Transcripts

Transcript – Episode 59

[Show music begins]

Eric Scull: This is Episode 59 of Alohomora! for November 30, 2013.

[Show music continues]

Eric: Hello everybody, and welcome to Episode 59 of Alohomora! I’m Eric Scull.

Kat Miller: And I’m Kat Miller. No third guest or host this week, but we can handle it. Right, Eric?

Eric: Well, we’ve compensated by having two special guests this week.

Kat: Two amazing guests, actually, from the podcast What Are You Doing, Movie? – Teague Chrystie and Michael Scott. So hey, guys. Thanks for joining us.

Teague Chrystie: Hello.

Michael Scott: Hi. Thanks. Glad to be here.

Teague: I’m Teague. That one’s Michael.

Michael: Yeah, sorry.

[Eric and Kat laugh]

Kat: It’s okay. So, big Potter fans, yes?

Teague: Michael certainly is. I’m a fan of YA fare and Potter was the first among them that I really got into, but not as much as Mike. I think his fandom ended up going deeper than mine did.

Eric: Hmm.

Michael: I would say so. I would say in terms of all the YA stuff I’ve read… I would say that I’ve continued trying to read stuff in the YA area because of Potter, because I loved Harry Potter so much and I… early on I had dismissed it, as I think many older people – people older than Harry – probably initially did as a kid’s thing until I was finally held down and forced to read it. And so because of that, now every time something gets really big in the YA area I think, “Okay, I just missed Harry Potter and I regretted that later.” I regretted that I hadn’t read that immediately, so I tend to pursue those other things. Nothing has come close so far.

Teague: I was going to say, which brought you to Twilight

Michael: Yeah, so I’ve read Twilight

[Eric and Kat laugh]

Michael: I’ve read The Hunger Games. I don’t blame Harry, [laughs] but…

Kat: That’s good.

Michael: But yeah, definitely a big fan.

Teague: He’s all trying to be casual about it.

Michael: Well, you get…

Teague: What the listeners don’t know – just radio theater here – is that he’s dressed like Dumbledore right now. He’s got a purple cloak on.

[Eric and Michael laugh]

Kat: Nice.

Teague: I swear. And a top hat. Just imagine it.

Eric: Well, that’s very un-“Dumbledore”an, but I think I’ll go with it. I like the image.

Teague: Just trying to put a spin on it.

Michael: Yeah.

Kat: So what Houses are you guys? Have you… do you affiliate with one?

Teague: I did end up Sorting myself through Pottermore because, like I said, I’m not a huge fan. Yeah, of course, so I ended up going to Pottermore. I’m kidding about not being a huge fan. Ravenclaw… and I’m really proud of it.

Kat: Nice.

Teague: I’m super psyched about being in Ravenclaw. Kat, if I’m not mistaken, are you Ravenclaw as well?

Kat: I am a Ravenclaw. Caw! That’s the secret call.

Teague: All right, we’re going to have to lock elbows and light some fires and stuff and it’s going to be awesome. And then intelligently putting them out.

Kat: Okay. Sounds good.

Teague: Yeah.

Eric: Michael, save us all. What House are you?

Michael: I was Sorted by Pottermore into Hufflepuff.

Teague: Oh!

Eric: Yeah, woo-hoo!

Michael: And I’ve gone through the seven stages of grief and I’ve got… [laughs] no.

[Kat laughs]

Michael: It’s interesting reading about J.K. Rowling’s personal views on Hufflepuff versus the way she expresses it in the books.

Eric: Isn’t it?

Kat: Mhm.

Michael: Because her personal views on it… it’s her favorite House. And she really respects Hufflepuff and thinks that… the impression that she has is that Hufflepuff doesn’t have a particular thing like Gryffindor… you know, Gryffindor is…

Teague: They’re very well-rounded.

Michael: Yeah, Hufflepuff doesn’t have a thing. They’re just well-rounded, sane human beings. But the way she has the Sorting Hat describe it is like…

Teague: People without a personality go over there.

Michael: Yeah. It’s the shortbus House.

[Kat and Teague laugh]

Eric: Well, and the things that she has said about Hufflepuff throughout the years have been very hilarious because they do go up and down towards Hufflepuffs.

Michael: Uh-huh.

Eric: And regardless of what she says about them, she did leave them out of the books basically.

Michael: Right.

Eric: They’re the only common room we don’t go to and all that other stuff, so I do feel a little short-changed. But reading that welcome letter on Pottermore – I was also Sorted into Hufflepuff – and really reading that welcome letter comforted me and made it feel like, hey, maybe it was a bigger fit than I thought it would be at first.

Michael: Yeah.

Teague: Well, my whole thing was I didn’t know that about Mike, which was really interesting. When I asked my buddy when I was Sorting – he was also doing it at the same time – I was like, “What’s Hufflepuff’s thing again?” And he was like, “Exactly.”

[Eric and Kat laugh]

Eric: Yeah, you know… loyal. They’re loyal.

Michael: Loyalty is… it’s funny because I think fanfiction has picked up on that a lot more than the actual books did.

Kat: Yeah.

Michael: Fanfics have fixated on the fact that Hufflupuff is the “Loyalty House” much more than it… [laughs] than the books actually managed to make it.

Teague: And it’s also the only House that doesn’t outright remind you of an animal.

Michael: Badger.

Teague: Ravenclaw reminds you of a crow, Gryffindor’s a lion, Slytherin’s a snake, and then Hufflepuff is Kirby.

Eric: [laughs] Or Ditto from Pokémon, right?

Teague: Yeah.

Kat: Right.

Michael: Yeah, exactly. Or is it Jigglypuff? I don’t remember.

Eric: It’s a badger, it’s a badger.

Kat: Ugh!

Michael: It’s a badger, which I thought… which I wound up thinking was appropriate because that was the point I got to after being Sorted. I was like, “I don’t give a [censored].”

[Teague laughs]

Michael: Fine. Whatever. So I truly am a Hufflepuff obviously.

Eric: Even though we’ve never seen the Hufflepuff common room in the Harry Potter books, we do… certain moments throughout the series, our characters do come awfully close to them. Such as in this chapter that we read for today’s episode, which is Chapter 21, “The House-Elf Liberation Front,” and that is of the book Goblet of Fire.

Michael: Right.

Eric: And we just want to remind all of our listeners to please be sure to read that chapter in Goblet of Fire before proceeding with this podcast.

Kat: But of course, as usual, before we jump into this week’s chapter we’re going to talk about last week’s chapter, which was Chapter 20. So one of… our first comment here comes from Riddle the Muggle on our main site. It says,

“Harry cannot carry his broom with him because it was specifically mentioned in the rules that the Champions should come to the arena carrying only their wands. I think Harry had to Summon his broom from his dormitory because it would have looked suspicious otherwise. If he had placed it in the stands or even in the Entrance Hall, it would have given away that he knew he would be needing it. The judges might know from how far the broom had come based on the time it took to reach Harry.”

Eric: So guys, the issue – we were talking about this last week – he of course just faced off against the dragon and I was saying… there’s this moment where he’s about to be crushed to death and he’s not sure if his spell has worked because his broom has got to come all the way from his dormitory, and it takes a while to get there obviously. So I guess I had asked the question: why couldn’t he have dropped it off a little closer?

Kat: And somehow we missed the fact that he wasn’t supposed to have knowledge of needing his broom…

Eric: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which actually… that’s a great point from Riddle the Muggle here that it really would’ve tipped things off. I mean, everybody knew, but…

Teague: Well, it would’ve been straight up cheating.

Michael: Yeah…

Eric and Kat: Yeah.

Michael: Well, it was… yeah, it’s an open secret that everybody is cheating…

[Kat and Michael laugh]

Michael: … when it comes to the Tournament…

Teague: [laughs] It’s like the Tour de France?

[Kat laughs]

Michael: Yeah, but you’re not supposed to… everybody knows that but you’re not supposed to do it blatantly.

Teague: Yeah, did… I mean, where would the Beaux… the Beaux-battons? I don’t know exactly the right way to say it.

Kat and Michael: Beaux-batons.

Michael: Despite what…

Teague: Beaux-batons. Where would they have kept… wait, didn’t Gambon say “Beaux-battons“, though?

Michael: Yes he did, but let’s not get into it.

Eric: I’m pretty sure anything Gambon says you can just disregard.

Michael: [laughs] Yeah, exactly.

Kat: Ooh, ooh, don’t go there, Eric!

Teague: No, I’m totally used to that because…

Eric: Don’t go there? I’m… [laughs]

Teague: … I’m all into Star Wars and I don’t think George Lucas has said “Count Dooku” the same way twice. But…

[Eric laughs]

Teague: … when it comes to those other…

Eric: How can you mess up “Dooku”? I’m sorry.

Teague: He says, “Doku.” He says, “Doo-kuu.” It’s just… it’s a mess.

Michael: And he calls [lightsabers] laser swords. It’s like he refuses to respect the mythology that he created. [laughs]

[Eric laughs]

Kat: Ugh.

Michael: Deliberately.

Teague: And of course…

Michael: Anyway…

Teague: … people swirl off onto different little tangents about whether or not what he said just now is canon, and God damn it, George, you’re not helping. Anyway…

[Eric and Kat laugh]

Teague: … how far… where would the Beauxbatons and Durmstrang people’s brooms have been? If theirs would have been…

Michael: Well, they didn’t use brooms.

Teague: Oh. What?

Michael: They… yeah.

Eric: Yeah, right, they each had their own way of defeating the dragon or trying to get past the dragon to beat.

Teague: Well, no, I know… but surely they have brooms. Surely they own them…

Michael: Well, Krum certainly does.

Teague: … I mean, Krum, for instance, I’m pretty sure has a broom.

Eric: Well, Krum… [laughs] I’m pretty sure Krum has made it this far by just mooching off other people and their brooms.

Michael: Yeah.

Teague: Oh, yeah. He’s been bumming broom rides since early childhood.

[Eric and Kat laugh]

Teague: No, it’s… if theirs would have been in the changing room off to one side of the sort of dragon area, then that’s… all right, that’s not cheating. But if Harry had to… “all right, I’m just going to tape this to the wall right here…”

Michael: But they’re not supposed to know that they’re facing dragons. They’re not supposed to be able to be that prepared.

Teague: Well, yeah, but if any of them had Accio‘d their brooms…

Michael: Yeah.

Teague: … they would have come to them just the same as they came to Harry…

Michael: Right.

Teague: … and if their brooms were all totally not suspiciously one hundred feet away…

Michael: Mhm.

Teague: … then Harry could have totally gotten away with that.

Michael: Right.

Kat: That’s true.

Michael: But they didn’t think to use broomsticks. Krum used… he…

Kat: Conjunctivitis.

Michael: Conjunctivitis, right, thank you. And I can’t remember what Fleur did.

Teague: She just punched them.

[Michael laughs]

Teague: Repeatedly.

[Eric and Kat laugh]

Eric: Yeah.

Teague: She shot fireflies out of her butt at them.

Michael: Yeah.

Kat: Nice.

Michael: But yeah, they weren’t… they didn’t think to use their brooms. Harry was the only one who thought to use it.

Teague: That’s a good point. If he had brought his broom with him and everyone else hadn’t, that would very much be a… well, if he brings his broom into play, then it’s going to seem really fishy. “Hey look, he got his broom!”

Eric: Mmm.

Michael: Yeah.

Eric: [laughs] Couldn’t hurt.

Kat: You’re right, but he’s not supposed to know what’s coming, right. Yeah.

Eric: Yeah, yeah, yeah…

Kat: Cheater, cheater.

Eric: Yeah, that’s a good point from Riddle the Muggle.

[Teague laughs]

Kat: Our next comment comes from – again on our main site – from Aradan, Araden… I don’t think we’ve decided how to pronounce that yet, but the comment says,

“On the Foe Glass, I think Rowling may have put in the part about seeing the whites of the enemies’ eyes to reference the quote ‘Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes’ from the Battle of Bunker Hill. That’s just a guess, though.”

I thought that was kind of clever.

Eric: Hmm, yeah. I thought of… I was actually… that was kind of a conscious thought on my part, too, but I couldn’t pin it down to historically… I’m sure that somebody at some point said that. It’s just meant to denote how close somebody is to you.

Michael: Yeah, I knew… in reading it, I always assumed… that is a fairly famous saying, although I didn’t know off the top of my head that it was from the Battle of Bunker Hill specifically, but that’s a thing that’s become a saying. They’ve said it in Looney Tunes and stuff like that and so…

Teague: I said it at the grocery store.

Michael: [laughs] Yeah, so I think it’s perfectly…

[Eric laughs]

Michael: It’s perfectly within Rowling’s sense of humor to make that – like that’s a saying that we have in the Muggle world and that is literally the way the Foe Glass works. That’s just her sense of humor in the way she develops certain magical objects.

Teague: Yeah.

Kat: Our next comment here comes from our forums from Honeydukes Empire. He says,

“So I’ve got to wonder, how was Snape feeling while watching Harry fight a deadly dragon in this task? Do you think he was in full panic mode on the inside because Lily’s son was being put in a life or death situation? But is he also vindictive enough to feel pleasure at the fact that James’s son is being put into this situation? Also, if Snape had found out about the dragons, would he have indirectly slipped some information to Harry about how to survive? After all, he did promise to protect him.”

Michael: For all that’s worth.

[Kat laughs]

Eric: I find this a great question, but I kind of just want to sidestep and be like no, Snape slept in that day.

Michael: Yeah. Well, I mean, probably Snape was trusting… I would say that probably Snape was trusting in the protections that were put up for the tournament because they had talked about how the tournament was designed a couple of centuries after the last time it had been done. They were bringing it back and there were protections and safeguards in place so that combatants or… sorry, what are they, competitors? Champions, sorry! Ooh, my brain. The Champions wouldn’t get harmed or killed, which by the way is insane. The fact that the very first task that they have is to fight a dragon and this is the safer version?

[Teague laughs]

Michael: I can’t even wrap my brain around that, but I would say more than likely… yes, Snape wasn’t too worried because he knew that there were a lot of protections up so he was probably just enjoying the show.

Teague: And if not, at least that’s plausible deniability. He’s like, “You guys said you had a firewall.” I don’t know.

[Michael laughs]

Kat: Right. Ba-da-bing, right. So, our next comment here comes from the main site and this is from RoseLumos,

“I never got the impression that Moody/Barty Crouch Jr. was really praising Harry when he overheard him telling Cedric about the dragons. I always thought that he was upset and just hiding it. After all, if Cedric knew he had a better chance of winning and thus getting to the Cup before Harry in the Final Task, I think the talk in his office was just an excuse to find out if Harry had a plan.”

Eric: Huh.

Kat: So this came from a discussion we had last week about Barty Crouch/Moody actually praising Harry for being kind and helpful to Cedric, which we thought was a little odd given his personality. So…

Michael: Hmm, I think part of it is that Moody – fake Moody obviously – was trying to gain Harry’s trust. He was trying to get into… I think the ultimate goal in this comment is right. The whole goal was to open up a conversation with Harry.

Teague: Oh, so he would have like an inside track on how Harry was feeling about it, every step of the way.

Michael: Yeah, about the fact that he had a plan and to plant the plan in Harry’s mind if need be. But first he had to gain Harry’s confidence that he wasn’t in trouble for cheating with Cedric – et cetera, et cetera – probably making him feel better about cheating in the sense that he was talking to somebody about it. He was talking to a teacher about it when he wasn’t supposed to be.

Teague: Hmm.

Eric: Yeah, that’s a good point.

Kat: All right. So before we jump into the last comment here, I just want to quickly give a shout out to KnightGryffinpuff. We talked about Star Wars very briefly in this episode as well as the last one, and they appreciated my Tauntaun comment. We were talking about what would happen if the dragon had eaten Harry and I said, “They would slice him right open, like the Tauntaun, and pull him out.”

[Teague makes Tauntaun noises]

Kat: So I just wanted to give…

Eric: Hey guys, wow! First of all, that is the best impression of a Tauntaun I have ever heard anybody do. Not that many people have attempted it in front of me, I’ll be honest.

Teague: Well, I am exceptional in many ways, I am ashamed.

Eric: But actually, Star Wars does tend to come up fairly frequently in everything, doesn’t it? I mean, it just does.

Kat: It does.

Eric: But I heard a joke about a Tauntaun I don’t want to forget – I want to tell it to you guys. I’m sure you experts probably already heard it, but what was the interior temperature of the Tauntaun?

Teague: I don’t know.

Eric: It was Lukewarm.

[Kat laughs]

Teague: So that about wraps it up for the day.

Eric: I may have set that up incorrectly.

Kat: That is a joke straight from the Hufflepuff folks.

Eric: But… aww.

Kat: Oh, you know I love you. I’m just kidding.

[Teague laughs]

Kat: All right, so for our last comment from last week, this comes from the forums from Hufflepuffskein and it’s a pretty great comment. Here, it’s… Noah, if you’re listening, buddy, this one’s for you. It says,

“You guys didn’t mention the issues involved with Cedric’s strategy to get the egg. He Transfigured a rock into a Labrador, which I imagine was immeasurably cute… and probably got annihilated by that dragon. So… is that Labrador alive? Did Cedric just commit animal abuse? Did he bring that Lab into life and offer it up as bait and then let it get slaughtered in front of an audience? If I was in that audience, I don’t think I could watch a poor dog get incinerated. Why is Hermione not upset about this? Even if you don’t want to technically categorize it as alive, it would still be hard to watch something that looks in every way like a cute Labrador blasted by a dragon! Wizards are harsh!!!”

Teague: Well, I refer back to the seminal classic Jurassic Park when I say that “Life finds a way.” And also, that’s a story, if not a parable, about the perils of playing God. And I do feel like Cedric should have been reprimanded if the animal came to harm, but I’m sure the American Humane Society was there – or the AHA, or the ASPCA – someone was there.

Eric: It was a rock!

Michael: Yeah, it was a rock that looked like… I mean, they go the other way in Transfiguration. They turn bugs into belt buckles and stuff like that. So I don’t think they are as concerned with animal rights as we might be. And watching them… and also, like I just mentioned, they are throwing students to dragons.

[Kat laughs]

Michael: And their favorite sport involves people getting smashed in the head with flying steel balls. So it is safe to say that wizards and what they find entertaining are pretty harsh.

Kat: Well, the title of her post was “Desk Pig” and we have this whole discussion – I think I mentioned this to you briefly, Teague. There’s a desk in the very first novel that McGonagall turns into a pig and then back into a desk. We have probably talked about it for, I don’t know, ten hours.

Teague: It’s like the [unintelligible] in Hitchhiker’s Guide where it’s like “Not again” and then it smashes into the ground.

[Eric and Michael laugh]

Kat: Right. And so we’ve talked at length about “Is it a pig? Is it a desk? If you could eat it, what would it taste like? Would it harm you?” All this stuff. So, Hufflepuffskein, loyal listener, was just bringing that to our attention. So thank you.

Eric: Well, if I’m not mistaken, the dragon was going for the dog and then changed its mind at the last minute, and that’s how Cedric got a lot of his body parts burned.

Kat: Right.

Eric: So hopefully…

Kat: So that dog is still out there somewhere.

Eric: So the dog is fine. It probably met up with the Homeward Bound pets who were finding their way home, or it turned back into a rock in the corner.

Teague: But hold on a second. If there’s no limitation of what you can Transfigure into what else, then how is there scarcity in any market in the Harry Potter universe? Why is Hagrid excited when he finds a very, very rare animal?

Eric: Well, there are rules.

Teague: He could just take that guitar, which is out of tune anyway – screw that guitar – and then turn it into an incredibly rare beast… and then again with food! If you could turn anything into pigs…

Michael: You can’t. There’s a rule.

Teague: Oh, okay.

Eric: There is a rule.

Teague: Is there a rule?

Eric: Gamp’s Law, is it?

Kat: Yep. Mhm.

Eric: Okay.

Kat: … of Elemental Transfiguration.

Eric: Well, you can’t create something from nothing. You can move it around a little bit, though. So perhaps it would just be a really out-of-tune Labrador.

[Everyone laughs]

Eric: Which I don’t know what that would sound like. Please people, do not submit entries.

[Everyone laughs]

Eric: We do not want your soundclips of your out-of-tune Labrador. Just please, no.

Michael: My assumption has always been that Transfiguration is simply inpermanent. You can’t permanently change one thing into another.

Teague: That’s even more horrifying though. Because if not for McGonagall immediately turning it into a desk, that pig would have just slowly become a desk!

Michael: Yeah.

Teague: That’s a Cronenberg film, sir.

Kat: Exactly! See, you get it.

Michael: I’ve always been bothered by the Chamber of Secrets movie – I don’t think they do the same thing in the book.

Teague: Of course not.

Michael: McGonagall’s Transfiguration – she turns a bird into a water goblet.

Eric: Yeah.

Kat: Mhm.

Michael: And then Ron tries… yeah, it is Chamber because Ron’s wand is broken. Ron tries it on Scabbers and it only goes halfway.

Kat: [laughs] Right.

Michael: It is played for laughs, but that is the most horrifying thing in the entire movie series. Because you can still hear it squeaking, and that’s terrible. Starting as an animal and going that way is wrong. But starting as a rock and turning into an animal and back is not as bad.

Kat: We couldn’t agree more.

Michael: It is still fundamentally a rock.

Kat: You so belong here.

Eric: [singing] “I am a rock… I am an island!” [pause] No… anybody? No?

Teague: I’m clapping on the inside.

Kat: Now we’re going to move on to our Podcast Question of the Week responses from last week. Our question was, just as a quick reminder here,

“We see Harry, and he is really struggling after he finds out that the first task is dragons. He has absolutely no idea what to do! So let’s pretend that nobody cheated what would Harry do? When he got to the arena and saw the dragon, what would be his first instinct?”

Okay, and as you can imagine, we got a varied amount of responses. But our first one here is from PondsandBowties – nice Doctor Who reference, I like it. It says,

“I think Harry would have reacted in a similar way, though of course he would have been more stressed. He was already learning summoning charms, and had at least a little experience with dragons prior to this (Norbert mainly) which leads me to believe that all that really would have changed would be how much sleep he got the night before and how frazzled he was going into the tournament. Cedric on the other hand might have been killed. We know that he is injured by the dragon even when knowing what is coming due to Harry’s Hogwarts loyalties. If he had not known that dragons were coming, I fear we would have lost Cedric much earlier in the competition.”

Interesting comment.

Eric: Hmm.

Michael: I love ponds!

Eric: [laughs] I love bow ties!

Michael: Yeah, bow ties are cool.

Eric: But I disagree. I don’t think that Harry knew anything about Summoning Charms before he sat down in the library with Hermione and began practicing. So I mean, I think that’s just maybe a misreading or inaccurate for whatever reason, but the fact that he had to sit down… it took him all night – into the wee hours of the night – and an entire day before that to learn the Summoning Charm. If he hadn’t known what to prepare for, if Moody hadn’t really just sat him on his lap, he would definitely have not used a Summoning Charm.

Kat: No, hold up, Holmes, because he definitely… they talk about that he was learning it in class, and he wasn’t getting it.

Eric: Well, he wasn’t getting it.

Michael: Yeah.

Eric: And now he was getting it.

Michael: The Summoning Charm is previously established in this book. We first see it when Mrs. Weasley is Summoning all of the Weasley twins’ stuff out of their pockets.

Eric: Ohh, good call, good call.

Michael: So we do know that it exists, but as for Harry’s capacity to use it, that’s a different question entirely.

Eric: Well, I think that [those] eighteen hours…

Michael: And whether or not he would have thought to use it is the bigger question.

Teague: Yeah.

Eric: I mean, [those] eighteen hours that he sits and studies it because he has to, because Moody told him to do it, is really crucial in this point. So I definitely think a Summoning Charm is off the table for what he would have used if he didn’t know about the dragons.

Michael: Yeah.

Kat: I actually agree with that completely.

Eric: Okay.

Kat: Good. Our next comment here comes from ArchdukeSeverus, who says,

“I think Harry would have definitely not thought to use something like the Summoning Charm. He probably would have either tried to use combat magic that he knew on the dragon (hexes and stuff) or ran around, dodging the dragon, until he got to the middle. He may have even repeated what Ron did in Philosopher’s Stone and use[d] the Levitation Charm to knock out the dragon.”

Like the troll.

“As unprepared as he was I still think that he would have survived and found a way to get the task done.”

Eric: Yeah, I guess there are a lot of rocks you could throw at the dragon.

Michael: It’d be a short book if he didn’t.

[Kat laughs]

Teague: I was going to say, “There’s a lot of really clever ways of getting around this, and I’m looking at the responses we’ve already read and the ones that are coming still, and it’s like, ‘Yeah, these are all good ideas.'” I’m going to be the one who says, “I think Harry dies.” I think he dies. Unless he can transfigure the dragon into the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, which I’m still not positive he couldn’t do.

Eric: What did you do, Ray?

Teague: Exactly! It just popped in there.

Eric: So do we think then that we have to thank Moody – or Barty Crouch Jr. – at this point for saving Harry’s life?

Teague: I’ve always said that that guy got a bad rep. No. [laughs]

Michael: I wonder what the rule would have been. I mean, is it like Quidditch? Would the task have continued going indefinitely until Harry had figured out something to do or been killed?

Kat: Hmm.

Michael: Where’s the clock? Is there a clock? And if there is, probably the smartest thing for Harry to have done in terms of the overall scheme of what was happening around him is just sit down and wait out the clock and be like, “I’m going to try to get myself disqualified from this competition so I don’t have to do this anymore.”

Kat: That’s very true, actually.

Eric: Yeah, for sure, and there definitely is a clock because at the end when he is successful they say he captured the egg the fastest of all of them.

Michael: Right.

Kat: But that doesn’t mean that there was a time limit.

Eric: Well, so if his time exceeded the time of the other three champions, they could stop the clock.

Teague: Yeah, that would have certainly made him last place.

Eric: Yeah.

Kat: Our next comment here comes from Leah McCurdy. She says,

“I like the premise of this question! So if no one had cheated to help him out with the dragons in particular …I was thinking back to the other sticky situations Harry has been in, and it struck me that when Harry is really faced with life or death, he does something instinctual but not particularly magical. He doesn’t go for his wand; he does something physical, something intensely brave, putting his body into it. I think this illustrates a larger concept about Harry as a person overall in the series; he overcomes evil through his love, through his heart. As a true Gryffindor, he has ‘the heart of a lion,’ and so this makes me think his personhood is intrinsically tied to physicality, through instinctual courage and almost primal responses. I like the idea that even though he has magic at his disposal, our hero instinctually goes for the physical option, using his heart and his grit to overcome evil.”

Eric: Wow. That is…

Kat: Yeah, I mean, it’s a really great comment, but it doesn’t really answer the question.

Michael: I agree with Leah, though. It’s just… but then what’s he going to use? His shoes?

Eric: A rock. But then he’s going to throw it. He’s not going to use magic to toss it.

Teague: Yeah.

Eric: Isn’t this the difference, though? I mean, based on what she was saying, couldn’t that be the difference between somebody who grew up knowing they were going to be a wizard and Harry, who [for] the first eleven years had to learn those basic motor skills and basic… I don’t want to say combat, but I mean [he] and Dudley growing up, there [were] some scuffles where he physically had to react to certain things, so couldn’t that just be the difference between the different way in which he was raised?

Kat: Yeah, I think so. Magic is not an instinct for him.

Michael: Yeah, I mean, the same thing happens with… toward the end of Philosopher’s Stone with Hermione. She’s trying to make a fire, and she’s panicking because there’s no wood. It’s because she grew up in the Muggle world, she doesn’t… that’s not the first place her mind goes. But you did also bring up an interesting point about him growing up with Dudley and his magical abilities coming out in moments of really high stress. I wonder if something completely unexpected would have happened just because he needed it to because otherwise he was going to get killed.

Teague: He accidentally blows up the dragon and just floats away.

[Eric, Kat, and Michael laugh]

Eric: I think that’s probably as likely as anything else, too, because, I mean, going back to that, when he Appparated by accident – or we assume he Apparated from the story of him just appearing on the school rooftop… and that takes a lot of effort later on in the series, two or three years later, and he did it by accident when he was a kid, so yeah, I think there’s something to that. The dragon just goes “puff.”

Kat: Puff!

Michael: Or inflates like Marge and just floats away like a balloon at the end of its tether.

Teague: And Alfonso Cuarón just films the hell out of it.

[Eric laughs]

Kat: So our last comment here comes from klemdrummer AKA Mr. Obvious. Once I’ve read the comment you’ll understand. It says,

“Crouch made sure Harry knew what the first task was because he needed him to succeed and eventually reach the Triwizard Cup first. If nobody had cheated then Harry’s name would never have come out of the Goblet! And he would have been sitting with his friends, encouraging Cedric who probably wouldn’t have known beforehand…”

Very true, but that’s not the point of the question of the week, is it? So…

Eric: No, and I think…

Kat: But you get an A+ for effort.

Eric: Cedric probably would have died.

Kat: Yeah.

Michael: Either Cedric would have died, or again, it seems like cheating behind the scenes is de rigueur for the Triwizard Tournament, so Krum knew without having to be told by Harry or by Crouch, Fleur knew…

Teague: No, but Crouch…

Michael: … so more than likely it would have gotten to Cedric. Probably more than likely Harry still would have been the one to tell him because probably Hagrid would have shown him the dragons. Which there would have been no restriction against since Harry wasn’t one of the competitors, and Harry would not have been able to resist telling Cedric.

Eric: Right.

Kat: That is so true.

Eric: He would have stumbled upon somebody else cheating – Krum finding out or Fluer finding out – and then he would have gone and done it.

Michael: Yeah.

Teague: You just caused some major characterist versions there, Michael. One, Krum is a very bright, young boy, and two, Hagrid can keep a secret like no one else.

[Eric and Kat laugh]

Teague: So take your negative comments and go home.

Eric: Wow. [laughs] I was just wondering: I bet… Kat, do you know if anybody just suggested this? I had this idea that Harry, if he didn’t know what to do, he [was] faced with a dragon all of a sudden… wouldn’t he just for future times’ sake give it a good, old Expelliarmus?

Kat: [laughs] Nobody said that, unfortunately.

Eric: Nobody said… well, let me be unique then.

Kat: As always.

Eric: Yeah. That’s pretty much his go-to spell, for those of you reading at home. If it’s not yet in the series it certainly comes to that later.

Kat: Yeah, yeah. But… so that was a little bit of a long recap this week but really good stuff, and there’s tons more good stuff; you know where it lives: alohomora.mugglenet.com and on our forums, so go check it out. Comment.

Teague: Do it.

Kat: Do it! That’s right. Do it.

[Goblet of Fire Chapter 21 intro begins]

[Sound of pots and pang banging]

Mrs. Weasley: Chapter 21, “The House-Elf Liberation Front.”

[Goblet of Fire Chapter 21 intro ends]

Eric: Well, guys, this week’s chapter is Chapter 21, and, like many chapters in the Harry Potter books, it starts off right where the previous chapter ended. How cool is that? So Ron and Harry are friends again, it’s all very lovely, and they’re both very excited from what just happened, and they actually get into a little bit of dialogue that I thought was very interesting right off the bat. Ron tells Harry that he has a great deal of confidence that Harry can win this thing, meaning the whole Triwizard Tournament. He says, [as Ron] “There’s no WAY the other tasks will be as dangerous as THAT! How could they be?!” He’s right, right? Dragons. But Hermione has a different opinion. She says, [as Hermione] “Harry [has] still got a long way to go before he finishes. If that was the FIRST task, just imagine what there’ll be next?!” My question is, guys, “Who is right here?”

Teague: Well, the question asks for incentives [of] the people who designed the Tournament in the first place. Do they have any reason to try to call out people at the first step? Because if they do, then maybe that was the one that they put up to try to kill the kids off, but otherwise, I feel like… I would expect it to get worse. I would not expect it to get easier, certainly. I mean…

Michael: Well, it’s just Ron… It’s a programming question, really. It’s essentally Ron’s lack of imagination to an extent. He looks at it, and he sees dragons, and he’s like, “What else can they do? What can they do to you that’s worse than throwing dragons at you?” And of course one of the things we find is that – for example, the underwater task – there’s an element of psychological warfare going on, where you’re panicking about someone you care about being in danger, and can you keep your head while you’re concerned about that?

Eric: Yeah, I guess I can see… wow, for the first time and only once you said that did I actually gain what I believe is a glimpse into what Rowling was actually trying to do with that task in the book, but I’m going to side with Ron just because I really think he’s right. I really think that the dragons… knowing what we know of the future tasks, if you can leave aside the fact that Cedric and Harry… what happens after the third task happens somewhere completely else by no design of the Triwizard Tournament… really, the third task is a maze. It’s a fun, interactive maze. Well, if Barty Crouch, Jr. weren’t going around attacking people, it would have been pretty lackluster and dull and safe.

Michael: Well, aside from the Acromantula and sphinxes and who knows what else.

Eric: Spinxes? Ehh. But… okay, so then the underwater thing… again, this is obviously a later chapter – I’m sure we’ll talk about it more when that happens – but really, did you… were they really going to leave everybody else to drown? Harry feels the need to grab Fleur’s little sister, Gabrielle, after she’s attacked, and he gets extra points for it. Was she really going to be left for dead?

Kat: Yo, yo. Yo, you’re jumping ahead, man.

Eric: No, but I thnik that those are fundamental questions because really, the first task, I think, is the hardest and was the most dangerous.

Teague: Yeah. No, they specifically… I mean, he’s specifically reprimanded by Hermione to be like, “Come on. Did you really think they were going to let us drown?” and so the implication is obviously “No, that’s not what would have happened if he had failed,” but he didn’t know that.

Eric: Mhm. But so… with the dragon, it still seemed up front. “A dragon is fifteen feet in front of you, you have to get an egg from under it” still seems like the biggest, worst task.

Kat: I disagree.

Teague: I actually agree with you on that front. In retrospect, assuming I could figure out some way to not breathe for an hour, I think there’s actually the most menace inherent in that task. I just like the implication that Ron is… whatever he’s imagining coming after it is like, arm wrestling and a bake-off or something like that.

[Eric laughs]

Teague: He’s like, “Well, it’s not going to be that bad. God!”

Kat: I think it’s the most dangerous. I don’t think it’s the hardest.

Teague: I agree with that. That’s a good distinction.

Kat: Which I think are a very different things, danger and difficulty.

Eric: It’s a nice distinction. So as we find often in the Harry Potter books, when Ron has one idea, and Hermione has the complete opposite, the truth ends up being somewhere in the middle. So that’s nice. But basically, Harry is really enjoying being Ron’s friend again. He tells him all the information that he learned from Sirius in the common room fire, which is the thing that Ron walked in on the other day.

Michael: Awkward.

Eric: And basically, he just tells him that Karkaroff was Death Eater, Ron says they probably should have known Lucius and Karkaroff probably were running around the Quidditch World Cup with their masks on. Again, it’s Ron’s active imagination getting the best of him here, but it’s possible.

Kat: But he’s right, isn’t he? I mean…

Teague: Probably. I think he’s right about Malfoy, don’t think he’s right about Karkaroff given what Karkaroff does later when the Mark starts coming back. I don’t think he was involved.

Michael: Innocent until proven guilty, man.

Teague: But then again, everybody panics. All of those people panicked when the mark went up. They weren’t doing it out of loyalty to Voldemort. They were doing it just because they were all there, and they thought it’d be a lark, so maybe he was.

Kat: Well, Karkaroff was probably at the World Cup, yeah?

Eric: I was thinking because he’s the Headmaster of the school that Krum attends, but now I’m thinking that that’s not enough of a binding thing for him to go support his sometimes student when he’s an international Quidditch star.

Michael: Yeah, there’s… I mean, as far as we know, Dumbledore wasn’t at the Cup, so… but then again, Harry wasn’t playing in the World Cup, so…

Kat: Right.

Teague: I don’t know. I don’t think Kobe Bryant’s kindergarten teacher comes out for games.

Eric: [laughs] Actually, I have it on good authority that Kobe Bryant’s kindergarten teacher comes to every game.

Teague: I can’t dispute you. Conceded.

[Kat laughs]

Eric: But anyway, so Harry – again, with his excitement over his unexpected triumph over this dragon – is just riding on that excitement. He writes Sirius this huge, long letter, which they give to Pigwidgeon. I forget where Hedwig is. But they give it to Pigwidgeon, and Pig can barely carry it. Harry and Ron are up in the owlery, Ron gives him the letter, and Pig drops it says, “twelve feet in the air” before he carries it off. We’ve talked about this a little bit before – about J.K. Rowling just giving these great character moments to these owls and these animals – and it’s just really… a chapter titled “House-Elf Liberation Front”… I was expecting to read all about the house-elves, and they kind of bore me, so I was just really excited that the chapter was starting off with such a luster that it had in the previous chapter.

Teague: I just… from a practical standpoint, imagining that this is a letter that I’m sending to someone who’s still of interest to everybody, that… if it looks right off the bat like that bird is not going to be able to hack it, I’d just go, “Wait, wait! Come back, come back, come back. Sorry.”

Eric: Yeah, isn’t that a super suspicious bird?

Teague: “I’ll trim this down.”

Michael: Well, yeah, I may be mistaken, but I think the reason they didn’t use Hedwig was specifically because they didn’t want Hedwig to be seen going to where Sirius was hiding out.

Kat: She’s too recognizable. Yeah.

Eric: Ohh, okay.

Michael: And so I think they decided to use Pigwidgeon instead for that.

Kat: And Pig [has] got spirit. How about you?

[Eric laughs]

Teague: Have got to give it to him for moxy.

Kat: That’s right.

Eric: Mm. Moxy. Of course, they leave the owlery when Ron says, “We’d better get going to your surprise party, Harry!” Umm, I guess he ruined the surprise.

Kat: Yeah, well…

Michael: Yeah, pretty much.

Kat: … it’s fine.

Teague: Just speaking as Harry’s alter ego right now, I appreciated it when he said that, to be honest with you. I like having a head’s up.

Eric: Yeah, oh, so you’re one of those people. No surprises, right?

Teague: Hey, man, my heart could explode really [easily]. I don’t know.

Eric: Oh okay, okay.

Kat: I love surprises, just for future reference.

Michael: Well, and it’s almost… I guess it’s the same thing, where he’s like, “Well, you were fully capable of pretending you didn’t know a dragon was coming. You can probably handle pretending not to know a surprise party’s coming. But it’s better you’re warned.”

Kat: That’s true. Fair enough.

Eric: It’s true. Well, quickly thereafter, there is a party in the common room! Woop, woop, woop, woop!

[Teague makes dubstep sound effects]

Eric: Woah, wait. Whoah there. This is not the Hufflepuff common room, guys.

[Kat laughs]

Eric: Don’t get too far ahead of yourself. Ain’t that right, Michael?

Michael: Umm, yeah.

Teague: Hufflepuff is way into dubstep.

[Kat laughs]

Eric: But party in the common room, everybody! Fred and George… they have some food that they got from the kitchens. Hermione is a little suspicious of that food, but we’ll get to that later. It turns out that Dean Thomas, who is great at drawing, has drawn some banners of Harry facing the Hungarian Horntail and some other banners featuring Cedric Diggory, the proud Hufflepuff, with his head on fire.

Kat: Harsh.

Teague: I guess he’s more of a Jacob fan.

[Eric and Kat laugh]

Eric: House pride. How’s that for house pride? But quickly things escalate because Harry is coaxed into opening this egg, which he’s been given, and we’ve been told in the previous chapter [that] this is going to give you a clue to the next task. So he opens it up, and there’s a loud, loud screeching sound, and quickly, he has to close it. But there’s nothing in the egg. It’s hollow on the inside. Essentially, he thinks that the sound that comes from there, the closest he’s ever heard to it, was at Nearly Headless Nick’s deathday party when they had a ghost band all playing musical saws. Seamus Finnigan comes right up and says, “Hey, Harry. That sounded like a banshee. Maybe you’ll be facing a banshee. Maybe that’ll be what the second task is all about.” But Neville has a different opinion, still. He says, “It sounded like somebody being tortured. Perhaps you’ll have to go up against the Cruciatus Curse in your next thing.” Now, my comment on this is that it seems like – really, especially with Seamus and Neville – they’re pulling from their backstory, even though we don’t know it yet with Neville except for the scene in Moody’s classroom, which happened recently with the Unforgivable Curses lesson. Seamus is from the country where the banshee is most popular. He may have actually heard a banshee before. And Neville, having experiencing this torture, coming out with what he hears when the egg is open. So is it a different sound coming from the egg? Or really, is it just this incoherent screech?

Michael: I think it’s just the… I think they’re all hearing the
screeching of the mermaid because it’s what mermaid voices sound like above water.

Eric: Hmm.

Michael: So they’re all projecting their guesses as to what it means, but I do think they’re all hearing the same thing.

Teague: And I think it’s clever that they… what you said about it reflecting stuff that they’ve heard in their lives and they’re just bringing it to it.

Michael: Yeah, they’re projecting it.

Teague: It’s a good observation. And I like to think that Hermione thought it was a bus stopping or something.

[Eric and Michael laugh]

Eric: Well, Fred and George, never to be the dreary ones here, do really save the day by joking that they think it sounds like Percy when he sings, and I think it’s Fred [who] says, “Harry, maybe you’ll have to attack Percy when he’s in the shower.”

[Kat laughs]

Eric: As the Second Task. Can you imagine the Second Task of the Triwizard Tournament? “There’s a showering wizard.”

[Michael laughs]

Eric: “You just have to tackle him without slipping on the soap.” Something like that. Oh, no, we know that the twins often make jokes like this. But I’m just submitting to the listeners and to myself – I want to write this down – this has to be one of the actual… I think, the funniest jokes that the twins… the funniest quips… because here I’m thinking, “Oh my God, Neville is witnessing his own parents.” It’s not like the Dementor – it doesn’t make them re-live it. But here I am thinking, “Neville just went to a really dark place,” and then they bring it up by saying, “You may just have to go attack Percy.” Who nobody likes at this point in the book. So I’d have to say that I think that is probably one of their funniest jokes of all time. The whole series.

Teague: I agree. It is very funny.

Michael: It never occurred to me that they were potentially doing it to kind of…

Teague: To lighten the mood?

Michael: To lighten the mood and to particularly help lift Neville out of that place as well.

Teague: Or maybe they were just being good party hosts and being like, “Okay, Longbottom. Anyway, so… lol.”

Eric: Yeah, lol. Well, he gets a little bit more of a laugh when they transform him into a canary. [laughs]

Michael: Right.

Kat: I wanted to see that so bad in the movie.

Eric: Ugh!

Kat: It’d be so amazing! Like a giant, Matt-sized canary. [laughs]

Teague: Of all the things they left out of Goblet of Fire for the movie, that’s the one you are going to go to town for?

Michael: Yeah. [laughs]

Kat: No, no, no. I like the funny moments in this book I feel like are some of the best ones of the series.

Teague: This is true.

Kat: And as we’ve discussed, this is one of my least favorite movies, so…

Michael: Yeah, they cut pretty much all of the preamble to the Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes stuff. None of that, I think, remained in this movie. Yeah.

Kat: Yeah. Gone.

Michael: It comes up in the next one, but not in this one.

Kat: Poof, gone. Poof.

Eric: So that’s really it for that party. It was really… it was just great to see Harry’s own house, including Ron, able to support him in his triumph. But next day…

Kat: Wait! You missed the baby sleeping dragon.

Eric: What baby… oh! Okay, okay. So Harry is going to bed that night and one of the cutest things…

[Kat laughs]

Eric: … to happen ever in the Harry Potter series…

Kat: In the history of life.

Eric: Kat, why don’t you tell us what it is? Because I know you’re passionate about it.

Kat: He puts his little baby model dragon next to his bed. It yawns. It curls up and goes to sleep. Aww.

Eric: And he thinks… his sleeping thoughts are, “Hmm, I can see what Hagrid was thinking of. These dragons, they’re pretty swell, aren’t they?” [laughs]

Kat: Yeah, it’s just the cutest little thing ever. And I want a little baby dragon that never gets bigger than that.

Eric: I want a little Horntail!

Teague: I want a little baby most animals.

Michael: Yeah.

Teague: I agree with the premise that babies are always cuter.

[Eric laughs]

Teague: I’m just saying, there are people in Florida who get a baby crocodile because it’s like, “Aww, he’s just so cute!” Well, alligator, but… and it’s like, ‘Hey, this is adorable,” and then in two weeks, it’s eating your babies.

Michael: Well, it’s not a baby dragon. It’s a model dragon. They have enchanted models.

Kat: Right, that’s the important…

Michael: It’s an enchanted action figure, essentially.

Teague: Well, then I want an enchanted baby elephant…

[Michael laughs]

Teague: … and an enchanted baby puppy and an enchanted pony…

[Eric laughs]

Teague: … and I want an enchanted platypus.

Michael: Because it’s established earlier in the book that they even have… they are literally action figures because Ron buys a Krum.

Kat: Mhm.

Eric: Yeah, and eventually, the spell wears off but…

Michael: Yeah.

Teague: Oh, yeah. I always wondered that… I’m sorry to bring you guys back three books, but what happens… if you tear a leg off a chocolate frog, does it react realistically? Because that’s horrifying.

Michael: Oh dear. Well, yeah…

Teague: You have to bite into them.

Eric: You have to eat it whole. That’s why so many deaths happen when people get chocolate frogs. You have to eat it whole.

Teague: Yeah, it’s like eating squids in Japan. You’ve got to be careful with that.

Eric: So is to never answer that question.

[Kat laughs]

Eric: In the whole history of canon, ever. But speaking of Hagrid, the next day, it’s class, just like usual. And they go to Hagrid for Care of Magical Creatures. Look, guys, this class is ridiculous.

Kat: And they’re all drunk.

Eric: Is it ri-donk-ulous? Yeah, there’s something [pronounces as “waaf-ting”] wafting over from Madame Maxine’s…

Kat: [laughs] Wait…

Eric: … horse cart where…

Kat: … did you say [pronounces as “waaf-ting”] “wafting”?

Eric: [pronounces as “waaf-ting”] Wafting? [pronounces as “wahf-ting”] Wafting?

Teague: [pronounces as “wahf-ting”] Wafting.

Eric: Is that not…

[Kat laughs]

Eric: [pronounces as “wahf-ting”] Wafting?

Teague: I would go [pronounces as “wahf-ting”] wafting.

Eric: It’s wafting from…

[Kat laughs]

Eric: Sorry, I’m from the East Coast originally. We say “waahft.”

Kat: No, I say “wafting.”

Eric: Uhh…

Kat: Wait…

Eric: I’m from the not-quite east coast then, where it’s…

Michael: I’m from the place where they say that.

[Eric and Kat laugh]

Eric: I’m from the place where they say “waafting.” Thank you. Thank you, sir. Anyway, it’s wafting over from Madame Maxime’s horse carriages where they only drink single malt whisky. Apparently, this whole class is getting a nice whiff of it. Regardless, the Blast-Ended Skrewts – which we’ve heard about, read about previously – are now six feet long. Six feet long, that’s one and a half inches taller than I am currently. There are only ten of them, thank God, because they keep killing each other, and Hagrid, who doesn’t know if they hibernate or not, has devised these boxes with pillows in them and wants to get the class to herd these Skrewts into these boxes.

[Kat laughs]

Eric: This sounds like something out of fan fiction. This is just a bad idea. How could Hagrid be so silly about this?

Teague: Kat, it goes back to what I was just saying: You get them when they’re all cute and tiny, but then look what happens.

[Kat laughs]

Michael: Well, Hagrid is very naïve, I think.

[Teague laughs]

Michael: I mean, ultimately that’s his character. He’s naïve, and I think part of it is because he’s a half-giant and so few things can hurt him. He doesn’t really think about… he doesn’t think to practise caution, and he doesn’t know how to teach caution.

Teague: Hmm.

Michael: Also, he’s making it up as he goes along with the Skrewts because he created them. He literally has no idea [of] any of their properties. He just thought it would be neat, as we discover later.

Eric: I never thought of it before as him having not getting hurt easily because he has possibly thicker skin.

Kat: Mmm.

Eric: Which definitely comes into play… I think it’s Book 6 when he gets a lot of spells cast on him, and he just doesn’t feel it as heavily. Just this idea that he is more careless, as a rule, because he’s bigger and the burns don’t hurt him as much, so he downplays what the students are feeling…

Michael: Yeah.

Eric: … when they get burned and stabbed and stuck.

Michael: Yeah, he’s a very sweet guy but he doesn’t have that kind of empathy. He looks at the Skrewts and then he goes, “Well, they’re not very dangerous to me, so they’re not dangerous.” That’s the same way he is with dragons and all that other stuff. He’s like, “Those are neat and I see no danger in them, so I don’t understand why other people see danger in them.”

Eric: There’s something that’s very ominous, though, and it’s really the headline of this whole scene – a headline, of course, because I’m thinking of Rita Skeeter – but she shows up… Hagrid says, “I don’t think you’re supposed to be on school grounds,” and she just ignores him. [laughs] But she asks where the Skrewts came from, and Hagrid goes quiet and turns red a little bit, and there’s this silence and Harry is wondering, “What happened? Where did Hagrid get these Skrewts?” Hermione saves the day by saying, “Oh, this is a very interesting class, isn’t it, Harry?”, drawing Rita’s attention to the fact that Harry is there, of course. Harry, her prized pig here that she writes about all the time.

Teague: Just throw him under the bus.

Eric: Really thrown under the bus! But [it’s] to save Hagrid from this abuse here… or this reveal. [Hermione is] protecting Hagrid… this is a good moment for Hermione’s character because she’s protecting him without knowing the answer. But as they’re walking away from class, they still don’t know the answer, and Harry really hopes that Hagrid got these Blast-Ended Skrewts, that he came by them, in a legal way. Because don’t you know it, Hagrid, naïve Hagrid, set up an appointment with Rita Skeeter on Friday night – bow chicka wow wow – to go and talk more about what it is he does at the school, and Harry is just worried that she’s going to misuse his words, the way that we know that Rita Skeeter does, and it’s going to cause a big problem. Hopefully it doesn’t, but I’m just curious [about] where he got the Skrewts from.

Michael: I think it’s fairly naïve of Harry, in that instance, to think, “Well, hopefully Hagrid got it from a legitimate source.” Because when Hagrid gets things from illegitimate sources, he sometimes doesn’t hesitate to blurt that fact out. So the fact that it was bad enough that he hesitated to tell Rita…

[Eric laughs]

Michael: … where they’d come from [laughs] is a really significant signal, I think.

Kat: Well, you know that Hagrid created the Blast-Ended Skrewts, right?

Michael: Yeah, yeah. That’s what I was…

Kat: Okay.

Michael: Well, that’s what it turns out to be, is that he crossbred them himself.

Kat: Yeah.

Eric: See, I must have forgotten that particular note, [that] fact.

Michael: Yeah, it comes out in the interview, that he crossbred them from manticores and fire crabs, which…

Eric: Oh.

Michael: Without the approval of the Ministry.

Eric: Yeah, I was going to say, some things just shouldn’t be stuck together.

Teague: That’s what I’m saying about Jurassic Park, you guys.

Michael: Yeah.

[Kat laughs]

Michael: But when has he really been… again, he got himself a dragon because he thought it would be cool, even though the Ministry is clearly not okay with that. And so he doesn’t really think things through in that way.

Eric: “We have a T-rex.”

Teague: That would be an interesting breeding session to see.

Michael: Yeah.

Kat: Oh, lord.

Eric: And MuggleNet Fan Fiction is alive and well.

[Kat laughs]

Michael: Prodding them with his umbrella.

[Everyone laughs]

Eric: Oh, gosh.

Kat: fanfiction.mugglenet.com.

Eric: “Come on, you two.” [laughs] “You know you want to.”

Michael: “Come on. Have at it, you.”

Eric: “Compliment her on her looks – you know she looks nice tonight.” [laughs] As if Hagrid has any fashion sense. But essentially, after Care of Magical Creatures Class, they have Divination. Harry and Ron essentially just laugh their way through it. It’s really relaxing; it’s meant to underscore, again, that Harry and Ron are friends again. I wouldn’t say too much happens…

Kat: I picked up on a really interesting bit in the Divination class, actually.

Eric: Ooh, go on.

Kat: If you don’t mind me bringing it up.

Eric: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Kat: So at the bottom of page 372 in the US edition, they’re talking about… Trelawney is, of course, predicting death. It’s coming closer and closer, as always.

Eric: And Lavender and Parvati are just hands over their mouth, right?

Kat: Oh my God, right. And, of course, she’s staring at Harry, and Harry was like, “Listen, I’d be more impressed if she hadn’t done it about 80 times before.” And the quote is, “But if I dropped dead every time she’s told me I’m going to, I’d be a medical miracle.” And Ron says, “You’d be a sort of extra concentrated ghost.” And I wondered if that was true.

Eric: Is Harry an extra concentrated ghost?

Kat: No! If somebody kept continually coming back to life and dying, would their level of ghostliness be affected? Are you a cumulative ghost every time you die?

Eric: I would argue that you have a choice when you die, assuming you’re not coming back… see, Harry screwed this all up because he had a choice to either die or not. But I think you can only be any kind of ghost, strong or weak or anything, after you’ve died and aren’t coming back. Say you’re in this afterlife purgatory plain and you don’t go toward the white light – okay, you get to be a ghost. But if you choose to come back, take the train back into the real world, I don’t think you can be any kind of ghost.

Michael: Yeah, I…

Kat: Even if you die again?

Eric: Well, the trouble is also with Horcruxes because you can actually divide your soul up so that it’s not all in your body, which is weird too. All of it is still on the earth, but it’s not all in your body, so there is that, the fact that your soul can kind of flake off.

Michael: The real trouble is that we don’t have a precedent for… in the Muggle world, we have people who were legally dead or medically dead for two minutes and then came back. We don’t know of any of that happening in the Potter world. All we know is that you can’t come back from death, so the fact that really Harry is the only person who does that, who dies later… spoilers, I guess…

[Kat and Michael laugh]

Michael: … if anybody is listening to this show and hasn’t read the whole series.

Kat: Whoops.

Michael: Sorry.

Teague: Dumbledore kills Snape.

[Everyone laughs]

Kat: Okay, Sheldon.

Michael: But then there’s also… really the only precedent we have for that kind of thing – dying and coming back over and over again – is Fawkes, and because he dies and comes back over and over again there’s never going to be an opportunity for him to be a ghost because he will always resurrect, as far as we know.

Teague: It’s like Groundhog Day.

Eric: Very, very interesting, Kat.

Kat: Well, something to ponder.

Teague: But wait, hold on. Wait, Kat, I’ve got one for you.

Kat: Got an answer?

Teague: What if I split off my soul into Horcruxes, but then I get a soul back? So I’ve got like one seventh of my soul and then my bodily form dies. Am I one seventh as opaque as a normal ghost would be?

Kat: That’s the question. I don’t know, man.

Michael: Well, according to Voldemort – later in this very book, actually – when that exact thing happens to him, what’s left of his soul when his body is destroyed is less than a ghost, not more.

Eric: “I was less than a ghost. I was less than the weakest breeze off the eastern seaboard.”

Teague: So there you go, he would be however many you divided it into, that fraction of the opacity of a ghost. Or it’s funny to imagine maybe it’s just a size thing, like he’s just a little short ghost. I don’t know.

[Kat laughs]

Michael: And ultimately, the whole point is that nobody could die as much [laughs] as Trelawney predicts that Harry will die.

Eric: Yes! Yes, it’s absolutely true and the amount of time that she spends gazing in front of these crystals and balls – or at least, says she does – but I really think she does. It’s unfortunate considering she only yields in her life two great predictions.

Teague: Yeah, well.

Eric: That we’re aware of.

Teague: She’s doing better than Nostradamus.

Michael: Yeah, exactly. It’s like, the impression I get from other people’s reactions to Divination is that her track record…

Teauge: She’s like the Miss Cleo?

Michael: … is still well above average for a seer.

Eric: Mmm. Good point. Now I feel a little bit better about poor, old Sybill.

[Michael laughs]

Eric: But… so Harry and Ron, they come down from Divination, it’s nice to get fresh air after one of those classes, and they’re getting back to the dormitory. They whisper – or they don’t whisper – they say the password. They’re about to go in, but Hermione comes running up behind them and says, “Harry! You have to come! It’s really important!” And pulls these guys back downstairs. The Fat Lady’s a little indignant because they made her open for nothing. But we don’t know what’s going to happen. Hermione’s just come storming up behind them. So I don’t know, it had been a while since I had read this and really, what did you guys think? I thought she was a little too urgent about what it is that she’s doing. She just wants to show them Winky? Is that it?

Michael: No, I think she wants to show them Dobby.

Kat: Dobby! Yeah.

Eric: Oh, yeah?

Kat: I think it’s legitimate.

Michael: They didn’t know Dobby was there.

Kat: Yeah.

Eric: Okay. Huh. Yeah, all right. Well, then it’s Dobby, then…

[Eric and Kat laugh]

Eric: … that she wants to take them to see. But she does. They go down the stairs and they actually wind up in the lower – I think they walk through the Great Hall. They take a path that Harry just doesn’t take too often, but Hufflepuffs probably take it everyday, to this painting of this bowl of fruit and they know from the common room party when Fred – or was it George? – told, I think it was, told Hermione how to gain access to the kitchens, that there’s this bowl of fruit, it’s a painting, and you have to tickle the pear. And this is like obligatory genius moment for Jo. I think it’s the cutest thing ever.

Kat: Mhm.

Eric: Maybe I’ve said that twice before already on this episode, but whatever. I don’t care. This pear in this bowl of fruit, if you tickle it…

[Kat makes tickling sounds]

Eric: … it squirms and then it begins to chuckle and then, it grows into a doorknob, which you can turn to gain access to the kitchens.

Kat: [laughs] I love it!

Eric: So this is…

Michael: Question.

Eric: This, if nothing else, solidifies Hogwarts as the place where I want to be living.

Michael: The real question is how did the twins figure that out?

Eric: Mmm.

Teague: Oh, they just do that.

[Kat laughs]

Michael: They just go around tickling paintings?

[Eric laughs]

Kat: I bet the Marauder’s Map told them.

Michael: Oh, maybe, yeah.

Eric: Hmm.

Kat: Much like the witch’s hump.

Michael: Well, then how did the Marauders figure that out? They go around tickling… it’s like… there’s an eventual recursion where somebody is going around tickling all the paintings to see what happens.

[Eric laughs]

Kat: Well, the Marauders said that they got a lot of their information for the Map from past generations. So…

Michael: Oh.

Eric: Mhm.

Kat: I would assume that it was… yeah, but you’re right. Somebody at some point went around, tickled paintings. It’s very true.

Eric: [laughs] Maybe they saw house-elves do it. Maybe that’s just…

Michael: Oh, maybe.

Teague: It’s good work if you can find it, I’m just saying.

[Kat laughs]

Eric: You observe… I’m sure house-elves can get in there without tickling the pear, though. That’s just the human entrance.

Kat: Well, they can Apparate inside Hogwarts through their own form of Apparition.

Eric: Yeah, their own form of Apparition, right.

Kat: Right.

Eric: But they go into the kitchens and Harry is immediately tackled – well, not tackled, I mean, Dobby’s a little bit smaller than him – by Dobby!

Kat: Dobby!

Eric: Dobby the house-elf! “Hello Mr. Potter!” Really, really excited to see Harry. So it’s a reunion of friends, everybody.

Kat: [as Dobby] “Harry!”

Teague: I would be psyched.

Eric: It’s true. And we… so the kitchens are full of house-elves and these tables, they’ve got these tables. All the walls are lined with cookware and the tables span this kitchen area, almost are identical to the ones directly above them, which is in the Great Hall where everybody feasts. So Harry assumes in the way that once you’ve been around magic for four years, you can get a better insight in to how things are happening. He says, “Well, basically that the food is prepared on these tables and then it just is levitated up or is somehow just transferred almost directly above where it is resting.” So he has that insight in to it. The house-elves do have uniforms, but I think they’re all still pretty scantily dressed. I think it’s like a toga.

Kat: Little togas, yeah.

Eric: Togas, yeah. They have the Hogwarts crest on them, but…

Michael: They necessarily have to be because otherwise they’d have been freed, which only Dobby is cool with.

Eric: So is it like you either have to have a choice of keeping your house-elf naked or giving it – or not even giving it – but letting it pick a rag or something, for it – in order for it to still be bound by the master-servant relationship?

Michael: Yeah, I think if you… it seems to me that if you… as long as it is not an article that is meant to be thought of as clothing, it’s okay. So Dumbledore could hand them all…

Eric: So that’s why they’re wearing obscure stuff all the time.

Michael: Yeah. He could hand them all towels with the Hogwarts crest or something and they can fashion it into a toga, but he could not actually create something that was fitted to house-elves because then that would be clothing.

Eric: Because I’m trying to think of… what’s Hepzibah Smith’s house-elf? Is it Hooky? Hokey?

Kat: Hokey.

Eric: Hokey. I’m wondering what Hokey is wearing. I have to read that chapter again, in Book 6, of course. But I think that… you’d think that the more important families would have a more uppity-looking, upper-class-looking house-elf. I’m thinking of a butler with a tie, but if you give them clothing, of course, they’re free. So that’s very interesting analysis there, I think, on your part.

Michael: There’s also the possibility with the higher-end families, if the Malfoys are any indication, that it’s also potentially a symbol of status for how shabby you can keep your house-elf looking, in a sense.

Eric and Kat: Mhm.

Michael: To create more of a separation between yourself and your servant, maybe.

Kat: Hokey, for the record, is wearing a linen sheet as a toga.

Eric: Oh my gosh.

Teague: Me too, by the way.

Eric: So really nobody dresses their house-elves. This is a thing! You can’t!

Kat: It’s a Greek system. They all wear togas all over the place.

Eric: [laughs] It’s a Greek system. Well, I didn’t realize that that was why they were always wearing things that I don’t even know what it is, like a tea cozy. I’ve never used a tea cozy in my life, I’m sure.

Kat: It’s a doily.

Eric: I don’t… okay, a dooly? That kind of sounds…

Kat: Wait, what did you say?

Eric: Doily?

Teague: Again, man!

Eric: Is that a Boston thing? Doily.

Michael: You said “dooly” the first time.

Kat: Yeah, you said “dooly.”

Eric: Dooly?

Teague: I guess that’s just something that…

Eric: I’m from a place where we say that. Thank you, Michael.

Teague: No, that’s just a place where a bunch of people’s last name is “Dooly,” that’s the thing.

Eric: Yeah. Yeah, but…

[Kat laughs]

Teague: [in a fake Boston accent] Hey, Dooly!

Eric: Well anyway, I think that’s really interesting and there are a bunch of other house-elves, Dobby included. Dobby has a tale to tell. Apparently, he’s only just arrived at Hogwarts maybe a week or two ago and the reason is he’s been searching, he says, the entire country. He says he’s spent two years going around the country looking for a job. And we know that this is 1994 from the extended calendar of events, so the economy should be a little bit better in the books than what it is. But the issue is that Dobby wants paying and this is apparently such an issue of contention that there’s not even this jolly old fellow running a boarding house or something in Kirk that says, “I’ll pay you just so that you work for me.” Nobody wants him. Nobody wants Dobby. Yeah. Nobody wants Dobby because he wants paying and this is something that we’re led to believe was an issue for two years for Dobby.

Kat: Poor Dobby.

Eric: I mean, he’s all cheers about it. And it’s a little bit funny because we find out that when he does find payment at Hogwarts, it’s for a tenth of what he was offered. [laughs] And so here’s the situation. Dobby found Dumbledore. Actually, Dobby found Winky and then they were looking for a place together and Dobby said, “Well, why not Hogwarts? We know they have house-elves, that sort of thing.” So Dobby… and this is one of the conversations that I would love for Jo to write out in charity, like how she did the motorcycle piece with Sirius Black and them.

Kat: Mmm!

Eric: I would love to see Dobby coming here because we hear these snippets from Dobby’s mouth as he’s telling Harry Potter that, basically, he showed up and he asked to work at Hogwarts and Dumbledore offered him… here’s what the initial pay was offering. First of all, it’s rude to ask people what they get made, what they… I learned this as a child. You’re not supposed to ask people what they get paid, but apparently the trio doesn’t have any problem doing that. It turns out that Dumbledore was going to pay Dobby ten Galleons a week – ten Galleons a week! – and offer him weekends off. Dobby, of course… this was far above Dobby’s expectations. Dobby settled for one Galleon a week, and one night off – or one day off – a month. So it’s quite a bit less, but it’s still so much more that Dobby is seen as reckless and basically, as… it’s an interesting thing is happening when the trio’s here because these house-elves are offering them all food and treats and stuff, but apart from the actual physical transaction that is required to give them these treats, they’re keeping their distance from Dobby and they’re giving him these bad looks because he’s talking about this story of accepting payment and they just can’t fathom it.

Kat: And I wanted to say I did the conversion and thats about 50 pounds, 50 British pounds. About 100 dollars.

Eric: One Galleon or ten?

Kat: Ten.

Eric: Ten, okay. Is that factored in for inflation from 1994 to now?

Kat: No, that is just the conversion on the Lexicon.

Eric: Yeah. Well, it’s funny because Dumbledore is totally willing to pay Dobby when he asks for it.

Kat: That’s because Dumbledore is bad ass.

Eric: Well, it’s just… he knows what it’s… he doesn’t… he is bad ass. That would mean that he is the first person, the first employer in Britain, or the first man probably ever – let’s face it, he’s got a lot of firsts going for him – to actually pay a house-elf for their service.

Kat: Most likely, probably the first. Yeah.

Eric: And he just doesn’t care about it. I mean, he cares. He’s just like, “I want… this is the right path.” He’s a trendsetter. He’s starting this revolution and Hermione wishes she had done it.

Kat: It’s true.

Michael: But then again, it’s unlikely that there’s going to have to be too much of a revolution because Dobby is the only one who wants this and even as you pointed out, there’s a certain point where it terrifies him, the level of… the idea of being too much of a revolution. He’s like, “No, don’t pay me that much.”

[Eric and Michael laugh]

Michael: “Don’t do that.” That’s… he’s still got that aspect of house-elfing inside him. He’s just a little… he’s a little more of a rebel than the other house-elves are, but even he – there’s still the fact that he’s a house-elf and he can’t go that far. He can’t act like he’s a person or anything.

Eric: There’s an upper limit.

Michael: Yeah.

Eric: Yeah. That’s a good point. So with Dobby is Winky and she is just a mess. I try and read this without being like, “Oh brother” or “Oh my God,” and they have some dialogue together and it is important, but Winky at this point in her fragile little life is just very upset that she was let go by Mr. Crouch. And really, what we learn – what the trio learns – is that the house-elves are still not really able to – after being dismissed – that they’re still not able to really speak down against their master. Winky simply won’t, but actually in the case of Dobby, he tries. He says, “Oh yeah, I can tell you now that the Malfoys were bad wizards, yeah. I can tell you that.” And then, he has to go and hit his head on the desk. Even though he thought he was going to be safe, he still can’t do it. So it really just… in this fit of rage – and Winky is sobbing on the floor, her head is hitting the stones, it’s ridiculous – but we really learn just how enslaved these house-elves are. It’s a very interesting setting for it to be taking place as they prepare tomorrow’s breakfast or whatever, but there really just are so many layers to this house-elf problem, as shown in this scene.

Michael: Right. And I would say that Dobby punishing himself, that’s more… I don’t think that’s an enchantment that remains on him. I think he just doesn’t… he’s not psychologically capable of thinking that he doesn’t have to do that if he is a bad elf.

Eric: Was it ever an enchantment?

Michael: Probably not. That’s really, probably, a good point. It was probably just that’s the way house-elves are…

Teague: Conditioning.

Michael: Yeah, conditioned.

Eric: Hmm, like…

Michael: So he hasn’t really broken that condition. And that’s a real thing, not to bring it down or anything, but that is a real thing that happens to people…

Eric: Mhm.

Michael: … if you condition them like that. So it makes sense that he would have trouble only two years later and not having that many opportunities or anyone guiding him out of it, deprogramming him, so to speak, that he would still be stuck doing that. And like you say, it’s a very interesting and surprising examination of this ugly side of the wizarding world that to come in this context.

Teague: Well, it’s trauma psychology and also classism.

Michael: Yeah.

Teague: I mean, it’s Downton Abbey, is what it is.

Michael: [laughs] Yeah. It’s true.

Eric: Mhm. I still have to see that show.

Kat: Downton Elfy.

Eric: Downton… [laughs]

Teague: Downton Dobby!

Eric and Teague: Downton Dobby!

Teague: We’re doing it!

Michael: And by the way, I also want to point out that I thought it was funny in this scene, like you said, they’re preparing the breakfast. I think it’s funny that even in the wizarding world, there is an element of illusion and magic trick that goes on. It’s not like the food actually just appears. There are people behind the curtain working tirelessly to get it there.

Kat: Yes! [laughs]

Eric: Oh, no!

Teague: Like a Disney cruise or something.

Michael: Yeah.

Eric: Are the house-elves like the midi-chlorians of the Harry Potter world? They’re just behind everybody.

Michael: Yeah. Well, they’re the stagehands. Like there’s the… Dumbledore’s the magician. He goes up and he goes, “Okay! Let’s eat!” and the stuff just appears, but he’s got all these little assistants behind the scenes waiting to…

Teague: Open a trap door.

Michael: … pull the levers and yank on the trap door and stuff to make him look really good.

Kat: That’s cute.

Michael: Even though he really is a wizard and really is a magician…

Kat: He…

Michael: … there’s a magic trick going on too.

Kat: And this reinforces the fact that Dumbledore is the damn puppet master of the world. There it is.

Eric: Well, I think the onus is on the house-elves because if all they have to do is go up to him and ask for payment and they’ll get more payment than their little minds could possibly imagine, they’ve just got to go do that. I think Dumbledore would employ every one of his house-elves if they asked.

Kat: Of course he would.

Teague: But they would never ask.

Eric and Michael: Yeah.

Eric: It’s convenient, isn’t it? [laughs] It’s like the school governor’s working on the budget and they’re like, “The potential for house-elves to ask for payment budget: Hmm, we can probably nix that. That’s not going to happen.”

Michael: Yeah. However house-elves came into being, however they were created, they were created to be subservient like this, and they like being subservient like this. Dobby is the exception. And that’s something that Hermione is really the only one who is properly horrified by.

Eric: Yeah. I would agree with that. This whole time Ron is saying, “This food is great!”

Kat: “Good service.”

Michael: Yeah.

Eric: [laughs] “Great service. A1. A1. A+ service. I’m giving a great review on Yelp.

[Everyone laughs]

Kat: Five Michelin stars.

[Everyone laughs]

Eric: But we do learn – from Winky in particular – that her mother and her mother’s mother were also house-elves for the Crouches, and so it is a family lineage thing. The Crouches must be one of those old families that we read about on family trees and that.

Kat: They are. Weren’t they named as one of the Pureblood families on Pottermore?

Eric: I would certainly assume so if they have a house-elf because to even get one is a pretty big deal.

Kat: I think they were. I think they were on that list.

Eric and Michael: Yeah.

Michael: And that’s why it would have been a huge deal for the disgrace of… those kinds of houses are the ones who are most concerned with honor and disgrace, and that’s why it would have been a big deal for Barty Crouch’s son to have disgraced the family.

Teague: Yeah. It’s like the Cameron’s dad of all the wizarding families.

Michael: [laughs] Yeah.

Teague: Ferris Bueller Cameron’s dad. Like, God, that’s just the most bummer of a house to be in.

[Michael laughs]

Teague: Just imagine how they treat the help!

Eric: Man, Winky drove the car through the garage. She’s the one that feels disgraced, though, instead of it being Barty Crouch Jr., it’s Winky now, and this is why she’s a wreck. We’re witnessing this emotional terrorism of society onto Winky, and she’s really not able to cope. She’s not able to do it, and she’s here in the kitchens not getting paid just because she hasn’t opened her mind to it yet, and she’s really just very, very, very, very upset about being dismissed. And when Hermione says that she saw Crouch recently, her eyes lift up and you see her be all cool for a moment. But the chapter ends… it gets a little suspicious because Hermione tells Winky that, yes, Crouch is coming to the castle. He’s judging the games, and Mr. Bagman is with him. And Winky begins to say that Mr. Bagman is a bad man. Make of that what you will.

Michael: I can’t remember why that turns out.

Eric: I can’t either. Is this the life-changing… I’m sure it’s the pivotal moment in this entire book is why Mr. Bagman is a bad dude.

Michael: Yeah. Well, there’s also – I honestly can’t remember – I’m sure it was explained later – but it’s also potentially just Winky’s perspective.

Eric: Mhm.

Michael: She sees from Crouch talking about him and maybe it’s just because he doesn’t have the proper amount of discretion, or he was accused of being a Death Eater at one point…

Teague: Or it could just be because it’s Winky’s personality that we’re filtering this through…

Michael: Yeah.

Teague: It could be that at one point Bagman said anything unkind, and her blind, sort of slavish adherence to the Crouch-is-God sort of paradigm is just…

Michael: Yeah.

Teague: Oh, he’s a bad man. He didn’t…

Eric: I think Crouch talks about him like he’s a bad man.

Kat: Yeah, I’m just… I was just…

Teague: I just feel like Winky could have seen him do some minor social faux pas and never have forgotten it.

Eric: [laughs] Social faux pas because Winky’s up on those, yes.

Kat: Yeah, I was just reading up on him on the Wiki while you guys were just talking about it, and basically that’s what it says. It basically says that Ludo was friends with Augustus Rookwood, who was a Death Eater. Nobody really believed him that he didn’t know Rookwood was a Death Eater, and that’s how he ended up getting a job at the Ministry was through Rookwood, so I think it’s a little bit of all of that.

Teague: Yeah, Crouch just never trusted him.

Kat: Crouch tried to put Bagman in Azkaban but it never really happened, and then he got a job at the Ministry, and…

Eric: Gosh, now they’re side by side, prime candidates for the judging of the Triwizard Tournament.

Kat: Yeah, prime.

Michael: And of course the main reason for this whole thing, on a meta level, is to be a complete red herring for us as the readers, as to who might be behind all of this, the shenanigans going on and the plot that’s there to get at Harry.

Eric: Yeah, that’s a good point. We do get wrapped up in these chapters because there is a lot to discuss here, but we have to think about actual plot elements on a larger scale of this being a book, and about, reasonably, you should have other people to suspect. So it’s Jo trying to throw us off the scent.

Kat and Michael: Yeah.

Kat: And putting someone besides Karkoroff in the line of fire.

Eric: That’s a very good point.

Kat: Okay, so this week’s Podcast Question of the Week was a very good collaborative one here. It’s a little deep, it’s a little… I think it will make you think. We’ll see. So of course it’s about the house-elves, the namesake of this chapter. And our question to you is: In this chapter, the trio, as we know, visits the kitchens for the first time. They find Dobby and Winky, who are both still powerfully restricted from being truly free of their former masters, either by conditioning or by magic. Ron “loves the service in the kitchens,” but Hermione, of course, is reacting really strongly to the situation, and we’re wondering, is she right to be reacting so strongly to the situation? The rest of the house-elves – the Hogwarts elves, rather – don’t side with either Winky or Dobby. They just keep to their work. So how are we meant to take the elf situation in the Harry Potter books? Is it more disgraceful that Dobby and Winky are in their situation, being “free”, and either enjoying it or severely disliking it? Or that the house-elves are looking down on them for acting out? I know it’s a complex question, but…

Eric: You’ll be able to see it in print on our Alohomora! website, which will help, we promise.

Kat: Yeah. But I’m interested to hear what you guys think about it. I think the SPEW and the house-elves are a hot button for a lot of people. So I think this should be good. I think it will be good.

Eric: I want to know what ArchdukeSeverus says, thinks.

Kat: Yeah. Or what was the one the we were making the beatbox…

Eric: Prongsandbowties.

Kat: No, the beatbox out of last week.

Eric: Oh, gosh. [laughs] I don’t remember.

Kat: [laughs] I don’t remember either. It was a good one though. But anyway. So, you know where to answer that question. It’s over at alohomora.mugglenet.com.

Eric: Well, we do want to give a super huge thank you to Teague Chrystie and Michael Scott for joining us. Thank you so much, gentlemen.

Teague: Thank you, guys. This was a lot of fun.

Michael: Yeah, thanks.

Kat: Yeah, absolutely. And we actually have a project coming up with you guys. Do you want to tell out listeners a little about that?

Teague: Sure. So our podcast, What Are you Doing, Movie?, which, there’s not a lot of podcasts with commas, but eh…

Michael: Punctuation [unintelligable]

Teague: What Are you Doing, Movie?, it’s a commentary show. We do commentaries for films, and we’ve done a 199 of them, which is talking about movies a lot, and for our 200th episode celebration thing – we tend to go all-out on milestone events: We did a marathon of all three extended Lord of the Rings at one point, we did a live show of Raiders of the Lost Ark at the Harris Theatre, and so on and so forth – and for our 200th we wanted to go all-out on it, and do a 24-hour-straight marathon of all eight Harry Potter films.

[Applause in the background]

Teague: Which, yeah…

Kat: Claps.

Teague: Oh, it’s going to be super, super cool. And the plan is, what we wanted to do was get the MuggleNet folks in it as much as possible. I mean, Eric held out on us, but Kat was there.

Eric: Hey, if you guys need any more room – if you have any room, I’d be happy to join you guys. I know it’s a little late.

Teague: You could take the L train all the way to LA.

Eric: There you go. [makes train whistle sound]

Teague: And what we’re going to do is – as we’re doing these commentaries for these movies, we discuss as they relate to the books and all those other things that will come up along the way – we’re also going to have all the podcasts hosts’, from the whole MuggleNet podcast family, reactions talking about how this movie was or that movie was and their thoughts on all that stuff. And all of this, in the service of raising money for Against Malaria Foundation. We don’t make a dime off of this. The whole thing is we’re going to think of it like a telethon, like a Jerry Lewis sort of thing, where what we’re going to end up doing is hoping that people will donate a couple bucks to the Against Malaria Foundation, and every single donation they throw in, 100% of it goes to buying these nets that they can hang in areas with carrier mosquitoes of malaria. Our goal is $10,000 worth of nets – I hope we do better than that – but at least $10,000, which will protect people in such a way – so many people for so many years, and so on and so forth – that if we just reached $10,000, those years of life saved would add up to 18,000.

Kat: Wow.

Teague: It would be 18,000 years of life saved. So we’re going to watch Harry Potter, we’re going to fight malaria with Harry Potter commentaries, you guys.

Michael: There have been other podcast that have done 24 hour charity events, which is just 24 hour livestreams and they’re doing it to raise money the entire time that they’re streaming, and we wanted to do that and the thing that was going to fill up about 24 hours was the Harry Potter series, and so that’s what we’re doing. So the goal is, like Teague said, to raise a minimum of $10,000, but I think, especially with the MuggleNet community joining us…

Teague: Coming out.

Michael:… and at our backs, we can far outpace that goal. And also, it’s worth noting that it’s not necessarily just a one-way conversation. We have a chat room that we pay a lot of attention to and will especially be paying a lot of attention to in the wee hours of the morning probably, when we need to get some suggestions. So it’s something that we’re aware of and that people can come out and not just watch but participate.

Teague: Yeah. We will have someone dedicated to reading the chat whenever someone says something particularly like, “Oh, great observation,” or “Funny,” that kind of stuff. We totally need people for that kind of thing because these conversations are all going to be really dense and we have to do 24 hours of them, and we don’t want to miss anything.

Michael: Yeah, so come join us!

Teague: Yeah! It’s on December 7 at noon, PST, which is…

Eric: Pearl Harbor Day!

Teague: Yeah, well, we wanted to change the infamy around a little bit.

[Eric laughs]

Teague: Make it something good y’all! And it’s 24 hours, so from noon PST on December 7 to noon PST on Sunday, for 24 hours straight. And you can learn more about all that stuff at our website, friendsinyourhead.com/potter, or you can also find all 199 episodes of What Are You Doing, Movie? and our other podcast as well, it’s a whole network of things.

Eric: That is just the best, friendsinyourhead.com. [laughs]

Teague: Thank you very much. [laughs] I’m proud of it. [laughs]

Kat: Potter fans are amazing so I wouldn’t be surprised if you very quickly surpassed that $10,000.

Teague: I hope so. Seriously, folks listening going, “Oh, that sounds cool.” Please, seriously post about it on Facebook and tell your friends about it.

Michael: And let’s keep it going the whole time.

Teague: It will be fun, it will be cool, and we really want to get a bunch of nets. That would be so cool if we could do that.

Michael: Yeah.

Kat: Yeah, our listeners are amazing, so we’re going to donate all that just on our own. So right, Alohomora! listeners? Right? Right?

Eric: Yeah.

Kat: They are all shaking their heads as they’re listening.

Teague: Please!

Eric: Maybe as a backup plan we could throw Movie 4 Dumbledore at the malaria.

[Teague laughs]

Eric: [as Dumbledore] “Did you put your name in the Goblet of Fire?”

Teague: An angry-Michael-Gambon-punching-Harry-Potter-in-the-face worth of the malaria nets, yeah.

Eric: [laughs] Yes.

Kat: There it is, kids. There it is.

Teague: Anyway, but definitely come out and hang out. It will be really cool. Once again, it’s friendsinyourhead.com/potter for all that info, and there’s a YouTube video with more information that you can share and seriously, please help?

Michael: It’s going to be a lot of fun.

Teague: Because getting the word out is always the hardest part of these things, and you guys would be our kings if you could help out with that.

Eric: I’m totally going to come into the chat and heckle you guys because I hate Movie 3. [laughs]

Teague: Do it!

Michael: Oh, come at us, bro.

Eric: Oh, oh, got it.

Kat: And we’ll put a link in the show notes, too, so there you go. So yeah, you guys should go listen to us on their show because you just listened to them on our show.

[Eric laughs]

Kat: And if you listening want to be on our show, you know how to do that. Go over to the “Be on the Show” page on alohomora.mugglenet.com. Of course you need to have appropriate audio equipment that includes a set of headphones, kids, keep that in mind. And in the meantime, subscribe to us and leave us a review on iTunes because we heart reviews. Thank you!

Eric: Yes. We heart reviews. There are many ways that you can get in touch with us as our listeners. You can tweet at us. We are on twitter.com/AlohomoraMN or facebook.com/openthedumbledore. You can write on our Facebook wall, share anything that you like or see, just catch up and see what chapter we are on, and all that stuff. You can, of course, call us. We have a hotline. It’s 206-GO-ALBUS – which is 206-462-5287 – and also we recently debuted a new service called Audioboo. You’ll be able to find the recording button – all you need to do is push it, it’s on the main page at alohomora.mugglenet.com and have your recording device plugged in – and you can leave us voice messages another quick and easy way, through Audioboo.

Kat: And, of course, our store – we’ll just remind you one more time – we have a ton of things: T-shirts, tote bags, sweatshirts, flip-flops, water bottles, travel mugs, and so much more. The Mandrake Liberation Front and the Desk!Pig shirts are now available, and actually the day that this episode releases, which is the Saturday after Black Friday, so November 30, everything is buy two, get free shipping anywhere in the US. So be sure to check that out, for sure. The code is on our Twitter, on our Facebook, on the website, it’s all over the place. There’s over 80 products to choose from, and then also the ringtones on our website, which are free, completely free, so download those. It’s a lot of fun to dance to our theme song when your phone rings.

[Eric laughs]

Kat: I’m just saying.

Michael: I need a Desk!Pig shirt. That sounds awesome. I’m going to check that out for sure.

[Eric laughs]

Kat: Yeah, you definitely should.

Eric: Also, we do have an Alohomora! app for the phone. You can find the information [for] that on the website. It is available seemingly worldwide. We always use this phrase “seemingly worldwide” because we get to hear from somebody who [says], “I can’t get the app!” So if you can’t, let us know, but if you can then you should. It is the Alohomora! app. You can find transcripts, bloopers, alternate endings for the episodes, host vlogs, and much more through the app.

Kat: [sings] Bum ba da ba!

Eric: Well, everybody, we want to thank you for listening.

[Show music begins]

Eric: I am Eric Scull.

Kat: And I’m Kat Miller. Thanks for listening to Episode 59 of Alohomora!

Eric: Open the Dumbledore by tickling the pear.

[Show music continues]

[Hosts begin beatboxing]

Michael: [rapping] Yo yo get my Dark V-mo. What’s your darkness? All I have to do is divine from what I know of you: Are you the sort of man who would put the poison into his own goblet or his enemy’s?

Kat: Mhm.

Michael: Now, a clever man would put the poison into his own goblet because he would know that only a great fool would drink from what he was given. I am not a great fool, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you. But you would have known I am not a great fool. You would have counted on it, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of me.

[Hosts continue beatboxing]

Michael: Awkward.