Transcript for MuggleCast Episode #761, “Hero-Zoned (DH Chapter 2, ‘In Memoriam’)”
Cold Open
Laura: What is the most scandalous thing you have uncovered about me to date, Andrew?
Andrew: I’ve got some pictures of you you’re embarrassed by, so those are my lede of the book to really entice people.
Laura: [laughs] Haven’t those been shared online?
[Andrew laughs]
Show Intro
[Show music plays]
Andrew Sims: Welcome to MuggleCast, your weekly ride into the world of Harry Potter. I’m Andrew.
Eric Scull: I’m Eric.
Micah Tannenbaum: I’m Micah.
Laura Tee: And I’m Laura.
Andrew: And we’re your Harry Potter friends, here to talk about the books and the movies and the upcoming TV show, so follow us in your favorite podcast app if you’re new here for new episodes every Wednesday. This week, keep your eyes wide open, because we’re discussing Chapter 2 of Deathly Hallows, “In Memoriam,” where Harry catches glimpses of a Dumbledore. But first, this week’s Quizzitch question.
[Quizzitch music plays]
Eric: This week’s Quizzitch question: After Hogwarts, Elphias Doge and Dumbledore planned to travel and see the wizarding world. In our world, what is the term for this period of time following secondary education, where students are encouraged to travel, particularly in the UK and Commonwealth countries? That’s the question; we’ll repeat it at the end of this episode.
Andrew: Listeners make this show possible, so if you love MuggleCast as much as Rita Skeeter loves to hear gossip, head over to Patreon.com/MuggleCast and support us today. To thank you, you’ll receive bonus episodes of the show, ad-free episodes, a yearly physical gift, a monthly Zoom hangout with the four of us and your fellow Potter friends – it’s a great community we have on our Patreon – and lots more. We can’t do this without you, so thank you so much for your support. And if you’re looking for other ways to support us, we would love a review in your favorite podcast app, or if you told a fellow Muggle or witch or wizard about the show. And visit MuggleCastMerch.com to buy official show gear.
Chapter by Chapter: Seven-Word Summary
Andrew: All right, without further ado, it’s time for Chapter by Chapter. This week we’re discussing Chapter 2 of Deathly Hallows, “In Memoriam,” and we’ll start with the scariest game in podcasting, the Seven-Word Summary. All right, let me gather my thoughts here.
Eric: Charity. Just kidding; I should have said that last week.
[Andrew and Laura laugh]
[Seven-Word Summary music plays]
Andrew: Rita…
Eric: … maliciously…
Micah: … attacks…
Laura: … Dumbledore’s…
Andrew: … back… [laughs]
Eric: … in…
Micah: … media.
Andrew: Oh, okay. [laughs]
Laura: We’ve got to bring back asking our patrons to grade our Seven-Word Summaries.
Micah: Rate it?
Andrew: Oh, yeah. Well, and don’t forget, at the end of the series, we’re going to read all of our Seven-Word Summaries, and we’ll see how good of a summary we did across the whole book.
Eric: And then we get to take one back, right? Because I already have one in mind. [laughs]
Andrew: Oh, yes. Yes.
Chapter by Chapter: Main Discussion
Andrew: So before we get into the main section of the chapter, the chapter opens up with Harry accidentally cutting himself. And in our reread of Half-Blood Prince Chapter 30, “The White Tomb,” remember, y’all, we were talking about how silly it was for Harry to think that he could go on this big journey in Deathly Hallows alone, without even Ron and Hermione. So at the outset of this chapter, Harry is bleeding, he’s cut his hand on the mirror piece in his school trunk, and he realizes that even if he was allowed to do magic at the Dursleys’, he doesn’t know the spell to fix this bleeding, and he even tells himself that he needs to ask Hermione. So right at the outset of this book, he is realizing, “Oh, wait, I actually do need Hermione.”
Laura: Duh.
Andrew: He’s thinking a little more clearly now for the road ahead.
Eric: Yeah, in fact, maybe he should be questioning whether or not going back to Hogwarts is the right call. You get another year of education in before you… Harry’s anti-intellectualist nature… I mean, he leaves most of his textbooks behind when he packs at the end of this chapter, so he’s not learning any lessons of what he’s… he knows that he doesn’t know a lot of stuff, but he’s not really solving for that.
Laura: But what’s the quality of what he’s going to get at Hogwarts this year?
[Andrew laughs]
Eric: Yeah, not this year.
Micah: Worse than a little cut.
Laura: And also, he’s like a sitting duck at Hogwarts right now if he were to go.
Eric: Right.
Andrew: So then the chapter quickly pivots to Harry reading Elphias Doge’s tribute to Dumbledore, and in Elphias’s opening paragraph, he describes the two friends as having a “mutual attraction” to one another, and Elphias says this is “undoubtedly due to the fact that we both felt ourselves to be outsiders.” So look, I’m really not trying to make Elphias gay here, but it is an interesting phrase to use: “mutual attraction”? Maybe it’s just kind of old-timey language because Elphias is a older fellow, but imagine Ron or Hermione writing, “We had a mutual attraction to Harry.” Knowing now that Dumbledore is gay, does it seem a little maybe they had feelings towards one another?
Eric: A little, you know.
[Everyone laughs]
Eric: Yeah, I feel like yes, but it’s interesting because I think there’s a very nice part where it could be antiquated. Maybe they had actual feelings for each other, but I also wonder if it’s more of an age thing where you would never use this language for each other when you’re young, but if you’re looking back over 60 or 100 and whatever years of life, you would then say, “Oh, yeah, we were attracted to one another’s charisma.”
Laura: What I like about this is I think it’s very open to interpretation, and I think one thing you could interpret from this is perhaps that there was something romantic between the two of them. Perhaps it was unrequited for Elphias’s part; I could see an argument being made that maybe he felt more strongly towards Dumbledore than Dumbledore felt towards him. But it is well-documented that historically, when you look back, I think it’s at the… God, I’m really bad with era names, but I’m thinking Victorian/Edwardian era, where when you’re reading old works of fiction, it was a lot more common for male characters who were heterosexual and totally platonic to just be more affectionate with each other. I know this is a pretty common read some people get off of old Sherlock Holmes stories…
Eric: Oh!
Laura: … where people have interpreted that maybe Holmes and Watson were an item, and there’s a lot of slash shipping of that, and I think that’s fine and good. I will say, there are a lot of traditionalists in the Sherlock Holmes community who would be very quick to step up and say, “Hey, at that time period, it was very common for men to just be more affectionate with their friends than they are now.”
Andrew: Bring that back.
Laura: Yeah, I know.
Micah: The line before the mention of the mutual attraction says that they met each other at the age of 11, so I’m not trying to imply anything around age in terms of feelings or anything like that, but that does seem kind of young to equate romantic feelings towards somebody.
Laura: Yeah, I mean, it would grow over time.
Eric: Maybe they met on the Hogwarts Express.
Micah: I’m not saying that it didn’t grow over time exactly, but I do think here the author is implying the mutual attraction was due to the fact that they were outsiders and they connected with each other as a result of that. Now, what happened in the years following that, we don’t know, right?
Andrew: Right.
Micah: But anything’s possible.
Andrew: He met Grindelwald. That’s what happened.
[Micah laughs]
Andrew: Elphias really writes this all-encompassing tribute to Dumbledore, and it’s great to have this out, especially with what Rita is going to be publishing, which we’ll get to in this episode. Another aspect that Elphias writes about is Kendra, and he says that when Kendra died, Albus was the “sole breadwinner.” Now, this stuck out to me because he didn’t have a career yet, so how was he earning money? There is no canonical explanation for this. So maybe he was a Transfiguration Today contributor; maybe he was doing private teaching lessons. He could have been working with Nicolas Flamel during this time, discovering the 12 uses of dragon’s blood, baking at Jacob’s bakery… I don’t know. There’s some options, both serious and playful. What do you guys think? How was he the breadwinner in the family?
Eric: I thought maybe an underground chess ring. After all, he’s the chess master.
[Andrew laughs]
Micah: Ahh.
Eric: Also, that would make his approval of Ron Weasley’s “best-played game of chess” at the end of year one would be a real compliment coming from Dumbledore, the chess master.
Micah: I think he could make some money tutoring other students. He’s pretty smart.
Eric: Another thing is that with Nicolas Flamel and the Sorcerer’s Stone – sorry, Philosopher’s Stone – we know that you can turn any metal to gold, and so Nicolas Flamel has an infinite supply of gold, and so he probably helped Dumbledore out.
Laura: Do they know each other yet, though? I mean, this is… Dumbledore is like, 17. He just finished Hogwarts, right?
Eric: Yeah, well, Doge’s… I keep saying “Doge”; it usually means something else these days.
[Laura laughs]
Eric: Elphias’s letter also talks about how within his first year at Hogwarts, Dumbledore got these correspondences with famous wizards.
Laura: That’s true.
Andrew: He’s a man of many talents, so he could have had multiple income streams, honestly.
Laura: True, yeah.
Eric: [laughs] He has so much passive income, honestly. It’s unbelievable.
Andrew: He’s got an Etsy store. He sells an app.
Laura: I was thinking that given that he’s in Godric’s Hollow, we also know Bathilda Bagshot is there. We know she’s the connection to Grindelwald. I’m wondering if maybe he was assisting her with any research that she was doing. She’s a historian.
Eric: The real question… it’s so funny from this write-up that Elphias does, but Dumbledore did all these amazing things, discovered the 12 uses of dragon’s blood… it’s like, what were wizards doing with their lives before Dumbledore came along and discovered all this stuff for them? Really, though, he’s kind of OP. He’s kind of overpowered here.
Andrew: Only other guess is he could have been a stripper. I don’t know.
Eric: Definitely. I think you solved it.
Micah: I’m so glad you said that, Andrew, because I asked AI…
Eric: Oh no.
Micah: … to give us some names that Dumbledore could have earned money under.
Andrew: Do I have to have the bleep button ready for this?
Micah: No, no, no, nothing like that. All right, here we go. Dumble[censored].
Eric: Listen, I could have come up with that. Yeah, we’re going to need the button.
[Andrew laughs]
Eric: Next time, just ask me, dude.
Micah: No, no, no, there’s some good ones here. Daddy Dumble…
Andrew: Okay.
Micah: … Albie Bear…
[Andrew laughs]
Micah: … GlitterDore, Professor Lap Dance, the Headmaster of Seduction, Wizard of Ahhhs, the Elder Wand, Velvet Beard, Sir Strips-a-lot…
Andrew: We need to add music to this scene.
Micah: … Bearded Temptation, The Grand Enchanter, Merlin Monroe…
Andrew: [laughs] Micah is going to sit here for an hour reading these.
[Laura laughs]
Micah: … Abraca-damn…
[Andrew laughs]
Micah: … Hex Appeal, Wand Solo, the Spellbinder, Enchanté, and Velvet Phoenix.
Andrew: Wow. Great job, “Micah,” on those. [laughs]
Laura: I feel like DumbleDaddy is the best one.
Andrew: Yeah, which I feel like we’ve come up with ourselves.
Laura: Yeah, I think we have.
Eric: I mean, “The Headmaster” is classic. I will say, for the Wizard of Oz, is it like, “Ah”s? The Wizard of “Ah”s?
Micah: “Ahhh”s.
Andrew: Ohhh. Thought you were doing Oz. Okay.
Eric: That one’s not bad.
Andrew: Wow, all right. Well, with those names, I’m sure he was making plenty of money. So Elphias also notes Albus’s battle against Grindelwald, and I love how he described it. He says, “Those who witnessed it have written of the terror and the awe they felt as they watched these two extraordinary wizards do battle. Dumbledore’s triumph, and its consequences for the wizarding world, are considered a turning point in magical history.” Now, something I love about this being mentioned is that the first time we learned about this battle, and the only other time we’ve heard about it in the series so far, was actually back in Book 1 on Dumbledore’s Chocolate Frog Card. And Elphias also notes that he is recognized for discovering the 12 uses of dragon’s blood in his tribute; this is another thing that was noted on his Chocolate Frog Card. And here we are at the end of the series hearing about these two things again, which I was looking into it, and as far as I can tell, they’ve only been mentioned in Books 1 and 7, these two things specifically. So I just love the symmetry here again.
Eric: It’s great, and these things are such turning points in wizarding history, but the books never concern themselves with what it means. What are the 12 uses of dragon’s blood? We don’t know. And it’s just, for me, I find it leaves me wanting more, not in a “Oh, the books are deficient” sense, but the world is so big. The world is so big, the Harry Potter books never even tell you what the uses are, but they exist, presumably there’s some utility to them, and they made Dumbledore all that money. Or sorry, Professor Head or whatever he was called.
Micah: That wasn’t on my list.
[Andrew laughs]
Eric: But yeah, it just really, really makes the world feel bigger.
Andrew: Well, the last time we did this Chapter by Chapter reread, we were probably saying at the time in 2007, “Well, don’t worry, Eric, you’ll find that out in the upcoming Harry Potter encyclopedia that’s definitely going to be written.”
Eric: Augh.
Micah: I feel like we’ve probably brought this up before when we’ve talked about this battle between these two, but I’ve always thought about it in the way that Grindelwald was defeated, in that his magic was removed somehow, and I think that speaks to the power of Dumbledore that somehow, some way, he was able to extract whatever magical ability Grindelwald had, and that’s how he was defeated. That’s why he didn’t rise to power again. Or if we’re going to go a totally different route, knowing that love plays such a role in this series, love won out in the end. That’s how it ended.
Laura: Probably something to do with the blood pact. I feel like that’s what they were setting up in the movies.
Micah: Oh, yeah. I forgot about that. [laughs]
Eric: I forgot about that. You know, it’s not stated that Grindelwald is still alive and out there somewhere, which is the interesting part that you bring up, Micah, about “Oh, what happened to his magic, and why didn’t he come back?” I wonder how many people know he’s still alive until later in this book.
Andrew: And of course, reading this again is just a reminder that the Fantastic Beasts film series was supposed to end with this legendary battle; that’s where they were going with it, and we never got it. But hopefully, we will in the TV series. And speaking of Maxing things, I feel like Elphias’s tribute is just one big “Max that” scene. We could get lots of flashbacks here, glimpses of Dumbledore’s life, including… maybe this would be the opportunity to see that battle between Dumbledore and Grindelwald. Could be a good way to fit Dumbledore into this season of the show, because he’s otherwise going to be less visible, right, Laura?
Laura: I agree. I think what would be cool too is we could see various ages of Dumbledore. In the movies, for example, when we go back in time to see the memories and such and we see younger Dumbledore, it’s just Michael Gambon. He looks the same, pretty much. So it would be cool to see Dumbledore at various ages, because we know that he does consequential stuff across his life.
Eric: By that point, technology will be possible to give us just young John Lithgow walking around like it’s totally normal.
Andrew and Laura: Maybe.
Andrew: They might do that. I mean, they did that with Michael Gambon, not with technology, I don’t think, but they used him for younger…
Eric: Well, but for a guy that’s been on film for 50 years or whatever, that too.
Andrew: Oh, yeah.
Eric: It’s got to be pretty easy.
Micah: Didn’t they do it with Richard Harris as well when they did the Chamber of Secrets flashback?
Eric: I don’t know what they did.
Andrew: Maybe.
Eric: I didn’t think it looked particularly…
Laura: I didn’t notice a big difference.
Andrew: Was it in black and white too?
Micah: It was.
Andrew: Yeah, so maybe they just used black and white to make it look…
Eric: I will say, by the time that Elphias Doge’s eulogy comes around, if we’ve gotten to the point in the Harry Potter TV series where contemporary music plays over the show, I would prefer to have “Two of Us” by The Beatles playing during the montage. It’s a really great song about friendship.
Andrew: Well, speaking of friendship, reading this tribute in the Prophet makes Harry wish that he had asked Dumbledore about his own life rather than always focusing on his own.
[Eric sighs]
Andrew: And like I said about Taco Bell’s Cheesy Gordita Crunch a few weeks ago – and by the way, I had one that following weekend after all this talk…
Micah: How was it?
Andrew: Delicious. You don’t know what you have until it’s gone! That’s what Harry is experiencing right now. And Harry acknowledges, too, if Harry had tried to ask Dumbledore about his life prior to meeting him, would Dumbledore have been forthcoming? As Harry recalls, he did try one time to ask him a personal question: “What do you see in the Mirror of Erased?” And Dumbledore just said, “A woolen pair of socks” and just kind of shrugged it off.
Eric: It’s true.
Andrew: Now, just quickly to play devil’s advocate, do we think Dumbledore would have been more willing to open up to Harry in the later books? Remember, just last book, he was saying, “I am not worried, Harry. I am with you.” The relationship is way different than it was in Book 1. He trusts Harry with his life now. So would Harry have been able to get more information out of him towards the end?
Laura: I don’t think anything consequential.
Andrew: Aw.
Laura: Because ultimately, I think Dumbledore would have continued to sidestep getting into anything that would have actually been insightful or deep with Harry, and I think specifically about his relationship with Grindelwald and how things went with Ariana. He specifically calls out in this book that he counted on Hermione to be the one to slow Harry down on this front on connecting those threads, so yeah, I don’t know. I don’t think… I mean, of course, Dumbledore maybe could have said, “Oh, yeah, my sister died,” but I don’t think he would have given much more than that.
Micah: No.
Laura: He played everything very close to the vest for a reason.
Eric: Yeah. And Harry… I don’t want to say… what’s the equivalent of being friend-zoned? Harry was hero-zoned, right? So anything that didn’t relate to Harry’s mission, Dumbledore wouldn’t have confided in him because it would have distracted Harry from the mission. And it partly is a trauma response because Dumbledore doesn’t want to re-traumatize himself telling the story or whatever, but he prevented Harry from… he prevented himself, and he’s admitted as much, from growing closer to Harry, and one way to grow close to somebody is to share more of yourself, right? More of your own lore, more of your stories. And because Dumbledore had to constantly prevent himself from getting closer to Harry, he never would have told the truth about any of this stuff. So unfortunately, it’s… what I love about it is it’s very nice that Harry feels bad about not asking, but I think the clues are here that Dumbledore really wouldn’t have told him anything.
Micah: Right. And it’s part of the grieving process for Harry that he’s going through this moment, and he’s reading this article, and he’s basically blaming himself for not being a better friend to Dumbledore, and I think that’s probably something that all of us can identify with to some extent. He’s learning a lot more about Dumbledore’s life, and Dumbledore intentionally shielded him from a lot of these pieces of information that he’s going to find out about over the course of Deathly Hallows. But what it reminded me of just a little bit, and especially because Dumbledore was Harry’s teacher, it’s kind of like when you realize that your teachers are real people too, as he’s going through and reading this tribute by Doge, that Dumbledore, if he were a Muggle, he would have gone to the grocery store, right? He probably would have had a partner; maybe he would have had a family. These are things that you don’t think about when you’re a teenager in high school, basically, which is what Harry was. You don’t think about the other aspects of your teachers or your professors’ lives, but they certainly… they’re real people too, at the end of the day.
Eric: Well, what shocks me the most, too, is the ages at which all of this is said to have happened. Dumbledore was 10 when his dad attacked the Muggles, and that cast a shadow over his school age, and when he was 17, his mother died. Ariana fell ill when she was probably 6 after that and died around age 13. Everybody’s so friggin’ young. Aberforth, who’s a few years behind Dumbledore… I always picture them fighting and Ariana getting killed when everyone’s 40, but no, it was much, much, much younger. And that’s the thing that shocks me the most about Doge’s tell-all, is it really jars me, but also shows how sad it is that all those things happened to Albus so young. So he’s been living with that grief for 120 years.
Andrew: Yeah, it’s a miracle Elphias is still alive too. How many gins would it have taken Harry to get Dumbledore to open up? I’m guessing four.
Eric: Yeah, but only three tequilas.
[Andrew laughs]
Laura: I was going to say, I think Dumbledore can handle his liquor a little better than that.
Andrew: Oh, more than four? Okay.
Micah: Wow.
Andrew: He is a tall fellow, so he’s…
Micah: He’s 150, so it probably impacts him a little bit more quickly than somebody who is a little bit younger.
[Ad break]
Andrew: Another big revelation in this chapter is we learn Rita Skeeter is going to publish The Life and Lies of Albus Dumbledore. And before we get into the details, I just want to share, I loved the cover art of this book in the movie – I don’t know if that makes me sick – but I bought the print version from MinaLima, and this is their deluxe edition, so it’s actually signed by them in the corner.
Eric: Ohh.
Laura: Cool.
Andrew: And it’s got holographic elements to it, so I just love it, and I have it up on my wall when I’m not showing it off on the podcast.
Eric: That’s really cool.
Laura: Yeah. No, that was really cool.
Andrew: It was, yeah. Purple and green cover, Dumbledore on the front, Rita on the back… [laughs]
Eric: It looks like a teenage girl’s diary, kind of.
Andrew: [laughs] That’s why I love it.
Eric: But it’s that gossipy, and I love it.
Andrew: Yeah. So Harry learns about this new biography that Rita is rushing to print. This book promises to reveal “the disturbed childhood, the lawless youth, the lifelong feuds, and the guilty secrets that Dumbledore carried to his grave. WHY was the man tipped to be Minister of Magic content to remain a mere headmaster? WHAT was the real purpose of the secret organization known as the Order of the Phoenix? HOW did Dumbledore really meet his end?” Find out by pre-ordering today.
Micah: For how much?
Eric: And hey, if you call in the next three hours, you’ll receive our accompanying leaflet: “Love Letters from Nurmengard,” scandalous professions of love between the two wizarding world’s most powerful men, star-crossed lovers, girls on fire.
[Laura laughs]
Andrew: Oooh, sign me up for that.
Eric: I know.
Andrew: So yeah, this is a pretty big revelation, and so frustrating for Harry to see.
Eric: It’s crazy that Rita’s whole framing here is that “Why was Dumbledore content to remain a a mere headmaster?” as if Dumbledore wasn’t the headmaster of the school of magic in Britain, and the most famous wizard in the world still. Dumbledore wasn’t hiding out secretly avoiding things.
Micah: Why doesn’t she want to be more than a gossip columnist?
Andrew: [laughs] Some people are happy where they are!
Micah: Turn the tables.
Eric: Yeah, Rita has no ambition, and so she’s accusing others of having ulterior motives.
Micah: Right.
Andrew: Also, I mean, he had other stuff going on. It’s not like he was just the headmaster of Hogwarts and that was it.
Micah: He’s a busy guy.
Andrew: Yeah, he was on the Wizengamot, right?
Eric: Yeah, Chief Mugwump, or Supreme…
Andrew: Chief Warlock!
Eric: Oh, yeah, Chief Warlock, Supreme Mugwump…
Laura: Yeah, but that doesn’t support the angle she’s trying to take here.
Eric and Micah: Right.
Andrew: It is a selling point. Like, “Oh, that is a good question. Why did he just stay headmaster of Hogwarts?”
Micah: Well, now we know why she was at Dumbledore’s funeral. We were asking that…
Andrew: Exactly! We talked about that, yeah.
Micah: Now, for me, when you’re comparing these two articles, Doge’s and now Skeeter’s, this is a bit like watching Fox News after having listened to MS NOW or CNN, or whatever order… you want to flip that around, flip it around.
Andrew: Flip it around, yeah. [laughs]
Micah: You know what I’m saying, though?
Andrew and Laura: Yeah.
Micah: It’s like, what you want to believe, that’s where you’re going to go, right? If you’re somebody who loved Dumbledore, you’re going to believe what Elphias Doge wrote. If you’re somebody who did not like Dumbledore, then Rita Skeeter is your cup of tea.
Eric: Oh yeah, especially if you’re inclined for conspiracy theories, right? If you’re inclined to believe them…
Micah: Sure.
Eric: … or be taken in by this whole “Dumbledore is evil.” And what’s funny is the truth is in the middle somewhere, right?
Laura and Micah: Yeah.
Eric: The things that… Rita’s book really has a toll on Harry throughout this entire book, and yet it gets him… the contents of the book really get him to come to a fuller picture understanding of the headmaster that he loved, and then also answer… or gets him to ask some really important questions, I think, that Dumbledore had left out, so it’s almost like the work wasn’t complete until somebody like Rita comes along and tries to poke at the established story. So there’s some value… I don’t agree with the way she does it, but there’s some value in having a second or a dissenting voice a little bit.
Andrew: Well, yeah. On the other hand, I think… I remember reading this for the first time, reading about this book, and reading the details in this book for the first time, and I think to your point, Micah, it’s shocking for Harry and the reader to realize, “Oh, wait, maybe not everything that I thought I knew about Dumbledore is true.” It’s like this whole interpretation you’ve had on him is suddenly stripped away. That’s a shocking and sad and scary realization to make. I mean, we all experience this in our lives, too. You find out some terrible secret about somebody that you never could have expected, and it’s horrible, a lot of times.
Laura: Yeah, and you’re confronted with the reality that people are imperfect.
Andrew: People are imperfect. Nothing is what it seems. You’re like, “Oh, I thought they had such a perfect life.” No, their relationship was horrible, they were on the way out the whole time… I’m not projecting.
[Laura laughs]
Andrew: So in a Daily Prophet interview with Rita in advance of the book’s publication to promote the book, we hear that Elphias and others were calling into question the accuracy of her book, particularly because it was rushed to print, and this is a great point. Inherently, this must be true. How accurate can a book be if you’re rushing to get it to store shelves? You’re not pulling from multiple sources, you’re just… presumably. This is Rita Skeeter we’re talking about. She’s grabbing the first sources she hears from and just believes it. She’s not checking second or third sources, which you’re supposed to do in journalism. And I mean, it had only been a month since Dumbledore died. This is the modern equivalent of people using AI to write crappy books and trying to make a quick buck on Amazon, which happens now more than ever because of these AI tools.
Eric: Yeah, or these biographies of famous people that you see come out a month after they’ve died. Things like that.
Andrew and Laura: Yeah.
Laura: For sure.
Andrew: Obvious money grab.
Laura: Yeah. There are examples of that for people like Steve Jobs, Michael Jackson, Princess Diana, George Harrison… some of their biographies literally came out within weeks of them dying, so this is real-world commentary.
Eric: Feels icky. Feels like vultures were circling, waiting to publish. So hey, guys, when it happens for me one day, 50 years from now, which one of you is writing the scandalous tell-all book?
Andrew: Oooh. I’ve got plenty of dirt on all of you…
[Eric laughs]
Andrew: … so I’m actually writing books about all of you quietly in the background.
Laura: Do you? Ohhh.
Andrew: Yeah, yeah.
Laura: Okay. What is the most scandalous thing you have uncovered about me to date, Andrew?
Andrew: I’ve got some pictures of you you’re embarrassed by, so those are my lede of the book to really entice people.
Laura: [laughs] Haven’t those been shared online?
Andrew: [laughs] Maybe.
Eric: Oh, probably most of them. I was going to say, this one time you left your pants in our hotel room, but everybody knows about that.
Andrew: I’m teaming up with the writer of the Acid Quill. Remember that blog that posted lots of bombshells?
Laura: Ohh.
Micah: [laughs] Oh, geez.
Eric: We learned who that was then, right?
Andrew: We did, yeah. [laughs] Speaking of betrayals, speaking of everything you thought you knew about somebody being flipped on its head…
Eric: She was our friend!
Andrew: Yeah, literally! Wow. So Hermione’s idea to have Harry interviewed by Rita in Order of the Phoenix comes back to bite them, because the Daily Prophet reminds us that Rita and Harry do have some sort of alliance if Rita was getting to interview Harry for The Quibbler, so wouldn’t that lead one to believe that the information she’s going to share about Harry and Albus’s relationship in The Life and Lies of Albus Dumbledore would be accurate? Because she seemingly knows Harry.
Laura: Yeah, they’re spinning this to give her credibility, 100%.
Eric: Honestly, it’s gross, but I love it because it remains true that the interview with Harry was the most important point in Rita’s career, right? That was the defining moment where she was able to use her skills and tell the truth with them, something she’s not inclined to do naturally. But the fact that that gave her the credibility to keep spinning lies and do all her bullshit is unfortunate, but I think even she knows that she’s never going to top that interview that she had with Harry, where she was literally forced to participate in, and she wouldn’t have done it naturally. For that to have given her the biggest boost or the biggest amount of credibility has to slowly eat her up inside, maybe a little bit, maybe not really. But I like to think they’re thinking of it.
Micah: Yeah, and the credibility goes beyond – I think that’s what you were alluding to – not just the portion of the story about Harry and Dumbledore; it provides legitimacy to her writing this book, that there has to be some level of truth to what she’s saying because she wrote this really great piece on Harry Potter back in Order of the Phoenix. So yeah, it’s one of those… it’s interesting in that here we are in Deathly Hallows; we’ve just gone through the first chapter where it’s clear Voldemort is on the rise. He’s gaining power; he knows when Harry is going to be moved. And in addition to that now, you have the Daily Prophet… you have this nice tribute from Elphias Doge, but at the same time, you have Dumbledore being discredited and this really salacious book that’s about to come out about him. It doesn’t seem like things are setting up very well for Harry in Book 7.
Eric: Yeah, we’re trying to do misinformation.
Micah: Right.
Eric: One more thing on Rita, though: I’m reminded that the reason Rita was chosen by Hermione was because they needed her credibility to publish. They needed her name, I guess, to be the one to publish it, so that people would pay attention in The Quibbler. So it’s interesting how they kind of traded on each other’s credibility now, between Rita and Harry.
Andrew: And also, there was some pleasure, I think, in making Rita write this article about Harry.
Laura: Well, I also think at that time Rita was the only journalist they could get. [laughs] I say “journalist” very charitably here. She was the only one they could get to talk to Harry because the Daily Prophet was running a smear campaign of him and calling him crazy.
Andrew: So as Harry is recoiling from what he’s just read from Rita, he glimpses at the piece of the mirror again that he is holding at the start of this chapter – that he mentions at the start of this chapter – and he thinks he just saw Albus’s eyes flash in it. And Harry tells himself, “Oh, I was just thinking about Dumbledore, so that’s why I think I saw his eyes in it.” But of course, what he will later learn is that the other end of this two-way mirror is now in possession of another Dumbledore. Something else that we’ll later see about these mirrors is that they were once used by great friends James and Sirius, and they’re now being used by Harry and Aberforth; the latter not being a great friend to Harry, but his brother was.
Eric: Can you just picture James and Sirius using the mirrors to basically FaceTime each other in the summer when Sirius is back at Grimmauld Place and he doesn’t want to be? And he’s like, “Wish I could be hanging out with you, James.” And then I picture them as both these boys laying prone with their feet up and dangling behind them and their hands crossed and just plotting on their next ten pranks they’re going to play on Snivellus Snape.
Andrew: Also, Max that mirror in Book 5!
[“Max that” sound effect plays]
Andrew: Because the mirror doesn’t make an appearance in the films until Deathly Hallows 1. In the Order of the Phoenix TV adaptation, they’ve got to set up Sirius’s mirror gift in that book and TV show.
Laura: Well, and we need to specifically see Harry break it at the end of Order of the Phoenix, because in the movie, it’s just out of nowhere he has this shard of glass that he’s seeing some random old dude’s eyes in.
Eric: Yeah, where the hell did that come from?
Laura: Yeah. If you hadn’t read the books, that was probably really confusing.
Andrew: So they would have… okay, they would have known about the mirror… they wouldn’t have known about the mirror’s significance in Book 7 while writing Movie 5, right? Yeah, correct. Because those two came out in the same summer.
Eric: Unless it came up, because there were extensive conversations with the author that prevented them from removing Kreacher from Movie 5, that kind of thing.
Andrew: Right, she could have left a note. And maybe she did, and they still said no. Or she just didn’t leave a note.
Micah: Budget. Too expensive.
Eric: Pacing.
Andrew: Budget. “Yeah, we don’t have room for a broken mirror.”
Laura: For a mirror.
[Andrew and Laura laugh]
Andrew: You can buy one at HomeGoods. Pull it out of their dumpster.
Odds & Ends
Andrew: Odds and ends. I just wanted to mention that, speaking of symmetry and memories, this chapter also finds Harry doing a deep dive into his school trunk for his first time in six years.
[Eric laughs]
Andrew: Lots of memories are unearthed. “Kneeling down beside the trunk again, he groped around in the bottom and, after retrieving an old badge that flickered feebly between SUPPORT CEDRIC DIGGORY and POTTER STINKS, a cracked and worn-out Sneakoscope, and a gold locket inside which a note signed R.A.B. had been hidden…” and it goes on. But I thought this was really cool, just getting these little trinkets from earlier in the series come up again.
Eric and Laura: Yeah.
Eric: I’ve got a question; let’s put ourselves on blast here. Guys, did we do what Harry does with his school trunk most years, which is just kind of scrape off the top level of stuff and put the new stuff on top, or did we all deep dive and did we deep clean our school supplies? Or just tend to do the surface?
Andrew: Yeah, what’s the equivalent here? I didn’t have a trunk. You didn’t have a trunk, did you? Like your book bag?
Eric: You didn’t have a foot locker, though?
Laura: Like your book bag, your locker.
Eric: Your locker. Well, yeah. It really depends.
Andrew: But that changes every year, doesn’t it? Change every year?
Eric: Yeah, I guess ours did.
Laura: But at the end of the year, what was the state of your locker? I guess is the question.
Eric: I had a Trapper Keeper that was reused a couple of years, and yeah, I had to take out… it was always overflowing and stuffed with homework and stuff, so I had to take out the worksheets, but I think I left some stuff in. I don’t think I ever fully cleaned… there was always a layer of pencil shavings and dust everywhere.
Micah: It just changed over so much from year to year, I don’t think it would pile up. That’s the… I guess one benefit of having a trunk is that you can keep a lot of crap in there over the years. [laughs]
Laura: I don’t know. I’ve always been a little bit disorganized. For more on that, see the inside of my purse currently.
Andrew: [laughs] But Laura, your backdrop on video looks pristine and organized.
Laura: Well, and see, that’s how I trick everybody into thinking that I’m a pristine, organized person.
Eric: Ah, that you have your stuff together.
Laura: I am decidedly not, yeah.
Andrew: The rest of that room is a mess.
Eric: Coming up in bonus MuggleCast, we’re diving into Laura’s purse.
Andrew: The camera turns, reveals the truth.
[Laura laughs]
Andrew: And I just also want to say, in light of these little trinkets coming out of the trunk, I love all these throwbacks across the series that we’re already seeing, and I can’t help but feel like the author must have been feeling incredibly nostalgic writing this final book and just wanted to throw it back in lots of ways. I mean, she’s paying tribute to her story, and to me, these mentions of the badges or the Sneakoscope aren’t so much written from a storytelling perspective so much as it’s paying tribute to the Harry Potter books. Do you guys get the same read? It’s just… I don’t know.
Eric: Yeah, yeah. Harry is leaving Privet Drive; it’s a big deal for him. And looking back, remembering the plot points that were… oh, the “Potter Stinks” badges were a whole four to six months of Harry’s life in Book 4. I just find it really jarring to see, oh, somebody would say “Potter Stinks” now when he’s about to embark and save the world. It’s kind of… I love how jarring it is in a “Isn’t time funny?” sort of way.
Andrew and Laura: Yeah.
Laura: It’s just a reminder, too, of how much the stakes have increased, because by comparison to what Harry is facing now, the whole “Potter Stinks” button thing is nothing. That’s small potatoes.
Andrew: Yeah, right. Time gives you a lot of perspective.
Eric: I also have to call out Harry’s, I guess, nostalgia or whatever, because he leaves some of his spellbooks behind. He sorts everything into two piles, things he’s taking and thinks he’s not. He leaves the spellbooks – not going to need them for anything; they’re useless – but takes the photo album that Hagrid gave him. And if you had a limited number of space – we know they don’t – but if you had a limited number of space, Harry, take the spellbooks, damn it! Over the photo album.
Micah: Eh, he’s going for the nostalgia, as you said, and that means something to him coming from Hagrid.
Laura: He also knows Hermione is coming with him. She’s like a walking spellbook.
Eric: [laughs] She’s going to bring all the…
Micah: He’s not going to check a spellbook, right? When he’s being chased by Death Eaters.
Laura: Right.
Andrew: No, there’s no time for that.
Eric: I honestly don’t know why he bought the spellbooks. He probably never opened them.
Laura and Micah: Right.
Laura: Can you imagine? Like, “Hang on, Mister Death Eater. Let me just flip over to page 356 to find the hex that I’m looking for.”
Eric: Listen, he’s going to have a lot of time to be rereading some of these things.
[Ad break]
Micah: One other very quick odd and end I wanted to mention was that when Harry briefly leaves his room to try and go treat his cut, he steps on a cup of tea, which he assumes was left by Dudley under malicious intent, but is actually a bit of an olive branch that’s extended by Dudley that we learn about later on.
Andrew: Probably just the next chapter, no? “The Dursleys Departing”?
Eric: Pretty soon, yeah.
Andrew: Okay. Aw, looking forward to talking about that. And thanks for calling that out.
Lynx Line
Andrew: So now it’s time for the Lynx Line. In this chapter, Harry worries about what the Dursleys would do with his Hogwarts textbooks and his robes that he’s leaving behind, so I wanted to ask, what are they going to do with them? My prediction… I took this a little seriously. I think Petunia carefully admired each one, wishing she had been in possession of all these as a young girl, and when Vernon says, “Burn ’em all,” she says, “No, no, no,” and says as a fib that she told Harry, she promised Harry, she would keep them for him.
Laura: Oh, that’s very sweet.
Eric: I love that.
Laura: I went a darker path. So I imagine that Petunia actually has a secret shrine to the wizarding world in a closet somewhere.
Eric: Oh, God.
Laura: Kind of like… did anyone watch Hey Arnold! when we were kids?
Andrew: “Hey, Arnold!” Oh, yeah.
Eric: Yeah! The Arnold wax figure or whatever?
Laura: Yeah, she had the Arnold shrine in her closet.
Eric: Bubble gum…
Andrew: That’s what I have of Micah in my closet.
Laura: [laughs] Oh, damn it! That was going to be something I included in The Life and Lies of Andrew Sims, but now I guess you spoiled it.
[Everyone laughs]
Laura: But yeah, so I think Petunia has her own little wizarding world shrine that she keeps secret. She would put it all in there.
Eric: I like how unexpected that answer is. I went very obvious one; I think there’s only one clear answer, which is the Dursleys took all of Harry’s stuff the second he leaves, and they donated it to the Leavesden Studio Tour down in Watford. I think it’s going to fetch a good price for them. It’s prime merch.
Micah: It’s like their Pokémon cards, basically.
Eric: Basically, yeah. “That one’s worth $7.”
Andrew: It’s a very literal answer. Literally, that stuff is at the Studio Tour.
Eric: That’s fun.
Micah: I’m going to go the more sentimental route. I think Dudley boxes them up and puts them in the cupboard under the stairs.
Andrew: All right, well, looking to see what our patrons contributed, John said,
“Vernon would bury them in the backyard. Petunia would secretly keep them in the closet and read the books wishing to go to Hogwarts. Dudley would hawk that shit on eBay.”
Ka-ching.
Eric: Rachelpuff says,
“It’s my headcanon that Dudley ends up having a Muggle-born magical child. Maybe that child would find them all packed up in the attic of where they are living and that’s how they find out they are *magical*.”
Micah: Cassandra says,
“The cupboard under the stairs has room. It would probably be dangerous to burn magical objects.”
[Andrew laughs]
Laura: Mev says,
“I would think that they would be scared to even touch them. Burning the whole house down with them might be an option.”
[Andrew and Laura laugh]
Laura: Sorry, that’s so chaotic.
“I also think Dudley might want to give those back to Harry at the end of Deathly Hallows.”
Maybe with a cup of tea.
Andrew: Yeah. Carlee says,
“Petunia secretly compiles all of it and tries, now that Dumbledore is gone, to sneak into Hogwarts as a ‘first year student’!”
I want to see that. I want to see her trying to pretend to be a young witch going to school.
Eric: Glo says,
“I reject the premise that the Dursleys are planning on coming back to Privet Drive at all. It’s much more likely that Death Eaters are the first ones in #4 Privet Drive after the protection spell is broken, and they would ransack his books and robes looking for any clue at what he’s up to. After not finding anything, I’m sure they just blow the entire house up thinking it would send a message to Harry, not realizing that he hates the home and that a part of him would be glad to watch it burn.”
Andrew: Thank you, everybody who participated over at Patreon.com/MuggleCast. Listeners, we would love your support there. You can pledge at different levels, whatever works for you budget-wise, and you’ll get lots of benefits, no matter what level you pledge at. If you have feedback about today’s discussion, you can email or send a voice memo to MuggleCast@gmail.com. Can also reach out via Spotify or YouTube or DM us on social.
Quizzitch
Andrew: Now, before we wrap up, it’s time for the answer to this week’s Quizzitch question.
Eric: Yeah, and this week’s question again, for those playing at home, was the following: After Hogwarts, Elphias Doge and Dumbledore planned to travel and see the wizarding world. In our world, what is the term for this period of time, following secondary education, where students are encouraged to travel? Particularly in the UK and the Commonwealth countries, I find. The answer we’re looking for is gap year. This was correctly suggested by Mev and Carlee and Sam and Elizabeth and Becky. Thanks to everybody who’s playing live and playing at home as well. It’s a gap year.
Andrew: Next week, Chapter by Chapter continues with Chapter 3 of Deathly Hallows, “The Dursleys Departing.” Don’t forget to visit MuggleCast.com for links to our social media, our Patreon, our transcripts, our favorite episodes, and lots more about the show. Thanks, everybody, for listening. I’m Andrew.
Eric: I’m Eric.
Micah: I’m Micah.
Laura: And I’m Laura.
Andrew: Bye, everyone!
Laura: Bye, y’all.
Micah: Bye.