With Chapters 55-56, I have some theories regarding Quirrell’s true plan. He is Voldemort (or rather contains a piece of Voldemort) but we know he doesn’t want Harry dead; he’s had ample opportunity to simply murder Harry if that was the goal. I think rescuing Bellatrix is a distraction as well, really nothing more than a cover story or “fortunate side effect” of achieving the true goal. If rescuing Bellatrix was the true goal, he wouldn’t have jeopardized the mission by attempting to murder the auror.
I think Quirrell’s ultimate goal is the Dementation of Harry, probably in order to draw out Harry’s dark side (which I think is the horcrux-fragment of Voldemort). He tried this at Hogwarts and it would have worked if not for Hermione’s intervention. Since he was unlikely to be able to bring Dementors to Hogwarts a second time, he concluded that he’d have to bring Harry to Azkaban. The rescue plan is a cover story designed to persuade Harry into going to Azkaban—although I suppose Quirrell figured he might as well make the rescue target someone who could actually be useful to him/Voldemort if freed.
So basically Quirrell deliberately put himself out of commission, thinking that Harry would quickly fall prey to the Dementors in such a situation. The hole in my theory is that this seems like an all-or-nothing play: he’s now revealed at least three pieces of important information to Harry (1. His own willingness to kill innocents; 2. The spell-clash aspect of their joined magics—which for my theory to be correct, Quirrell must already have known about; and 3. Quirrell’s own insanely-high power level). These three pieces together are probably enough to make Harry suspect that Quirrell is an aspect of Voldemort, once he has the chance to think things through. Quirrell is subtle enough that he should have had a backup plan in place in order to retain Harry’s trust in the event that Harry is not Demented, but I can’t imagine what that might be. Maybe Quirrell’s backup plan involves the Imperius Curse or memory charms or something. I’d say that “Kill Harry” would be the simplest and most obvious backup plan, but I think Voldemort wants/needs Harry alive.
Not a prediction so much as a guess: Bellatrix’s Innervate charm did work on Quirrell. He’s currently faking unconsciousness (and remaining in the form that gives himself some protection from the Dementors) as he waits to see whether Harry will or will not succumb to Dementation.
So basically Quirrell deliberately put himself out of commission
To counter this, it was Harry’s actions that lead to the fight with the auror. Up to the point that Harry almost lost control of his patronus Quirrell had been acting to shield Harry’s hearing, perhaps fearing that exact response. I don’t think there is any evidence that the fight was inevitable.
I agree that it’s unreasonable to expect that Quirrell could have anticipated the entire chain of events that led to the duel with Bahry. However, it’s not at all unreasonable to expect that a duel with one or more aurors would occur at some point during the course of breaking in and out of Azkaban, and in fact we know that Quirrell planned for this contingency, because he gave Harry standing orders for what to do if/when it happened. So, while that fight was not inevitable, a fight was always likely.
I think Quirrell’s ultimate goal is the Dementation of Harry, probably in order to draw out Harry’s dark side (which I think is the horcrux-fragment of Voldemort). He tried this at Hogwarts and it would have worked if not for Hermione’s intervention.
Doesn’t work. It was Quirrell (and only Quirrell) who spotted Harry’s wand next to the Dementor’s cage and alerted Flitwick so he could remove it.
If he had wanted Harry Demented he would have kept his mouth shut.
I think he did that because he didn’t want Hermione going in front of the Dementor again—she was getting too much information from it—and also because he figured (rightly) that Harry had already received enough exposure for his purposes.
But it was more likely that Harry would get picked up be Aurors than Dementors (now it doesn’t look that way, but Quirrell couldn’t have predicted Harry’s actions), and Quirrell wouldn’t risk his own arrest.
Yes, my theory definitely depends on believing that Quirrell COULD predict Harry’s actions when he cast the killing curse on the auror. You also have to be willing to believe that Quirrell knew Harry would figure out a way to observe the battle, even though he was ostensibly lying out of sight. I think the first is more of a stretch than the second. Anyone who knows Harry at all could predict that he would try to find a way to spy on the battle: using the Patronus to block the Killing Curse is a much more specific action that only somebody who understands Harry really well would be able to predict. I guess I’m willing to believe that Quirrell does understand Harry that well.
Patronus to block the Killing Curse is a much more specific action that only somebody who understands Harry really well would be able to predict. I guess I’m willing to believe that Quirrell does understand Harry that well.
Harry really isn’t that hard to predict… If he had a few moments spare I can even imagine him giving an impassioned speech on the subject before he used the patronus.
Is it possible that any magical interaction between Voldemort and Harry would cause that effect—a kind of blast radius that cancels both their magic, causing painful feedback in the process?
Then Quirrell wouldn’t need to know exactly what magic Harry would use in response, just that he would do something, and that in doing so both of them would be temporarily shut down...causing Harry to lose his Patronus no matter what kind of magic he’d used to try and block the Killing Curse. This might be consistent with the sense of doom that Harry feels when close to Quirrell—it’s kind of a magical matter/antimatter thing, for lack of a better metaphor.
I concede that Quirrell should have have known that Harry would intervene if possible, and that he might have guessed that painful feedback would be the outcome of any intervention. I would also offer that Quirrell throwing away his wand does imply he had some idea of what was happening.
However, I still don’t see that Quirrell intended for the fight to occur.
He gave Harry instructions for what to do in the event that they encountered an auror, so clearly he’d at least anticipated the possibility that a duel would happen at some point during the prison break. We’re also told that Harry’s maneuver with the mirror is something he’d “practiced...in the Chaos Legion,” so Quirrell should also have anticipated that Harry would be watching the duel if/when it happened. At the very least, he knows that Harry will be able to hear it.
So. The duel was not outside Quirrell’s plan. Therefore his actions during the duel must also have been deliberate and have been part of the plan. If those actions seem to foil the plan, then...it was never the real plan. And the real plan must somehow be furthered by Quirrell’s actions. So the only way I can make sense of Quirrell’s behavior is to think that he was deliberately trying to provoke the reaction he got from Harry.
Why? What does it gain him? Well, it leaves Harry exposed to Dementors. And coincidentally enough, this is the second time that Quirrell’s actions have left Harry exposed to Dementors. At which point I decide that it’s not coincidence at all. So my theory is really just trying to answer the question, “Why does Quirrell want Harry exposed to Dementors?”
I agree that we can’t reasonably assume that the Patronus teleport, magical feedback and subsequent Dementor exposure had been part of Quirrell’s plan.
However, the much more limited and much more certain prediction that AK’ing a guard Auror while in Harry’s earshot would cause a mess and make the stated “perfect crime” plan impossible is easily within Quirrell’s ability to figure out beforehand, even on the spot.
Therefore, his casting of AK—if not the very unusual result—is sufficient evidence that the “perfect crime” plan was at least to some degree horsecrap. Not that he must have wanted Harry to get caught, but, unless he had a doppelganger of Bahry in his pocket to replace him with, he certainly wasn’t as interested in a clean breakout as he had claimed.
I agree. The exact disastrous consequences of Harry’s reaction were most likely not part of the plan, and can’t be seen as a serious flaw or rationalized-in-hindsight as having been part of the plan all along.
But there’s nothing in the situation that would have come as a surprise to Quirrell. If his goals were the ones he stated to Harry, then Quirrell is indeed left holding the Idiot Ball.
EDIT: By “nothing in the situation that would have come as a surprise,” I mean the fact that there’s a duel with an auror in Azkaban, and that Harry is present and observing. In that situation casting a Killing Curse is idiotic, if the goal is simply to keep moving with minimum fuss. Quirrell would have known that perfectly well when he was making his plan.
He could have confidently foreseen that the AK would have ruined the “perfect crime” and pissed Harry off.
He could not have confidently foreseen that Harry’s Patronus would teleport in the way, block the Killing Curse, cause a magical backlash, and disappear.
I realized after I wrote that line about “nothing in the situation that would have come as a surprise” that it could be read that way, and I edited to clarify.
My speculation is that Quirrell might have reason to assume that any intervention by Harry would cause the magical backlash, but that really is just speculation, I freely admit.
Why does Quirrell want Harry exposed to Dementors?
At the risk of building this theory on top of another unconfirmed theory… It’s been speculated that Quirrell himself is Demented. He doesn’t appear so when Voldemort is telepathically controlling him, but when Voldy takes a cigarette break or whatever Quirrell enters zombie mode. Quirrell is just kind of an empty body, zombie-like unless Voldemort is logged in.
Maybe Voldemort wants to control Harry’s body in a similar fashion. What the difference is between dementing and then telepathically inhabiting, versus simply using the Imperius Curse… /shrug.
Alternatively, Voldemort has tried killing Harry, it didn’t work, so he wants to eliminate Harry as a potential obstacle through other means. If Harry’s soul is sucked out (or whatever the Dementor’s Kiss does, actually) then he is still alive technically but not an obstacle. It’s worth a shot as an alternative approach to just trying to kill Harry over and over, which is what canon Voldemort tries to do.
Also, and this can’t possibly be Quirrell’s reasoning, but it’s still an interesting thought: the MOR version of The Prophecy says that “either must destroy all but a remnant of the other”. If Harry is subjected to irreversible Dementation, all but a remnant of him is destroyed.
Therefore his actions during the duel must also have been deliberate and have been part of the plan.
I am confused by Quirrell’s behavior in attempting to kill the auror, so I assume that there is something that I don’t know or understand about Quirrell’s motives.
What I don’t see yet is that Quirrell was relying on the dual to occur, only that it was a possibility that he accounted for.
“Why does Quirrell want Harry exposed to Dementors?”
Assuming that this was part of the Plan, in some sense, then it comes across to me as a test. Perhaps to force Harry to confront his sensitivity dementors, perhaps simply to test him in an apparent no-win situation.
I am confused by Quirrell’s behavior in attempting to kill the auror, so I assume that there is something that I don’t know or understand about Quirrell’s motives.
What I don’t see yet is that Quirrell was relying on the dual to occur, only that it was a possibility that he accounted for.
You’re right, that’s all we can know for sure from the story so far. My theory is purely speculative, a guess at Quirrell’s true motives. It springs more from earlier chapters than from this one: I think it was really suspicious of Quirrell to go to all that trouble to bring Dementors into Hogwarts, and I’m inclined to believe that Hermione got true information from her encounter with the Dementor (namely, that Quirrell wanted Harry drained). Given that background, it seems more than a little suspicious that Quirrell has brought Harry into the same danger all over again, which is why I’m so quick to believe that stripping Harry of his Patronus was part of the plan. But I definitely don’t think I have all the details worked out.
Assuming that this was part of the Plan, in some sense, then it comes across to me as a test.
But in that case isn’t he risking a lot for very little reward?
I don’t think it’s reasonable to assume that he could predict the Patronus stopping the curse. Harry didn’t know it could do it. How could Quirrell, who can’t even cast Patronus 2.0?
Additionally, he had to be certain that Harry wouldn’t be able to recall his Patronus, which would also be beyond him.
With Chapters 55-56, I have some theories regarding Quirrell’s true plan. He is Voldemort (or rather contains a piece of Voldemort) but we know he doesn’t want Harry dead; he’s had ample opportunity to simply murder Harry if that was the goal. I think rescuing Bellatrix is a distraction as well, really nothing more than a cover story or “fortunate side effect” of achieving the true goal. If rescuing Bellatrix was the true goal, he wouldn’t have jeopardized the mission by attempting to murder the auror.
I think Quirrell’s ultimate goal is the Dementation of Harry, probably in order to draw out Harry’s dark side (which I think is the horcrux-fragment of Voldemort). He tried this at Hogwarts and it would have worked if not for Hermione’s intervention. Since he was unlikely to be able to bring Dementors to Hogwarts a second time, he concluded that he’d have to bring Harry to Azkaban. The rescue plan is a cover story designed to persuade Harry into going to Azkaban—although I suppose Quirrell figured he might as well make the rescue target someone who could actually be useful to him/Voldemort if freed.
So basically Quirrell deliberately put himself out of commission, thinking that Harry would quickly fall prey to the Dementors in such a situation. The hole in my theory is that this seems like an all-or-nothing play: he’s now revealed at least three pieces of important information to Harry (1. His own willingness to kill innocents; 2. The spell-clash aspect of their joined magics—which for my theory to be correct, Quirrell must already have known about; and 3. Quirrell’s own insanely-high power level). These three pieces together are probably enough to make Harry suspect that Quirrell is an aspect of Voldemort, once he has the chance to think things through. Quirrell is subtle enough that he should have had a backup plan in place in order to retain Harry’s trust in the event that Harry is not Demented, but I can’t imagine what that might be. Maybe Quirrell’s backup plan involves the Imperius Curse or memory charms or something. I’d say that “Kill Harry” would be the simplest and most obvious backup plan, but I think Voldemort wants/needs Harry alive.
Not a prediction so much as a guess: Bellatrix’s Innervate charm did work on Quirrell. He’s currently faking unconsciousness (and remaining in the form that gives himself some protection from the Dementors) as he waits to see whether Harry will or will not succumb to Dementation.
To counter this, it was Harry’s actions that lead to the fight with the auror. Up to the point that Harry almost lost control of his patronus Quirrell had been acting to shield Harry’s hearing, perhaps fearing that exact response. I don’t think there is any evidence that the fight was inevitable.
I agree that it’s unreasonable to expect that Quirrell could have anticipated the entire chain of events that led to the duel with Bahry. However, it’s not at all unreasonable to expect that a duel with one or more aurors would occur at some point during the course of breaking in and out of Azkaban, and in fact we know that Quirrell planned for this contingency, because he gave Harry standing orders for what to do if/when it happened. So, while that fight was not inevitable, a fight was always likely.
Doesn’t work. It was Quirrell (and only Quirrell) who spotted Harry’s wand next to the Dementor’s cage and alerted Flitwick so he could remove it.
If he had wanted Harry Demented he would have kept his mouth shut.
I think he did that because he didn’t want Hermione going in front of the Dementor again—she was getting too much information from it—and also because he figured (rightly) that Harry had already received enough exposure for his purposes.
But it was more likely that Harry would get picked up be Aurors than Dementors (now it doesn’t look that way, but Quirrell couldn’t have predicted Harry’s actions), and Quirrell wouldn’t risk his own arrest.
Yes, my theory definitely depends on believing that Quirrell COULD predict Harry’s actions when he cast the killing curse on the auror. You also have to be willing to believe that Quirrell knew Harry would figure out a way to observe the battle, even though he was ostensibly lying out of sight. I think the first is more of a stretch than the second. Anyone who knows Harry at all could predict that he would try to find a way to spy on the battle: using the Patronus to block the Killing Curse is a much more specific action that only somebody who understands Harry really well would be able to predict. I guess I’m willing to believe that Quirrell does understand Harry that well.
Harry really isn’t that hard to predict… If he had a few moments spare I can even imagine him giving an impassioned speech on the subject before he used the patronus.
Could Quirrell have guessed that Harry’s patronus would block a killing curse? That seems like a stretch.
Is it possible that any magical interaction between Voldemort and Harry would cause that effect—a kind of blast radius that cancels both their magic, causing painful feedback in the process?
Then Quirrell wouldn’t need to know exactly what magic Harry would use in response, just that he would do something, and that in doing so both of them would be temporarily shut down...causing Harry to lose his Patronus no matter what kind of magic he’d used to try and block the Killing Curse. This might be consistent with the sense of doom that Harry feels when close to Quirrell—it’s kind of a magical matter/antimatter thing, for lack of a better metaphor.
I concede that Quirrell should have have known that Harry would intervene if possible, and that he might have guessed that painful feedback would be the outcome of any intervention. I would also offer that Quirrell throwing away his wand does imply he had some idea of what was happening.
However, I still don’t see that Quirrell intended for the fight to occur.
He gave Harry instructions for what to do in the event that they encountered an auror, so clearly he’d at least anticipated the possibility that a duel would happen at some point during the prison break. We’re also told that Harry’s maneuver with the mirror is something he’d “practiced...in the Chaos Legion,” so Quirrell should also have anticipated that Harry would be watching the duel if/when it happened. At the very least, he knows that Harry will be able to hear it.
So. The duel was not outside Quirrell’s plan. Therefore his actions during the duel must also have been deliberate and have been part of the plan. If those actions seem to foil the plan, then...it was never the real plan. And the real plan must somehow be furthered by Quirrell’s actions. So the only way I can make sense of Quirrell’s behavior is to think that he was deliberately trying to provoke the reaction he got from Harry.
Why? What does it gain him? Well, it leaves Harry exposed to Dementors. And coincidentally enough, this is the second time that Quirrell’s actions have left Harry exposed to Dementors. At which point I decide that it’s not coincidence at all. So my theory is really just trying to answer the question, “Why does Quirrell want Harry exposed to Dementors?”
A Bayesian villain plots under uncertainty, and shouldn’t be judged with Hindsight bias.
I agree that we can’t reasonably assume that the Patronus teleport, magical feedback and subsequent Dementor exposure had been part of Quirrell’s plan.
However, the much more limited and much more certain prediction that AK’ing a guard Auror while in Harry’s earshot would cause a mess and make the stated “perfect crime” plan impossible is easily within Quirrell’s ability to figure out beforehand, even on the spot.
Therefore, his casting of AK—if not the very unusual result—is sufficient evidence that the “perfect crime” plan was at least to some degree horsecrap. Not that he must have wanted Harry to get caught, but, unless he had a doppelganger of Bahry in his pocket to replace him with, he certainly wasn’t as interested in a clean breakout as he had claimed.
I agree. The exact disastrous consequences of Harry’s reaction were most likely not part of the plan, and can’t be seen as a serious flaw or rationalized-in-hindsight as having been part of the plan all along.
But there’s nothing in the situation that would have come as a surprise to Quirrell. If his goals were the ones he stated to Harry, then Quirrell is indeed left holding the Idiot Ball.
EDIT: By “nothing in the situation that would have come as a surprise,” I mean the fact that there’s a duel with an auror in Azkaban, and that Harry is present and observing. In that situation casting a Killing Curse is idiotic, if the goal is simply to keep moving with minimum fuss. Quirrell would have known that perfectly well when he was making his plan.
He could have confidently foreseen that the AK would have ruined the “perfect crime” and pissed Harry off.
He could not have confidently foreseen that Harry’s Patronus would teleport in the way, block the Killing Curse, cause a magical backlash, and disappear.
I realized after I wrote that line about “nothing in the situation that would have come as a surprise” that it could be read that way, and I edited to clarify.
My speculation is that Quirrell might have reason to assume that any intervention by Harry would cause the magical backlash, but that really is just speculation, I freely admit.
At the risk of building this theory on top of another unconfirmed theory… It’s been speculated that Quirrell himself is Demented. He doesn’t appear so when Voldemort is telepathically controlling him, but when Voldy takes a cigarette break or whatever Quirrell enters zombie mode. Quirrell is just kind of an empty body, zombie-like unless Voldemort is logged in.
Maybe Voldemort wants to control Harry’s body in a similar fashion. What the difference is between dementing and then telepathically inhabiting, versus simply using the Imperius Curse… /shrug.
Removing happiness makes for better evil.
Alternatively, Voldemort has tried killing Harry, it didn’t work, so he wants to eliminate Harry as a potential obstacle through other means. If Harry’s soul is sucked out (or whatever the Dementor’s Kiss does, actually) then he is still alive technically but not an obstacle. It’s worth a shot as an alternative approach to just trying to kill Harry over and over, which is what canon Voldemort tries to do.
Also, and this can’t possibly be Quirrell’s reasoning, but it’s still an interesting thought: the MOR version of The Prophecy says that “either must destroy all but a remnant of the other”. If Harry is subjected to irreversible Dementation, all but a remnant of him is destroyed.
I am confused by Quirrell’s behavior in attempting to kill the auror, so I assume that there is something that I don’t know or understand about Quirrell’s motives.
What I don’t see yet is that Quirrell was relying on the dual to occur, only that it was a possibility that he accounted for.
Assuming that this was part of the Plan, in some sense, then it comes across to me as a test. Perhaps to force Harry to confront his sensitivity dementors, perhaps simply to test him in an apparent no-win situation.
You’re right, that’s all we can know for sure from the story so far. My theory is purely speculative, a guess at Quirrell’s true motives. It springs more from earlier chapters than from this one: I think it was really suspicious of Quirrell to go to all that trouble to bring Dementors into Hogwarts, and I’m inclined to believe that Hermione got true information from her encounter with the Dementor (namely, that Quirrell wanted Harry drained). Given that background, it seems more than a little suspicious that Quirrell has brought Harry into the same danger all over again, which is why I’m so quick to believe that stripping Harry of his Patronus was part of the plan. But I definitely don’t think I have all the details worked out.
But in that case isn’t he risking a lot for very little reward?
Your point would seem to apply to the whole rescue attempt, and especially to Quirrell’s attempt at murder.
Wha? Quirrell knew about Harry’s superpower against Dementors before he proposed the mission.
I think that’s why he cast the killing curse—to get Harry to expend his Patronus.
I don’t think it’s reasonable to assume that he could predict the Patronus stopping the curse. Harry didn’t know it could do it. How could Quirrell, who can’t even cast Patronus 2.0?
Additionally, he had to be certain that Harry wouldn’t be able to recall his Patronus, which would also be beyond him.