Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets Has A Post-Credits Scene Most Fans Missed

/Film has previously instructed readers on how to ethically watch Chris Columbus' 2001 fantasy film "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" without putting money into the pockets of the notoriously bigoted J.K. Rowling. One can always watch a YouTube rendition of Brad Neely's hilarious spoof commentary track "Wizard People, Dear Reader." Sadly, Neely never did similar commentary tracks for the remaining ten films in the Harry Potter universe, so those still need to be consumed in other formats. I trust readers to find ways to consume those movies ethically as well. 

And if you can, for my money, the best of the extant "Harry Potter" films is the 2002 sequel "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets." That film possessed all the warmth and wonderment of the first film, but with a tighter story, a more complex mystery, and the implication that Harry's magical boarding school Hogwarts was full of more mysteries than we could initially imagine. 

One of the highlights of the film was a wonderfully smarmy performance from Kenneth Branagh as the dandyish Professor Gilderoy Lockhart, a dashing celebrity author and ultra-powerful wizard in Harry Potter's world. Lockhart was the Defense Against the Dark Arts professor at Hogwarts, and while he was confident, didn't seem to know a lot about the Dark Arts. His lessons all went awry, and some viewers immediately began to wonder how was able to keep his job. It would later be revealed that Lockhart was actually a con artist whose successes as a wizard were all false. Rather than achieve anything, he would magically manipulate people's memories, making them forget key events and staging himself as a hero. 

We'll get into the film's story below, but Lockhart's ultimate fate was revealed in a post-credits scene in "Chamber of Secrets."

The climax for "Chamber of Secrets" takes place in, well, the Chamber of Secrets, a vast stone cavern hidden inside of Hogwarts that serves as the home of ... well, I shan't reveal that here. Needless to say, the young Ginny Weasley (Bonnie Wright) has been kidnapped and is being held prisoner there, and the students elect Gilderoy Lockhart to go in after her. Lockhart is, naturally, a coward, so his plans is to enlist Harry and his friends to help him, and then erase their memories so he can take credit. But because Lockhart used a broken magic wand to cast his memory spell, it backfired, and erased his own memory instead. 

At the end of the film, he is still happy and pleasant, but he cannot remember Harry's name. Nor any of his friends' names. Nor his own name. He even seems to forget that he is a wizard. This is appropriate comeuppance for a dastardly charlatan. 

In the film's post-credits scene, however, we learn that Lockhart is still writing books, only this time, he seems to be taking a new angle. The camera swerves through the Wizard World's local shopping center, Diagon Alley, and settles on a book store where Lockhart's latest memoir, "Who Am I?" is on sale. On the cover, Lockhart is wearing a straightjacket, implying that he had been committed to a wizard asylum. He still has no memory of who he is. 

Given that the character never returned in future films, we can assume that Lockhart continued to have no memories of his identity prior to the events of "Chamber of Secrets." Poor dope.