OVERANALYZING THE TEXT

This is quite late, really, but I've had some computer troubles.

Pippin wrote:

I admit that arrival via portkey is somewhat disorienting and that it's not practical for all the DE's to show up at once. However...

The DE's also have an agent on the scene who can create a diversion to cover their arrival. In fact, he already has, by disabling Krum and Fleur. He may have also put a confundus curse on Fudge and Bagman so that they didn't immediately notice what was happening in the maze--the residual effects of this may account somewhat for Fudge's inability to grasp that Voldemort has returned.

Hmmmm. I think that if Crouch had actually confounded Fudge and Bagman, then he would almost certainly have bragged to Harry about that in his "I want you to DIE, Mr. Potter...but first, let me provide some plot exposition for the folks watching at home" scene.

Also, if Crouch had really been that heavily involved in a plan involving use of the Portkey as a means of allowing the DEs to attack Hogwarts, then I would rather expect for him to be a bit more interested in learning from Harry why the plan didn't work. Instead, he seems far more anxious to learn first if Voldemort has really returned, and second, how he then treated the other DEs. He's just panting to hear that Voldemort punished them severely for their disloyalty. He wants to hear that they've been made to suffer. In fact, I really don't get the impression that he would shed too many tears to hear that a good number of them had been killed.

I can't really imagine that he'd be expecting or hoping for such a thing if he knew that the DEs would then be called upon to aid Voldemort in an attack on Hogwarts. They simply wouldn't be in any condition to do so if they'd been punished in quite the manner that Crouch seems to be so desperately hoping to hear about.

He does seem rather undismayed by the fact that Harry escaped, though, doesn't he?

Debbie wrote:

Also, Crouch Jr., after explaining to Dumbledore how he turned the cup into a Portkey, says "My master's plan worked. He is returned to power . . . ." This doesn't make it sound like the plan was to attack Hogwarts.

No. It doesn't to me, either. Or at least, if that was part of the plan, then it doesn't sound to me as if anyone sent Barty a memo to that effect.

I do agree with Debbie, though, that Crouch's relative lack of dismay over the appearance of Alive!Harry does strongly support Pip's idea that Voldemort might have always had the possibility that Harry might escape in mind as a "Plan B."

Pippin wrote:

Dumbledore would have been notified by Snape as soon as possible once the Dark Mark burned, at which point he would certainly evacuate the students to their Houses, especially if he had realized by that time that Harry was missing. So most of the students would have been leaving the stands and the adults would be guarding the students. This is why Harry saw people moving in the stands when he returned.

It's an interesting question, this. Just what was going on when Harry first returned from the graveyard? I've just gone and reread the passage, and it is somewhat ambiguous. The sense of time passing is deliberately vague—it's actually a rather nice bit of writing here, JKR's conveyance of the poor boy's state of shock—but the impression that I receive is that Harry lies there in the grass for a few moments in silence ("waiting...waiting for someone to do something...something to happen...") before the "torrent of sound deafened and confused him" and the stampede begins. I don't get the impression that there was already an evacuation of the stands underway at all.

Certainly if the students were being shepherded away, then they were not being very competently shepherded away. Harry hears girls screaming and sobbing in the crowd thronging around him while he is still lying on the grass, right before Crouch drags him back to the school. It looks like chaos to me. I don't see any signs that anyone is trying to lead the students back to their dormitories or that any adults are standing guard over them.

Pippin:

However, I think the terrorist purpose would be served if Voldemort was at Hogwarts long enough to drop off Harry's body, set off one of those blast spells like the one Peter used to kill all those people at once, laugh his unmistakeable laugh, and portkey out again.

This, however, I can accept as a possibility. It strikes me as perfectly consistent with everything that we've seen of Voldemort so far. He does generally seem to prefer to take care of matters personally, rather than delegating them to his followers while he himself remains hidden safely away. He attacked the Potters in person. He chose to reveal himself at the end of PS/SS. And he tried (at first, at any rate) to convince the DEs in the graveyard not to interfere in his "duel" in the graveyard.

So all right. I will accept the "Voldemort portkeys in with Harry's body, kills a bunch of people, laughs like a fiend, and then vanishes again" plan. I can live quite happily with that.

Rosie suggested the possibility of a "Voldemort portkeys in with Harry alive, kills a bunch of people, laughs like a fiend, and then vanishes again" plan.

Rosie:

If they didn't zap Harry before appearing through the Portkey...who would they have as a very convenient hostage?

Given that Voldemort did cast the Killing Curse at him, I can only imagine this as a variant on the Spying Game's Plan B. According to this interpretation of events, Plan A was "kill Harry with the good old AK," while Plan B was: "And if that doesn't work, then Portkey to Hogwarts with Harry in tow as a hostage."

Sure. That has possibilities.

Debbie, however, objected:

But a more practical objection. If the Portkey was rigged to take Voldemort back out of Hogwarts after dropping off Harry's body (and it would need to be to allow Voldemort to escape), why didn't the person who picked it up after Harry let go of it get transported back to the graveyard?

Hey, for all we know, that's exactly what happened. Do we ever see the Cup again after Harry gets dragged off by Moody? He gets his sack full of Galleons eventually—he tries to give it to the Diggories—but whatever happened to the trophy itself? Unless there's some mention of it that I've missed (which there might well be, as I am not, I fear, at all competent at that LOON stuff), we never see the thing again.

Boy. A nasty shock that must have been for some souvenir-seeker, eh?

Debbie also wrote:

Also, this was a pretty risky plan, even if Crouch Jr. was on patrol at the edge of the maze. If he dropped the Portkey and someone else picked it up, he would be stuck at Hogwarts, not exactly a glorious climax to a triumphant return.

He could have just held onto it, though. Simply letting go of it and then touching it again really wouldn't be all that difficult, I wouldn't think. There's risk involved, but not tremendous risk.

Pippin:

He wouldn't need all the Death Eaters for that. If the blast was aimed at the Judge's Booth, he might very well succeed in killing Fudge, which would be perfectly adequate as far as demoralizing everybody and disrupting the WW.

Debbie:

Kill Fudge? Whether he's Ever So Evil or just Ever So Incompetent, Fudge is one of Voldemort's best allies. Kill him? What could Voldemort be thinking of?

The assassination of even a weak leader is exceptionally demoralizing, and political chaos is even easier to exploit than Cornelius Fudge himself is. A leaderless wizarding world would be exceptionally vulnerable -- even more vulnerable than a wizarding world with a Fudge at its helm.

Also, say what you like about Fudge (certainly everyone else around here does), but he presumably really does have some genuine political skills. He has held the office for quite some time, after all. I imagine that he's got quite a knack for consensus-building and bipartisan compromise and other skills that prove useful in maintaining order during times of peace. That the wizarding world is strongly politically divided is implied in Fudge's exchange with Dumbledore over the dementors:

'Half of us only feel safe in our beds at night because we know the dementors are standing guard at Azkaban!'

'The rest of us sleep less soundly in our beds, Cornelius, knowing that you have put Lord Voldemort's most dangerous supporters in the care of creatures who will join him the instant he asks them!'

They're speaking metaphorically, of course. But still, the fact that even Fudge uses the word "half" is somewhat suggestive to my mind. Fudge is an appeaser, a compromiser. That is both his particular flaw and his particular talent. With him gone, the wizarding world might well find itself at a political impasse which would benefit no one so much as Voldemort and his followers.

Debbie put this entire of speculations into some doubt with this:

Except for one problem: If the Cup was originally set to carry the first person to touch it back to the edge of the maze, why did Crouch Jr. tell Dumbledore later that when he carried the Cup into the maze, he "Turned it into a Portkey." Voldemort uses almost exactly the same phrase ("the cup which my Death Eater had turned into a Portkey") (GoF, pp. 657, 691). If it had been a portkey all along, Crouch would have had to say that he'd fixed the Portkey to go to the graveyard first, right?

Aw, Debbie!

Did you have to?

::sigh::

Yeah, you're right. That does make it all seem rather unlikely. But if we don't imagine that the Triwizard Cup was always a Portkey, then we're left with that old question of how the contestants were supposed to get back out of the maze in the first place. And of how the judges would know for sure which contestant really touched it first. And of...of...well, and besides, it's ever so much more interesting this way, don't you think?

But the detour in the portkey makes so much sense I'm willing to write this off as a FLINT.

That's the spirit!

—Elkins