goes into a gay bar and then somebody’s like, “Hey, man, what’s your name?” And he doesn’t want to say Albus, so he’s like, “Brian.”
[Everyone laughs]
Mike: Oh, that’d be great. He looks at the TV and there’s a baseball game on and Brian McCann is batting, and “Uhh, Brian.”
Andrew: A cheesy lawyer commercial. “Call Brian today!” [laughs] “Brian. My name is Brian.”
Mike: I would also love to live in a world where that’s his pet name. He’s dating whoever, and then they call him Brian as the cute couple name.
Andrew: “Brian, baby.”
[Andrew and Mike laugh]
Andrew: Next time I’m in a gay bar, I’m going to say my name is Brian. If you have any feedback about today’s discussion, send it on in: MuggleCast@gmail.com. You can also send a voice memo to that email address, or use the contact form at MuggleCast.com. You can also call us, 1-920-3-MUGGLE; that’s 1-920-368-4453.
Quizzitch
Andrew: It’s almost time for Quizzitch, but I wanted to let everybody know that Eric and I went to another Harry Potter trivia night here in Chicago a few days ago, and we got third place out of, like, 29 teams.
Mike: Hey, nice.
Eric: It was hard, you guys. It was a little…
Andrew: It was hard.
Mike: What was the hardest question?
Eric: Scorpius Malfoy’s middle name.
Mike: He doesn’t have a middle name!
Eric: I know! That’s what I said!
Andrew: That’s what we thought! [laughs]
Mike: What was it?
Andrew: It’s so bad.
Eric: Hyperion.
Andrew: Yeah, Hyperion.
Mike: [blows raspberry] Scorpius Hyperion? All right, Draco can’t be a father anymore. You should call Child Protective Services if you’ve named your kid Scorpius Hyperion.
[Andrew laughs]
Eric: I don’t know where the hell it came from, but I feel like once it was said… and that was the wager question involved, getting his thing right, and if we had gotten it completely right – because they asked for full names of characters – then we would have won, and we didn’t, so we didn’t.
Andrew: The quiz master just clearly was not a Harry Potter fan, which happens from time to time. For example, she kept calling Thestrals “thresholds.”
[Everyone laughs]
Laura: Gotta be careful with those thresholds. You can only see them if you’ve seen death.
Andrew: [laughs] Right, and then there was a question about Potterwatch, the radio show, right, in Deathly Hallows, and she called it Pottercast, and I tweeted Pottercast; I was like, “Hey, guys, you got some free promo, because this quiz master doesn’t know what they’re doing.”
[Laura and Mike laugh]
Eric: I will say – and we’ve been to this exact brain bash, I want to say, trivia before – but this time it was really flawed, because the entire first round was fan art and said, “Identify these character pairs by this fan art.” First of all, it’s fan art. The interpretation is completely loose. And although we did very well in this round, only missing two, I just thought that’s the entire wrong place to start, because an artist’s interpretation is their own and nobody else’s. And it’s not like this is the illustrated edition by Jim Kay that they’re using; this is just fans from across the Internet doing stuff, so I don’t know. And I question whether or not Andromeda Black was a ginger, because she was totally… I thought it was Lily Potter.
Andrew: And our team name was Potter-no-more, and we wrote “RIP” in parentheses, and I don’t think anybody got that.
Mike: You could have called it Potterless, but then I would have sued you for millions.
[Andrew and Eric laugh]
Andrew: Yeah, we just wanted to pay tribute to Pottermore going away. And yeah, that would have been a good one.
[Mike laughs]
Andrew: Anyway, what was last week’s question, Eric?
Eric: Last week’s Quizzitch question was: What is Cornelius Fudge’s middle name? And I planned to do a deep dive on name origins and what it means to be called this, but Cornelius Fudge’s middle name is, of course, Oswald. I think of Lee Harvey Oswald, who killed JFK.
Andrew: Ooh.
Eric: Really got in the way of some good things; that’s what I think of. But anyway, the correct answer was submitted by many people. Welcome back, everybody who is playing Quizzitch.
Andrew: Yeah, everybody participated, I noticed. [laughs]
Eric: It had kind of fallen off ever since we stopped naming every single person, but I’m glad everybody’s back. So the winning answers were submitted by people including Solar Wind, Jacob Zinkula, Casper Plays Quizzitch From Memory, Patch’s Thoughts, HallowWolf13, Dancing in the Rain, Stacy Zuverinc; and Amanda Loves Lilikoi, and others.
Micah: What about Count Ravioli?
[Andrew laughs]
Eric: Might be in there somewhere. So people who submitted the correct answer did so over to us on Twitter using hashtag Quizzitch and at replied MuggleCast; that is how you play. We do a tweet that lists everyone’s handle on Twitter once a week, every time. You get credited there, if we did not name your name on the show. Next week’s question – this is designed to be a little messy, but here we go – what nickname does Malfoy give Harry while at the Ministry? This is a question from…
Andrew: Hyperion.
Mike: I’m just going to guess Potter.
[Eric and Mike laugh]
Eric: Okay. That might be halfway there, buddy.
[Mike laughs]
Micah: Brian.
[Andrew laughs]
Mike: So good. I’ve got to give props to you guys, the fact that you actually say, “If you have feedback about this episode, please email or call us”? Bonkers. That is…
Andrew: Well, we’re very high tech here.
Eric: Oh, we have a hotline.
Mike: You’re so just brave that you are actively welcoming criticism, because I actively tell people, “Please don’t tweet corrections at me.”
[Andrew and Laura laugh]
Mike: And I still get emails where the subject line is “Hem-hem,” and then people are like, “Um, you said…” It’s the most nitpicky things.
[Andrew laughs]
Eric: That sounds awful.
Mike: So power to all of you. [laughs]
Andrew: Yeah, people are very passionate, and they want to get the correct information out there. We do try to correct it. Of course, we’re always, as you are, working on the fly a lot of the time, so we can’t look things up when we’re talking, and so yeah, we do try to…
Mike: Yeah, I think it’s more of… I think at least in my case, it’s that if I post an episode and I’ve made a mistake, within an hour of posting, every correction is there.
[Andrew laughs]
Mike: Whereas I’ll still get emails from episodes that released two and a half years ago, and people will be like, “Hey, just listened to Episode 15,” [laughs] which was posted in 2016, “and you said you were confused about why they called Percy ‘Weatherby.’ You said it wasn’t close to Percy, but it’s actually really close to Weasley, just in case no one’s told you this.” And then there’ll usually be a follow-up email that’s like, “Hey, just listened to Episode 22 where you told people to stop emailing you this. Just wanted to apologize.”
[Everyone laughs]
Andrew: “I retract my previous email.” [laughs]
Mike: I love how detail-oriented Harry Potter fans are. It’s great, but it’s like, “Guys, if the episode is more than an hour old, I’ve got it.”
[Andrew and Eric laugh]
Mike: “I’ve been brought up to speed, and I’m so sorry for all of my transgressions.” [laughs]
Micah: Well, Mike has just revealed the secret that neither the email inbox or the phone line are valid whatsoever. We just read them out on each episode.
Mike: [laughs] It just gets an auto filter. Anything in the inbox goes straight to trash.
Andrew: No, no, we read and reply to everything, so thank you to everybody who does submit feedback. And also, be sure to follow us on social media; we are @MuggleCast on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Mike, thanks so much for joining us today. It was great having you on.
Mike: Thanks so much for having me! I’m so glad that I was able to be on the show, now that I am a spoiler-free boy. I was able to contribute and not have to preface this with, “Hey, guys, I’m on Book 6, Chapter 12. Please don’t talk about anything after…”
[Andrew laughs]
Mike: No, I’m glad, and I’ve gotten to meet some of the team at different conventions, and that’s been fun. So I’m glad we could finally make this official in podcast form.
Laura: Yeah, this was fun.
Andrew: Yeah, where can we find you online?
Mike: Sure, if you want to find the show that I do, Potterless, just search for it anywhere on any podcast or app or Spotify or whatever. For Twitter, it’s @PotterlessPod, and then Instagram is @PotterlessPodcast. And then there’s a Facebook group as well at Facebook.com/Potterless, so check it out there. It’s very fun. I’ll post about the show or some memes sometimes. I’ve had a good run of some Twitter memes this week, so if you need some comedic Harry Potter content in your life, come through.
Andrew: [laughs] Strong meme game this week. That’s always good.
Mike: Yeah, I mean, Twitter just gives you gifts, and sometimes those gifts are GIFs…
Andrew: [laughs] Right.
Mike: … and you just quote tweet them to delight.
[Eric laughs]
Andrew: All right. Well, thank you, everybody, for listening, and thank you for your support. I’m Andrew.
Eric: I’m Eric.
Micah: I’m Micah.
Laura: I’m Laura.
Mike: And I’m Mike!
Andrew: Bye, everybody!
Eric, Laura, Micah, and Mike:s Bye.