Film Theory: Dumbledore Was Secretly Weaponising Harry Potter

5. Dumbledore’s Precedent

It’s crucial to remember that Dumbledore is a law unto himself. A wildcard of the highest order who flirted with the Dark Arts and wizarding world extremism in his youth, befriending a villain worse than Voldemort. He gave a prestigious job to Gilderoy Lockhart as a means to punish him for being a charlatan. He sent his own students on detention into the Forbidden Forest. He allowed pupils to meddle with time travel.

The point is, his decision-making was not what you might call… conventional, to say the least. So there’s no need to question why he’d assume that gambling on turning a child into a dirty bomb wasn't a perfectly reasonable idea. In every one of those cases, Dumbledore was seeking to make a point, no matter what it took.

And you need only consider how he dealt with Draco Malfoy in the run-up to his own death to see his mind in action. There is some debate over whether Dumbledore knew that Draco had been tasked with killing him, but the fact that Snape knew renders the speculation redundant. He was Dumbledore's spy. Dumbledore knew.

And yet, despite knowing this and having every reason to track Draco's every movement - if only for the boy's own protection since that was Dumbledore's primary aim - he still allowed other innocent characters to almost be killed. Ron, Katie Bell and Bill Weasley were all gravely injured as a result of Dumbledore's recklessness with Draco - and that's not to mention him imperilling every Hogwarts student by allowing Draco to let the Death Eaters into the school - and it could all have been preventable.

From the outside, all of that could seem like the desperate acts of a deranged, vaguely psychotic mind. But every one of them ended the right way in the long-run. He is the ultimate champion of the By Any Means school of thought.

And on top of all that, his past had imprinted on him the means to weaponise Harry...