Recorded Neutral Territory - A Dresden Files Podcast

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (00:34)
Welcome one, welcome all, welcome to Recorded Neutral Territory, a Dresden Files chapter by chapter reread podcast. Today we're looking at the finale of Stormfront, but this is spoilers for all of the Dresden Files series. I am Adam Ruzzo, and with as always, is an abruptly unemployed drug dealer, it's Brian O'Reilly. Welcome Brian, are you gonna be okay?

Baloreilly (00:57)
Nah man, competition snapped me like right up. I'm gonna be pushing doobies for Marconi. Homies rockin' the ganja.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (01:07)
Okay, well, that's good to hear. Welcome, Brian. We are talking about chapters 25, 26, and 27, the last three chapters of Stormfront. We are almost done with this book and I am very excited. Quick note up front, we will not be releasing an episode next week that is Friday the 20th, but we will be releasing the final episode about Stormfront the following week, the 27th. We're taking a one week break so we can get your questions to talk about

on that following week. We'll have more to talk about that at the end of the show.

Baloreilly (01:37)
Yo.

So this episode starts exactly where the last episode left off. Harry has made the decision with his sight open to walk into Victor Cell's dark lair. And as we progress through the opening chapter, the despairing dark vision of the house...

just becomes more and more real for Harry.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (02:05)
But he walks in, he basically has no problems, the door's open. Victor is just completely confident that he has everything under his control. And this despite the fact that

He probably, did he know that Harry came to his lake house earlier? Was he in there at that moment? He probably could have been sleeping. Maybe he just didn't know.

Baloreilly (02:25)
Yeah, I don't think he has any idea that Dresden knows where he is or where he lives, which is part of the reason why he's so shocked when Harry, force jumps his way onto the platform. ⁓ One thing that's important to note here, ⁓ because it is consistent, Harry will actually bring this up in Grave Peril. There's no threshold in Victor's house because Victor's been using it as a place of business.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (02:30)
Right.

Yeah.

Baloreilly (02:52)
So not only is literally open to the public in the sense of being unlocked, but it's also figuratively open to the public, which is why Harry gets to walk in with all of his magic, what's left of it, still with him.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (03:04)
Mm-hmm.

And you marked a sentence here where it's referring to the spell, the complex ritual spell that Victor is doing, and Harry calls it tricky. Quote, no wonder it was so effective. It must have taken Victor a lot of trial and error to figure it out, unquote. Why did you highlight that?

Baloreilly (03:25)
I mean, it's almost begging us to assume that it wasn't trial and error, right? That he got this sort of designed elsewhere by presumably someone with more experience than him. And I think there's two key reasons why we can make that assumption. First is we're being flagged the whole story and even in this moment that Victor maybe has help, but also trialing and erroring your kill people ritual sounds like something that would

probably end up with you a greasy stain on the floor, right?

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (03:57)
Yeah,

Yeah, that suggests that he probably did have help to get it right before he backfired on himself. then he looks through and he finds all the potion ingredients.

and one of them is absinthe, and I think you brought up The thing that most people think they know about absinthe probably isn't true.

Baloreilly (04:14)
Right, everyone has this belief, it's actually due to propaganda by the French wine industry like 200 years ago, that absinthe makes you hallucinate, that the wormwood in real absinthe causes hallucinations. Now,

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (04:21)
You

Baloreilly (04:30)
Real absinthe used to be illegal to buy or manufacture in the US because it had wormwood in it, but that's because wormwood is in large quantities toxic. It's not because it's The 3i obviously uses absinthe because it's supposed to give you visions. 3i makes you see things, absinthe makes you see things. But it's really okay that absinthe doesn't...

literally have that effect because magic is of course about belief. So absinthe symbolizes hallucination as a base ingredient, which is why it's used for this working. Victor is also using peyote, so he's not neglecting actual hallucinogens, but that's not what absinthe is.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (05:06)
Mm-hmm.

Exactly, when Harry makes

the wake-up juice that he uses in Full Moon, I think he uses coffee as the base. The caffeine isn't literally giving him a second wind, it's a metaphor for what the potion is going to do. That's a perfect explanation here as well.

Baloreilly (05:33)
Right, so whether Jim did or did not know that that fact about absinthe was propaganda doesn't actually matter from a Watsonian perspective because the magic should work better using absinthe as a base ingredient than water. Absinthe has this significance. Also, I love the vision Harry gets of the three eye because he does take a brief glance at it with his sight open. It looked different, thick.

and cloudy with possibility, potential disaster lurking in every vial, faces twisted in horror and torment swam through the liquid, ghostly images of what might be. Again, telling us on the one hand, the sight is to a certain extent precognitive. He is able to see an idea of what could happen as a result of third eye, but also that

Three-Eye isn't just a thing that's gonna make people see stuff. It is a looming disaster. It is the kind of thing that could cause Apocalypse to be your frame of mind.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (06:47)
So in this scene, he decides to finally shut his sight down and we get an interesting line here, I was afraid with the same fear that a child feels when confronted by a large angry dog or with the neighborhood bully, the kind of fear that paralyzes, that makes you want to make excuses and hide, unquote. This is a bit unusual because we don't see Harry paralyzed with this fear.

pretty much any other time in the files. I guess you could say when he's under psychic attack in the Wraith Deeps, he's paralyzed in that moment, but that is not what's happening here. He's not under attack. He's just normal ass fear from I'm about to go confront a warlock and I don't know if I can do this. And it's specifically like the same fear a child feels when confronted with a large angry dog or the neighborhood bully. This is the kind of fear of.

I can't do this fear. I'm about to try something I'm not equipped for. There's no way it goes well for me. why don't we see that at all in the future? Keep in mind this quote. We're gonna come back to it in the next couple chapters.

Baloreilly (07:56)
And I just want to highlight, it's not just he says he's afraid, he literally says he's shaking. And the fear is preventing him confronting Victor. It's literally keeping him hidden under the platform where he can feel, quote,

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (08:04)
Mm-hmm.

Baloreilly (08:17)
His strength from here, his confidence, the force of his will, infusing the very air with a sort of hateful certainty. Harry is afraid in an infantilizing, disempowering way. He is plenty afraid of stuff in the future. Harry will tell us all the time that he is scared, he will run away, but he is afraid, usually in the Dresden Files, in a way that leads him to taking action.

not in a way that prevents him from taking action. This is a young man who's scared in a way that little kids are scared.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (08:56)
Right, lack of experience. You don't know what's gonna happen next, because you've never done anything like this before. And so that fear of the unknown, of the inexperience is what he's seeing here. Now, there is one other sort of interpretation of this, because right after he says he's terrified of coming out of his hiding place, he says, quote, but there's no time for hiding, no time for excuses. I had to act, so I forced my sight.

Now, in the previous chapter, we speculated that maybe one of the reasons he was feeling the draw to use the power that he felt in the place to murder Victor outright with his magic was because he was being influenced by the negative energy through his sight. It was just getting into his psyche in a way that he wasn't feeling. Here, once he closes his sight, he is

able to gather his courage and act. And I wonder if there's something about the sight amplifying what's going on above him, the ritual and all that that's going to entail, and that is also amplifying his fear until he closes the sight, at which point he can best the fear and act.

Baloreilly (10:15)
Yeah, that's a really good point because as we've noted, Dresden doesn't leave his sight open like this in future confrontations, even when it would be helpful for him to perceive where his enemies are, etc. I love, though, that immediately after something that is maybe a little uncharacteristic of Harry in the future, we get things that are very characteristic of Harry in the future, the showmanship with which he confronts his enemies.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (10:40)
Yes, he immediately walks out from under the balcony, he Fuego's the stereo to blow it up, and this is a great little detail. Writers, take note. Butcher reminds you, quote, Murphy's handcuffs still dangled from my wrist, one loop swinging free, unquote. There's your Chekhov's handcuffs right there. He's reminding you this is a thing that is true, and it sounds like just another.

detail of what's going on, but that's going to become very important in the next chapter. So he then turns, extends his arms, and Veni, che. And I tried to figure this I gathered. Veni meaning I came, like Veni, vini, vici in Latin.

And Che is like that or witch, Anyway, it doesn't have to make sense, it only has to make sense in Harry's head. And then the next line sets up this cool moment launches himself into the air, as you said, uses the force to like jump up onto the balcony

with his duster billowing behind him like Batman and Victor is shocked and he can only say, you! Like all villains that Harry makes fun of later for having like the cheesiest corniest line, that's definitely the cheesiest villain line when the hero shows up unexpectedly. It's just great. And Victor stares at him in shock.

one of the things that I thought was very interesting here is he says, me, there's something I've been meaning to talk to you about, Vic. And that sounds very similar to his entrance when he goes to the Varsity, and he says, quote,

I'd really like to talk to you for a minute, John," unquote, to the same point where he is shortening and familiarizing their names in a way to upset nobody calls John Marcon John. They call him Mr. Marcon, right? And here, he's shorting Victor to Vic and just becoming way more familiar. That's taunting that Dresden is known for.

Baloreilly (12:44)
Yeah, I mean, this is effectively a battle cry. shocking and disorienting the opponent before the combat starts. It's very effective. I think Veni Che, what he's literally trying to do there is say something along the lines of, I come at you. It's very direct. The magic in Dresden's head is working in concert with his approach to do this very ⁓

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (13:02)
Yeah, that's probably it.

Baloreilly (13:13)
immediate in-your-face challenge, which Dresden backs up with a kind of understated confidence that makes Victor Sells really angry, irrational. It bothers him. And I think it ultimately saves Harry's life because Harry can't effectively fight

back against Victor and the Beckitts, as we'll get to later in the chapter, if they sort of coordinate their assault and come at him in a logical way. And Victor just doesn't seem to be able to get it together to do that. Something keeps him at arm's length, keeps him from wanting to get all up in there with Harry magically. And I think it's that Harry just scares the crap out of him with this move.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (14:06)
Yeah,

Harry's not supposed to know his name, much less where he is, and suddenly he shows up and says, I know who you are and where you are, and I'm here, and I look calm like I can defeat you. That should scare the crap out of him, because it completely undercuts all of his understanding of reality at that moment. that immediately Harry to chuck.

Baloreilly (14:11)
Mm-hmm.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (14:28)
the empty plastic film canister to break the circle and release the spell before Victor can complete it, which has a different reaction here than other points that we have seen spells contained in circles rituals be disrupted or Harry discusses what happens if they're I believe in Blood Rites, he discusses how the wife who's holding the spell in the Wraith Deeps.

has to keep it going or else it will backlash on her. So maybe spells backlash in different ways and this one just causes the power to swirl around because Victor's on control. Who knows? It doesn't seem super consistent, but it might just be that that's how that works. And then Victor starts screaming at him and he's clearly out of control. Compared to Harry seeming to be very much in control, like you said, understated confidence. But then we get down to this line.

where Harry rushes him and says, you know, I don't think Victor expected me to rise, lurch across the trembling floor and drive my shoulder into this chest. This is an echo of other things that we have seen this in the past. Wizards don't expect you to throw a punch or to raise your gun. They expect everything to be done with magic. And here he's taking advantage of that again. But the line I wanna draw our attention to is right after he goes after Victor physically, he says, quote,

By this time, I was screaming at him, senseless and incoherent. I started kicking at his head." This to me belies the understated confidence that we saw earlier. That was tightly leashed anger that has been boiling ever since he learned Monica's story and saw what she had to go through and has blamed Victor not only for what she did to her, but to Linda and Jennifer Stanton and Tommy Tom.

Baloreilly (16:16)
Yeah, Harry is clearly not able to keep his deep anger at Victor from affecting the choices he makes in this moment. I also think it's because Harry's confidence is shaken a little bit by just how close he cuts it. Victor is literally bringing the sacrificial spoon down on the sacrificial rabbit to kill Harry.

the moment the film canister breaks the circle. And you're right, we would expect a spell held that close to its ending should have more of a backlash. Now it does seem to mess up the house pretty badly, pretty immediately ⁓ in terms of knocking things around on the platform and the floor is trembling afterwards, but it doesn't vaporize Victor or anything like that. doesn't...

seem to harm him in any meaningful way. So this could be a bit of an inconsistency with how other spells work, or it could be kind of a thing where when a circle is broken like that, there's a chance it'll just vaporize you, and there's a chance it won't, right? Harry's pretty confident that when he bumps Cowl's elbow during the Dark Hallow, that's gonna be the end of Cal, but then Cal shows up two books later. So.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (17:30)
Hmm

Baloreilly (17:41)
It might be that Jim's actually always had this idea that breaching a circle or interrupting a spell midway through is highly dangerous, but it's a bit more of a die roll than just an instant fatality. Harry's anger, however, does keep him from noticing that Beckett, Mr. Beckett, has grabbed an automatic weapon and is ready to kill him immediately. The Becketts are...

Cold-blooded killers in this scene. They don't miss a beat.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (18:11)
Yeah.

Yeah. And that is something he didn't expect at all. I imagine that if the Beckitts weren't able to get it together and didn't have weapons ready, then Harry just wins this fight by punching the crap out of Victor until he's incapacitated. Maybe with a concussion, maybe just so hurt that he can't focus on anything. And then maybe Harry could turn and deal with the Beckitts or leave and call the cops. Any number of things could have happened. But instead,

they start shooting at him and he is not prepared for that because the line where he said he's screaming senseless and incoherent puts the lie to the fact that he seems like everything he's done up until this point is very and thoughtful and rational and that recontextualizes all the choices that he made. Because you asked me before the show, why didn't he just shoot Victor? Why didn't he do something else other than cut it so close and throw a film canister across? Why didn't he?

do something to incapacitate Victor from the very jump. He had the ambush. Why didn't he use it? And I think it's because he's thinking with his rage right now and barely keeping control of it. So he's not able to think as rationally and as tactically as he might otherwise.

Baloreilly (19:20)
grab

a bottle of Absinthe, right? Something that'll actually hit the guy and, if not knock him out, at least exactly. And Harry doesn't plan that out. He just gets his courage together and goes for it and realizes at the moment, ⁓ I guess I got a film canister and throws that.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (19:22)
Yeah!

Bruis'em.

It does

seem very reactive, which is very hairy, to be fair, at this moment. So then Victor his tube to himself and brings out six or more scorpions and he has the most creative way to get these scorpions. His spell is scorpis, scorpis, scorpis. It just is so villainy and just so cliche. So.

Harry gets into the kitchen, hides behind the counter. He realizes he's been shot in the hip as part of while he was running away and the broom of destiny falls into his hand and we move on to the next chapter with him saying, all in all, it was looking like a bad evening for the home team.

Baloreilly (20:24)
Yeah, he begins the next chapter with quote, I was so dead, end quote, really puts into perspective how bad his situation is. He's pinned down by this automatic. The only reason he's still alive is that the ambient magic in the area caused it to jam once already. He's got the scorpions coming after him and Victor seems to be capable of doing other workings now that he's

set this spell on the scorpions. One thing I want to mention about that is I think this shows some evidence that the spell Victor uses on the scorpions is a self-feeding thing or that he has charged up a lot of scorpion batteries because these things start growing immediately and Victor is still free to do other magic.

So Harry's under assault from sort of three different quarters and the only thing he has between him and depth is I guess the kitchen counter.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (21:29)
Yeah, and I think you bring up a very good point there. Remember that Harry describes one of the things, I don't remember if it was earlier in this book or later, but he describes one of the things that makes wizards so dangerous is their ability to prepare. If you give a wizard time, they know what they're going into, they can be prepared, they can do almost anything, deal with almost any problem. Here, it's showing that Harry's counterpart,

The evil, selfish version of what Harry could have been that he's fighting here is also someone who's really prepared, thought ahead, had these scorpions at the ready, charged up and good to go to use for moments like this.

Baloreilly (22:10)
Right, Harry's response to the scorpions is, of course, a stroke of luck on his part because he that he's got a way to deal with all these scorpions, casting the spell pulitas, and in an echo of victory, he repeats it twice more, pulitas, pulitas, and the broom,

does a cleaning spell, it sweeps. Right, so he just starts sweeping the scorpions away and the thing we know, the weakness of these scorpions is they don't get to renalt size immediately, they start out small and gradually grow, so this broom can bat them around no problem. The funniest part of the scene to me is that the quote.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (22:33)
Yeah, just means, that word just means clean.

Baloreilly (22:58)
The Beckitts lifted their guns and opened fire on the broom while I hunkered down by the counter.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (23:03)
Yeah, what? ⁓

That is a funny thought, but I kind of that off as Remember when Monica was describing what happens when she's in the ritual circle where nothing mattered except the lust and the moment, like she loses her mind into that So I imagine the Becketts are still kind of coming out of that daze.

And so they're not thinking too critically when they see this broom come flying towards them, pushing the scorpions, they're like, no! And they just start shooting at it reflexively rather than thinking about it too much. But that does show that they're not all there in that moment.

Baloreilly (23:40)
Right, and maybe if they hit the broom that would end the spell, but I mean, try shooting a moving stick with a revolver when you're naked in the kitchen. Like it just seems like a very low percentage play. Additionally, Harry tells us that now they've switched to revolvers. Man, Victor is so deranged. This guy's like Scarface. His house just has drugs and weapons everywhere.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (23:44)
Maybe?

You

Baloreilly (24:06)
don't think this is unrealistic. think this is just a portrait of how much Victor's losing it. He's like a drug kingpin from a gangster movie.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (24:11)
Hmm.

Yeah, and I was thinking, how does he deal with his underlings, right? He has people on the street. There's a gang war going on between his dealers and Marcon's dealers. We know about that from the scene in the police precinct, but how does he deal with, how can he be safe and then it occurred to me, he's using his shadow form when he interacts with his cronies.

And maybe he uses other go-betweens, like the Beckett's, to pay them or pick up merchandise or whatever. But he never has to reveal himself if he has that shadow form spell.

Baloreilly (24:52)
And Marcon, I think, even says to Harry that he doesn't have a description of him because he always sticks to the shadows when he meets his people. And that, of course, is just, you know, the playing telephone. It's not that he's sticking to the shadows. It's that it's not really Victor being there. Yeah, that's really, really good thing to note. And that probably is even more of a reason why he is utterly flabbergasted that Harry actually shows up at his place.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (24:59)
Hmm.

Yeah.

Baloreilly (25:22)
So the broom, at least temporarily, takes care of the scorpions.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (25:26)
And at this point, Harry said, you know, police know all about you. I told him myself. He's taunting Victor. And he says, I told the White Council too. freaking out. And he's like, no, you're lying. You're lying. You have to be. and I told John Marcon. And suddenly, that's what Victor believes is, ⁓ no.

John Marcon knows where I live now? I'm screwed, we've gotta get outta here. That's when he says to the Beckitts to like, hey, go get the car running, we're gonna get outta here.

Next, he figures out another way to go after Dresden. And you pointed out, pointed out just hiding behind a cupboard. Why is this so He's tried throwing fire at Harry and Harry blocked it. And I think that freaked Victor because to him, the fire spell that he's using has got to be the strongest thing he can do.

Baloreilly (26:10)
wonder if Victor doesn't even know how to make a shield.

Victor has never even seen anything like that. He's new at this. He's all offense, but he's got a glass jaw. And Harry just showed, oh, I can block. And Victor, even positionally, tactically, he's on the front emotionally.

Harry has him on the back foot in this whole confrontation. Harry flies up onto the platform and breaks the spell. He knows things that he shouldn't know. He's doing magic that Victor didn't know was possible. So why doesn't Victor just have one of the Beckett's walk around the counter and plug him? Why doesn't Victor just get a little closer and set the kitchen on fire directly? Because he thinks Dresden's got an answer for

everything and all he can do all he can do is pin him down until the fire gets him from below.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (27:06)
Yeah, he doesn't want to take the risk.

and he's taunting him the whole time, saying, ⁓ cute, fire's the simplest thing you can do. All real wizards learned that spell in the first couple weeks. He keeps rattling him over and over again, first with I told Marcon, I told the White Council, that ⁓ fire's easy, what's your problem? And you're not the real wizard. And then in order to reassert his dominance, he realizes like, there's one thing I have that you don't have, and he calls up,

KAL SHAZAK!

Baloreilly (27:40)
Yeah, now this is crazy, we're gonna find out, because how Victor is dealing with this demon, is...

not only just against the laws of magic but also stupidly

because we're gonna find out that the only thing keeping this thing on task is Victor dominating its will and binding it with its name. He doesn't have a deal with this demon. He hasn't summoned it in a circle and struck a bargain. This is actually just a...

vicious animal that he's keeping away from him with a cattle prod.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (28:17)
until we talked about it here before the show, I hadn't really realized this is very different than any other things that Harry does later. Like, Victor is breaking the fourth law. It's kind of overtly stated here. we see Harry call up demons later. He calls up Chauncey. And then he binds So how is this different? This is different because those are physical restraints.

When he calls up Chauncey, Chauncey is physically restrained in the circle, but he isn't mentally dominated. His will is not Same with Ethniu. She tries to resist being physically restrained with her will, but Harry isn't dominating her will to command her to do things. He's just allowing her to be bound physically.

into the crystal and into demon reach. He doesn't break the fourth law in doing that. Here, Victor is dominating the spirit and will of another being, and that is what's against fourth law.

Baloreilly (29:22)
Right, and that means that when Harry uses a being's name to summon it, like he does with Toot in the beginning of this, or Mother Winter much later, he's not dominating them. He is calling to them in a way that's hard for them to resist.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (29:33)
Hmm.

Baloreilly (29:40)
So that difference between request that's hard to deny a restraint that might even be impossible to break doesn't violate this idea that a creature

needs to be able to make its own choices. And I wanted to highlight this specifically because we talked about this in the episode where Toot because he doesn't give us the text of the fourth law at the time. And I think this does give us sort of the key to solve that puzzle. Breaking the fourth law is literally, I think as you said, hijacking the thing and telling it what to do.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (30:17)
Okay, so Toad Demon gets called up, Victor, very stressed, sweating, manages to bind it but just barely, and Harry with the climactic says, you really shouldn't just hand someone else a demon's name. I can't get over how clumsy you are. And Harry calls the demon.

but doesn't break the fourth law. Instead, he lets it loose, knowing that it's going to want to go after the thing that just tried to bind it more than him.

Baloreilly (30:50)
So when he releases the demon, it turns this from a contest that Victor is tactically but emotionally losing, to an absolute everything is up in the air moment.

because now the most powerful thing in the room is aligned with nobody

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (31:12)
And I do like this as the climactic moment for the climax of the book, because if this was just Harry beats him with his fist and wins, or manages to topple him over the thing and then he gets eaten by his own scorpions, that would be less satisfying than Harry comes up with a clever

response to Victor's ineptitude, right? This whole book has been about how Victor is untrained, uneducated, and Harry has had formal training, and the solution to the final climax perfectly demonstrates that thesis. So it's very satisfying to see that come full circle right here in the climactic moment.

Baloreilly (31:55)
Now Harry does a bit of a crazy thing next, and this again shows that even though he is the one who went to school, he's still got a lot to learn. Because I think in any other book, Harry is going to use force here to knock Victor down so the demon can get him, or Harry is going to knock the demon out of the park with a force spell and then deal with Victor. But what he does instead,

is use wind to throw himself into Victor.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (32:29)
Yeah, that is an odd way to do it. and we basically never see it again anytime in the future. I think Jim decided, I don't want Harry to be able to force jump places. So we're just gonna pretend that never happened.

Baloreilly (32:42)
Well, I also think it's probably very inefficient. Harry's using a lot of magic to lift himself into the air and move himself I mean, Harry says the line about wizards not expected to get punched in the face and the physical, the fact that he's willing to get rough is an advantage. But literally using yourself as a projectile is probably very rarely a good idea. And frankly, it doesn't work here.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (32:48)
That's true.

Baloreilly (33:09)
You almost get the impression that Dresden's kind of already decided when he lets the demon off the leash that this is going to be a suicide mission.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (33:18)
Yeah, it very well might be the case. Because fire is spreading everywhere. Victor was about to get away, right? soon as the cord was to the demon and Victor figured out what was going on, he started to rush towards the door. Harry's like, ⁓ if he gets out, I'm dead and he wins, so instead I'll take him down with me. I think that's the interpretation that I would go with it as well. So they both get pushed up against the balcony, the demon comes over.

struggling with the demon. And then get this well-defined moment, which reminds me directly of the final scene in Temple of Doom, where Indiana Jones is hanging off of the broken rope bridge.

with the bad guy and they keep cutting down below to the crocodiles that just keep snapping up at the air and that is just perfect. It's a much shorter distance but you've got the scorpions that clapping claws up and trying to stab up at the feet of the two people that are hanging and of course Harry eventually realizing he needs one more push to rattle Victor enough for him to make a mistake.

Baloreilly (34:08)
Mm-hmm.

So what does he do? He finally tells Victor from whence his downfall came. hey Vic, I shouted. It was your wife. It was Monica that ratted on you.

The words hit him like a physical blow and his head whipped around toward me, his face contorting in fury. He started to say something to me, the words of a spell meant to blow me to bits maybe. But the Toad Demon interrupted him by rearing up with an angry hiss and snapping its jaws down over Victor's collarbone and throat. Bone broke with audible snaps and Victor squealed in pain.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (35:16)
that's a great moment. It causes Victor to hesitate at exactly the wrong moment. The demon gets at him, and now they're both on the balcony, balanced, and Harry has a thought. While he's struggling, he's hanging on by his fingertips, he thinks, I should have listened to you.

Brian, what do you think he should have listened to Murphy about? What is he talking about specifically there?

Baloreilly (35:42)
So that's a... I'm really glad you pointed this out because this is a really strange thought to have. You'd expect something like, Murphy, I hope you're gonna be Or Murphy, I hope you get the bastard. Murphy, I should have listened to you. Did she tell you to bring your gun to the fight at the end, Dresden? You know, yeah.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (36:03)
Yeah, there's no

super obvious thing of like, she told him to not do something and he did it and that screwed everything

Baloreilly (36:11)
So I wonder if he's talking generally about Murphy's critique that he didn't tell her what he was supposed to, the things he know, that he kept secrets from her. That's what Murphy gets annoyed about with Linda Randall's business card, that she has to

pull Harry's teeth to get the story out of him. I wonder if what he's saying is, Murphy, I should have listened to Meaning, Murphy, I should have told you.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (36:47)
Yeah, because remember, after he decides, I'm gonna go do this myself, I can't call in the cavalry for reasons X, Y, and Z, he calls He was gonna bring her with him, he couldn't because he pushed her away. He didn't talk to her when he had the chance, and therefore, she wasn't there to help him later.

That seems to me the most likely situation here is he's realizing that if he had just talked to her sooner, that she could be here to back him up. He really, really relies on Murphy in particular backing him up in future books when he has to go deal with something and he doesn't have her here. This is one of the glaring examples where he can't call on her for backup.

So this next line ties back to what we were talking about earlier, where he was talking about how afraid he was. And we asked, why is he that afraid? And here's another clue. He says, quote, I was going to die.

There was a certain peace in thinking in knowing that it was all about to be over. I was gonna die. It was as simple as that. I'd fought as hard as I could, done everything I could think of, and it was over." Unquote. So I think that is him accepting that death, right? As a young man, 25, he's like accepting that he will die. Most people don't get to that stage.

even before they die sometimes. A lot of people arrive to it much later in their life to where they get to acceptance, right? You go through the different stages of grief and you finally get to acceptance. He's here at 25 accepting And part of the reason he can do that the process of dying while doing the right Exactly what goes on his headstone later. He's realizing that he can accept

a good death if he stuck to his principles and did what was right. He doesn't want to die. He doesn't have a death wish, but he will risk death

Baloreilly (38:57)
Harry is coming to terms with the fact that his fear of dying

isn't going to be the thing that determines his actions henceforth thinking his last moments is acceptable all he wishes is that he had time to apologize to people for not doing as well as he could. Death liberates him from the recriminations

he would face himself with if he survives but fails and he views in this moment the prospect of death as less horrible than the idea of having to face these people having failed. That's why he's willing to double down and the second time use Monica's name to counterbalance Victor to throw him off his game.

Harry is always willing to put more at stake if it increases the chance that he gets a good outcome because his real fear is having to face people he failed.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (40:10)
Yes, that is his deepest fear, I think, which motivates so many of his actions. So at this moment, while he's accepting death and wishing that he had time to apologize to Murphy or Jenny, he realizes that he still has Murphy's handcuffs. He's got a way out. can put the handcuff around the banister and then put his whole weight to...

pull down Victor and the demon, overbalancing them and throwing them down to the below where the scorpions and the flames will get them. at that point you think, ⁓ good, he's got a way out of this. But no, he starts to immediately pass out he has saved himself for about 10 seconds before he passes out and the last thing he sees is Morgan showing up.

and Morgan's silver sword goes snicker snack, as we alluded to last time, leaving the scorpion writhing in pieces on the floor. And then he thinks that Morgan is about to execute him in his delirium, then, of course, Morgan is actually saving him. And that brings us to the last chapter of the book.

Baloreilly (41:20)
You know, one thing to call out here is these are some really good handcuffs because they're not just holding Harry up, but they take his entire falling weight and stop him. So the fact that he doesn't, or he doesn't seem to break his wrist or break the handcuffs, pretty impressive. Murphy is not buying from the cheap police supply store. They're getting the good stuff in Chicago. True.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (41:30)
Hmm.

Murphy saves him again by getting good handcuffs.

So one thing I want to talk about, Chapter 27 is oddly structured when compared to the other denouement of Dresden Files books. Specifically, he basically wakes up, spends a very short scene talking with Morgan.

And then it gives you like an epilogue where it's just paragraph after paragraph of Harry narrating what Like at the end of the historical where they have words come up on the screen that tell you what all the characters went on to do with the rest of their lives.

Baloreilly (42:21)
like at the end of Animal House for us to lower brow viewers. Yeah.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (42:23)
Yes, there you go, okay.

I was thinking the end of Band of Brothers, but that works too.

Baloreilly (42:28)
And

the scene with Morgan is very short. so it's an extremely brief scene. Now it's very important, so I don't wanna pass through that without mention. First, Morgan's giving him CPR,

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (42:32)
it's like a page or two at most.

Mm-hmm.

Baloreilly (42:45)
we get the impression here that Dresden has just had too much smoke inhalation and that's why he passed out, So Morgan saves him in the moment and then sticks with him to resuscitate him. You know, I know that we were talking about how sort of backfilling some ideas of who

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (42:50)
Mm-hmm.

Baloreilly (43:07)
Morgan is from future books and giving him a little more credit in the pages of Stormfront than how he does. But you get a really strong signal in this last chapter here that ultimately Morgan places his belief in doing the right thing above anything else. He goes literally through fire and flame.

who save Dresden's life and stays with him until he's sure he's gonna make it.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (43:38)
He's basically lawful lawful. Like there's no such thing in D &D, but he is. Because when Harry says like, you saved me, why? There's no comprehension in Morgan's response of like, you were about to die. There was no alternative. I don't understand the question, right? That's kind of the way that Morgan is responding here. And Harry's like, but just because you saw what happened doesn't mean you had to save me.

Baloreilly (43:41)
Ha ha ha!

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (44:07)
Harry says, you could have just let me die. And then we get this from Morgan, quote, his heart expression never changed, but he said, you weren't guilty. You're part of the White Council. Technically, I had an obligation to preserve your life. It was my duty, unquote.

And this is a moment, this is a missed opportunity. Harry could mend some fences here. He could build some bridges. Remember he McAnally's with his bridges burning behind This is a moment of reconciliation. Morgan is admitting he was wrong. Harry could say, I'm glad we're finally on the same page. Instead, he said, give me a gallon of Listerine.

directly insulting Morgan after he had just saved Harry's life. Come on, dude.

Baloreilly (44:55)
The funny thing is he uses almost the exact same line on Lara in White Night. Now, Lara, despite the fact that she's his future fiance, is literally a monster. But Morgan's not.

But I think it's just Dresden letting Morgan know that this doesn't change their relationship. And I think when I was talking about splitting last week, this is what I'm talking about. Dresden has put Morgan in the camp of asshole I don't like, and he's not willing to change his mind on that. The thing that's craziest about this for me though is,

Morgan's line there, technically I had an obligation to preserve your life. was my duty.

Normally when somebody says, well, technically I was supposed to, they're talking about something they didn't do because though they were technically required to, nobody would actually, I honestly think that the lawful lawful joke aside, it's just that Morgan is exceedingly lawful good. He is a good guy, ultimately, we do kind of find that out, but he is so committed.

to the code being the way you do good, that he thinks technicalities are moral imperatives.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (46:24)
Yes, that's a great way of putting it.

Okay, so we get this list of things that are wrapped up in this chapter, and it's usually like a paragraph or two for each one. I'm just gonna briefly run through them super quick, and then we're gonna come back and talk about a couple of them. So, number one, the police caught the Beckett's. The varsity burned down mysteriously. Word on the street is that Dresden took out Victor on Marcon's behalf. That becomes important. Next book.

The White Council lifted the Doom of Damocles, obviously very Murphy recovered and resumed her working relationship with Dresden, although not quite as familiar. That's also very important. Monica and her children vanish into the witness protection. We never really see them again. came home after... And Bob comes home after a wild college party.

Baloreilly (47:03)
Jenny sells this Kimori.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (47:08)
Susan writes a great article and he gets another date with her. He manages to cajole another one out. Mac gets his card back. Dresden gets his card back. Toot Toot and Co get lots of pizza and Harry gets some self-confidence. Everybody gets something. You get the brain, you get the heart, you had the courage all along. And as I mentioned before, this is a little bit strange because of the way this is written. I feel a little rushed in comparison

Baloreilly (47:25)
Ha ha ha ha!

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (47:34)
other Dresden Files books. The way that I would have imagined this to be written, having read the rest of the series, is we get a scene with him in Max and Murphy comes in and says something to him and they have a conversation. Or, like you pointed out earlier, in the hospital scene when he wakes up in the hospital and she's right down the hallway.

we'd see that scene play out where she comes and throws the flowers back at him. And then maybe we see another scene cut to Max a couple weeks later, and that's, get to see him cajoling the date out of Susan and explaining what happened to all of these other people that were involved. And her sharing, yeah, did you hear the varsity burn down? Like you could slitter all of these things into couple of scenes.

to do a show don't tell situation rather than just this, narrator comes out and tells you what happened.

Baloreilly (48:28)
think about it. In the later books, we're gonna have right in a row, proven guilty, couple of long hospital scenes where they do exposition, White Knight, hospital scene with Elaine wrapping that up before they go to bad guy part two, and very next book, small favor, multi-page hospital exposition with Mab and Uriel and the Carpenter family.

That Murphy scene of her waking up and throwing the flowers back in his face fits seamlessly with those other moments that Jim has lovingly peppered the series with. Here, he's trying to wrap up this book, get it over with. have the climax. I'm supposed to kind of, know, wrap things up with a bow. This is something where you clearly see a writer who hasn't yet gotten

the fans adoring these characters, knowing them, spending time with them. It's somebody who needs to tie up the plot threads, not somebody who is trying to make characters feel as human as possible.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (49:40)
Yeah, he gets much better at that as the series goes on. And this was his first book. So this is not a criticism. It's just me noticing the difference, right? It is what it is. So.

Baloreilly (49:49)
Yeah, let's

be really clear. This is well done. He executes this with some funny scenes, some good asides. Exactly, it doesn't fit with the way he writes things in the future, which we prefer, but it's perfectly well written. Just because an author changes and arguably improves does not mean that they were bad at first.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (49:52)
Yeah?

It's not bad, it's just odd.

Absolutely. So let's go back to a couple of the lines in this series of paragraphs. One of them that caught my eye.

was interesting here is Murphy professed to have no memory of what happened at my office and maybe she didn't. Let me ask you, Brian, do you think she actually had no memory of what happened at his office? The way this is written,

Baloreilly (50:32)
No.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (50:34)
suggests that she's lying. It didn't say Murphy had no memory. It said she professed to have no memory. And then the last part of that is maybe she didn't. Harry doesn't seem to believe her.

Baloreilly (50:46)
Yeah, I think Harry's correct here. Murphy is lying. And I think it's pretty obvious. So we're gonna have to go to a line that's mentioned a little bit earlier here. Word hit the street that Mercone had hired Harry Dresden to take out the head of the Three-Eye Gang. That's the word on the street. That's what everybody's hearing. That's what the cops are hearing. That's what the bad guys are hearing. That's what everybody's hearing.

Harry says, quote, I didn't try to deny it.

Harry lets everybody believe he did this on Marcon's say so. Now he does that for very reasonable reasons, but he also does a really crazy thing that's going to be established in Full Moon. He and Murphy don't talk about any of the stuff that went down in like the last two days of this book.

between now and the events of Full Moon. And part of the reason why Full Moon's so weird is they don't even really talk about it in a blow-by-blow fashion then. I don't think Murphy necessarily believes that Harry took out a hit on Victor, essentially. But I do think that she's really freaked out.

that he never once in the times they work together afterwards because she does bring him back in denies it.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (52:18)
Yeah, and I think it's a bit of a pride thing too. I think she does remember what happened. I think she remembers him saving her life or at least acknowledges that, even if she only remembers it in scraps. And that kinda chagrins her a little bit. She had pegged him as a suspect and she was wrong and she feels a little embarrassed, she and her pride is hurt. She doesn't want to acknowledge that and she doesn't want to talk about it. So.

They both have reasons not to talk about it, and yet, it would be very, very good for both of them if they could get that all out in the open, and that's why we have so much tension in Full Moon.

Baloreilly (52:55)
Well, I think this is, the reason why I said all that is because I think that if you take that idea and play out the counterfactual that she actually doesn't remember the office, how the hell is she bringing Dresden back at all? If she actually has no memory of Dresden saving her life from the booby trap, all she knows is she went to his office, a booby trap was sprung on me, I nearly died, and he killed a guy from our cone.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (53:10)
right.

Baloreilly (53:22)
there is no way Karen's gonna have any relationship with this guy at all. So she must remember that he went to the office and actually remember that he saved her life. And that is even worse for her in a way because she's in debt to him. She rescinds the arrest warrant, he saved her life, he took out the guy. And it's not that she to

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (53:27)
Right.

Baloreilly (53:50)
demark him from suspect in her brain. He's also suspected as being with Marcon, which by the way, I know that me saying that maybe sounds implausible, why would Murphy believe that? It's perfectly logical, Marcon is literally trying to hire him in this book and the next book. Marcon wants that to happen. So there's no...

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (54:14)
Yeah, she doesn't

know Harry well enough to know that he would turn that down because the vast majority of people wouldn't, especially like a private eye in Harry's position. Those guys are kind of crooked all the time.

Baloreilly (54:28)
I mean, Marcon probably has guys in Murphy's unit payroll that she has to work with.

He is almost certainly paying off huge chunks of the cops.

Murphy probably works with people who are that level of corrupt on a daily basis. She probably expects that most people are that corrupt. knows that Dresden isn't because a good consultant?

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (54:58)
Yeah, we don't have any reason to think they've worked together enough for her to know him that well.

Baloreilly (55:04)
So think that she must remember that's the only way they'd continue to have a working relationship and she won't say so because she can't acknowledge that he saved

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (55:13)
Yeah, and my last piece of this is I think Murphy has the same hero complex that Harry has in the sense that when Linda is killed, Harry blames himself. And when Harry and her wind up in the hospital, she blames herself for it. If I'd only listened to Harry, then I wouldn't have opened that desk drawer. He would have had me for backup.

Victor would be alive and in jail. Like that's her line of reasoning. This is my fault. She has the same complex that he has. And so that is also another piece of guilt eating away at her.

Baloreilly (55:54)
All right, so we're covering this ground thoroughly because it makes up a huge part of the full moon plot, so it's really important to go into.

before we get to the last couple of paragraphs of this, we also want to talk about why Harry sends...

all this pizza to toot toot right away because you looked up at him that's not the deal

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (56:19)
No, the quote here is, I made sure to send pizza out to Toot Toot and his fairy buddies every night for a week and once a week ever since. Unquote. So that is a lot of pizza. And the end of that paragraph is I make good on my promises.

So I wanted to go back to the earlier thing. What exactly did he promise Toot Toot? Here's the line from earlier. His promise to Toot Toot goes like this.

Look, maybe I can bring you guys some pizza sometime soon to thank you for your help." Unquote. That's it. He just said, maybe I can bring you some pizza sometime soon to help you. And he gives them pizza for a week and then every week thereafter. That speaks to me that he is doing way over delivering on that promise. He is purposefully building up a line of credit with a member of the Fae.

and he is going to call in that debt occasionally in the future. He is thinking this through and looking ahead, being a wizard.

Baloreilly (57:22)
Yeah, we don't think Harry is like a Machiavellian genius or anything, but he's a smart guy and he does think long-term.

So you figure that Harry has some idea here that he's made a bargain with Toot Toot at least once, we think more given the evidence of their first conversation. And by over delivering on his promise here, he's one, ensuring that Toot is willing.

to get ensnared by those circles in the future, but also creating something of a debt that's gonna kind of make Toot feel obligated to do that. And Harry's instinctive understanding of how fey bargains work, which he probably also got a flavor of from the Llananchi, is something that equips him really well to take this step in book one.

to start building this command of the little folk that's going to on multiple occasions allow him to do major, seemingly impossible workings.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (58:26)
You're right, he does think in the long term. We see only these short books where he's reacting all the time and it can be frustrating. Why didn't he think ahead? Little Chicago is an incredibly long-term project that is kind of crazy. Even Bob isn't sure if it's going to work, but Harry's like, this will make everything so much easier, I'm doing it. This is another example.

Baloreilly (58:38)
Mm-hmm.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (58:51)
putting the spells on his duster. He talks about how he has to layer them on every week over and over again. But he goes through that process because he knows he might need it way down the road. And this is a perfect example of that. It might even be simpler than all of this. I'm just gonna make friends with them because it was very useful to know them in this instance. It might be useful again. And over time, he realizes the things we're talking about where he's building up credit with them and that's the way that their debt thing works.

Baloreilly (59:21)
Now, the very end of this, is to talk about what Harry got out of Stormfront. What does he tell us, Adam?

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (59:31)
He says the following,

I'm not so sure. The power is there. The temptation is there. That's just the way it's going to be. I can live with that."

Baloreilly (1:00:05)
So it's pretty interesting that Harry says that for them, the question of whether he's gonna go bad has been laid to rest, but he's not so sure because at the end of this book, it seems like these events and particularly the fact that in lifting the doom, the White Council called him valorous above and beyond the call of duty changes some things about his self-perception.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:00:34)
Absolutely. And it's important to understand that from Morgan's perspective, he saw Harry go in there, fight the bad guy, not break the first law or the fourth law, and risk his life over and over again to stop the bad guy in an almost certain death way. And that's where you get valorous action above and beyond the call of duty. What did the White Council and Morgan not see?

They didn't see him wrestling with temptation outside of Victor's house. Harry does have that memory. So.

For them, it had been laid to rest because they only saw the valorous action. They didn't see him barely fighting off temptation. He has that memory and now he's decided that he can live with that. He's fought it off once. He can do it again. I think that's where his confidence comes from.

Baloreilly (1:01:29)
Yeah, that's definitely a huge part of it. This time he managed to defend himself without striking out with magic.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:01:38)
That's probably true,

Baloreilly (1:01:40)
But Harry does, I think, get something special out of that commendation from the White Council.

So during this book, Harry has to keep reminding himself, I'm a wizard. But in addition to that, he seems to be trying to prove to himself he is a wizard. And what the council says here is that you didn't just do what a wizard would do, you did more.

than what we'd expect a wizard to do. He goes from, a duty to be a wizard, to the super-rogatory. I'm going to be a good wizard. I'm gonna be better than what I have to be. And in making that calculation, I can be what I'm supposed to be.

And I think that's a big reason why we don't see those flashes of infantilizing fear that we see in this confrontation, because Harry believes, after this book, that he really is grown man, a wizard, not just somebody who's trying to be one.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:02:59)
and that speaks to his whole journey here, to the fact that we see him with more self-confidence in future books, without being paralyzed by fear, standing up to the White Council more than just standing up to Morgan, being mad at them and saying, I am a good guy, you guys persecuted me. Until this point, he kind of thought maybe they had a point. Now he decided, no, I'm a good person, screw you guys, I'm gonna prove it.

Baloreilly (1:03:22)
Mm-hmm.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:03:27)
That takes us to the final set of paragraphs here at the closing of the book. Why don't you close it out for us?

Baloreilly (1:03:32)
The world is getting weirder. Darker. Every single day. Things are spinning around. Faster and faster and threatening to go completely awry. Falcons and falconeers. The center cannot hold. But in my corner of the country, I'm trying to nail things down. I don't want to live in Victor's jungle.

even if it did eventually devour him. I don't want to live in a world where the strong rule and the weak cower. I'd rather make a place where things are a little quieter. Where trolls stay the hell under their bridges and where elves don't come swooping out to snatch children from their cradles. Where vampires respect the limits.

and where the fairies mine their Ps and Qs. My name is Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden. Conjure by it at your own risk. When things get strange, when what goes bump in the night flicks on the lights, when no one else can help you, give me a call. I'm in the book.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:04:46)
That's a great ending, but the only thing I can think of with that final line is, when things get strange in your neighborhood, who you gonna call? Harry Dresden. So that's an awesome ending, and it couldn't even be that Butcher's channeling that, but one thing he's definitely channeling, in the first couple sentences here, he says, I'm gonna read it again because it's very important.

Baloreilly (1:04:54)
Who you gonna call? Harry Dresden!

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:05:12)
The world is getting weirder, darker every single day. Things are spinning around faster and faster and threatening to go completely awry. Falcons and falconers, the center cannot hold. Now, if that sounds familiar to you, you might be an English major. But if that sounds familiar to you, it might be because it is from a famous poem by W.B. Yeats.

And I'll read the first stanza here, which this line clearly alludes to, quote, turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer. Things fall apart. The center cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned. The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity." Now, I'm not great at poem beat things, so that might not be a great reading of it, but Brian, why did Butcher through Dresden evoke that particular poem?

Baloreilly (1:06:20)
So I love this poem. It's one of my favorites. I've got the first stanza memorized. Love it. And it's called The Second Coming. In Revelation, the Second Coming is preceded by the birth of the Antichrist and the end of days. That's what the poem is about. It's metal as hell.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:06:48)
It's

an apocalypse, capital A.

Baloreilly (1:06:50)
And Jim says that he turned in Stormfront and the next day he turned in his 20 book outline capped with a big apocalyptic trilogy. The reason why you quote the second coming at the end of your book one is because you're already planning the apocalypse. And

I love the lines he's quoting. They're the beginning, he's quoting the beginning, because this is the beginning.

but the falcon cannot hear the falconer is saying that the falcon is a hunting bird. It's going to kill for the falconer. It's flying off to kill another bird for its master.

If the Falcon cannot hear the Falconer, it's just going off to kill. It's not doing what it's told, it's not being properly restrained. It is a raptor flying around and dealing death.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:07:53)
much like a demon released from its leash.

Baloreilly (1:07:57)
Exactly, much like all of the things that are let off the leash in the early books of Dresden. And what does Nemesis do? It frees things from their rightful constraints and lets them take actions that are against their very nature.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:08:18)
Yeah. And that illusion, the world is getting weirder, darker every day, that's what is referred to throughout the series. And part of it is explained by Nemesis, exactly as you said, pulling strings behind the scenes, it's also leading up to this big apocalyptic trilogy. And the next paragraph where Harry says, in my corner of the country,

I'm trying to nail things down. That's very much like a Western attitude. The sheriff's in town, this is my town, and my town is not giving in to chaos. As we were talking about, I think way back in the very first episode, hard-boiled noir detective stories are basically Westerns patched into the modern day more or less.

Baloreilly (1:09:05)
Yeats is taking in his poem from Revelation, where, you know, the beast comes forth and the nations of the world follow it and people receive the mark and those who are good are downtrodden and persecuted. The best lack all conviction. The worst are full of intensity. Jim turns that on its head here. He's read the poem. That's why he's quoting it. Harry doesn't.

not lack conviction. In his corner, he's gonna hold the apocalypse at bay. That is a hell of a thing to do in two paragraphs at the end of novel one.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:09:48)
we all always joke about how hard Jim is on Dresden, but in book one, he gives him the job of forestalling the apocalypse or saving the world from it. That's a heavy lift. Poor Dresden doesn't know what's coming in for him. He's just, I'm just gonna try to keep the vampires at bay and the trolls under their bridges. That's what I'm gonna do. Meanwhile, we're all going, yeah, we've read the later books, buddy. You're gonna be asked to do much more than that.

Baloreilly (1:10:16)
And just the last thing that I love about him using this poem here, Harry, we know, has a GED.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:10:25)
Where did he get access

Baloreilly (1:10:25)
He's writing this.

Clearly, he read it because among the paperbacks and the other things he reads, Harry'll read anything thinks might be good, including Irish romantic poetry.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:10:41)
We know he's incredibly well-read because he doesn't get a lot of work in the early books and he spends most of it reading.

Baloreilly (1:10:49)
And I really like, because in America, it's not super sexy to be able to throw off quotes of hundred year old poetry. I really like, I really like that Jim has his hero be somebody who's not credentialed. He's not a professor.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:11:01)
Speak for yourself, buddy.

Baloreilly (1:11:13)
He's somebody engages with culture in a way that he can employ it as a metaphor in his own life. I think that's a really thing that Jim wants.

his hero to aspire to and is signaling to us that it's a good thing for people to aspire.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:11:34)
The other thing that I just noticed about this is the lines that Butcher uses slowly converge until it's directly quoting the poem. So for example, he says, the world is getting weirder, darker every day. Those don't have any particular direct allusions to the poem. But then he says, things are spinning around faster and faster, which sounds very similar to turning and turning in the widening gyre.

Baloreilly (1:11:51)
Mm-hmm.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:12:00)
That's the first line of the poem. Then the next line is, the falcons cannot hear the falconer. And Jim says, falconers. Very close. Finally, the third line, things fall apart, the center cannot hold. Jim just says, the center cannot hold. He's now directly quoting the poem, as if we're descending more and more into the reality of the poem.

where the future is bleak and apocalypse is threatening.

Baloreilly (1:12:30)
Yeah, that's a really good point. He's doing a very deliberate job of first invoking it and then calling it as a metaphor for the world of the Dresden Files. And specifically, the center cannot hold. Like the whole series might be about the destruction of the pillars of mortal reality. The Winter Court, the White Council.

That's the center. That's what the rest of the book is about. The fight to hold the center against the darkness literally coming from outside. So just really think this is a really good job of Jim using a literary illusion to effectively layer in a lot of meaning. And I think that he's doing that on purpose.

Because this is the end of the book, you put that kind of effort into your last few lines, especially when you invoke a metaphor this powerful. So I have no trouble believing that we're supposed to read this not just as an allusion to the poem, but as something that has a little bit of a special meaning for the series.

And of course, this is juxtaposed against Dresden, who says in his corner, he's trying to nail things down. But what he doesn't know yet is that he's actually the center. This is actually the first part of the files where Jim is introducing his chosen one narrative, though he's not using any of the star-born language yet, because the second coming is not just a poem about the, about an apocalypse.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:14:01)
Yeah.

Baloreilly (1:14:15)
It's a poem about the biblical apocalypse and the birth of the Antichrist. Literally, the last line of the poem is about the Antichrist sloughing off to Bethlehem to be born. Dresden invokes the term Antichrist in reference to himself in this very chapter.

I'm not saying that Dresden is the Antichrist in the biblical sense of the word, but I'm saying that a star-born, the destroyer, would be. And that means that the, in the reality of the fiction, the star-born who stands against that, the person who, in the star-born cycles, keeps everything from falling apart, is a...

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:14:53)
Yeah.

Baloreilly (1:15:12)
prophetic figure and using this language that is about a poem about a prophecy in Harry's mouth is not just an allusion to the apocalypse but to Harry's role within it.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:15:29)
Yeah, it's a really cool end to the book.

all right, that is gonna do it for Stormfront. We are done, but we're not done tonight because we've got one last piece. It's our question for Bob.

Baloreilly (1:15:42)
Okay, Adam. What's the excuse this time?

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:15:46)
Well, it was odd, he didn't actually send one, he just failed to show up. But there were reports of an absolutely wild party at the sorority house last night, so my guess is he's a little tired.

Baloreilly (1:15:58)
is the end of the year, that is when those things tend to happen. Okay, since Bob's not here, we gotta handle it ourselves again. So I'm gonna put it to you, a lot of bad things happen in Stormfront. We're gonna talk about some of them specifically. Could Harry have done anything to avoid them?

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:16:01)
All right.

Yeah, and again, as we mentioned last week, this is within the biases and limitations of this version of Harry. So yes, if he had just talked to, if he had just trusted Murphy, but he can't, he doesn't trust Murphy yet, so he can't just do that. So within those limitations, what kind of interesting answers can we come up with? My initial thought before consulting the internet was Harry has two paths.

at the start of this investigation. Go all the way back to chapter two when he's in the Madison with Murphy and they're examining the Tommy Tom and Jennifer Stanton murders.

They talk about two possible leads. Jennifer Stanton worked for Bianca. Tommy Tom worked for Marcon. Harry decides to pursue the Bianca angle. Now he had perfectly good reasons for doing that. He figures Murphy's gonna be better at discovering the Marcon angle because Bianca's a vampire and she won't talk to mortals, but maybe she'll talk to me. All very reasonable. But what if Harry decides to go the other way? What if he decides to investigate Marcon instead?

Maybe he asks Marcon in the car, why was your guy killed? Was he targeted? What's going on? Maybe he asks Murphy before he leaves, hey, why would somebody be targeting one of Marcon's guys? Is there a gang war going on? Harry doesn't find out about that until he goes to the precinct much later when he's already distracted by the three-eye thing and by the Bianca thing. And so as a result,

he doesn't think too clearly about, hey, the Three-Eye gang war, that's related to Marcon's right-hand man being murdered. That would have tied him directly into the answer to a lot of these questions. Maybe he could have found out about the shadow man who's in charge of the drug dealers that are dealing Three-Eye and come at the problem from that angle. To me, what that does is a couple of things.

He never goes to Bianca, doesn't have to deal with all the fallout that goes into grave peril, but that's not super important. What is important is he never goes to Linda Randall, so she never becomes a target for Victor, at least not in the way that we speculated. And maybe he winds up finding out all of this and talking through it with Murphy because a gang war is in her jurisdiction, not his, and he can share some information with her about that.

and maybe that winds up with a better resolution where maybe he doesn't have to kill Victor, maybe he just gets taken into custody or something like that. That was my first initial thought about how this might work.

Baloreilly (1:18:58)
I think that's really

good for two very simple reasons. First, if Harry's a more experienced investigator, of course he might think to do but also, if you're just an idiot plucked off the street and two people are killed in a hit, and one is a prostitute who happened to be there, and the other is a major league player in the local organized crime syndicate,

That other guy is the one who was probably the target. So the fact that Harry doesn't chase down the time-by-time angle is kind of silly. And it might be because when he meets Marcon in the limo, he just kind of gets put off the idea of doing that. He doesn't want to deal with him. And that's a bridge that he could have crossed because Harry's willing to deal with Marcon.

later in the book to chase Gimpy to the varsity, it doesn't take much for me to believe that he could have followed that lead.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:20:00)
Yeah, Elphitch 47 agreed with us. He replied to our Reddit question and he said the following, quote,

Harry being put at the same case from two different directions, but how he pursues it changes a bit in the details." Unquote. So yeah, LFish is kind of going exactly where you're talking about there. Now, did you have any thoughts about the answers to this question before we go to the rest of the Reddit answers?

Baloreilly (1:20:44)
Yeah, I had two. ⁓ One of which we kind of put our heads together and just said, what if he just believes Monica in the beginning? She knows an awful lot about what to do around wizards. Don't look in the eyes, don't give him your name. But how it kind of blows off the idea that her husband might be a sorcerer without a second thought. know, he's been looking into magic, he's been acting weird, whatever.

Harry's very familiar with black magic. He's under the doom of Damocles. This should twig him at least a little bit. So obviously if he takes that seriously, maybe he does everything the same, but when he goes to the lake house and he finds the film,

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:21:15)
Yeah!

Baloreilly (1:21:27)
He tries to track down who is taking pictures. Maybe when he finds that nobody's there, he says, I'm gonna have a stakeout and see what happens.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:21:37)
Or maybe if he believed her, he just opens his sight and looks at the house and goes, whoa, that's a lot of negative energy there. There's really something to this. Hey Morgan, you see this? That really could have solved the problem way fast.

Baloreilly (1:21:52)
Now Harry is not somebody who weirdly believes in magic that he's not already aware of very easily. So that might be a little out of character. But I think the really big point of departure for me, and I think something that if you sat Harry down and had him think about it for an hour in the book, he would decide not to do, is visit Linda Randall.

And the reason why I think that that's just a very clear mistake, an impulsive mistake that he would decide against if he really thought about it is, first of all, as we discussed in the episode where comes up, he's incredibly lucky to be able to find Red O'Hare in the first place. The only way he's gonna do that is if she's not about to get on a plane. And if she's not about to get on a plane, then he doesn't have to rush there to do that. So.

It's a little weird that he sort of decides to pursue that, but also he can rationalize going to Bianca. She's a vampire. She's not gonna talk to the cops. Linda Randall is just a prostitute who is friends with Jennifer Stanton. Murphy specifically said, let us do the interviewing basically. You have no excuse.

for going to talk to her and no reason to believe you're gonna be able to lean on her effectively.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:23:20)
Yeah, and telling Murphy about the Linda Randall lead without following up on it himself doesn't require that he do any extra trusting in Murphy. He doesn't have to tell her about the White Council. He doesn't have to tell her about anything that he's worried about, anything that he wants to hold back. He's just giving them a name of a possible lead who seems to be perfectly human. So there's no reason for him to hold back based on his current book limitations.

except that he's being impulsive here, and I think it's partly down to he really wants to deliver for Murphy, and to him, that means delivering the answer, not just a lead.

there was another couple of obvious answers and we got some good ones from Reddit. Temeraire64 suggests that Harry could have just called his mentor for help. Why not spend the five minutes to at least see if Ebenezer can offer some useful advice, even if he's not gonna come all the way up from the Ozarks. He said, quote, I think the main obstacles to this are, I'm not sure Jim are actually invented Eb's character yet in Stormfront. That's a doiless problem.

Baloreilly (1:24:21)
Yeah.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:24:21)
And number two, Harry doesn't know that Ed is one of the most powerful and dangerous wizards on the planet who once fought and defeated three warlocks simultaneously. Maybe he thinks he'd just be putting his mentor in danger by getting him involved, lol. But otherwise, there's really no reason for Harry not to just contact him and ask for advice. It would take him all of five seconds to track down and deal with cells.

Baloreilly (1:24:43)
And the great thing about that is that if Ebenezer does show up and track him down, obviously that solves the problem. But even if Harry doesn't think Ebenezer should put himself in danger combating Victor, because he doesn't know that he's, you know, the Black Staff yet.

Harry's still gotta figure out how somebody did that magic. Why not call the guy who taught you magic and ask him?

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:25:06)
Yeah.

Yeah, if Ebenezer figures it out, it's no problem. Nobody's gonna yell at him about it, because he's not under the doom of Damocles.

Baloreilly (1:25:17)
Right, Ebenezer literally, if he just gives him the answer, Harry doesn't have to do any of the stuff he's worried about, the whole, well, Murphy, can't tell you that yet, I've gotta figure it out. You solve the whole problem. And I think Harry would tell you the reason he doesn't do that is because just the way that in the next book, Harry won't explain everything to Kim Delaney because he thinks she's getting in too deep with something bad.

You know, the second he says to Ebenezer, thaumaturgical ritual to make heart explodes. Ebenezer is gonna be, coming down to Chicago to grab him by his ear and drag him back to the Ozarks.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:25:53)
That's his perspective, yeah. And I think the other thing is, at this point, course, does not know connection to his grandfather. so you have to think about it from Harry's Harry has been saved from the Doom of Damocles by this random old wizard and then allowed to rebuild himself.

at this guy's farm for, I don't know, like two years or however long he spends training with Ebenezer, he must feel hugely in debt to this guy who put his life on the line to intervene and take care of Harry as an apprentice. And so I think he's like, I don't wanna bother that guy with this, man. He's already done so much for me. I can do this. So I think that there's gotta be part of that as well. If you're looking for a more Watsonian perspective.

Baloreilly (1:26:46)
And you know, Harry grows up in the process of solving this case. I think that Harry doesn't want to run off to mommy and ask for help. He wants to handle this himself. That might not be a good instinct, but that's something that a lot of young people feel. So I expect that that's got something to do with him not asking any of anyone he knows in the White Council for assistance.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:27:04)
yeah.

Yep. All right, we've got a couple other good small changes that could have had big effects. Elthitch47, who commented earlier, also says, touch more paranoia for that scorpion, either crushing it, containing it a circle, or burning and disposing of it.

And similarly, generic name here, ⁓ O-1, also answers about the scorpion, but has a different suggestion. One thing he does that could have gone differently, though with different negative consequences, would have been if Harry brought the scorpion home with him to study in his basement lab and not left it absentmindedly in a drawer. I only bring this up because I can't think of any other time in the series that Harry just leaves magic-linked objects in his office instead of bringing them home with him, unquote.

Baloreilly (1:27:51)
Now I don't think this would actually have any other negative consequences, because I think Mr. kill that thing in about two seconds.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:27:58)
Possibly.

Baloreilly (1:28:01)
but it is an interesting counter fact.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:28:03)
Yeah, Mystery Legos says, don't make a love potion or dump it out after making it at least. Geez. Yeah, that actually would have helped a lot in the Toad Demon fight.

Baloreilly (1:28:16)
Yeah, talk about Harry not acting as a mature adult.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:28:18)
And finally, Electrical, yeah, why did he keep it? Some part of him was thinking, well, maybe. Yeah, that can't be so bad. Electrical ad 5851 says, call the wardens like he's supposed to. Now, we know that Harry has a bit of a ⁓ chip on his shoulder about the wardens. He might not want to call them because he just hates them, right? So, you could still see.

Baloreilly (1:28:22)
I think he, mm-hmm. Just a drop in the wine.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:28:48)
a reality where a different version of Harry goes, I can't take on a warlock, ugh. I guess I should just tell Morgan.

Baloreilly (1:28:56)
Yeah, this is one that I think would actually jump into the out of character zone here, because, but I think it's a good point because it brings up the fact that Harry's commitment to dealing with this himself is irrational.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:29:01)
Yeah, maybe a little more out of character.

Multiple different ways he could have dealt with the problem, but he didn't because he must do everything himself.

Baloreilly (1:29:19)
Right, so next week there will be no episode. But the week after, the question for Bob will be, forget about Bob. You, listeners, what have we missed?

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:29:33)
Yeah, what's the question for us? There must be some things about Stormfront, whether it's just Stormfront on its own, or connections from Stormfront to other books, characters that change and move from one book to another. If you think we missed something, if you want us to talk about some other meta element that has a tie to Stormfront, let us know. Shenni sells his Kimori, of course.

Baloreilly (1:29:52)
Jenny Sells, this is Kimori.

But seriously guys, if there is theory that is tangentially related to the text of Stormfront, we're totally willing to ⁓ talk about it in the show.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:30:11)
So with that, think we are done for today. We'll see you in two weeks.