That whole locket, green goo in mysterious cave thing (was: green potion et.all)

[Marion Ros]

No: HPFGUIDX 165746

Hi people,

I'm sorry I've been erratic in answering posts etc; I've been very, VERY
busy (writing a thesis, part-time job AND being a Teacher's Assistant is
really eating up my time).
It's all I can do when I come home late at night to skim through messages
and cherrypick what looks like an interesting thread. But I just keep
still on this one. Maybe I've missed it, but am I the only one who thinks
that the whole secretly buggering off on one's own (I mean DD and Harryy.
No back-up, no apparant telling where they're going) to a oooohhh, scary
secret cave with ghouls and whatnot and having to past a certain test and
DD drinking poison and going all 'OOOOhhh!! I'm *hurting*, I'm *dying*' is
all a bit, I dunno, *theatrical*?

A performance?

A test, maybe, wether Harry would feed his mentor poison if asked?

I remember that there was an experiment once, where students had to push
buttons which would give a human subject increasingly painful (or so it
seemed, the subject was an actor) electric shocks when that subject
answered a question wrong. The result of that experiment was
disconcerting. It showed how easily people would torture another human
being if told to do so by an authority figure.
I also remember the episode 'Comes the Inquisitor' of the tv series
Babylon 5. In it we are told that there are evil forces afoot called the
Shadows and a mysterious race called the Vorlons handpick a group of
people to fight them (secret society, mystic philosophy; irresistable) The
leader of this group one day is told that in order to proof that she is
the 'Chosen One', the one worthy to lead against the Shadows, she has to
subject herself to an 'inquisitor'. She gets tortured. BUT, she has the
power to stop the torture. However, when she stops the torture she has
shown that she is not worthy, she is not the Chosen One.
Of course, it turns out that the Vorlons and the Shadows are not Good or
Evil, they just have a difference of opinion and they use other people to
duke it out. The Vorlons simply choose their pawns by searching for people
with enough hubris to endure torture simply to proof that they're
'worthy'.

So when I read the whole cave scene I thought, "this is such a
performance. Who does DD think he's kidding?"

If you ask me, DD and Snape have been setting up the chessboard for the
past fifteen years. They've been playing for high stakes, and every
chessplayer knows that sacrifice it the way to place a queen on the
enemy's side of the board.

In short, if DD didn't plant that locket in that cave himself, I'll eat my
keyboard.

Thoughts, anyone?

Marion (who goes back to lurking because she is really to busy to join in
the discussion, much to her regret)