Transcripts

Transcript – Episode 63

[AudioFictions holiday show advertisement plays]

[Show music begins]

Caleb Graves: This is Episode 63 of Alohomora! for December 28, 2013.

[Show music continues]

Caleb: Hey everyone, welcome to our last episode of 2013. I’m Caleb Graves.

Michael Harle: I’m Michael Harle.

Kat Miller: I’m Kat Miller.

Noah Fried: And I’m Noah Fried.

Kat: How was everybody’s Christmas?

Michael: It was pretty good. How about yours?

Kat: Ah, excellente. Noah, I know you obviously do not have a Christmas, but did you have a good day yesterday?

Noah: It was an all right day. I haven’t had a Christmas in 23 years, Kat.

Kat: Well… I mean, that’s not true.

Noah: I mean, there are a couple of times, but for the most part, my descent does not allow me to enjoy the festivities as much.

Kat: Sure. I bet you still wear a Santa hat, though.

Noah: Oh, I would. In fact, I did. There was a party and I might have took on a few hats, but that’s for another podcast.

Kat: [laughs] Fair enough. Michael, did you have a good day?

Michael: Yes. Even though my family is Jewish, we celebrated with reckless abandon anyway.

[Caleb laughs]

Kat: See, that’s… good for you.

Michael: [laughs] We mostly…

Caleb: You guys have it… go ahead.

Michael: Oh, we mostly do it because my brother Charlie has autism, and he just gets Christmas a little better. So just lump all the presents in one day, and then he has a whole day to play with all his new toys and things. So it just works out better that way.

Caleb: Awesome.

Kat: Sure.

Caleb: You guys are really lucky, you get the best of both worlds. You get Hanukkah and Christmas.

Michael: [laughs] Well, we kind of do. I played Dreidel this year. I haven’t played Dreidel for a long time.

Noah: Michael, we should totally play Dreidel sometime.

[Caleb laughs]

Kat: I’ve never played Dreidel. That sounds fun.

Michael: Dreidel is fun.

Kat: All right, LeakyCon this summer we’ll play Dreidel.

Michael: [laughs] I’ll bring a Dreidel.

Kat: Everybody who comes to our live show bring a Dreidel…

[Michael laughs]

Kat: … and we’ll play. We’ll have a game of Dreidel.

Michael: Yeah, that would be awesome.

Noah: Me and Michael and Anthony Goldstein.

[Michael laughs]

Kat: Yes, Anthony Goldstein.

Caleb: Right.

Kat: Right.

Caleb: But it’s also… like I said, guys, it’s the end of 2013. That’s crazy.

Kat: Oh, it’s insane. I was just thinking about what we were doing this time last year, and we were watching… we had a live show just after Christmas last year, and I think it was for Chamber of Secrets.

Caleb: Yeah, that would make sense.

Kat: So that’s crazy that we’re still in the middle of Book 4 and it’s a year later.

[Everyone laughs]

Noah: It’s a big book.

Kat: Come next year, we’ll be on Book 5 – this time next year.

Caleb: Really? Wow, that’s insane.

Kat: Yup.

Caleb: But speaking of Book 4, before we get started we want to remind you guys to read Chapter 25, “The Egg and the Eye,” because that is what we will be discussing this episode.

Kat: But of course, as usual, before we jump into the new chapter this week, we’re going to recap some responses from last week. So our first comment here comes from the main site and it’s about unicorns, from Susan… what is that last name? Schutjes?

[Caleb, Kat, and Noah attempt to pronounce “Schutjes”]

Kat: Susan, spell it out phonetically for us.

[Caleb and Noah laugh]

Kat: That way we know how to say it so we don’t butcher it again, I apologize. But the comment says,

“Regarding the unicorns, there are myths in Europe that state that males have trouble catching unicorns, but a maiden can catch one because it will approach this maiden (a girl who is still a virgin) and lay its head in her lap. Then the unicorn can be caught.”

Which I didn’t know. I think that’s pretty cool.

Caleb: Mhm.

Kat: But Subjective Unicorn…

Caleb: How appropriate.

[Caleb, Michael, and Noah laugh]

Kat: Yeah, I thought so, too… [Subjective Unicorn] rebuts and says,

“I don’t know if you have noticed, but in Western European legends (mostly spread by Romans) unicorns are portrayed with goat-like hooves and goat-like features. Later their portrayal transforms into a creature mostly horse-like. I don’t remember Jo describing unicorns precisely in the books and was just wondering what kind of image she would take as a unicorn, the Medieval one or the contemporary one?”

Michael: Ooh, that’s interesting.

Caleb: I did not know that they looked like that. That’s interesting.

Kat: When I was researching them for the last episode, I didn’t go into it much but I definitely read a lot of stuff about the goat thing.

Noah: Well, isn’t goat imagery kind of tied to Satan? I don’t mean to bring in Satan, but the Devil has these goat horns and stuff. I mean, you wouldn’t get that in a unicorn at all, so I’m surprised to see that imagery associated with unicorns.

Kat: I know very little about religion so I cannot contribute to that.

Noah: Okay. Well, in any case I’m just going to bring up sex because I think I can here.

Caleb: Wow! We made such a jump there.

Michael: Wow.

[Everyone laughs]

Caleb: Satan to religion to sex…

Kat: Welcome back, Noah!

Michael: That escalated really quickly.

Noah: Why does the unicorn only come to girls who are virgins? It’s like something about its horn or…

Caleb: No!

Noah: No?

[Kat laughs]

Caleb: No. I know where you’re going and… the maiden and the virgin, that’s like a common thread in a lot of mythology. How am I trying to say this? Someone who presents no harm or danger, it’s just a stereotype of the…

Kat: Innocence?

Caleb: The symbolism of the maiden.

Noah: Right. So the unicorn goes to her because she is pure – pure of heart.

Caleb: Right.

Noah: The unicorn is the embodiment of pure and therefore [unintelligible] that women should be chased.

Kat: I mean…

Caleb: Well, not necessarily “should be” but…

Kat: In mythology, anyway.

Caleb: Yeah. Not necessarily there should be, there just are maidens so that’s why that comes up.

Kat: But what image of the unicorn do you think Jo is thinking of here?

Michael: Well…

Kat: We know that she writes goats into the books.

Michael: [laughs] I think basically… because I’ve got Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them here, and based on the description that Newt Scamander gives it sounds – and vaguely recalling the description in Sorceror’s Stone – I think she goes with the more modern interpretation of a unicorn.

Caleb: Yeah, I would think so.

Michael: And the movie definitely took that route. That’s not of course reliable info, but I think based on the descriptions we have in the book – they are vague, but it says here that “[t]he unicorn is a beautiful beast found throughout the forests of northern Europe. It is a pure white horned horse when fully grown, though the fowls are initially golden and turn silver before achieving maturity.” So yeah, she probably went with the classical interpretation, I’m thinking.

Kat: Ooh! I want to see a gold horse. How cool would that be?

[Michael laughs]

Kat: Like a pure gold… well, it’s a unicorn but it looks like a horse. That would just be so cool, I don’t know. So next, we have an Audioboo from Cassandra1447. We got a lot of slack about this last week so… just listen. We’ll talk about it when it’s over.

[Audio]: Hi, this is Sarah, more commonly known as Cassandra1447 on the forums, and I would like to defend Parvati Patil. First, Parvati has a very valid point. Hagrid does not do an effective job of teaching students how to deal with magical creatures, partly because he doesn’t teach a very broad range, also because he doesn’t have good organization, and because his lessons tend to scare them rather than inform them. Secondly, Parvati supports Trelawney for many of the same reasons that Harry and Ron support Hagrid, and they say that Hagrid is a good teacher despite the fact that I believe Harry really does know Hagrid is not an effective teacher. They support Hagrid because he’s their friend; Parvati supports Trelawney because she’s her friend. So you can’t say “Good job, Harry and Ron” for supporting Hagrid as a teacher while condemning Parvati for doing the exact same thing for the exact same reasons. And thirdly, Parvati is not weak. And I don’t appreciate the implication that she’s weak because she is girlish or because she is interested in more stereotypically girlish subjects than say, Ginny or Hermione. As we will see in later books, Parvati is a very strong character. In Order of the Phoenix she joins the DA and fights against Umbridge. In Half-Blood Prince she remains in solidarity with her house and fellow students at Hogwarts despite the fact her parents want to remove her from this dangerous situation. And in Deathly Hallows her parents’ worries are proven true when she has to endure a year under the Carrows and Snape. And in the final battle she fights Death Eaters quite successfully. She’s not a weak person. She simply has different interests that are more traditionally feminine than characters such as Ginny and Hermione.

Noah: Damn, Michael, what was that? What did you do last episode?

[Kat laughs]

Michael: I didn’t do it. I’m only taking partial responsibility for this. I was one of four! [laughs]

Caleb: Yeah.

Kat: That’s true, he was one of four.

Michael: But… there are a lot of points in her Audioboo, but the one that I want to bring up first is the one about Hagrid vs. Trelawney and how there’s the comparison that Harry’s defending Hagrid, so therefore we can’t congratulate Harry for doing that and then condemn Parvati for doing the same to Trelawney. I don’t know if it’s necessarily a fair comparison – in my opinion – and I know we all have different opinions on Hagrid.

[Noah laughs]

Michael: Poor Hagrid.

Noah: Yeah.

Michael: Last week I stated that while I do believe that Hagrid [laughs] has a lot of problems with how he teaches, my idea was that he should co-teach with Professor Grubbly-Plank, because I think together they would both be really good teachers because they both seem to have a sense of how to teach the class well. But Hagrid, I think, does have a good handle on the more dangerous creatures of the wizarding world and knows how to make his lessons interesting, for sure. And Grubbly-Plank at least is more aware of the safety precautions and she’s also more intrested in creatures that aren’t as crazy. And together I think they would balance out really nicely. Whereas [with] Trelawney, there really is not much to her class at all.

[Noah laughs]

Michael: There’s really no merit to what she teaches… I’m with Hermione on that. If I was in Divination, I would have dropped like Hermione after a while.

Noah: But Michael, what about the fact that Parvati and Lavender get special joy out of Trelawney’s class? So while the practice might not be real for every student, she is providing the service of being entertaining and getting kids engaged, which I think is one of the primary roles of any teacher. Whereas Hagrid just sets Blast-Ended Skrewts on them and only Harry, Ron, and Hermione are actually paying attention in class.

[Michael laughs]

Noah: So on some level, Trelawney is a better teacher than Hagrid.

Michael: Well, that’s not necessarily true that Harry, Ron, and Hermione are the only ones paying attention. There are other students who engage in the class. That’s been seen in other classes, so I don’t know if that’s necessarily [true]. You could say the same thing about the students who don’t pay attention in Trelawney’s class…

Noah: Yes.

Michael: … because a lot of them don’t. The interesting thing to bring up about Parvati and Lavender here, there was a panel at LeakyCon that I went to… interestingly it was about slash fan fiction, which I am not necessarily a fan of, but I wanted to see what they had to say about it. And they brought up something that is known in film circles as the Bechdel test. Do you guys know the Bechdel test?

Caleb and Kat: Yeah.

Michael: For those of you…

Kat: I think we just had a big post about it on the MuggleNet Blog, actually.

Michael: Oh! Okay. Well, actually for those… well, everybody should of already checked it out.

Caleb: I wrote an article about it on MuggleNet.

Noah: Well, I don’t know what it is, so if you guys could explain it for me… [laughs]

Michael: Oh, well, okay. The basics of the Bechdel test is that it is a requirement to see if a movie follows these three criteria, which is that it has to have at least two women in it who talk to each other and they have to talk about something other than a man. And we talked about this at that panel at LeakyCon and Harry Potter barely passes. Barely!

Noah: Oh no!

Michael: Because there are a few instances where female characters do talk to each other about something other than guys, but it is extremely rare and most of the time it is off-screen. Like Hermione will say, “Oh, Ginny and I were talking about blah, blah, blah,” but rarely does that occur. So I think Parvati and Lavender are prime examples of that, because while they do things… they definitely do fill in the student space. They’re there and they follow Harry, and they are definitely part of the war, for sure. But we don’t see a lot of that, aside from their parts in Order when they’re taking lessons from Harry and whatnot. And they don’t really have… I just feel like there’s not enough meat in the story to make them completely unique characters. They’re definitely individuals but there’s not a lot to them. You could say the same thing, I suppose, about Seamus and Dean. We don’t really get that much from them, but even Seamus gets a bigger role in Order of the Phoenix that kind of defines him.

Kat: Right.

Michael: So I guess it depends on how deep you want to define what makes a unique, strong female character. Because we’ve all got different opinions about that in Harry Potter at least.

Caleb: Yeah, when you talk about what a strong female is, that in itself is really difficult to…

Noah: Define…

Caleb: … flesh out. Because there are different types of ways that women, just like men, can be strong. And I think it just definitely struck a chord with a lot of people because it wasn’t just this Audioboo.

Noah: No.

Caleb: There were these comments… well, I wouldn’t say so much in the forums, definitely on the main site. A lot of people were very… I guess offended is safe to say – they were pretty upset by it. And I can kind of… I think they may have taken y’all’s comments a little farther then what you guys had intended. Because I think we – at least I – would be firm in saying that I do not think Parvati is weak at all. I agree, Michael, that she and Lavender are not as fleshed out as some characters are. And there are some quirks about her just like there are other characters, but I wouldn’t call her weak by any means.

Kat: Yeah, I think what it comes down to is that we – like you were saying – just don’t know them well enough.

Caleb: Mhm.

Kat: And I think that maybe just the perception of what we think we know about them is what is perceived as weak or not strong or whatever, because look at the people we do know who we’re comparing them to.

Michael: Definitely.

Kat: We’re talking about McGonagall, Luna, Ginny, and Hermione, and they’re all characters…

Caleb: We get to see their shining moments.

Michael: Yes.

Kat: Right. They’re all characters that we know really well, and we don’t know [Parvati and Lavender] as well, so I think the perception of them is that they’re just these silly girls who gossip. That’s probably not true.

Michael: Mhm. Yeah, and we’re just coming off of a major section of the book where that’s kind of the only focus – teenagers being teenagers.

Kat: Right. Dances and balls and boyfriends…

Michael: Exactly. So we haven’t even gotten to that point where these guys really get to show off their stuff with anybody, because we’ve really just been taking a teenage break for a while.

Kat: So it could really be argued to say at this point of the book, we know so little about them that maybe they are weak. Maybe it takes something like Dumbledore’s Army to make them realize what’s really important in life. [pause] No?

Caleb: Right. That’s true.

Michael: I think that’s a fair analysis just because there really hasn’t been… for everybody outside of Harry, Ron, and Hermione, there really isn’t… especially for the students, there really isn’t that much conflict in there. Nobody’s really thinking about war because Voldemort’s not at the forefront of everybody’s mind.

Kat: Especially because they’re both half-blood, right? So they wouldn’t have been affected in the Chamber of Secrets.

Michael: Mhm.Kat: So they literally have had nothing to worry about since they’ve been at Hogwarts.

Caleb: Yeah. You know…

Kat: Except for the rabbit dying. Oh, but wait, that’s not even for another year and a half, so never mind.

Caleb: Yeah. And before we leave the comments, I do want to just touch on the whole discussion about Hagrid in this sense and whether Hagrid’s a great teacher or a bad teacher. It was kind of passed over but listening to last week’s episode, Gina’s point about Hagrid’s teaching was really, really great and something I had not thought about, how he tried to do bigger things with the Thestrals. Probably if the thing with Malfoy had not happened, then the students wouldn’t have thought of Thestrals as “monsters” like Parvati calls things other than unicorns after this lesson with Grubbly-Plank. I think Hagrid… and I have a lot of problems with Hagrid, so don’t get me wrong, but I think he has the misfortune [that] every time he tries something different, something throws him off, and it’s not necessarily his fault. One is Malfoy screwing up his hippogriff lesson. Here we have Rita Skeeter blowing stuff up for what he’s trying to do now. Although the mixed breeding is probably pretty questionable since that’s…

[Kat laughs]

Caleb: … not really legal. But I think… I mean, Hagrid has a lot of problems, but I think his ability to try to grow as a teacher and do things are thwarted by things he doesn’t really have control over.

Noah: Yeah.

Kat: And it’s funny because one of the comments that I put in here this week is from MartinMiggs from the forums, and he basically says exactly everything that you just said. That Hagrid is a great teacher and really, that Hagrid’s classes aren’t really any more dangerous than anything else at Hogwarts, that they’re interesting and… so I would agree with that.

Caleb: Yeah.

Kat: Completely.

Caleb: I didn’t realize I was getting ahead of myself, so…

Michael: No, no. That was was perfect.

Kat: No, no, you weren’t at all. It was perfect.

Noah: Well, those classes are more dangerous than History of Magic unless you’re…

Michael: Every class is more dangerous than that class.

Noah: … the dangers… [laughs] yeah.

Caleb: Yeah.

[Michael laughs]

Noah: Unless you’re scared of falling into comatose or something because you can’t focus. [laughs]

Kat: I wonder how many people pass that class.

Caleb: History of Magic?

Kat: Mhm.

Caleb: Man, that’s a good question.

[Michael laughs]

Kat: I sure as heck wouldn’t.

Noah: Hermione does.

Kat: I mean, I don’t enjoy history and then… never mind. Ugh, that would be nap time.

[Michael and Noah laugh]

Kat: I mean, personally.

Caleb: Yeah.

Kat: And just… so I want to wrap up with this one last comment. This one’s actually kind of funny. It’s from Olivia Underwood on our main site…

[Michael laughs]

Kat: … and it’s about Cedric and his advice. So it says,

“That advice scene in GoF with Cedric and Harry was awkward, and in my fan fic mind, I imagined Cedric was in fact a closet gay and was actually crushing on Harry (that’s my imagination flying around).”

[Michael laughs]

Caleb: I think a lot of people thought that way. Especially in the movie.

Kat: Yeah, I mean…

Noah: It’s just something about him.

Caleb: I mean, safe to say, it’s kind of a homoerotic moment with Cedric and Harry there in the movie.

Kat: Especially because it’s Robert Pattinson, and he’s very feminine.

Caleb: Flamboyant.

[Michael laughs]

Kat: Yes, very… yeah.

Noah: Well, just think about what they’re talking about. Cedric is like, “Oh, go check out our prefects’ bath and all of our great shampoos and bubbles and that.”

Kat: Right.

Caleb: Well, really, we should just be taking this moment to be thankful that the Hogwarts students are actually bathing.

Kat: Bathing, yeah, right, exactly.

Noah: [laughs] But only this one time.

Kat: Right, and if he had said the line and then threw a wink in at the end, there you go.

[Noah laughs]

Caleb: Yeah.

Noah: Which would have been really confusing with the fact that Harry is so jealous of him with Cho.

Caleb: Yeah.

Kat: That’s true.

Noah: It could be so misconstrued.

Kat: Oh, man, this could be a good fan fic. Olivia, I say you run with it.

Michael: Oh, I’m sure it’s already out there. [laughs]

[Noah laughs]

Kat: Oh, I’m sure it is.

Michael: [laughs] That shouldn’t take too much searching.

[Kat and Michael laugh]

Kat: Yeah, there'[re] probably a lot of those.

[Michael laughs]

Kat: Again, especially because it’s Robert Pattinson.

Caleb: Right.

Kat: Whatever the appeal is there. Sorry. Team Jacob.

[Michael laughs]

Noah: So now I think it’s a good time to move into responses from the Podcast Question of the Week from last week. So just to reiterate the question, “In this chapter…” – the last chapter – “… we learn a lot about Hagrid, his backstory, and even his parents. Now, we have all likely had this conversation with friends, but we want to expand on this a bit. We are wondering how Hagrid s parents came together. What attracted them to each other? How did they meet? Did they fall in love? And of course, how did Hagrid come to be?” So that is a very interesting question. I myself have been thinking about this for… ever since I heard he was a half-giant. We have one response from Olivia Underwood:

“Perhaps Hagrid’s father was saved by Fridwulfa from some centaurs in a dense forest somewhere, and she refused to let him leave without repaying her.”

That’s kind of interesting.

Michael: Oh!

[Kat laughs]

Noah: That’s one way.

Caleb: Yikes! I feel slightly uncomfortable.

[Kat laughs]

Noah:

“Perhaps she secretly liked gentle, subtle things and hated being stereotyped as a rough, insensitive giant with no feelings. Perhaps the giant community was a rough place at the time, just as dismissive about interbreeding as the wizarding world, and she knew that if they found out about Hagrid or his father they would kill them, so she pretended to hate them in order to make them leave.”

Umm.

Kat: Wow.

Noah: So a lot of these comments seem to paint the mother… Fridwulfa? Is that the right pronunciation?

Kat and Michael: Mhm.

Caleb: Yeah.

Noah: … as this sort of outcast giant who’s a bit softer, more gentle, which makes sense. I didn’t see too much evidence of that in the books, of her being very different than other giants in that capacity, but maybe that’s sort of a logical jump given that she would be with a human.

Kat: Well, but the only real reference we get [of] her after this chapter is when… I think it’s Hermione in Book 5 [who] asks about his mother, and Hagrid says, “Dead,” and that’s it, so I assume that that’s probably true. And here we go getting into weak females, she was probably a weaker female giant and just bit the dust.

Caleb: Well, weaker in what… I mean, what do you mean by weaker?

Noah: We keep saying “weak” but could we…

Caleb: That’s a loaded word.

Noah: What would constitute a weak woman in this series?

Kat: Not strong giant. How’s that?

[Michael laughs]

Noah: Well, I mean, yes, she is definitely…

Caleb: So do you mean more she’s not one of the alpha females?

Kat: Yes, there you go.

Caleb: [Not] the bigger of the group, can’t assert herself physically as much?

Kat: Yeah.

Noah: That seems to be what the commenters are saying.

Caleb: Okay. Yeah, I buy that.

Kat: Yeah.

Noah: So all right, so within the context of giants, she is perhaps a weak woman, but that works for Hagrid’s father, presumably. Another comment from PixieDragon137:

“I was kind of thinking along the same lines. But I viewed their relationship as being more like (feel free to crack up here) King Kong and Ann Darrow.”

Kat: Oh, Lord.

Noah: [continues]

“Perhaps as WatchSky181 said, Hagrid inherited his father’s passion for dangerous creatures, and this might have ignited his father’s interest in Fridwulfa when they met. Maybe he found the same majestic beauty in her as Hagrid finds in the most dangerous creatures. And as for how they fell in love, I believe that initially Fridwulfa must’ve been attracted to Hagrid’s father because he’s a wizard and because giants love a bit of magic. And perhaps over time, as they got closer, they learned to live with each other as [a] couple.”

Kat: Okay.

Noah: Okay.

Kat: I mean, that’s a point I had never thought of, that giants do love magic. That makes sense.

Caleb: Yeah, that’s good. That’s good, yeah.

Noah: But how much do they love magic?

[Michael laughs]

Caleb: Well, I don’t know if they ever really found a way to live as a couple.

Kat: Yeah, this seems like a one-off kind of thing.

Caleb: Yeah.

Noah: So maybe she just cornered him in a field somewhere.

Caleb: Well, maybe not necessarily a one-off, but it definitely didn’t work. If they tried to make it work it didn’t work.

Noah: I feel like that’d be really tough to make work.

Caleb: Yeah.

Kat: Well, I mean, it definitely worked.

Michael: I like the comparison to King Kong.

Caleb: I do, too.

Michael: Because that’s… I mean, although, of course, that ends rather differently.

Caleb: They don’t have a child.

Michael: [laughs] No.

Kat: Oh my God. That would be… I imagine King Kong as quite a bit larger than a giant.

[Caleb, Michael, and Noah laugh]

Noah: Right on!

Kat: I meant… that’s not at all what I meant.

[Caleb and Noah laugh]

Kat: Gross.

Michael: We’re in that realm now. We’re in that realm.

Kat: I know. We are. We’re circling around some…

[Michael laughs]

Noah: Well, think about this: [In the] King Kong/Ann Darrow situation you’ve got the gender switch of hypermasculinized big monkey man, but in this case, we have the man as the potentially submissive or slightly smaller role.

Kat: But maybe not because he’s a wizard, and he has magic.

Noah: And a wand. And a wand.

Kat: So does that make him the superior one?

Noah: That’s very… I don’t know. That’s kind of complex, but I wonder if that somwhow translates to Hagrid being a more gentle giant because his parents perhaps were of opposite normally gender-inclined roles.

Michael: I wonder if it’s just because from the sound of it, even though we have nothing really on Fridwulfa, like you guys mentioned… but I mean, people are implying through this that Hagrid’s mother was unusual for a giantess and that perhaps she was softer in her feelings toward humans, so I mean… and then Hagrid has mentioned frequently that his father was a very kindhearted man, so I think that’s more where it’s coming from.

Kat: Do we think that she was more intelligent? That she could speak English?

Caleb: It’s possible.

Michael: I’d imagine.

Noah: If you’re going to be making babies that’s Step 1.

[Michael laughs]

Caleb: Also, there’s just…

Michael: The language of love.

Caleb: … as far as female and male – the female being the giant – it just has to be this way logistically because if you’re going to have a half-giant, it has to be a female giant to birth something that large.

Kat: Fair enough.

[Michael laughs]

Caleb: Right? Let’s just be real: A human female could not birth…

Kat: Well, and plus… okay, if you flip-flop it there’s no way that the thing would fit in the thing.

Caleb, Michael, and Noah: Whoa!

Kat: I’m just saying!

Michael and Noah: Whoa!

Noah: Kat, that was pretty much just the impression that he just climbed up in that, you know?

Caleb: Oh!

[Everyone laughs]

Kat: Okay, umm…

Caleb: Going back to my Christmas movies! I don’t care!

[Everyone laughs]

Noah: Well, next comment from WhatTheGrace is quite interesting as well:

“I think that Hagrid’s father had a personal interest in giants and magical creatures and one day whilst looking to learn more about giants (despite their reputation) came by Fridwulfa, who (like Grawp is described) was slightly smaller than regular giants. which led her to be bullied and made an outcast by the other bigger giants. She may have then, upon crossing paths with Hagrid’s father, end[ed] up forming a friendship with him, which eventually led to love as a result of him showing her kindness and viewing her as an equal. I’m sure along the way he taught her English and other human mannerisms.”

Caleb: It’s like what Hagrid does with Grawp.

Kat: Right.

Michael: But we still don’t know how long they were together, too, so we can’t…

Kat: If they were ever even “together.”

Michael: Together, yeah.

Caleb: Yeah.

Noah: I’d like to think they spent a holiday just in the mountains, just the two of them, [with him] just riding on her shoulders, with arms in the air like on Titanic, like, “I’m king of the world!” and so she’s just…

[Caleb and Kat laugh]

Caleb: It always comes out to Titanic, always to that moment.

Kat: [laughs] I know. Everything leads back to it, doesn’t it?

[Michael laughs]

Noah: I mean, that’s humanity, man. But that’s all the comments.

Michael: Okay.

Kat: So it’s… but wait a minute. Nobody answered if they thought that they were in love.

Noah: How could a human love a giant and vice versa? It’s disgusting.

Michael: [laughs] Woah.

Kat: That is giantism.

[Caleb laughs]

Kat: Wait, is that a thing?

Noah: I guess you just made it a thing. Yeah, I guess I’m a giantist.

[Kat and Michael laugh]

Kat: That could be taken so wrong. Okay.

Michael: All right, well, after that I think we’re going to need to go to the prefects’ bathroom to rinse ourselves off, so let’s go into Chapter 25.

[Goblet of Fire Chapter 25 intro begins]

[Sound of bubbling]

Mermaid 1: [in a singsong voice] Chapter 25.

Mermaid 2: [whispering] Come seek us where our voices sound.

Mermaid 1: [in a singsong voice] “The Egg and the Eye.”

Mermaid 2: [whispering] We cannot sing above the ground.

[Goblet of Fire Chapter 25 intro ends]

Michael: Okay, so we start off the chapter with Harry finally deciding after Hagrid being so confident in Harry abilities that he has got to crack down on what is going on with the golden egg, so he does decide to give in to Cedric’s advice, but he is still very hesitant to do so, and as we’ll through the chapter, Hagrid will continue – or Harry, rather – to keep doubting Cedric throughout this entire process, thinking that this is just an entire farce. But he comes up with a plan to go to the prefects’ bathroom, which requires both the Invisibility Cloak and the return of the Marauder’s Map, which is very important to this section. We haven’t seen the Marauder’s Map for a while. Harry hasn’t been doing very much sneaking about this year, so it’s a nice thing to see that return. And Harry heads to the prefects’ bathroom, takes it in. There’s some very interesting magic in this extremely overdone bathroom: white marble everywhere, almost a hundred taps around a pool-sized tub…

Kat: With a diving board!

Michael: With a diving board!

Caleb: Yeah, how many tubs do you see with a diving board. That’s pretty baller.

Kat: That’s insane. I liked that it mentioned that the password is “pine fresh.”

Michael: Pine fresh.

Kat: I thought that was cute. And then I was thinking about in this section… and I’m sorry if I interrupted you, but this is clearly one just kind of large open room of a bathroom, like a hot tub room or whatever that somebody might have in their house.

Michael: Yeah.

Kat: Does the room know when somebody’s already in there?

Michael: What do you mean? What…

Kat: Because if Harry is in the tub…

Noah: Is it alive?

Kat: … and it only takes the password to get into the room, what if a female prefect walks in?

Michael: It would seem, based on the rules of the room, that said female prefect could just waltz right in.

Kat: Right, that’s what I’m thinking.

Michael: I mean, this seems like the kind of place where the prefects could all have a huge pool party.

Caleb: Fun times.

Noah: Or something else.

Kat: Or other things, yeah, exactly.

Michael: Or other things.

[Caleb and Michael laugh]

Noah: I mean, you got that mermaid up on the wall and shaking her fins…

Michael: Yeah, actually…

Noah: … getting people excited.

Michael: I’m glad you mentioned the mermaid because interestingly, the mermaid that we see in the painting is actually depicted as a beautiful, blonde, more humanlike mermaid, which of course, as we know, is not what Harry encounters in the lake later on. So I went to look at my new edition of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them out of curiosity, and on page 54 of the new edition, there’s the entry about merpeoplke, which I thought I would read. Merpeople are also known as Sirens, selkies, or merrows. Their Ministry of Magic classification is XXXX, which translates to “Dangerous/requires specialist knowledge/skilled wizard may handle.” But it is noted that they are “classified as such ‘not because [they are] unduly aggressive but because [they] should be treated with great respect,'” similar to centaurs.

Kat: I was just going to ask… is the centaur… what are they rated? Are they 4 or 5?

Michael: Centaurs are rated the same.

Kat: There. Okay.

Michael: Okay. As the book says,

“Merpeople exist throughout the world, though they vary in appearance almost as much as humans. Their habits and customs remain as mysterious as those of the centaur, though those wizards who have mastered the language of Mermish speak of highly organized communities varying in size according to habitat, and some have elaborately constructed dwellings. Like the centaurs, the merpeople have declined ‘being’ status in favor of a ‘beast’ classification.”

And that comes from the beginning of Fantastic Beasts in the “What is a Beast?” section.

“This occurred around 1812, after Grogan Stump…”

The minister at the time.

“… declared that a ‘being’ was defined as ‘any creature that has sufficient intelligence to understand the laws of the magical community and to bear part of the responsibility in shaping those laws.’ Merpeople rejected this status due to having a social system of their own and thus having little to no interest in the affairs of witches and wizards). The oldest merpeople were known as sirens (Greece), and it is in warmer waters that we find the beautiful mermaids so frequently depicted in Muggle literature and painting. The selkies of Scotland…”

… which are what Harry encounters in the Black Lake…

“… and the merrows of Ireland are less beautiful…”

… or as Harry so tactfully writes in the book, “ugly”…

“… but they share that love of music [that] is common to all merpeople.”

So there’s your history of mermaids, everyone. So what’s being depicted in that painting, obviously, is a…

Kat: Grecian mermaid.

Michael: Grecian mermaid. A Siren. Which is funny because that’s not at all what lives in Hogwarts’s lake.

Caleb: Yeah.

Michael: So after Harry takes in the bathroom and plays with the taps a little, which I’ll have these fun little features in, he also notes that the water seems to fill up the tub much quicker than it should, although he has been playing with all 100 taps.

Kat: I want to take a bath in the foam that he talks about that looks so thick that he could stand on.

Michael: He could just float on.

Caleb: Oh my gosh. Yes.

[Michael laughs]

Kat: That just sounds so relaxing. [sighs]

Michael: But Harry actually takes a few lengths around the pool. And I just thought that was interesting because I wondered if Harry taught himself to swim because it’s mentioned later on in the chapter that the Dursleys never let him have lessons in the hopes that he would drown. [laughs]

Kat: Right, that… it’s funny because I thought about that exact same thing. Like, “Where did you learn to swim?”

Michael: Yeah. Yeah, because I mean…

Caleb: Yeah.

Michael: To swim lengths, unless he’s like, doggy paddling back and forth, that takes some lessons. You don’t just dive in and go.

Kat: Maybe Sirius taught him the doggy paddle.

[Sound of rimshot]

Caleb and Michael: Oh. [laugh]

Kat: And that was the bad joke of the episode.

Michael: Beautiful. So while Harry is swimming in the pool, Moaning Myrtle returns, something of a bathroom voyeur…

[Caleb laughs]

Michael: … hitting on Harry.

Kat: Okay, as much as I hate this movie, I love this entire scene because pervy Myrtle is incredibly funny and I love it. I just absolutely… especially when you think about the fact that Shirley Henderson who plays Moaning Myrtle…

[Caleb and Michael laugh]

Kat: … is like 37 in that scene and then there’s little Dan who is, what, 15 or 16 at that point?

Caleb: Yeah.

Michael: Yeah.

Kat: And it’s just so funny.

Michael: Ups the creeper factor.

Kat: It’s so funny. I know, I love it. I absolutely love it.

Michael: Well actually, what’s interesting is that the movie takes it a step further by putting her in the bath with Harry.

Kat: I know and she’s trying to, you know, get an eyeful.

[Michael laughs]

Kat: It’s hilarious, and Dan did a really good job in that part too.

Noah: Just on a more serious note, reading it in the books, I wasn’t aware that ghosts even had a sort of sexual need anyway. I mean, why is she even doing it, just to kind of reminisce about when she had those kinds of feelings or do ghosts have some form of sex life?

Michael: Well, I think that comes from… and Rowling’s detailed [this] on Pottermore that ghosts are just kind of an imprint and they can’t really progress past the stage that they died at, and Myrtle died as a teenager. Because how old was she when she died? Do we know the exact date she was when she died? Was she around 12 or 13 or so?

Kat: I think she was a third-year, right?

Michael: Okay.

Caleb: I was thinking second or third, but I can’t remember.

Kat: Because I think… isn’t she in Hagrid’s class?

Caleb: I don’t know.

Kat: And he was expelled in his third year. I’m going to look it up – keep talking.

Michael: Oh, that’s interesting. So she’s around the age where she has an interest in boys, so I think that’s just part of that personality imprint that was left with her ghost.

Kat: Born in 1929 and she died in 1943, so she was 14.

Caleb: 14.

Michael: Okay.

Caleb: So probably third or fourth-year maybe?

Noah: I thought in my head “fourth-year,” but it could just be because Harry is…

Kat: Her birthday… let’s see. Okay, yeah, she was 14 when she died. 14…

Michael: Okay.

Kat: … according to the Wiki.

Michael: And Pottermore mentions specifically too that ghosts can’t enjoy any physical pleasures of any sort. She mentions eating and touching objects, so I assume that discounts a sexual life.

Caleb: Yeah.

Noah: Yeah.

Michael: They cannot have that because ghosts can’t copulate. [laughs]

Kat: Unless there’s something in the ghost world, this ghost world that we’ve talked about many, many times before, the other dimension where all the ghosts live.

Noah: It could just be them flying into each other or something. “Oh, I’m so cold. I’m so cold.”

[Michael and Noah laugh]

Caleb: Stop.

Michael: Well, it is funny to mention the ghost world because we do get a little bit of that, because Myrtle pulls a handkerchief out of her pocket later.

Kat: Yes!

Michael: And the thing is… did she die with that handkerchief? Where did the handkerchief come from?

Caleb: Yeah, I’d say she’d have to die with it.

[Michael laughs]

Kat: I mean, she definitely has to die with it. Again, I feel like… I know we’ve had this conversation where we talked about what we would want to die with in our pockets.

Caleb: My cell phone.

[Kat and Michael laugh]

Kat: A cell phone. Those don’t work at Hogwarts, Caleb!

[Caleb and Michael laugh]

Kat: I forgot who it was that said “parchment and pens.” I think it was Rosie. That way she could write forever.

Michael: [laughs] The interesting thing is Myrtle serves two purposes in this chapter, and one is pretty obvious and one is a little more subtle. Her main point here, of course, is to pretty much egg Harry on, so to speak, as far as the riddle of the egg goes, because she pretty much tells him what to do; [laughs] he doesn’t really figure this out on his own. But her secondary purpose is that Rowling can get in quite a few references about the Polyjuice Potion from Chamber of Secrets, because Myrtle is so directly tied to that. We actually get our first reference pretty quickly about Polyjuice Potion here, which happens here: Harry is trying to defend the reason why he hasn’t visited Myrtle since his second year and he says,

“‘I’m not supposed to come to your bathroom, am I? It’s a girls’ one.’

‘Well, you didn’t used to care,’ said Myrtle miserably. ‘You used to be in there all the time.’

This was true, though only because Harry, Ron, and Hermione had found Myrtle’s out-of-order toilets a convenient place to brew Polyjuice Potion in secret. A forbidden potion that had turned him and Ron into living replicas of Crabbe and Goyle for an hour or so, so that they could sneak into the Slytherin Common Room.”

Now really there’s no reason to have to do this here that’s overt. It kind of just seems like, “Oh, we’re just remembering that one time.” But of course, with the second part of this chapter with Moody and the things that happen, this is a pretty much direct clue that we should be picking up on what’s going on with Moody. And this is not the first time that that’s mentioned. There will be a few more later. But as we move on, Harry finally figures out that he needs to dunk the egg under the water. And he finally hears the merpeople’s song. Which for all of you who only remember the movie version, it goes something like this:

“Come seek us where our voices sound,
We cannot sing above the ground,
And while you’re searching ponder this;
We’ve taken what you’ll sorely miss,
An hour long you’ll have to look,
And to recover what we took,
But past an hour, the prospect’s black,
Too late, it’s gone, it won’t come back.”

And the interesting thing – I was thinking about this poem – is that of course Harry gets teased quite a bit later for thinking that the people who were taken by the merpeople for the task were going to die. But isn’t that…

Caleb: Oh, yeah…

Michael: … a reasonable concern? [laughs] Based on the poem?

Caleb: It definitely makes it seem like people are going to die.

[Michael laughs]

Kat: Especially because the interactions we get from the mermaids is that they aren’t all that friendly.

Michael: Mhm.

Caleb: No.

Kat: So I think that that lends to putting truth in this song, for sure.

Michael: So then we get our second reference to Polyjuice Potion, where the book says,

“Harry had never seen Moaning Myrtle so cheerful apart from a day when a dose of Polyjuice Potion had given Hermione a hairy face and tail of a cat.”

So yet again, more references to what the overall mystery is here. Rowling is constantly reminding us what Polyjuice Potion is, what its effects are, its name. We’re getting kind of bombarded with it. So it’s actually… I felt kind of silly looking back on it and not taking that in at all.

Kat: There’s a lot here that I know in the movie…

Michael: Mhm.

Kat: … they try to push really hard for the Polyjuice Potion angle. And I feel like putting just one of these lines in from Moaning Myrtle…

Michael: Would have been nice.

Kat: They put in the stupid, “Oh, I was floating in a blocked drain and thought I saw Polyjuice Potion. You’re not brewing it again, are you?”

Noah: Yeah, they did that.

Kat: I feel like that was too… I don’t know. It wasn’t as…

Michael: I wonder, though…

Kat: It didn’t blow me away like it did in the book, I guess.

Michael: Well, I wonder because if it was the movie that was really the only way… because Harry’s reminiscing on this is almost too on the… if in a movie, I wonder if it would be too on the nose because it’s just so off topic.

Kat: Yeah.

Michael: I think that was the only way they really could put it in.

Kat: It’s true.

Michael: But Myrtle also gives us our first glimpse into the Black Lake. Also, inadvertently and horrifyingly revealing how the Hogwarts plumbing system works. It all goes right to the lake! [laughs] So…

Noah: So when she’s in the toilet, she doesn’t actually get pooped on. She’s in the bend and she goes with the poop, is that the…

Kat: I mean…

Michael: Yeah.

Kat: I think she probably chooses to stay in the bend for that exact reason. But it’s kind of gross to think that she can just get flushed down with everything else.

Caleb: And that everything is going into the lake.

Michael: Yeah, that’s the part that disturbs me.

Kat: I mean, what else is the squid going to eat?

Caleb: I don’t know, but those children are in the lake too much for there to be that stuff going there.

[Michael laughs]

Noah: Maybe the merpeople eat it.

Kat: Well, I just said the squid. Maybe that’s squid food. I don’t know.

Caleb: Maybe.

Noah: Someone’s got to eat that.

Caleb: I’m not swimming in that lake. Ugh.

Michael: It’s pretty messed up when you consider that this has been going on since Hogwarts installed the plumbing in the 1800s. [laughs]

Kat: I mean, I wonder maybe there is some magical septic tank that automatically configures it.

Noah: [laughs] A magical septic tank.

Kat: Transfigures it along the way.

Noah: It talks, too. And it’s alive.

Kat: No, no, no, I’m not going that far.

Caleb: I hope it’s not alive. No, it’s not.

[Michael laughs]

Kat: Like the Thief’s Downfall where it’s just something that everything goes through and it transfigures it into just water or rock or whatever.

Michael: Well, anyway, we’re still not feeling very clean after this bath, are we, with all this talk?

Kat: It is a pretty dirty episode.

[Michael and Noah laugh]

Michael: But Myrtle drops a few more details interestingly enough about her death that we didn’t get in Chamber of Secrets in that she was left there for hours in the bathroom after the Basilisk killed her, and she was only found because Olive Hornby was sent by Professor Dippet to go look for her. Myrtle haunted Olive until Olive placed a restraining order on her through the Ministry of Magic, afterwhich she was forced to return to Hogwarts. So we get a little more on Myrtle there, which is interesting because we don’t really… that’s another one of those moments that I like because it just fleshes the world out a little more. Because this actually isn’t an important detail; it’s just there because it’s kind of fun.

Kat: [laughs] Oh yeah, it’s real fun, dead girl in the bathroom for hours.

Michael: Well, it’s fun in the sense of we learn more about who Myrtle is.

Kat: I know what you mean.

Michael: [laughs] I don’t revel in people being killed at Hogwarts.

Kat: Mhm. Yeah, sure, sure.

Noah: What?

Kat: Sure, yeah.

Michael: So…

Kat: You say that now, Hufflepuff.

[Michael and Noah laugh]

Caleb: Thinking about Dippet, it also made me think of another detail. I wonder what he taught.

Michael: Professor Dippet? Oh, you mean before he was headmaster.

Caleb: Headmaster. Which also just made me think about… doesn’t Dumbledore teach Transfiguration before he is headmaster?

Noah: That’s correct.

Kat: He does.

Caleb: So what was McGonagall doing? Because they had to have some overlap.

Michael: Oh.

Noah: No, she was also doing Transfiguration. I think she was kind of an understudy.

Kat: No. Was she even working at that time?

Michael: Yeah, I thought…

Caleb: See, that’s what I was just curious about, but I feel like there has to be some overlap. Before Dumbledore is headmaster, McGonagall has to be teaching.

Kat: I bet that they knew each other just through Minerva’s deals with the Ministry and stuff and her husband.

Michael: Mhm.

Caleb: I just feel like she was teaching, before that. But I don’t know, I’m looking it up now.

Michael: Yeah, according to her Pottermore bio she went straight from the Ministry to Hogwarts.

Kat: To Hogwarts.

Michael: Without any… because apparently you don’t need a teaching certification at Hogwarts, because Hagrid doesn’t have one. [laughs]

Kat: Right, and I don’t think Trelawney does.

Michael: Yeah, I think the hiring process just seems to be whoever the headmaster wants on his staff.

Kat: And Flitwick seems to make sense, though, because he was a dueling and Charms champion, so at least that makes sense.

Michael: Yeah, he has credentials.

Caleb: In McGonagall’s bio on Pottermore, it says… this is after her guy passes away. It says,

“She sent an owl to Hogwarts, asking whether she might be considered for a teaching post. The owl returned within hours, offering her a job in the Transfiguration department, under Head of Department, Albus Dumbledore.”

Noah: Woo!

Kat: Okay, so there’s more than one Transfiguration teacher.

Caleb: Yeah, they were teaching it together.

Michael: Oh, okay.

Noah: Wait, guys, give it to me. Give it to me as the… I’m the Harry Potter encyclopedia today.

Kat: No.

Noah: Okay, fine. Whatever.

Michael: [laughs] Hey, but that means that Hagrid and Grubbly-Plank could co-teach.

Caleb: Yeah, that’s true.

Kat: That would be… why…

Caleb: And it’s obviously not unprecedented for teachers to be teaching the same subject, because we know Trelawney and Firenze do.

Kat: Right.

Caleb: But I still want to know what Dippet taught.

Kat: Does the Wiki not have that information?

Michael: No, there’s very little information on Dippet. He’s kind of another one of those that I guess you would hope Pottermore expands on a little bit more. Because in the Prisoner of Azkaban video game, he does have his own Wizard Card.

Kat: Hear that, Jo? Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.

Michael: [laughs] So after this distinctly – upon reflection – somewhat disturbing visit to the bathroom, Harry leaves and is looking on the Marauder’s Map to prepare his way back to the dormitories, when he notices the name Bartemius Crouch on the map, and he assumes that it’s Crouch Sr. because he doesn’t know about Crouch Jr. at this point in the story.

Kat: And because the map doesn’t say.

Michael: Yes, and I wanted to point that out. Isn’t that an interesting little bit? The Marauder’s Map doesn’t denote juniors. It can’t tell the difference.

Kat: Which… is there anyone else [who] is a junior or senior in the series?

Michael: Who we have a case of being on the map or anything like that?

Kat: I mean, just… yeah, maybe, I guess.

Caleb: Hmm.

Michael: Not that I could think of immediately.

Caleb: Well, I mean I wonder what it… do we ever see Voldemort showing up on the map?

Michael: Oh, yeah. Because he is…

Caleb: Because technically it would say…

Caleb and Michael: Tom Riddle Jr.

Kat: That’s true.

Caleb: But I suppose if this is the case it would just say “Tom Riddle.”

Michael: Huh.

Kat: I don’t… yeah, I don’t know. I don’t think we ever see him on the map.

Noah: Maybe it depends on if the ancestor goes to Hogwarts.

Kat: Or if they’re alive.

Noah: Or if they’re alive.

Michael: Hmm, that’s interesting. Because yeah…

Kat: Senior is not dead yet, right?

Michael: No.

Kat: No.

Michael: No, he is not. And it’s a wonderfully convenient thing as far as the plot goes, because this of course helps Crouch, later in this chapter, get away with this. Because of course, if it did have “Jr.” that would give away a lot… that would bring up a lot of issues here. So Harry decides to go check it out, and he heads down a…

Kat: Naturally.

Michael: Yeah, of course. He heads… I don’t know what he was planning to do, but he heads down a secret passageway, and as he is examining the map, his foot gets stuck in the trick step that Neville always gets stuck on. The egg goes tumbling down the stairs and starts screaming, and he also drops the Marauder’s Map. I just… I still can’t really… I mean, until Order of the Phoenix this has to probably be the worst possible situation Harry has ever been in up to this point when sneaking around, next to being caught with the dragon.

Kat: I mean, yeah, as far as late night tomfoolery, this is…

Michael: Yeah, this is…

Kat: … definitely it.

Michael: … pretty bad because he has got… there are implications all around that it’s him.

Kat: And I feel like for me, with the exception of the stuff in the Third Task, this is the scene that I was so disappointed wasn’t in the film, because I just love everything about this scene.

Noah: Yeah, it’s such a tense scene.

Michael: Mhm.

Kat: I love it. I love it. I love it.

Michael: Well, and like I mentioned in the last episode, Goblet of Fire as a film has no subtlety whatsoever, and this scene is full of subtext…

Kat: It is. Very much.

Michael: … and subtlety. It’s a very important scene for building up the future books, so it is kind of disappointing that this gets lost in the movie. And what happens is Filch comes along and sees the egg and assumes that Peeves has stolen it from one of the champions because of course his mind immediately goes to Peeves.

Kat: So prejudiced.

[Michael laughs]

Kat: Just saying.

Michael: Not even possible that it’s a student sneaking around. It has to be Peeves who took the egg.

Kat: Which is so funny because he’s like the student-out-of-bed police.

Michael: Right. Yeah, that’s what I thought.

Kat: And of course he jumps to Peeves.

Michael: It’s funny that he immediately goes to that assumption, but Mrs. Norris seems to be pretty on the ball and she seems to know that Harry is there. Her Kneazle senses are tingling.

Kat: I was going to say, has it been decided that they can see through invisibility cloaks?

Michael: You know…

Noah: I thought it said she has other senses that can tell that Harry is there, like smell or something. That’s why Harry keeps talking about his bath soaps.

Michael: He does… yeah, because he mentions that he regrets using all the perfumes from the bath. [laughs]

Noah: Which is another question entirely.

Michael: [laughs] But he also says that she is looking right at him, which he often says is an issue pretty much every time she comes around and he is under the Invisibility Cloak. I think… because what I read in Fantastic Beasts… and the thing is, I believe, Mrs. Norris is only half Kneazle, right? She’s not a full…

Kat: She is half Kneazle. Right.

Michael: That’s what I thought. Okay, because there’s a mention in Fantastic Beasts that full Kneazles can sense unsavory or suspicious behavior, so I’m kind of wondering if that’s… she doesn’t necessarily… she can’t see him, but she knows that there’s something up in that area. She can sense… it’s almost the magic of the Invisibility Cloak. I would wonder if it’s because it’s usually used for rule breaking anyway, if that’s what she’s sensing. So…

Kat: I’ve got a feeling that she can see through it.

Michael: You think she… you’re going to go with she can see through it?

Kat: I think so. I just… I feel like it does mention that she’s staring right at him.

Michael: I’ve always just thought it would be funny. She… her and Filch seem to have a weird language with each other.

Caleb: I feel like she can… oh, sorry. Go ahead.

Noah: It runs deeper than that.

Michael: It runs deeper than that? [laughs] Well, I just think it’s funny that she never… he never directly figures out that Harry’s there when she does.

Kat: Right. Caleb?

Caleb: I feel like if she thought that Harry… if she could actually see Harry, she would draw attention to it.

Michael: Yeah.

Caleb: I just feel like she has an idea that something is going on that is not completely visible.

Kat: Kind of like a dog with ghosts, I guess?

Caleb: Yeah, sure.

Kat: How dogs are supposed to be able to sense ghosts.

Caleb: Yeah.

Noah: Yup.

Kat: I mean, okay. I’ll buy into that. Fair enough.

Michael: So the situation continues to get worse. This is pretty much… this is a pretty bad situation for Harry. We’ve got Filch, Mrs. Norris, Map on the ground, egg wailing, and then Snape shows up.

Caleb: It’s like, what? How can this get worse? And it just keeps…

Kat: And then, it does.

Michael: You never ask because it just keeps… because the universe takes that on as a challenge.

[Kat laughs]

Michael: In comes Snape, but the interesting thing is, Snape has no interest in what Filch is talking about because they both have this conversation where they’re not really talking to each other.

[Caleb laughs]

Michael: And Filch is going on and on about Peeves and how he’s finally got Peeves. Snape, in the meantime, is mentioning that his office has just been ransacked, as Harry noticed on the Marauder’s Map, because Barty Crouch was in Snape’s office on the Map. So Snape is ready to pull Filch away from his concerns and Harry is praying that that is about to happen, when Moody comes along. So now we’ve got two Death Eaters – one former, one current – and Filch, screaming egg, cat…

[Noah laughs]

Michael: … Map…

Caleb: [laughs] Stuck in the stairs.

Michael: Stuck in the stairs! [laughs]

Kat: And a Hallow, nonetheless.

Michael: Yes!

Caleb: Oh, yeah.

Michael: Yes. So this is a giant… this is just a giant mess in the staircase, what we’ve got here. But the interesting thing is the conversation that comes up when Snape and Moody encounter each other because Filch drops that somebody has been ransacking Snape’s office and Snape tells Filch to stop talking. And the interesting thing here is that Snape pointedly does not want Moody to know about the ransacking of his office. And I was wondering because we don’t find out about it this in Deathly Hallows when we see Snape’s memories, does Snape already suspect Moody of something? Does he feel that there’s something wrong already with Moody?

Noah: I don’t get that impression…

Michael: You don’t?

Noah: … in the scene. I think he distrusts Moody just as a character, but I don’t think he… if you’re talking about does he has any suspicion that it runs deeper, potentially connected to Dark Arts, I don’t believe so.

Caleb: Yeah. Because I think we get… the fact that we get to see Snape’s interaction with Quirrell in the first book…

Michael: Mhm.

Caleb: … when he does suspect something, indicates how he would act towards Moody if he did suspect something.

Noah: Exactly.

Caleb: And he doesn’t here.

Michael: That’s true.

Kat: I mean, I don’t know. I feel like Snape is a pretty intuitive guy…

Michael: Mhm.

Kat: … and I think that he knows… he’s probably met Moody before. And he might be…

Noah: Yeah, but there’s…

Kat: … he might be picking up on some subtleties that maybe us as readers aren’t aware of because this can’t be a perfect fake Moody.

Michael: Mhm.

Kat: It just can’t be perfect. Snape has to be picking up on something.

Caleb: But how many times do you think Snape really has been around the real Moody?

Michael: Well, I guess as a former Death Eater they have to have encountered each other.

Caleb: But probably not intimately enough…

Michael: That’s true. That’s true.

Caleb: … to where he knows the finer workings of his personality.

Noah: Right. I mean, for this to work at all, they would have had not to have met that much. Then Snape would have…

Caleb: Yeah.

Kat: I think that Moody probably just rubbed Snape the wrong way and that…

Noah: Right.

Michael: Well, I mean…

Kat: But I still think that Snape has… there is something else besides just dislike there, I think.

Michael: Well, and to boost that point, Kat, the interesting thing here is… because I was wondering what you guys think of this – Moody-Crouch – because I like that nickname for him.

Noah: Moody-Crouch.

Michael: Moody-Crouch. Does Moody-Crouch falter in his suggestion that Dumbledore allowed him to search Snape’s office not knowing because Crouch doesn’t know of Dumbledore and Snape’s relationship?

Caleb: Hmm.

Michael: And he claims that Dumbledore allowed him to search Snape’s office the first time when, of course, now keep in mind this whole time Crouch is just looking for potion ingredients for the Polyjuice Potion.

Noah: Right.

Michael: So that’s the reason. That’s what’s going on here. But he claims that the first time Snape caught him it was because Dumbledore told him to go do that. Do you think that was Moody’s flaw here and that’s why Snape might be titchy?

Kat: Do you… wait. Do you think he doesn’t know about the relationship because isn’t he… doesn’t… I feel like he would know or think that Snape had gone over to Dumbledore. I think he does know about that.

Michael: Really? Because…

Kat: About their relationship. Yeah.

Michael: Well, because Voldemort has no idea, which is his fatal flaw in the end.

Caleb: Well, Voldemort just thinks that Snape is playing Dumbledore.

Noah: Right.

Kat: Right, that’s right. Exactly.

Michael: Mhm.

Kat: I think that…

Caleb: He thinks that he actually has Snape’s loyalty. I think Moody at least probably suspects it. He may not know that they’re… they run that thick, but he probably suspects there’s something there.

Noah: But doesn’t…

Kat: Or he’s just… his anger for Snape getting off scot-free is blinding the fact that anything that’s real.

Caleb: Hmm.

Noah: I’m pretty sure Moody thinks Snape is unfaithful though here because doesn’t he, at the end, go off on how he’s angry at Death Eaters who go free?

Caleb: Yeah, but…

Michael: Mhm.

Caleb: Yeah, that’s true. And then Voldemort… I think if… I may be wrong, but I feel like Voldemort defends… or says something, I can’t remember.

Kat: That… no, he does. He says that Snape was his only true ally, or servant, or whatever.

Caleb: Yeah.

Michael: So there’s definitely, at least, bitterness here. So…

Kat: Yeah. Definitely.

Michael: … about that. So it’s… I just thought it was interesting to examine how… if Crouch is actually doing well at keeping up this…

Caleb: Yup.

Michael: … whole facade of being Moody.

Caleb: There’s a really complex web of interactions that’s going on that we don’t really know where everyone’s coming from.

Michael and Noah: Yeah.

Michael: Yeah, it is. Again, it’s so fascinating reading this scene just because of how… I mean, the first time I read it and I think the first time most readers read it, they really think that Moody’s helping Harry here…

Caleb: Yeah.

Michael: … and being a pal. And then when you reread it and you knowing everything that happened later on, this becomes a pretty dark and unnerving scene.

Caleb: Yeah.

Michael: With what’s going on.

Caleb: I mean, in a way… I mean, right now he’s helping him to stay out of trouble. He legitimately is, but obviously to a much terrible end.

Kat: For selfish reasons.

Caleb, Kat, and Michael: Yeah.

Noah: I mean, doesn’t Harry, on some level, give Moody the tool that he will later use to…

Michael: Yeah, yes. We’ll actually…

Caleb: Yeah.

Michael: … talk about that in a minute…

Noah: Yes.

Michael: … but before we get to that I did want to also mention, again, we get our third mention of Polyjuice Potion. This one’s a little more indirect, but actually, this is also almost literally Snape solving the mystery of this section because Moody asks,

“‘Who’d want to break into your office?’ ‘A student, I daresay,’ said Snape. Harry could see a vein flickering horribly on Snape’s greasy temple. ‘It has happened before. Potion ingredients have gone missing from my private store cupboard… students attempting illicit mixtures, no doubt.'”

So… and this, pretty much, I’m assuming this is Snape referencing Hermione stealing the potion ingredients in Book 2.

Kat: Wait! He does not know about that.

Michael: No, he doesn’t, but this is… that’s the moment that’s being referenced because I can’t imagine students take that on regularly.

Kat: I bet it’s more often than we think.

Michael: You think? [laughs]

Kat: Hell yeah, I think.

[Michael laughs]

Kat: I think that there’s probably a lot that happens at Hogwarts that we don’t know about and I bet stealing potion ingredients is one of those things.

Michael: Is a regular thing.

Kat: Because why else would he have to lock his office so much?

Michael: Yeah, that was the other interesting thing. Yeah, Snape actually does mention he has a security for his office. He actually puts protective measures on his office.

Caleb: He clearly needs to invest in better measures.

Kat: Right.

Michael: [laughs] Well, of course, the guy who does break in is the one who is a Death Eater, so fair enough.

Caleb: Yeah.

Michael: But… and the interesting thing again, too, is that we don’t know that Snape has a Dark Mark on his arm, so Harry just sees him convulsively grabbing his arm for no reason, according to Harry. So there’s an interesting hint there about what’s to come. Of course, we don’t know anything about that yet. And then, the other interesting point in the conversation is that when Moody not so subtly accuses Snape of being the one who put Harry’s name in the Goblet and who has it out for Harry and we can’t see Snape’s expression when he reacts to that statement, but then Snape becomes very defensive and claims that he was just worried that Harry was possibly out when he shouldn’t be.

Noah: I think this is actually probably a very tender moment and is probably a look of pure compassion fills Snape’s face just to that instant and it’s…

Caleb: False.

[Michael laughs]

Kat: Completely false, yeah.

Noah: [laughs] But why would his face been away from Harry then? Why would Jo have needed to do that unless it was a face full of some, at least, a glimmer of compassion in his eyes?

Caleb: No! Not compassion. Maybe a lot of conflict and pain…

Noah: Yeah.

Caleb … to deal with what he has to go through, but definitely not compassion.

Kat: No.

Noah: I’m talking Christmas morning compassion. [laughs]

Caleb: Nope!

Kat: Definitely not.

Michael: And then, going, of course, off of that note of Snape’s face filling with compassion, [laughs] Crouch says to Snape, “Got Potter’s best interests at heart, have you?” Which of course has a little more truth to it than we perhaps realize at this point in the series. But eventually Snape is just barely convinced to go away after almost getting his hands on the Marauder’s Map, which, ostensibly, would have insulted him had he picked it up, and Filch leaves as well to go after…

Kat: He would have seen that it said Barty Crouch if he had picked it up! I’m just dying. That’s all.

[Noah laughs]

Caleb: Yeah, no. It wouldn’t have insulted him because it would have already been activated.

Kat: Right.

Michael: I was wondering that because on Pottermore it says that the Marauders actually specifically put an enchantment on the Map that it would insult Snape all the time if he got a hold of it.

Caleb: Oh, hmm. That’s a good…

Michael: So I’m wondering what would… so that goes… I guess that’ll go perhaps into the Question of the Week. But after that, Moody finally helps Harry out of the trick step and picks up the Map, and Harry starts questioning him about why he thinks Crouch Sr. would be in Snape’s office. And Crouch Jr. very, very tactfully, very quickly on the ball covers his tracks by referencing his father’s hatred for Death Eaters and by very lightly suggesting, but not saying outright, that Snape was in fact a Death Eater, which I don’t believe we know at this point. Is that correct? We haven’t had confirmation on that, right?

Kat: Wait, wait, wait, wait. How does he imply that?

Michael: Because he says… oh, let me… sorry, it just got really dark in my room, can’t see my…

Noah: It’s certainly implied.

Michael: It’s definitely implied. Let me… it’s this line, where he says, “It’s a Death Eater who walked free.” And it says, “Harry stared at him. Could Moody possibly mean what Harry thought he meant?”

Caleb: Yeah.

Kat: Wait, how did I miss this line? Where is that?

Michael: It’s on page 477 near the top. I mean, the suspicion is all coming from Harry’s end.

Caleb: Yeah. And this is where, I think, you start to really, really think that Snape was a Death Eater.

Michael: Mhm. This is the first inkling we get of that because I’m pretty sure we don’t know because since Harry didn’t know why Snape grabbed his arm, we don’t even know about Dark Marks at this point.

Kat: Hmm.

Caleb: Right.

Michael: So…

Kat: I didn’t pick up on that.

Michael: And he doesn’t say anything outright. He just… and that goes back to what you guys were saying about Crouch’s bitterness over people like Snape leaving Voldemort.

Kat: Right.

Michael: But, yes, as you mentioned earlier, Noah…

Noah: Yes.

Michael: … then Crouch Jr. takes the Marauder’s Map from Harry because Harry willingly gives it to him because he feels he owes him a favor. [laughs]

Noah: [laughs] Good job, Harry.

Caleb: Dumbass.

Michael: [laughs] He gives him a major tool to use because Crouch Jr… I’m not sure, and this is kind of vague in the final explanation… but if Crouch Jr. hasn’t received word from Voldemort yet that Crouch Sr. has escaped from his house, he’s going to very shortly. So the map ends up being the tool that he uses to find his father on the grounds and kill him.

Noah: So in a way, Harry Potter kills Barty Crouch Sr. if you kind of ignore the details…

Caleb: Whoops.

Kat: By accessory, yeah, absolutely.

Michael: Yeah, he is an accessory to murder.

Noah: Bring him down.

Michael: [laughs] So we’ve already got Ron indicted a few chapters… wasn’t that a few chapters ago from… or it hasn’t…

Kat: For Krum. Yup.

Michael: … for tearing up…

Kat: For his miniature murder.

Michael: Yeah. For miniature murder. So now… [laughs] now we’ve got Harry.

Kat: That’s two strikes against the trio.

Michael: [laughs] So…

Kat: I mean, and Hermione basically kills her parents in the last book, so…

Caleb: Oh, no, she brings them back. It’s okay.

[Michael laughs]

Noah: You mean by taking away their memories? I mean, that’s a far cry from death.

Michael: She fixes it.

Kat: Is it, though?

Michael: She fixes it.

Caleb: She brings them back. It’s okay.

Michael: Yeah. It’s outside of the books, but it’s… Rowling confirmed that.

Caleb: Yeah.

Michael: We’ll keep an eye out for what we can indict Hermione on. [laughs]

Noah: We’ll keep a death toll.

Kat: Okay. Sounds good.

Michael: So…

Kat: For not having her priorities in order, is probably what it will be.

[Michael and Noah laugh]

Michael: But the big finishing thing in this chapter, and it is actually… I put the quote in here because I would like to read it because it’s kind of a watershed moment for Harry’s life, but Crouch Jr., as Moody, plants the seeds for Harry’s future as an Auror here. So the book says, “They climbed to the top of the stairs together, Moody still examining the map as though it was a treasure the like of which he had never seen before. They walked in silence to the door of Moody’s office, where he stopped and looked up at Harry. ‘You ever thought of a career as an Auror, Potter?’ ‘No,’ said Harry, taken aback. ‘You want to consider it,’ said Moody, nodding and looking at Harry thoughtfully. ‘Yes, indeed… ‘ Harry walked slowly back to Gryffindor Tower, lost in thought about Snape, and Crouch, and what it all meant… Why was Crouch pretending to be ill, if he could manage to get to Hogwarts when he wanted to? What did he think Snape was concealing in his office? And Moody thought he, Harry, ought to be an Auror! Interesting idea… but somehow, Harry thought, as he quietly got into his four poster ten minutes later, the egg and the cloak now safely back in his trunk, he thought he’d like to check how scarred the rest of them were before he chose it as a career.”

Kat: Mmm.

Michael: So there’s just a lot of interesting points in there. We’re left with all of these red herrings from Mad-Eye, from fake Moody, from Moody-Crouch. But we’re also left with the thought that Harry should become an Auror, and this of course ends up being a major moment in future because he does end up pursuing that career successfully.

Kat: It’s the second of the three in this book that Moody plants in Harry and which inevitably come true…

Michael: Mhm.

Kat: … if I’m not mistaken.

Michael: And Harry even notes the irony that his career as an Auror is inspired by a Death Eater who directly tells him to go for that. And we’ve talked in previous chapters about perhaps if Crouch Jr. wasn’t being genuinely kind or nice or whatever in certain scenes, and I would tend to say that considering he’s pretty much a sociopath, [laughs] I would say no, and that it’s all an act. But this seems the closest to that to me. I don’t know what… what do you guys think as far as why… because this comes out of the blue, completely out of the blue.

Noah: I think it’s somewhat genuine. He’s seen that Harry’s a crafty fellow. He’s hiding under the Invisibility Cloak and sees the instant when Snape could possibly get the paper to ruin him and tells Moody, “No, take it.” He’s fought off dragons. Remember, Moody holds Harry up to some pretty high esteem, considering he defeated the Dark Lord, so…

Kat: Yeah, I think that Little Crouch is feeling some sort of kinship with Harry, even though, obviously, they have very different objectives and they’re very different people, I feel, in some way, Little Crouch admires him and is in awe of him at times.

Noah: Right.

Kat: And maybe just, not because he’s talented or because he’s Harry Potter or whatever, but just because things seem to always work in Harry’s favor.

Michael: Hmm.

Kat: Always, and I think Little Crouch is kind of hoping that some of that luck is going to rub off on him.

Michael: Hmm. Well, it’s… like what you were saying, Kat, it’s interesting that… and you two know about how Crouch was in awe of Harry, just because of what he knows of Harry and what he’s done, but I guess, perhaps, maybe there’s a different angle when he actually meets Harry in person and sees what he’s capable of first-hand.

Kat: Yeah, definitely.

Noah: This is true. He does end up helping him a lot.

Michael: Mhm. Because he sees what Harry’s capable of in his classes almost everyday. So it’s an interesting thing to think about, exactly how genuine Crouch was being in his statement. But regardless of that, Harry goes to bed, wondering if, perhaps, that isn’t his future. And that is how we conclude Chapter 25, “The Egg and the Eye.”

Kat: I just have a question. Do we think that Little Crouch is enjoying his time as a teacher?

Michael: Mmm.

Kat: Because he seems to be pretty happy. I know he’s faking, whatever, but he seems to be jolly. He’s not very surly or…

Caleb: Yeah, I mean…

Kat: … acting rude in really anyway to anybody except Malfoy, who’s a prick anyway.

[Michael laughs]

Caleb: It’s very interesting because I think that Snape is probably, well, in my opinion, the most complex character in the whole series, but Barty Crouch gives him a close run for second, and maybe if he was spread to more books, we would think even moreso, but he’s such, such an interesting character.

Michael: Mhm.

Kat: Yeah.

Michael: Yeah, I would say that because he’s… and he mentions this later when he’s given the Veritaserum, but I think it’s almost because… I think he’s just enjoying being free and being out…

Kat: Mhm.

Caleb: Yeah, that’s true.

Michael: … because he hasn’t gotten… he’s just reveling in his freedom, I believe. Because being… what more freedom could you have? He’s a teacher in the most prestigious wizarding school in Britain. That’s a pretty big step from being completely confined in your… from having to wear an Invisiblity Cloak in your own house.

Kat: Ugh, true.

Michael: Yeah, true. And being under the… because I believe his father puts him under an Imperius Curse to keep him under control.

Kat: He does.

Caleb: Yup.

Michael: So, to go from that to being teacher? Yeah, I would say he’s probably just reveling in that newfound liberty.

Noah: And he’s got a new body.

Kat: Well, guys, I will do the hard task and I will sit down with David Tennant and J.K. Rowling and I will talk it out with them. I know, I know it’s…

Noah: Do it.

Kat: … going to be difficult and I’m not going to like it at all.

Noah: Use your touch.

Michael: Yeah, you poor thing.

Kat: But I will do it for the sake of the show.

Michael: I would like to think… that would be interesting to see if David Tennant did have any more to say about Barty Crouch Jr., because the way he’s portrayed in the movie is not… I mean, it’s funny because…

[Noah laughs]

Michael: … as Caleb just said, he’s so layered in the books.

Caleb: Yeah.

Michael: He’s so surface and boring in the movie. [laughs]

Caleb: Well, it’s true.

Noah: Wait a minute. I love that tongue thing, though.

Michael: Oh God, the tongue thing.

[Noah laughs]

Caleb: It’s a choice. Speaking of which, Kat, you talking about David reminded me that the first time I met Maureen Johnson, she told me that I reminded… she said that I look like David Tennant as he was the Doctor, so…

Kat: Well, we’ll have to get you a brown pinch-striped suit and…

Caleb: That’s what she told me I had to find.

Kat: And some…

Noah: The Doctor.

Michael: See, Noah? The Doctor did come back into the conversation.

Kat: … some sand shoes.

Noah: I’m glad.

Caleb: Yeah. I don’t really see it, but I’ll take it. I guess.

Kat: You’ve just got to… your hair’s long enough, so you’ve just got to get the square glasses, and we’ll make it work. The suit fits a little too tight. It’ll be perfect.

Caleb: Right.

Kat: Anyway. Sorry. I had a Who moment.

Noah: Well…

Kat: Sorry about that.

Noah: Did you guys all catch the Doctor Who special? Uh oh. We’re not going to talk about that.

[Caleb, Kat, and Michael laugh]

strong>Noah: We’re going to talk about the Podcast Question of the Week, everyone. So we have this great scene, as Michael described, where a lot is going on. We have an egg ringing. We have Filch and his cat right near the stairs and then Snape comes in, but this is just such a mess. What would have happened had Moody not come to Harry’s rescue and Snape had discovered Harry on the stairs when he was searching, with his hands outstretched? What do you think would have befell Harry? What sort of punishment would he have gotten? And how would it have changed the arc of the story from this point forward?

Caleb: That’s a good question.

Noah: I know.

Michael: What’s gone down on the staircase of lies?

Caleb: All right. Well, if you would like to be a guest on our show and join us in our discussion, we would love to have you. Head over onto our website, alohomora.mugglenet.com and check out what it takes to be on the show. And that’s what the link says, “Be on the Show.” You will just need appropriate audio equipment to record alongside us. We also would like to invite you to record something that we’re doing that’s a little new for the show. We do want to hear some of your comments and questions alongside our chapter discussion. So the way you can do this is record a short audio clip, through Audioboo, which is super easy, on our website. You can just record right there, or leave us a voicemail. And these would be comments or questions about the upcoming chapter. So you would make the comment or question before we even record. For example, this week we are recording about Chapter 25. So between now and next week, record a comment or question about Chapter 26, and if it’s really good we will integrate it into our chapter discussion.

Kat: Yeah, and we might actually play it on the show. So we’re only going to be doing one per episode, so definitely come up with a really good one and send it in. And where do you send it in, you might ask? Well, you can tweet it to us. I mean don’t tweet it to us. You should email it, but you can get us on Twitter at twitter.com/AlohomoraMN, facebook.com/openthedumbledore, and that phone number to leave one of those audio messages is 206-GO-ALBUS (206-462-5287). And, of course, the Audioboo, as Caleb mentioned, really easy to use. It’s on our main website, alohomora.mugglenet.com. All you need is an Internet connection and a microphone and you just hit record, boom, easy as pie. You heard one earlier from Cassandra1447. And of course, don’t forget to subscribe to us on iTunes and leave us a review because we love reading those. They make us feel all warm and fuzzy inside, like Hagrid’s mom.

[Michael laughs]

Noah: Wow. Woah. Pause. And we also have the store we talk about a lot, but we have lots of different products and a great way to spread the love about Alohomora! and tell your friends is to buy a T-shirt or flip-flops or tote bags or sweatshirts or travel mugs. There’s so much Alohomora! swag that basically you can fit your every Alohomora! need and there’s also Mandrake Liberation Front shirts and Desk!Pig shirts. Those proceeds are all going towards the Mandrake Liberation Front and all of its efforts to fight Mandrake cruelty worldwide. So check out our store on our website. There are over 80 products to choose from, and we’ve got ringtones, the Alohomora! ringtones. If you like the song, you can get it on your phone.

Kat: Yeah, and they’re free. So…

Noah: And they’re free.

Kat: … even better.

Michael: And we also have an app, which is available – as we always say – seemingly worldwide; prices vary. It includes transcripts, bloopers, alternate endings, host vlogs, and much, much more. So get on your phone and check it out. So I think that’ll end the show.

[Show music begins]

Michael: I’m Michael Harle.

Caleb: I’m Caleb Graves.

Noah: I’m Noah Fried.

Kat: And I’m Kat Miller. Thank you for listening to Episode 63 of Alohomora!

Noah: Open the Dumbledore!

[Show music continues]

Noah: What would Snape have done if he had found Harry on the stairs?

Kat: Hey, can you give it a little more…

[Caleb and Michael laugh]

Caleb: No build whatsoever.

[Michael and Noah laugh]

Kat: What’s the word I’m looking for? Exhibit…

Michael: Exhibition? Explanation?

Kat: That’s the word. Yeah.

Caleb: No. That’s not the word you want, though.

[Caleb and Noah laugh]

Kat: No, it’s not. Exposition.

Michael: Exposition.

Caleb: Yeah, there you go.

Kat: That’s the word.

Noah: Man…

Caleb: Build it up a little bit more.

Kat: Yeah.

Noah: … I could go for some exhibition, but…

[Michael laughs]

[Phone rings]

Michael: Hello?

Kat: Ooh, look at that! Someone is buying the app right now.

[Michael laughs]

Noah: Is that an Alohomora! caller?

[Phone continues ringing]

[Michael laughs]

Kat: That sounds like a house phone, so I don’t think you can get the app on a house phone.

Noah: It is. I’ll just mute myself.

Caleb: Well, you’ve got to say your name, so you can’t mute yourself.

Kat: No, it’s…

Noah: Just leave it out.

Kat: Let’s just wrap it up. Go ahead, Michael.

[Michael laughs]