Transcript for MuggleCast Episode #715, Pickup On Aisle 97 (OOTP Chapter 34, The Department of Mysteries)
Show Intro
[Show music plays]
Andrew Sims: Welcome to MuggleCast, your weekly ride into the world of Harry Potter for 20 years and counting! I’m Andrew.
Eric Scull: I’m Eric.
Micah Tannenbaum: I’m Micah.
Andrew: I thought you’re going to say, “I’m old!”
[Everyone laughs]
Eric: Old! I was trying not to say it. But gosh, you guys. 20 years of MuggleCast next week.
Andrew: I want to remind everybody that we’re your Harry Potter friends talking about the books, the movies, the upcoming TV show for the next 20 years as well…
Eric: [laughs] Right, right.
Andrew: … so make sure you press that follow button in your favorite podcast app so you’ll never miss a week with your Potter people. And this week, we’ve got one foot on the ledge of the stone dais, because there’s voices coming from inside the veil. There are people in there! We swear we hear them! We’re discussing Order of the Phoenix Chapter 34, “The Department of Mysteries.” Laura couldn’t make it this week, but we are very excited to be joined by Eric’s wife, Meg! Welcome back, Meg!
Meg Scott: Hi! Thank you. It’s great to be back and here to talk about some mysteries and some departments.
Andrew: Is this the first time you’ve been on since you two got married?
Meg: I think it is!
Andrew: Wow.
Meg: I was on What the Hype?! and we talked about cozy games, but I think this is the first MuggleCast that I’m on since we’ve been wed.
Eric: Nice.
Andrew: [emotionally] The first MuggleCast marriage. With current panelists.
Eric: [laughs] I wondered who would get that first, that accolade, but looks like it was…
Andrew: Eric is like, “It’s gotta be me. I gotta make it happen.” [laughs]
Eric: Yeah, quick, quick, quick. Quick, Meg, come over here.
Micah: So how’s married life? Tell us.
Eric: Oh, gosh.
Meg: Um… we hang out with our cat.
[Andrew laughs]
Micah: How’s Martha?
Eric: Martha is good. She’s locked out of both of our rooms, though, right now…
Micah: Oh no.
Eric: … so if you hear a loud bang, she’s gone rogue.
Meg: Usually she hangs out with me during MuggleCast hours, but no, I’m on the job tonight.
Andrew: Well, we appreciate you, Meg, hopping on at the last minute. You know your stuff, though. I feel like you’re ready at any moment to discuss Harry Potter, any chapter, anytime.
Meg: Well, we’ll see. We’ll hope.
[Andrew laughs]
Eric: And because Meg is our transcriber, she just transcribed the big Department of Mysteries episode we did, so she’s more familiar with our thoughts from eight years ago than we are. [laughs]
Meg: Yeah, I know the theories that you were talking about back then.
Andrew: Well, MuggleCast does turn 20 years old the first week of August. We’re actually recording July 31, Harry Potter’s birthday, so it’s quite a special week in the wizarding world and the MuggleCast world. Harry turned 45 years old, as we discussed in bonus MuggleCast, which we also had a lot of fun with, right, Micah?
Micah: Yeah, we had a great time. We went through all of Harry’s birthdays in the Harry Potter series, so from Books 1 to 7, and then we came up with some gift ideas for him. We gave some gift ideas to some characters. Might have gotten a little inappropriate at times, but that’s the beauty of bonus MuggleCast. When you’re behind the paywall, anything goes. Andrew cannot censor me like he can in this show.
[Andrew and Meg laugh]
Eric: His powers stop at the door to the recording room.
Andrew: Right, the capability just does not exist. [laughs]
Eric: Oh, man.
Meg: It’s Micah unleashed back there.
Andrew: So yeah, MuggleCast turns 20 in the first week of August, and to celebrate, we’ll be doing a 20th anniversary-themed episode of the show next week, so look forward to that. And we’re also celebrating by launching a special deal on our Patreon. We have not done this before. For the whole month of August, you can get 20% off an annual subscription to our Patreon. This is the largest discount we have ever offered on our Patreon. Typically, when you pledge for a year upfront, you would get 10-15% off. Now you can get 20% off for the month of August. Just visit Patreon.com/MuggleCast, and at checkout, enter promo code “20YEARS.” We really wanted to do a promotion on Patreon, because our Patreon is the reason why we have made it this far, so thank you to everyone who has supported us there. If you aren’t a member, help us reach the next 20 year milestone, and next week – as a teaser I’ll just say now – I want us to make predictions about what’s going on in the Harry Potter fandom 20 years from now, so start thinking about that.
[Micah laughs]
Eric: Oh my God. Harry Potter’s 65th birthday. He retires from the Ministry of Magic. Can’t wait for that bonus.
Andrew: Your support helps us keep the show running as reliably as the giant motor powering that spinning room with all those doors, and to thank you for supporting this indie podcast, you’ll get two bonus episodes of the show every month. You’ll also get ad-free episodes, and physical gifts. In fact, we just announced year four of the MuggleCast Collector’s Club; five brand new stickers celebrating MuggleCast past and present are available now. Micah, tell everybody the stickers that we have.
Micah: All right, are you ready for these stickers? There is a sticker to commemorate our 700th episode. We recently celebrated 700 episodes not that long ago. A “I declare canon,” which obviously I can’t do as well as Andrew, with a design inspired by Monty Python. Do we have that clip?
Andrew: “I decl…” Yeah, here, I’ll put it in.
[Everyone laughs]
[“I declare canon!” sound effect plays with thunder]
Micah: That’s what it sounded like here just a hour or so ago.
Meg: Ooh, exciting.
Micah: A birthday cake created by Hagrid just for us.
Andrew: That was so nice of him to do that.
Micah: Not for Harry, just for us. And let’s not forget Quizzitch, with a design inspired by Jeopardy. And a goat with a headset. Wonder who that’s for?
[Andrew laughs]
Eric: That’s for you. It says, “For Micah.”
Micah: Oh, yeah, but it was weird if I read it like that.
Eric: I know, I know.
Andrew: [laughs] “Just for me.”
Micah: So thank you for the assist.
Andrew: Yeah. So these are all inspired, like we said, by MuggleCast references past and present. We have a lot of fun dreaming these up. We have one more year of the Collector’s Club to go, so please don’t miss out. Patreon.com/MuggleCast; put in “20YEARS” at checkout, and you’ll get 20% off an annual membership. And by the way, we have the Collector’s Club, and then we have a separate physical gift that goes out to Slug Club patrons, and we’re going to be announcing that next week, Eric, is that the plan?
Eric: I believe so.
Andrew: Okay, everybody get ready.
Eric: It’s an exciting time to pledge. This 20% discount has come at the perfect time, because…
Andrew: This is the time of year to do it, yeah.
Eric: It is. Thanks, as always, for those goes out to Anna, who we use, who’s designed the entire Collector’s Club. She has been a wonderful collaborator to work with on this, and is the artist behind all of the magic.
Andrew: Yeah, like our album art, our current album art. She did that as well.
Eric: That’s right. It occurs to me she also did the “19 Years Later” shirt that we did last year that I’m wearing now.
Andrew: She did, yeah.
Eric: So she’s basically our go-to.
Andrew: Well, thanks, everybody. And onward we go into the next 20 years.
Chapter by Chapter: Time-Turner
Andrew: And this week, we’re discussing Order of the Phoenix Chapter 34, “The Department of Mysteries.”
Eric: As mentioned last week, this was a shared chapter discussion episode. We talked about it on Episode 471 of MuggleCast, called “PUNK’d,” which is what Harry gets in this chapter, Punk’d. And that aired on June 30 of 2020. Here is a clip from our discussion for Chapter 34.
[Ticking sound]
Dumbledore: Three turns should do it, I think. Good luck.
Ron: What the…?
[Bell dings]
[Whooshing sound]
Robotic voice: Episode 471.
Laura: Don’t we later find out that that’s the love room?
Eric: Yeah, Dumbledore tells Harry. He asks him directly, “What’s in that door, Professor?”
Laura: And see, this is why I think that probably, under normal circumstances, all these other doors would be locked too, but I could see the Death Eaters opening them except the love door, because they’re like, “Uh, we don’t want to open that one, because that defeated our boss last time.”
[Andrew and Eric laugh]
Eric: Or they’re just like, “Ew, gross. Love.”
[Andrew and Laura laugh]
Andrew: “Cooties.”
Eric: “Cooties!”
Micah: Maybe Bellatrix opened it just a little bit, and then that’s why we have Cursed Child.
[Everyone laughs]
[Ticking sound]
Dumbledore: Mysterious thing, time.
[Bell dings]
Andrew: I do like this segment, because I forget about the things we said. [laughs]
Eric: It’s good to look back. It’s good to look back.
Meg: It’s fun. Fun little reminders.
Chapter by Chapter: Main Discussion
Eric: And speaking of looking back, there was actually… it’s funny. So 471, we talked about the Department of Mysteries. We also did a big, as mentioned at the top of the show, Department of Mysteries deep dive episode; this was number 374, and that is on our audio feed, and the transcript as well is now available. That’s from June 25 of 2018. That was the episode where we really went room by room and were like, “What are our thoughts?” Which we will be doing some of in this week. But first, you guys, I have to talk about Thestrals, because this very unique way that our heroes get to London for their rescue mission is kind of something that… [laughs] because you’re very excited, the momentum of this chapter is so real – you finally want to get to London, there have been all these setbacks, you finally want to get there – I find myself not often questioning just what really is happening with the Thestrals. So my question to you all, and this is going to sound bad – don’t read too much into it – I just want to ask, why don’t more of Harry’s friends die getting to London?
Andrew: Whoa.
Eric: Because this is a terrifying thing. Half of them can’t even see the creatures they’re riding on. Luna helped them up the thing and was just like, “You got this.”
Andrew: Being up in the air and not knowing what I’m flying on would probably give me a panic attack. I have enough of a panic attack risk on a plane, and I can see everything I’m sitting down on and whatnot. But this, in the open air, flying in on an invisible object, yeah, it’s scary. It’s scary.
Eric: And a living, breathing, beating wings creature too, as well. It just… at one point there’s a scream, and Harry fully expects to look around and see somebody falling. [laughs] It’s just… there’s no protection here! And what would he do if that were the case, if somebody was falling? You really can’t hope for anything here. This is terrifying.
Meg: I think some credit can be given to the Thestrals because, well, first of all, they’re smart enough to understand English; I feel like they also are thus smart enough to understand, “A living thing is on my back, and I’m in charge of them not dying.”
[Andrew laughs]
Eric: Hmm.
Meg: And we also know that Dumbledore rides Thestrals sometimes. Earlier in the book, Hagrid says something like, “Dumbledore takes the Thestrals to London sometimes when he doesn’t want to Apparate.”
Eric: Oh. [laughs] Yeah.
Meg: And Dumbledore is kind of old and rickety…
Andrew: [laughs] Hey. [imitating Dumbledore] “Hey!”
Meg: … and you imagine that if he can survive this, then the others… I also think Ron and Ginny, despite not being able to see the Thestrals, they play Quidditch. They probably have some instinct on how to not die while flying on something in the air.
Andrew: True.
Meg: Neville, while not athletic, he can see the Thestrals, so he’s got that going for him. But yeah, Hermione should have died.
[Eric and Micah laugh]
Andrew: Wow.
Eric: I had some things I was going to say to some of the middle stuff, but just the end there…
Micah: Given her recent commentary on horselike creatures…
Meg: That’s true.
Micah: … you’d think the Thestrals were listening in the bushes, and they heard her, and they’re just going to back-kick her off mid flight.
Eric: I don’t know whether or not the Thestrals understand English, but I do know they understand the currency of warm blood on their robes. Hermione and Harry’s…
Micah: They understood “London,” so they understood English.
Eric: Yeah, I guess so.
Meg: They understood “Visitors’ entrance.”
Eric: [laughs] They got ’em right there. I wonder if it’s the same magic as owls that kind of lead these flying creatures to a destination. All you have to do is state it.
Micah: So what I imagined when you asked this question was either how I appeared when riding Hagrid’s Magical Creature Motorbike Adventure…
[Eric laughs]
Micah: … where I was gripping on for dear life, even though I was on the motorbike…
Andrew: Yeah, same.
Eric: We rode those together. I was going to say, I don’t remember you falling, hunched half over…
Micah: It’s a great photo, actually; we should find it and share it in the show notes. Or being in the middle seat on an airplane. That’s the worst seat, arguably, to be in, and you just feel like you can’t move, especially if you’re a little bit of a bigger person like myself.
Andrew: Nicole, who’s listening live on our Patreon right now, is saying, “I guess we have to credit Hagrid for having them so well-trained.” And I think we should do that, because we tend to be a little critical of Hagrid on this podcast.
Meg: Maybe Hagrid also taught them English.
[Andrew laughs]
Meg: He’s teaching Grawp English.
Eric: I don’t know… well, is he? Is he really? [laughs]
Meg: He’s taught Grawp five words in English.
Eric: Yeah, yeah. All of his efforts went to teaching the Thestrals English so that Dumbledore could take them to London when he wanted to. So yeah, this is a little less luxurious than one would hope, but it is emergency transport, to Micah’s point and Meg’s point. They do go exactly where they need to. But this is actually not the first invisible thing that our heroes have ridden above the skies of Hogwarts and of London. [laughs] We often love connecting the threads, but I was getting flashbacks to the sometimes invisible Mr. Weasley’s flying car, which also was not as pleasant of an experience as it should have been. But also, just in general, hippogriffs. When Harry rides Buckbeak, they go above Hogwarts. The broomstick, at times it’s been uncomfortable. So I guess what we’re gathering is no magical mode of transportation can just be everything you want it to be, just like no public transit in the Muggle world is 100% foolproof.
Andrew: They all have a bit of danger to them. That’s something we talk about in the wizarding world. Everything’s got a little tinge of danger to it.
Micah: It feels like broomstick would probably have been the best option here, just given how familiar most of them are with it. Thestrals, they’re taking on for the first time, so there’s that element of it, too, where there’s a high level of unpredictability. And presumably with a broomstick – and maybe you could have done this with a Thestral too – could more than one of them have fit on? Instead of making Ron, Hermione, and Ginny ride creatures they can’t see?
Andrew: Yeah, that probably would have been smart. I’m also just thinking brooms would have been smart because, like you said, they know how to use brooms if, heaven forbid, they got into some danger while in the air – Death Eaters, whatever else – they’d be able to act faster, I think, to deflect, fly away, whereas with the Thestrals, if you don’t know how to really control them, you might get into some trouble there.
Eric and Meg: Yeah.
Meg: You’d think that they could have just been like, “Let’s head down to the Quidditch pitch and grab some brooms to go,” especially because Umbridge…
Andrew: [to the tune of “Hot to Go” by Chappell Roan] “B-R-O-O-M…”
[Everyone laughs]
Eric: “To go…”
Meg: Brooms to go! Especially because Umbridge is the one who’s been cracking down on everyone, but she’s gone now. She’s not going to stop them.
Eric: Yeah, well, and I’m sure after all they went through to get as far as they did to get rid of Umbridge, the last thing Harry wanted to do was wrestle a troll to get his broom back. But the school training brooms are right there, the cupboard that they’re kept in, or the shed that gets mentioned a couple of times throughout the series, that’s right there. So we are in London, and we are entering the manual public entrance to the Ministry that Harry… so good he was paying attention and knows what numbers to dial on the telephone. But he doesn’t even say thank you to the Thestrals.
[Andrew laughs]
Eric: I can’t believe it. We need a Harry Sucks count, honestly.
[Andrew laughs]
Eric: It’s time to start it.
Meg: He gave his Thestral a pat.
Eric: Is that enough?
Meg: I don’t know if anyone else did…
Eric: [laughs] Well, and presumably they’re gone because there’s garbage that they can root through. They’re like coyotes or something.
Meg: Maybe they thought that was their feast. They’re like, “Ooh, dinnertime.”
Andrew: And this is why I’m with you on criticizing Harry for not thanking them, because these poor Thestrals are apparently so desperate for food that they’re going into a dumpster to find something? That’s a sad state of affairs for them.
Eric: It’s crazy, because with most people being unable to see them, especially even in the Muggle world, they could probably get up to some real hijinks in a major city. They could eat anything they want.
Andrew: Oooh, yeah. Steal a lot. If some nice old fellow is sitting on a park bench and he puts his cupcake down and he doesn’t see any birds, but the cupcake starts disappearing bite by bite…
[Micah laughs]
Andrew: He won’t be able to know why.
Meg: There’s some good food in London. Could go get a curry. Go to a chippy.
Eric: Sorry, a chippy?
Meg: You know, a chip shop.
Eric: Oh.
Andrew: [in an English accent] Fish and chips.
Eric: So Andrew, Harry is muttering to himself, and there’s a particular moment that you wanted to highlight.
Andrew: Yeah, so Harry does say, “If Voldemort decided Sirius was going to crack, I would know.” He isn’t feeling any emotion coming from Voldemort – in this whole chapter, actually – and this should have been a major red flag that something was awry. Something’s not right. Maybe he should have slowed down and considered this vision a little more, because if this really was happening, Harry and Voldemort’s connection would have been experiencing something. Because Sirius definitely wouldn’t have cracked for Voldemort. He would rather die.
Eric: Right, and why no follow-up imagery? Why no other flashes? Especially because Harry is going towards where Voldemort is. I mean, Harry’s scar works like a magnet like this, and if they get closer, Harry should be feeling more, not less.
Andrew: Right, right.
Eric: It’s really just been that one vision, and then everything that’s gone on since then could maybe be seen as distracting Harry, but there’s just nothing. Nothing’s coming through on the feed. If you were to turn the television on, it would be static right now instead of…
Micah: But he was so cold he couldn’t feel anything.
[Everyone laughs]
Meg: He was numb to anything.
Andrew: That’s a secret to avoiding Voldemort’s pain through your scar, being cold.
Eric: Oh, man. That’s better than Occlumency.
[Andrew laughs]
Meg: But yeah, rather than… if Voldemort did truly have Sirius at the Department of Mysteries right now, and this was what Harry was feeling through his scar, the only way that would be possible is if Voldemort had said to Sirius, “All right, now we just kick back and we wait,” and then Voldemort stretched out on a nice long chair somewhere…
Micah: Hammock.
Meg: On a hammock, yeah, got out a magazine…
Eric: There’s probably hammocks down in the Unspeakables’ break room.
Meg and Micah: There’s got to be.
Eric: You know they have foosball too.
Meg: Oh, yeah. Air hockey.
Micah: In fairness to Harry, though, Arthur’s vision only happened once.
Meg: This is why, rather than being taught Occlumency all year, Harry should have just been learning Scar 101.
Andrew: [laughs] “How you know your scar’s being honest.”
Meg: Exactly, exactly.
Eric: Yeah. Well, no, and that’s a great point, Micah. That’s well taken. I think you’ve made a similar one before in that… I’ve never really put too much weight on the cleverness of having the Mr. Weasley scene in this book, because it really justifies a lot of Harry and Ron’s behavior. It talks about why they believe in Harry’s vision, and it also talks about why he doesn’t question it. It just plants… it works on so many levels to have had the Mr. Weasley thing happen at Christmas, so that this fake vision can just pervade and escape unscrutinized in June.
Meg: And such an emotional pull, too, because when Harry sees Sirius in danger, that’s Harry’s emotional pull. He’s like, “Oh my God, my godfather is in danger.” And at first Ron and Hermione are both kind of like, “Eh,” but then as soon as Harry is like, “Okay, but Ron, your dad,” that’s when Ron is like, “Oh, yep, I’m with Harry here. We gotta go.”
Micah: And I know it doesn’t mean as much to him in the grand scheme of things, but the Avery vision also is a factor here, because it happened in between the one with Arthur and the one with Sirius, and Harry remembers how painful that situation was for him. Which you could argue should have given him a little bit more of a clue as to the fact that the Sirius one was fake, because he wasn’t feeling as much of an intense reaction to it. But again, he’s now had a series of visions that have occurred which he knows to be true. Why should he not believe the one about Sirius to be true?
Andrew: Yeah. I just feel like if Voldemort was torturing Sirius, he’d be feeling that emotion coming through to his scar.
Eric: Yeah, and Harry would not…
Andrew: If he wasn’t getting what he wanted, he’d feel that coming through his scar. Voldemort would be experiencing some powerful emotion that would be making it to Harry’s head, and he’s not getting it. And I think what we’re supposed to be taking from moments like the one I quoted is that there are some red flags here that Harry isn’t fully digesting.
Eric: Yeah. I remember just a few chapters ago, we went through what were the signs that this was fake? And should Harry have known? And I agree, Harry doesn’t have the level of self-control at this junction where he would be tuning out, or able to tune out what’s going on currently with Voldemort and Sirius. He would be constantly looking. Somebody else would need to fly the Thestral for him or make sure he doesn’t fall off, because Harry would be constantly watching. You know how sometimes he just decides to look and then he sees, later on, what’s going on with Voldemort? That would be him now, because he couldn’t afford to miss what’s going on. It’s just kind of… yeah, he’s distracted.
Meg: All the more reason for them to double up on Thestrals.
Eric: So let’s get into it. We have talked about how the atrium of the Ministry is deserted. Eric Munch not doing his job…
Andrew: Suspicious.
Micah: Red flag.
Eric: We don’t exactly know what’s going…
Meg: Listen, Eric Munch checks out at 5:00 p.m. He’s gone.
[Andrew laughs]
Eric: He’s very big on work/life balance.
Andrew: He’s not paid enough to stay late!
[Eric laughs]
Micah: Can we also talk about how there should be some security measure in place when Harry Potter checks into the Ministry of Magic?
[Andrew laughs]
Eric: Oh. Yeah, he gave his real name, didn’t he?
Micah: Not only that, he says he’s there for a rescue mission.
Andrew: “If you guys aren’t going to do anything about it.” [laughs] Doesn’t he say that?
Micah: Is this not going back to Aurors? To people in positions of power? Isn’t there somebody checking the folks who are calling into the Ministry?
Eric: The flagged logins?
Meg: Maybe they did have an alert, but then they kept getting prank calls by the teen London wizards who would be like, “It’s Harry Potter, ha ha.”
[Andrew laughs]
Meg: And then the the Ministry was…
Eric: Those teen London wizards.
Meg: “Those youths! Those youths!” They were like, “You know what, Harry Potter is not coming here. Just cancel it.”
Eric: Well, if “Harry Potter” is not a red flag, “Neville Longbottom” should be, because that’s what Harry said his name was when he went on the Knight Bus.
Meg: [laughs] That’s true.
Eric: But Neville is with them, so they said Neville’s name too, and that didn’t raise any flags. So it would be under… it’s funny, because I think “Neville” is probably a known alias of Harry Potter because of what happened in year three, so now Neville can’t sign into government buildings without getting extra security checks. Poor Neville. But yeah, I agree, this is just kind of wild. I really do wonder how they managed to pull this off and have so few people, because that security position is not something that at five o’clock it stops. It’s a shift. Somebody else has to come take that over.
Andrew: And Harry even notes that when he’s taking the elevator, he notices how noisy it is, which he didn’t notice when he was there for his trial, and he’s noticing that because everything else is so quiet. It’s quiet, too quiet. It’s that type of thing. There’s too many red flags. And rereading this chapter, knowing where it’s going, he falls right into Voldemort’s and the Death Eaters’ trap. It’s just tough to read.
Meg: Rereading it, I was trying to find out is there any point where he actually says to Neville or Luna, like, “Hey, just so you’re aware, we’re going to go see Voldemort right now.”
[Andrew and Eric laugh]
Meg: They’re kind of vague about what they’re doing. It’s not until even at the end, when Neville is like, “Sirius Black? Was that a friend of yours, Harry?” He and Luna are just not really told what’s going on.
Andrew: No.
Eric: They’re along for the ride.
Micah: Luna is somewhat clued in on the Sirius end of things, because she refers to him as Stubby Boardman.
[Eric and Meg laugh]
Meg: And no one corrects her, so she thinks that they’re there for Stubby Boardman.
Eric: I want to know what she thinks they’re doing there, totally.
Micah: Yeah, there’s definitely an eerie sense of them entering the Ministry, the fact that you’re in this huge government entity, and it’s totally empty. As Andrew said, the elevators are making noise. You’d think, though… Harry was just there at the beginning of, or just prior to him going off to Hogwarts; that should have also been a major clue to him that something wasn’t right. There has to be somebody there. People work late in all sorts of office settings, and I would assume the Ministry is a place that…
Andrew: Especially a government building.
Micah: It’s a government building. Those people are working long hours, overtime…
Andrew: Crime doesn’t end. Crime is around the clock.
Eric: No, no, no. Yeah, there’s this 24-hour security for sure. The thing that I like about it… I’ve never noticed this before; when Harry signs in in the telephone booth, he says that they’re there to save some people, “if your Ministry can’t do it first.” He actually gives the government a little bit of credit.
[Andrew laughs]
Eric: He’s like, “Hey, you guys. We’re here, and also, you guys should come join us.” I’ve got to say, Harry has no reason to really be that trusting of them, but he flat-out says it. Like, “You guys should…”
Andrew: Well, I took that as, “I’m frustrated that I have to come here and take care of this myself. Why is my godfather in danger?”
Meg: Yeah, it read as very sarcastic to me.
Andrew: Yeah, exactly.
Eric: Ohh.
Meg: Like, “I’m 15; why am I doing this?”
Andrew: “Here I go again, saving people again.”
Eric: You can’t sass the AI telephone booth lady! That’s not going to get you anywhere. You ever try sassing Siri?
Meg: She’s sass-proof.
Eric: It’s not good.
Andrew: “I have a saving-people thing because nobody else goes and saves people!”
[Eric and Meg laugh]
Eric: “Harry Potter (annoying): Rescue Mission.”
[Meg laughs]
Eric: Oh, man.
Meg: I imagine that this entire time, Hermione was thinking, “This isn’t right. There should be people here. Something is very wrong.” But she has just been so rattled by the entire day; she just wanted to finish her OWLs…
Micah: She’s cold.
Meg: She’s cold, she royally screwed up with the centaurs, Grawp was bleeding all over her… I just imagine at this point she’s just exhausted, and so she’s like, “I just can’t even… I don’t have the bandwidth to even argue with Harry anymore about this.
Micah: I do like what Michele said in the Discord. “Luna doesn’t need to know what they’re doing there. She’s a total ride or die.”
[Andrew and Meg laugh]
Eric: Aww.
Micah: It’s true.
Meg: She is, immediately.
Eric: Yeah. And I’ve said this before, but I like the friendship that Luna and Ginny have, sort of inter-House friendship, that they’re down a corridor, they hear a noise, they both go check it out. We were talking in the last chapter how wild it is that this big group forms, but really, these people have been spending time together all year, and Neville at least really wants to be able to help and be able to prove himself to himself, I think, in the defense front.
Meg: And I can’t remember if this happens in the book, but it is a nice touch in the movie when Neville kind of has that moment with Bellatrix, where she says, “How are your parents?” And he says, “Better, now that they’re about to be avenged.” You’re like, “Oh, Neville is meant to be here right now.”
Eric: Yeah, that line goes hard. That line goes real hard. So let’s talk… so essentially, the Department of Mysteries is exactly how Harry remembers it in his dream. That’s probably a red flag. There’s always something that changes, right? That chair wasn’t there; it should be there…
Andrew: Yeah, it shouldn’t be perfectly accurate.
Eric: It shouldn’t be empty, and it shouldn’t be exactly-the-same accurate. But at this point he’s so far along, he’s just going to get to the end of the thing, make a right at the room, and then it’s going to… there’s no way he’s turning back. So we get into the room that rotates, and we joked, but it’s got to be a big motor, right? That just rotates the walls and the doors?
Micah: It’s magic.
Andrew: It’s the owls underneath, spinning it around, working overtime.
Eric: Owls!
Andrew: House-elves are spinning it around from below.
[Andrew and Eric laugh]
Eric: Just a crank, just a big wooden crank that they’re turning.
Micah: It’s just a Thestral on a wheel going around in a circle.
Andrew: Aww.
Eric: A Thestral on a wheel! Oh, and it’s raw meat dangling on a stick in front of it, and then it’s going to the raw meat. That’s real sad.
Micah: We’re horrible people.
Eric: Yeah, but the Ministry is more horrible for making that sort of thing exist.
Meg: Exactly, we want them to be freed.
Eric: Free the Thestrals.
Meg: Let them go. Let them go root around in that dumpster.
Eric: So let’s talk about one of the rooms here, and it’s a bit awkward. There’s a giant tank. There’s these floaty white things which are not immediately apparent what they are. And it turns out, that’s right, not your first five guesses, but your sixth guess: human brains is what’s in there.
Andrew: Oooh. I’m squeamish when it comes to stuff like this. I’ve been watching The Pitt lately on Max; I’m sure some of our listeners have been watching that. It shows a lot of stuff coming out of the body, and that’s hard for me to watch. I’ve always been this type of way, so I couldn’t handle this room. I’d be out of there once I realized they were brains.
Meg: I like Luna’s theory. She thinks they’re Aquavirius maggots.
[Andrew and Eric laugh]
Eric: I don’t want it to be them either!
Meg: Imagine maggots that size, just swimming.
Eric: Um… no thank you.
Meg: I would be entranced by that.
Micah: I just want her to be right one time.
Meg: “Yeah, that’s what it is.”
Eric: Yeah, yeah.
Meg: Give her something. Yes, Luna, it is maggots.
Eric: I love that. For there to actually be empirical proof that the Rotfang Conspiracy or something is real, and they just stumble upon it in a room, and then she’s like, “Daddy is going to love this,” and she takes a document. [laughs] Yeah, she’s earned that much.
Micah: For me, despite the fact that we are in the wizarding world, I think this room in particular shows that witches and wizards likely know just as much or as little about the human mind and all of its intricacies, and so they need to study, just like doctors here in the Muggle world study the brain and there’s so much about it that we still don’t know. I feel like we’re finding out new things each and every year.
Andrew and Eric: Yeah.
Meg: I wonder if there’s any overlap between Unspeakables and Healers in this room.
Eric: That’s an interesting…
Meg: They’re Unspeakable, except for they speak to some Healers about it so that Healers can better work with this kind of thing at St. Mungo’s.
Eric: Well, they’ve solved the big problem, which is that in the Muggle world, we can only really study the brain through MRI and some imaging devices, or after the host has been deceased. However, this time they solve the problem of the brain being hidden in people’s heads, and they manage somehow to get the brains to animate themselves. This is the part that unsettles me. I tried to figure out what about this is creepy. Is it the giant tank? Is it the way the lighting is? No, it’s the fact that brains are autonomously swimming around in a tank, not just sitting in formaldehyde, but actually swimming around that unsettles me. Are these then the exact same as a human brain that has just come from someone’s head, a wizard, or are they something more?
Meg: Well, Eric, when you’re swimming around, isn’t that your brain swimming itself around, just with added flesh?
Andrew: Whoa…
Eric: Yeah, my brain is commanding my body to swim around, but my brain couldn’t do it on its own. That’s why there’s a body.
Andrew: So you’re kind of saying it has a life of its own.
Meg: You don’t like that these brains have a little zoom power.
Eric: Yeah, basically the brains with tentacles that extend and attack is just kind of one step too far for me.
Micah: This can be some kind of bad experiment that goes wrong when we get to the actual battle portion and we see one of the brains attack Ron in the next chapter. Who knows what kind of things the Unspeakables might be doing to these brains to try and find out different things, right? They could be doing magic on them, and that’s why they have these tentacles and attack. I don’t know.
Andrew: That’s an interesting take. Yeah, because you would think, if your brain is being dissected like this and analyzed and used for research, maybe the brain would be like, “Well, I don’t like this,” and becomes increasingly…
Eric: Defensive?
Micah: Especially a magical brain.
Meg: Hostile?
Andrew: Yes.
Meg: In 374, you guys all kind of theorize, like, can you be an organ donor? Were these brains donated by wizards? And you talk a bit about what kind of wizard would donate their brain for this. Is it very powerful wizards, and that’s what they’re studying? Could it be the brains of evil wizards, and could that be why they attack? Because these are evil brains?
Andrew: Brains of magical beasts, too, maybe?
Meg: Oooh.
Andrew: We don’t necessarily know if they’re human brains.
Eric: Could be the brains that were jettisoned out of people who went through the veil and ended up in the brain room.
Andrew: Yeah!
Eric: But I also think, too… I love this idea – I guess I’m first considering it – that when we think of the Department of Mysteries, we think of these rooms as being the definitive way to study their subject matter. Like the time room, like, “Oh, clearly, there’s no better way to study time than exactly the structure of the time room.” But I love this idea that Micah brought up, that this could just be mad science happening. This doesn’t need to be the definitive way to study whatever it is they’re studying in that room. This is just a creepy room in a creepy place.
Micah: Which you’re bound to find in a place called the Department of Mysteries.
Andrew: Yeah, I was just going to say, I mean, we’ve just got to keep that in mind, too; they are just trying to answer, in all of these departments, life’s big questions. Death, love, the brain… I think, Micah, you said a few minutes ago, there’s still endless research to do on humans and the human body and the human experience, all that, so it’s not necessarily surprising that they’re analyzing the brain. They can just do it in a way that Muggles can’t, and that’s the shocking part.
Eric: To that end, I want to say… I have a less creepy suggestion for what they could be studying here, and I wonder if, because there’s more than one brain in a tank, what would be the purpose of doing that? Unless the brains are connected or linked telepathically? Maybe they’re trying to create a collective consciousness or something.
Andrew: There’s so many options. Maybe they’re doing all of them! There’s no one goal here.
[Eric laughs]
Micah: And you don’t know who’s doing the actual research and what their background is. They could be a bit of a mad scientist at the end of the day, and doing experiments under the Ministry’s nose that… I mean, let’s face it, it’s not like the Ministry keeps tabs what’s going on in the Ministry, right?
Meg: No. Yeah, who is overseeing the Unspeakables? I kind of feel like they just have free rein to do whatever they want.
Eric: Like special projects?
Meg: Like if an Unspeakable is like, “I want to get a massive tank and fill it with brains,” the other Unspeakables are going to be like, “Sure, man.”
Eric: [laughs] The other Unspeakables are like, “Oh, that’s Dave’s idea again. Always Dave.” I have to think there’s some hierarchy; there are people that they… I mean, if the wizarding world had a Department of Defense, right? Or Homeland Security or something like that, there would always be a higher level justification and a higher level of supervision than just whoever happens to work in that department, because there’s people who hire them, and there must be some kind of motive behind that. But yeah, who knows? There is, of course, the famous room that Harry and friends cannot get into, and instead of using the gift from Sirius that Harry should have used all year, he instead tries to use the knife and fails miserably to open the door to the room that Dumbledore tells him is filled with love.
Andrew: [emotionally] The world’s greatest mystery.
[Eric laughs]
Andrew: Yeah, so it can’t be unlocked with Sirius’s knife or Alohomora. And it’s kind of interesting that the protection here is extremely strong to protect whatever they’re researching related to love, related to one of the most mysterious things of all time. [laughs] It kind of feels funny to say that love is so mysterious, but it kind of is.
Eric: I know, I know. When you think of love, you think mystery. Absolutely.
Andrew: Yeah. But what’s funny to me is that this one’s locked down, but meanwhile, the death room, where the veil is, eh, anybody can just go in, no problem. It’s no issue. So you can die in one room easily…
Meg: I think there’s even multiple doors to the death room.
[Eric laughs]
Andrew: Yeah, right, right. A lot of security should be there. But I think this is sort of trying to tell us something about just… I don’t know if it’s the author. Is the author trying to tell us something about love? Which I guess maybe ties into Lily’s protection for Harry, saving his life. I don’t know.
Eric: Yeah, it’s just as well that we didn’t see what’s inside it and get told later by Dumbledore what’s inside it, because there… I mean, frankly, if you’re writing a Department of Mysteries, and it’s supposed to house all the mysteries of the universe that wizards are working on, you have to have a door you can’t open. It doesn’t matter what’s in there; there has to be a door, no matter what, you can’t open. It doesn’t matter what’s in it.
[Micah laughs]
Andrew: Maybe what’s happening in there is too inappropriate for children, and the author was like, “You know what? I’m locking it. The kids can’t get in here.”
Meg: Cursed Child.
Eric: Yeah, yeah.
Meg: There was a interview where the author was on an episode of PotterCast, and they asked her about this, and I don’t like what she said. She said in the love room, there’s just a bunch of Unspeakables drinking love potions and seeing how they act…
[Andrew laughs]
Meg: … and that the door is locked because of that. And I think that’s stupid.
Andrew: But you could still go and die in the other room? I don’t know.
[Eric laughs]
Meg: Yeah!
Andrew: Sometimes I think she just pulls stuff out of thin air without thinking it through.
Meg: I think she was like, “I don’t want to be on PotterCast anymore. I’m just going to say something to get out of here.”
[Andrew laughs]
Eric: I think it’s one of the dumbest answers I’ve ever heard. Well, because Amortentia, the love potion, is not love; it’s infatuation. It’s certainly not… it cannot be likened, no matter how hard you try, to the love that gives Harry his protection from his mother can, so for the love room to be just a bunch of Unspeakables taken some love potion? No.
Meg: And for it to be like, “Oh, the door is obviously locked because crazy things go on in there…” I much prefer that the door is just locked because the study of love is so strong that the love room has kind of locked itself from outsiders.
Eric: Oooh. Like only the worthy can get in.
Meg: Yeah, something like that, and that it’s not just people in there drinking love potions and seeing what happens. I imagine that room to be more about studying what actually… what is love? Baby, don’t hurt me.
[Micah laughs]
Andrew: [singing] “Baby, don’t hurt me…”
Meg: I imagine it to be about what is the purpose of love?
Andrew: [singing] “What is love?” Who sang that? Maybe that person’s in the love room, just singing.
Eric: Haddaway.
Meg: Haddaway is in that room.
Eric: Haddaway is in the love room.
[Andrew laughs]
Meg: Because there’s so many questions, though! Why does love exist? If it’s just for the biological imperative to find companionship and reproduce, how does that explain why certain people who find love don’t end up reproducing? And why is love different between humans than it is between other species? But then, why do certain species mate for life? Why are certain species monogamous versus not, and what kind of love is that? This is what I like to imagine is going on in that room.
Micah: So based on what she said, it sounds like the love room is just the break room.
Eric: [laughs] That we talked about earlier. There’s foosball and an orgy pit… sorry, a conversation pit.
Andrew: Also… [laughs] And the band Foreigner is in there as well, and they’re singing their 1984 hit, “I Want to Know What Love Is.”
Meg: It’s just a concert room.
[Andrew laughs]
Eric: Yeah, and Tina Turner is in there too, and she’s singing, “What’s love got to do, got to do with it?”
Meg: There’s a light-up dance floor.
Andrew: “Why’s the love room got a lock, got a lock on it?”
Eric: Yeah. But I mean, to Andrew’s point, look, the death room – which we’re going to talk about – you can just go up to it, presumably jump in, and never return.
Meg: You can die in the death room without even going through the veil. You just fall down the 20 feet of steps.
Eric: Yeah, very dangerous. You’re going to break your neck.
Micah: To the clip you played earlier, though, perhaps Death Eaters were strategic in terms of the rooms that they were making available to…
Andrew: That wasn’t a clip, Micah. That was me really singing Foreigner, “I Want to Know What Love Is.”
[Micah laughs]
Eric: I feel more powerful.
Micah: Me too.
Meg: No, that was actually Foreigner was here.
[Andrew laughs]
Eric: The question is, if the Death Eaters… okay, if the Death Eaters went around unlocking all the doors, and they decided not to unlock the love room, was there the insight there that maybe the forces within the love room could have actually made Harry more powerful? Because love protects Harry from Voldemort, presumably. That would be one that… I mean, I don’t think any Death Eater or Voldemort has a concept so conscious that is “Love is what I don’t have, and will be my undoing” to avoid it, but at the same time, if Harry went in there, he’d pretty much be invincible.
Meg: He’d come out glowing and flexing.
Eric: Yeah, it’s his love for his friends that saves him time and again. It’s his love for Sirius that prevents him from jumping through the veil, that he kind of wants to do in the death room.
Meg: It’s his love for Sirius that gets Voldemort out of his head a few chapters from now, when Voldemort tries to possess him.
Eric: Yeah, so Harry and love are very tight, but he can’t get in the door.
Micah: And I doubt the Death Eaters would want a bunch of Unspeakables running around while they’re trying to deal with these kids.
Eric: [laughs] What if the Death Eaters just locked everyone in the love room? It was like, “They’ll entertain themselves.”
Andrew: “Now kiss.”
[Eric and Meg laugh]
Eric: And the Unspeakables are like, “This is just Thursday. This is just what we do every week. This is fun.”
Meg: Maybe that’s why the Death Eaters and Voldemort scheduled it for that night.
Andrew: Oooh.
Eric: Ah!
Meg: They were like, “Thursday night is when…”
Micah: Karaoke night?
Meg: “… the Unspeakables go do karaoke in the love room.”
[Andrew and Micah laugh]
Eric: All right.
Meg: “We’ll just lock them in there, and then we do our plan.”
Micah: One of the things I wanted to mention, though – and this is what makes what the author said just even more questionable – is that Dumbledore, later on in this book, describes this room as containing “a force that is at once more wonderful and more terrible than death, than human intelligence, than forces of nature.”
Eric: It sounds to me like he and Grindelwald were in that room once.
Micah: I was going to say. Huh.
Andrew: Hey now.
Eric: That can’t be canon. I don’t care who said it; there’s no way that there’s a… just like the veil, which we’re going to talk about in a moment, is an otherworldly thing that mankind, I think, could not have created, but which they are forced to always witness, the love room contains something just like that.
Meg: It can’t just be Unspeakables in there being like, [sniffs] “It smells like chocolate to me.” “Smells like fresh grass to me.”
Eric: It’s time to talk about the room that is not appearing on the Deathly Hallows American edition cover. It’s a large stone amphitheater with a crumbly dais, down, down, down in the center of a large, like I said, amphitheater-type room. Now, Harry is strangely drawn to this room. It’s one of the first ones they go into, and the stakes could not be higher; he needs to find Sirius. But something about the veil just attracts Harry, and Hermione, who we mentioned being exhausted from her flight and her horrible day, actually snaps out of herself long enough to scream at Harry to back up, that the veil is dangerous, and that he needs to focus on finding Sirius. She at least has the wherewithal… because he doesn’t even realize he’s doing this. He has one foot stepping up; he is sure that there are people inside the veil – people, not person, not an intelligence, not something vaguely he feels he’s being watched – people. He thinks there are people on the other side. Guys, what’s going on here?
Andrew: I mean, the foreshadowing is overwhelming to the point where I almost feel like you can’t call it foreshadowing, because it’s just telling you what’s going to happen.
[Eric laughs]
Andrew: Harry is calling to Sirius in the veil, in the veil room, in the death room, and Harry and Luna can hear the voices coming from the veil. And I actually found this to be pretty interesting as a followup to last week’s discussion on what would happen to Thestrals if they were pushed through the veil. So it sounds like if you have experienced witnessing somebody die, you can hear voices coming through the veil, right? And so I just was very surprised by how just kind of obvious it is what’s going to happen. Reading it again… hindsight is 20/20, but I can’t believe that Harry is hearing Sirius through the veil already.
Micah: Yeah. Well, and I can’t remember, sequentially, does the death room come before the love room?
Andrew: In the chapter?
Eric: I think so.
Meg: I think it does. I think it’s brains, then death, then love, then time.
Micah: Because what ends up happening as they try and enter the love room, which was mentioned, is Sirius’s knife basically dissolves, and that’s another bit of foreshadowing. You could argue that basically Sirius is about to dissolve.
Andrew: So that’s what he was hearing through the veil. It was actually Sirius’s knife, because it had died. [laughs]
Eric: Really, just the question about whether Luna… I mean, it’s a small sample size, but yes, we know that the few people that can see Thestrals also can hear these voices. Harry is desperate just not to be the only one who can hear them; I think he doesn’t want to be proven to be crazy.
Meg: Well, Harry and Luna definitely hear the voices. Harry is kind of like, “I think there’s voices in there?” Luna is like, “There are voices in there.” And then Neville and Ginny are also kind of staring entranced at it, and Neville has also seen death, but Ginny hasn’t, but she’s still entranced by it, and I imagine it has something to do with…
Eric: Voldemort?
Meg: … her experience as a first year student at Hogwarts, what happened that entire year. Meanwhile, Ron and Hermione are so like, “What’s the big deal?” And I think Hermione’s anger comes from not being able to understand something. I think that’s what is fueling her being like, “It’s dangerous; get away from it!”, I think is that she just doesn’t understand it. And I think out of the six people there, Ron and Hermione are the two that are most… Hermione, ruled by her head, definitely, but the two most realistic, most reality…
Eric: Pragmatic? Grounded?
Meg: Yeah, most grounded of that six, and that’s why they’re kind of like, “This is weird. We’re going to stay away from it. Come on.”
Eric: They’re the most pure… yeah.
Micah: Ron and Harry were almost playing \ peekaboo around the side of the…
[Eric and Meg laugh]
Meg: That’s true.
Micah: I was worried for a minute for Ron that something was going to happen there.
Eric: I’m glad nothing reached out and grabbed him, yeah.
Micah: I did pull from that same interview you mentioned earlier, Meg, what the author had to say about the veil, and I can just read it here quickly. She said that, “It’s the divide between life and death. I tried to do a nod to that in the Tale of the Three Brothers – she was separate from them as though through a veil. You can’t go back if you pass through that veil; you cannot come back. Or you can’t come back in any form that will make either person happy anyway. But when they surround that veil in Order of the Phoenix, I was trying to show that depending on their degree of skepticism or belief about what lay beyond… Luna believes firmly in an afterlife. She’s very clear on that. And she feels them speaking or hears them speaking much more clearly than Harry does. This is the idea of faith. Harry thinks he can hear them; he’s drawn on. But Harry’s had a life that has been so imbued with death that he now has an uncharacteristically strong curiosity about the afterlife, especially for a boy of 15. Ron is just scared, as I think Ron would be – he just knows this is something he doesn’t want to dabble with. Hermione, hyper-rational Hermione can’t hear anything. ‘Get away from the veil.’ So if you walk through the veil, you’re dead. You’re dead. What you find on the other side, well, that’s the question.”
Andrew: And that is what the Ministry is studying, I presume. I also thought maybe it’s some sort of… they want to kind of maybe open up a portal between life and death. Because right now it’s one way, but what if they could reverse it somehow?
Eric: Right, there’s a very real value to having that be studied, having that be a thing that’s studied.
Andrew: Yeah, a lot of power would come with that.
Eric: And you get all the answers to exactly how the universe works.
Micah: The portal piece is interesting because I remember… we have talked about this before on the show, and there was this longstanding theory that the veil is some kind of ancient relic or portal that the Ministry was actually built around, and I know that the veil is at least as old as the Ministry, because it was there at the time that it was built, which was early 1700s, so I’m still inclined to believe that it was there before the Ministry was there. I don’t think the Ministry built it or brought it in.
Andrew: Oh.
Micah: I just… that’s my headcanon. I think it was there.
Meg: I agree with that, and I have an entire theory about this, in fact.
Eric: Ooh.
Meg: I think that these portals exist all over Earth, and most of them are in places like in the wilderness, in the middle of nowhere. In fact, most of them are probably in the ocean, because that’s, like, 75% of the planet.
Eric: Oh, yeah.
Meg: And so there’s probably a portal like this somewhere in the Bermuda Triangle, and that’s why things go missing there, because they just pass on through to another plane of existence.
Andrew: [laughs] Uh-huh.
Meg: I think this one in London, though, just happens to be one that people found, because think about London; it was built there because it was a port city, and when you’re building a new society, you want there to be water so that you can do fishing and trading with other cities. And so I think that over time, people in London started – Muggles and wizards, presumably, because this was a long, long time ago – they started realizing, “Hmm, when certain people go for walks, they don’t come back.” And I think that these portals are invisible, and I think that at some point humans were like, “We need to mark this somehow, so that people stop walking through it and going missing.” So I think people put up these ancient stones, and got this tattered cloth and hung it there. And then I think that as life continued and society progressed, and the Statute of Secrecy was passed sometime in the 1600s, wizards were like, “We’re having a society here where we study things; let’s build a building around this thing so we can study it further.” And then when the Statute of Secrecy was passed, and it was time to build a Ministry away from Muggle eyes, they were like, “Well, we’ve already got this magic building where we’re studying this veil; let’s just expand upon that.” And I think that the veil is much, much older than that, and I think it’s much older than the Ministry itself by thousands of years, and the reason I think that is because it’s underground. So I think that 100,000 years ago, that was ground level, but then with tectonic plates shifting and continents changing and just Earth happening, land built up over that.
Andrew: Interesting.
Meg: But throughout the entire process, the wizards were like, “Well, this is our little death room where we study that.”
[Andrew laughs]
Meg: And I think at one point, wizards were like, “You know, we could also use this as a place to execute people,” and that’s why there’s the amphitheater aspect to it, so that people could sit around and watch, because people loved watching public executions back in the day.
Eric: That’s right, Harry does visually compare it to the trial room.
Andrew: Yeah, you think of witch burning. I do love the idea of… and great theory, Meg. I do love the idea of the Ministry being built around the veil, because then the veil kind of takes the form as the root, the root of the Ministry of Magic, and there’s a lot that could probably be said there about this gateway to death being the root of a government building, of all things. [laughs]
Eric: And I think we do this naturally, whether we realize it or not. Important buildings are built off of certain energy places, like high energy places or important places. Meg mentioned the port city; that’s exactly right. I also just think that… we may not know it, but there’s ample examples of ancient cities particularly being either directly aligned with constellations at the time or something crazy, where people feel there’s energy and there’s power, so it makes sense that the seat of power for the government, for the wizarding world in Britain, would be in the same place as this very powerful ancient artifact object.
Meg: And there’s something poignant about it being… it started the Ministry, basically, and now barely anyone at the Ministry knows that it’s there even now at this point in time.
Eric: I like that, yeah.
Andrew: And this is why studying history can be really interesting, because it’s like, “Well, why was Chicago built there? Why was Las Vegas built there?” And you hear about, “Oh, well, Chicago is on the water, and it was a port…” and all that too. A lot of cities get built along water where ships can come in, drop off goods, stuff like that. That’s how cities grow into what they are today hundreds of years later. We’re talking about a port right now, with the veil. [laughs] Coming and going, built around yet another portal in the world.
Eric: Crazy. So we will spend more time in this next room next week, or two weeks from now, when we destroy it. But let’s talk briefly about the Hall of Prophecy, which is… finally they get in the right door. Harry notices some shining; he’s like, “This is it. This is it.” There’s lots of shelves. Any new takes on the Hall of Prophecy, guys? What do we think was the plan here? Is it just to get Harry to go and take it off the shelf, because no one else can?
Micah: It hit me a lot harder, I think, reading it than it did in previous times because I really felt bad for Harry in this moment, because I think despite the fact that he’s able to retrieve the prophecy, I think he also before that has a period of recognition and almost reckoning with himself where he realizes that he’s been hoodwinked. He realizes that Sirius is not here, and that everything that Hermione was telling him prior to them departing Hogwarts was true.
Andrew: And I think one reason it hit me harder this time is because just with more lived experience… I’m not sure I can say I’ve been hoodwinked before, and certainly not in this type of way, but you experience those moments in your life where your stomach just drops; you feel the floor come out from under you. That’s the feeling that Harry is experiencing here, and when we read this as adults, we can really relate to that moment. We know what he’s feeling.
Eric: Yeah, he runs around the shelf a couple more times, looking behind it, looking… and when Ron is trying to point out that there is a clue or something, Harry’s first inclination is, “No, shut up, Ron,” because he’s sure that Ron is going to point out how duped and stupid Harry was. So I think Harry, it finally sinks in that what he saw was not the truth. But then there’s some hope, so that’s kind of neat.
Andrew: One thing I did want to mention is that when they find the prophecy with Harry’s name on it, before grabbing it, Neville is the one who tells Harry to not pick up the prophecy with his name on it. And the prophecy, as we know, also could have been about Neville, so I’m wondering if this line being delivered from Neville is a wink about that.
Eric: Probably. And the prophecy is even labeled with a question mark.
Andrew: Right.
Eric: I think… it’s not said, and I was expecting in this chapter to see it, but maybe it’s in a later chapter where it says… the part that says “Harry Potter” is actually hand drawn. Or am I making this up? Where it’s like the question mark was the engraving…
Meg: It’s written in spidery writing.
Eric: Yeah, okay. Because yeah, it could have been either of them. I like that Neville is involved in trying to caution Harry. That’s kind of neat.
Andrew: “Don’t pick it up, Harry, because it’s mine to pick up! We’re scratching off your name, and I’m writing mine!”
[Meg and Micah laugh]
Eric: Ahh! Swipe.
Andrew: I put that memory in your head about Sirius! It was me! [laughs]
Meg: Oh, plot twist.
Eric: You!
Andrew: “Not me, not Hermione, Neville.”
[Everyone laughs]
Eric: Yes, yes. There’s no good and evil; there’s only prophecies and those too weak to seek them.
[Andrew laughs]
Eric: Yeah, so it’s an interesting kind of hoodwinking, perplexing situation, and we’ll have to tune in to see how the kids get out of it. But we do hear the voice of Lucius Malfoy. Finally, something is about to happen. After all of this mystery, after all of these empty rows and nobody’s where they should be, we do finally, at the very least, hear a familiar unfriendly voice, and it ends the chapter.
Meg: What was Lucius doing? Was he just like…?
Eric: Staying out of sight, making no noise, pretending he didn’t exist…
Meg: They’re all hiding like, [whispering] “Shh, shh, okay, here they come, quiet…”
Eric: No, really. Yeah, it’s like that scene in Labyrinth with all the goblins in the closet. Because they needed… here’s how it doesn’t work, because it was all up to chance. They needed Harry to go to row 97; that was planted. But then they need somebody to look close enough at one of… I don’t know if it’s at eye level. They need somebody to look at the specific prophecy that says, “A.P.W.B.D. to S.P.T., regarding Harry Potter.” They need somebody to notice that and then go, “Hey, Harry, there’s a thing,” and then him to take it, realize he has to touch it, and pull it off the shelf. How unlikely is that? I don’t know. He does it in about five seconds.
Meg: But was there a backup plan in case they were like, “Oh, Sirius isn’t here. Okay, guys, let’s go back to Hogwarts,” and didn’t see it?
Micah: I feel like Lucius could have coerced them.
Andrew: Or he just hears, “Pickup on aisle 97.”
[Eric and Meg laugh]
Eric: And Harry, from his many years in retail, knows what that means. It’s time to look around.
[Andrew and Meg laugh]
Andrew: “Prophecy pickup on aisle 97.”
Superlative of the Week
Andrew: I thought we could do for the MVP segment of the week the most interesting room at the Department of Mysteries. For me, it is the death room. Meg, loved your theory. I loved our discussion about it. There’s just so much that could be considered when it comes to that room. What is the Ministry doing with the veil? How did it get there? Was the Ministry built around it? Why is it so easy to pass through that veil? I have so many questions for this room, more than any other room, I think.
Meg: I mean, I think all these rooms have to do with mysteries in life, in reality, but I do think that, more than love, more than brains, more than time, death is the ultimate mystery. It’s the biggest mystery of all.
Eric: I actually put… mine’s sort of a copout, but also, I’m interested. Because they’re in a hurry, we don’t go into all the rooms, so my most interesting room is the rooms that we don’t see, because we don’t know what we don’t know, and I’m assuming there are a few other mysteries that are kept hidden away.
Micah: Well, much like Ginny, I was intrigued by the time room, and would love to have spent a little bit more time there. No pun intended.
[Andrew laughs]
Micah: I know we will get some more of it in the upcoming chapters during the battle, but just with everything that happened in Prisoner of Azkaban, we know that the Ministry has – or had, supposedly – Time-Turners that they destroyed, but what else are they studying there as it relates to time?
Meg: And I said the love room. Now, if it’s just people doing Love Potion shots, I’m not that interested in that. But if it is the idea of studying the theory…
Micah: What about if there’s karaoke?
Meg: Yeah, if there’s karaoke, that’s a different…
Micah: Then you’re in.
Eric: We could sing “Love Shack”! Meg!
Meg: We will do “Love Shack.”
Andrew: Oooh, fun.
Meg: We will duet “Love Shack.” Oh, that’s got to be what happens in there. But just the overall idea of what is it? Why is it? Why did it evolve?
Andrew: Why? Why love? How love? Who love?
Meg: Why love? How? When?
Eric: How love.
Meg: When love. Where love.
Andrew: The five things I ask myself every morning.
Eric: Well, that, I believe, concludes our chapter discussion.
Lynx Line
Eric: Now let’s go over to the Lynx Line, where MuggleCast listeners who are members of our community at Patreon.com/MuggleCast have answered this week’s question, which actually is open-ended: What other rooms should be represented at the Ministry of Magic Department of Mysteries? So this follows up on my copout answer of what rooms do you actually think that would be there?
Andrew: B said,
“A room that studies the origins of magic itself in its rawest form. It could contain artifacts and such from throughout history. My public health-minded wife would also like to add a room that studies the socio-economical impact of magic on Muggle communities. We are road tripping across Washington state and have been discussing our answers to this question for far too long.”
[Andrew and Micah laugh]
Eric: I love that. That’s really cool, B. Next one comes from Robert:
“There should be a ‘Fudge is Special’ room, where the walls are lined with portraits of all of Fudge’s supposed ‘enemies’ who can shower him with praise and tell him what a good job he’s doing, and also how handsome and smart he is. There’s also two punching bags shaped like Harry Potter and Albus Dumbledore and a mirror for Fudge to look into and tell himself that everything’s okay and he’s actually doing a good job.”
Micah: Isn’t this just his office?
[Meg laughs]
Eric: Probably, probably. But I love the idea that he requisitions the Unspeakables to build a room strictly so he can feel better about his life.
Meg: He probably wants to have one room on every floor of the Ministry specifically for that purpose.
Micah: Michael says,
“A ‘Muggle Science’ department, where they study how and why different non-magical phenomena work (but obviously completely fail). Trying to understand gravity, thinking chemical reactions MUST be magic, researching evolution could be some examples!”
Meg: Shyam – I hope I’m pronouncing that correctly – says,
“There should be a snack, tea, and coffee room with comfy chairs! Unspeakables work an extremely stressful job and need a room where they don’t need to study anything and can just take a breather.”
Andrew: Yes, they do. Nicole said, “A rubber duck room; we need answers!”
[Meg and Micah laugh]
Eric: And Jill says,
“I think there should be an ‘innocence’ room, to study the concept of what kind of magic and wisdom we all have when we are innocent and young! Often children are even more intuitive than we give credit for… they ‘know’ things unexplainably and sometimes remember past lives or can speak or pass messages from people who are passed on… as if by magic! A room to study the ‘concept’ of innocence and wisdom and how they go hand in hand would be fascinating from a magic perspective! (Of course with no real children in the room, not suggesting that! More like the love room, which is more about harnessing the conceptual force of love).”
Andrew: We got a few more answers as well. Patrons, you can read those. I love the creativity, as always. If you want to participate in the Lynx Line, you can become a member at Patreon.com/MuggleCast. And don’t forget, right now we’re running a 20th anniversary special. Now through the end of August, you can get 20% off an annual membership to our Patreon. Just use code “20YEARS” at checkout, and by supporting us there, you’ll be helping us fly into the next 20 years of MuggleCast, so thank you so much for your help there. Speaking of the 20th, next week on the pod we will celebrate 20 years of the show, and then we’ll get back to Chapter by Chapter two weeks from now. If you’re looking for other ways to support us, you can visit MuggleCastMerch.com to buy official gear, and by the way, patrons have access to a 20th anniversary discount code through the month of August. So much 20th anniversary excitement happening right now. Other ways to support us: You can leave us a review in your favorite podcast app, and tell a fellow Muggle about the show. Lastly, visit MuggleCast.com for quick access to all of this information, our contact form, and a lot more. If you’re looking for more podcasting from the four of us, you can listen to our other shows, Millennial and What the Hype?!, for more pop culture and real world talk.
Quizzitch
Andrew: And now it’s time for our Harry Potter trivia game show, Quizzitch!
[Quizzitch music plays]
Eric: This week’s question was: Psychologically, human beings respond to threats in one of four ways, all starting with the letter F. Two of them are fight and flight. What are the other two? Want to thank everybody for all of your F-words; really appreciated that. And this week’s correct answer: In addition to fight and flight, freeze and fawn are the most common answers. A fifth F-word does exist sometimes using… it’s called flop, where you just kind of pass out. But freeze and fawn are the four Fs, those and fight and flight. 64% of folks with the correct answer say they did not look it up. Correct answers were submitted by… oh boy, here we go. A Healthy Breeze; Big time freezer; d7Hufflepuff; De-Bort-Ment of Mysteries… I love Bort.
[Andrew laughs]
Eric: Defense Against Dumbledore’s Army; Dumbledore the Pathological Manipulator; Elizabeth K.; Emotional range of a teaspoon; Fantastic fearless forager of forgotten fungi; First time answering, so excited I know one of these…
Andrew: Aww.
Eric: Yeah, welcome. Welcome to Quizzitch. Fitzfatsuffices; Fluffy’s three heads; HufflePuffleKittyFluffle; I thought it was a doe, not a fawn!; I am a social worker and my education has prepared me for this moment; Julie Anne Fae; MustBeAWeasley92; My parents used to pronounce Firenze as “fire knees” and now I can’t unsee it… that’s hilarious. Rizzindors must not tell lies; Slytherin Squib; Tickled by a disco ball; Yes, another Weasley; and Tofu Tom. Wow. Congrats.
Meg: That’s what’s happening in the love room. People are being tickled by disco balls.
Eric: And so here is next week’s Quizzitch question: When entering the Department of Mysteries, Harry and friends first encounter a room with many unmarked doors. Similarly, the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California, USA has over 2,000 doors in its mansion, which contains 160 rooms. How many windows are present in the Winchester Mystery House? This is a multiple choice Quizzitch question. Is the answer A) 2,001, B) 10,000, C) 665, or D) 4,000? How many windows are present in the house that has 160 rooms and 2000 doors in San Jose, California, USA? Submit your answers to us on the Quizzitch form located on the MuggleCast website, MuggleCast.com/Quizzitch, or if you’re on the website, maybe checking out those lovely transcripts that Meg does, click on “Quizzitch” from the main nav.
Andrew: Thanks, Meg, for joining us, and at the last minute too. We really appreciate your help on today’s episode and all your insights.
Meg: Oh, no problem. It’s a great chapter, a real mysterious one.
Andrew: Yeah. Hah, oh, I see what you did there. You said the word.
[Meg laughs]
Andrew: Listeners, don’t forget to visit Patreon.com/MuggleCast and become a member to support us. Please also leave a review in your favorite podcast app, and tell a friend about the show. Thanks, everyone, for listening. I’m Andrew.
Eric: I’m Eric.
Micah: I’m Micah.
Meg: And I’m Meg.
Andrew: Bye, everyone!
Micah: Bye.