Jan 11, 2022 - Daniel Handler joined the Beyond the Trope podcast to chat about writing, humor, kissing, and Poison for Breakfast (interview recorded Oct 2021). Starts at 1m30s, and the first 15 minutes offer some topics not extensively covered before.
“This is the big difference between digital culture and analogue culture: Digital is good for searching, and analogue is good for wandering. So when you’re on your way looking up a word [in the dictionary], you see other words, which is sometimes what you really meant. (…) Whereas Google will find only exactly what you said, but you can’t really wander.”
- Daniel Handler (22 min)
Snicket’s back, and he’s not doing well. In fact, he’s just been murdered.
Join the Sleuth as we unravel the latest (and weirdest) Snicket novel… after the cut.
There are many things to compliment about “Poison for Breakfast” but its plot is not one of them; the solution to the mystery is frustratingly simple, as the narrator himself admits. The book only masquerades as a crime novel but never truly conforms to the genre. Contrarily, “All the Wrong Questions” managed to hit all of the sweet spots of a good detective story, with the added task of parodying them. But Handler already spent several years deconstructing these tropes so he’s understandably not interested in doing the same thing with “Poison for Breakfast”. Its murder mystery is more of a pretext to give a sense of direction to the meandering narration.
Lemony Snicket has become infamous for its long tangents on philosophical musings only vaguely related to the subject at hand, or events of his early life which have nothing to do with the events he describes. But “Poison for Breakfast” is unique in that the book seems to be composed of nothing but digressions. In “A Series of Unfortunate Events” and “All the Wrong Questions”, the trivia interrupted the plot, but this time it’s the other way around. Snicket’s descriptions of places, characters and actions and are far more expeditive than the prose used in the philosophy inserts.
But as often is the case in those types of Snicket stories, the excerpts are not chosen at random. While they appear innocuous at first glance, they are in fact used to introduce details and concepts which will turn out to be of crucial importance later. The story is, amongst other others, a defense of serendipity; the protagonist cannot find a solution to his problems, and his mind travels to faraway places as a way to fill in this void. But in doing so, he finds the solution. Similarly, Lemony’s ramblings draw us closer to the heart and message of the story. It’s a method of writing which the author has used in his earlier works, of course. But never to this extreme, and perhaps never so successfully. There is little plot, yes; but there’s a good more amount of characterization.
From that perspective, “Poison for Breakfast” is undoubtedly the snicketiest Snicket story ever. It’s as if Daniel Handler were trying to examine his own style and obsessions under a microscope, to combine them into a new form of bacteria just to see if he can. This was a risky experiment on his part. The resulting organism could have turned out pedantic and arcane. Instead, it’s just weird in the cultured and subversive fashion we’ve come to love. To our relief, Handler came up with what may be remembered as the most accessible Snicket novel. Then again, one could say it’s more of a novella. It’s very likely that this type of exercise in style in structure could have become insufferable in a longer format.
There’s a sense of finality, of completion, even, in “Poison for Breakfast”. “The End” of “A Series of Unfortunate Events” was a commentary on the experience of the Great Unknown, but this book takes it one step further. We are no longer just entertaining the possibility of death and oblivion; we’re getting a full-fledged philosophical treatise on the topic. This may indeed be the last Snicket novel we’ll ever get, and its obsession with mortality is a testament to that. It speaks volumes that a good number of fans were seriously considering the possibility that Daniel Handler might kill of his self-insert character before the publication. What remains to be seen is whether “Poison for Breakfast” marks a transition towards a new phase in the extended universe of Lemony Snicket, or simply a last hurrah.
Hello, may I have permission to use some of your insights from several of your theories for my fanfiction? I'll give credit for the insights used. The fanfiction is set after 9 years of the events of "The End" and is a reader-insert type of story. If it's not okay with you, it's totally understandable. Your theories are extremely detailed and helpful, thank you for your efforts <3
Hello @celestionyx, this blog is on indefinite hold due to other projects on my part. As to the hypotheses/theories mentioned on this blog, reusing their general ideas and arguments for a fanfiction is completely fair game. Thank you for your interest and good luck with writing your fanfic!
Beatrice Letters was precisely designed to present several possible interpretations.
Unfortunately, the tendency of some fans to accept the most obvious interpretation as the only possible interpretation has overshadowed the beauty of the work for many people. The best known case of this is the question of whether the Baudelaires died shortly after leaving the island or not. For a long time, I argued that the only possible interpretation for what is written in TBL is that the Baudelaires survived long after leaving the island, as Beatrice claims that she remembers Sunny on a radio show. However, Dante showed me that there is another way to interpret this: the fact that Beatrice Jr may be mistaken. I have to admit that I really like this type of argument, because that is exactly what I say (now) about Beatrice's death. Assuming this possibility, we are saying that Daniel Handler planned the existence of characters who are mistaken about facts in ASOUE.
Thus, we cannot fully rely on Lemony Snicket's claim in some books about Beatrice's death for the simple fact that Lemony may be mistaken about her death. (Similarly, we cannot rely on the Baudelaires' survival on the island, because Beatrice Jr may be mistaken about this).
And as I have previously published, Daniel Handler left tips that indicate that Beatrice may have survived the fire at her home, and that he decided that Beatrice survived at some point between the publication of TAA and TPP. These tips were left in LSTUA and the Snicket File.
I also believe that in TSS, Daniel Handler used a resource used by Agatha Christie in her books: disappointment about a prime suspect due to forged clues or coincidences, so that in the end Agatha would reveal to the reader that the prime suspect was really the murder . It would be a very specific type of Red Haring. I'm going to call this feature "Smoke Cloud". From my point of view, Quigley's TSS revelation is a well-planned Smoke Cloud, made to hide the revelation (which was already becoming very obvious since the publication of LSTUA) that Beatrice had survived her house fire. We found evidence that Quigley's revelation was a Smoke Cloud when we realized that Daniel Handler was keen to point out that Olaf was surprised to find that Quigley was alive after Olaf had read the Snicket File. If Daniel Handler's intention was to confirm that the fire survivor named in the Snicket File was Quigley, this scene would not make sense.
As Hermes and Dante explained, perhaps that was left as it was so that some plot change or new ideas were possible in the next books. I remember this feature being used at the end of the second season of Prision Break, where a scene is shown in which a major character is being taken inside a truck surrounded by police, and then a group of armed men assault the truck and the camera shows them shooting. But the camera angle does not show whether they shot the prisoner or the police. Evidently, it was recorded that way, so that both realities could be used in a possible future season. I will call this feature "Flexible Roadmaps". The use of "Flexible Roadmaps" allows the author to write a story without knowing exactly all the details of the sequel. The existence of an intensional Flexible Roadmap in ASOUE is the fact that the bodies of Beatrice and Bertrand have never been described as being found by anyone. Someone (Dante) can argue that describing the bodies of the parents of the main characters would be too shocking for readers who are children (and I agree). But not even a funeral? Furthermore, in LSTUA it was clear that Daniel Handler resorted to this aspect of the Flexible Roadmap by stating that the bodies of the Baudelaires' parents were not buried in two of the places where photos are displayed. The Flexible Roadmap exists due to the fact that the reality in which the bodies turned to ash and the reality that they survived co-exist at the same time.
And then we come to the end of TPP full of Flexible Roadmap spread throughout the work. A conventional author would choose some of the possibilities of his Flexible Roadmaps and present them to the reader. But I think we all agree that Daniel Handler is not a conventional author. Instead of clarifying the truth about Beatrice's survival or not, he publishes TBL and then TE. I think we all agree that at least TBL and TE were written together. It is important to understand that one of the goals of TBL is to leave some of the Flexible Roadmaps open.
I disagree with the statement that all the mysteries contained in TBL have been solved, because I see evidence that the mysteries contained in TBL were not created to be solved, but to be identified.
To refuse the existence of these unsolved mysteries is actually to overlook the hidden beauty that TBL possesses. I will try to publish some texts indicating the existence of these mysteries, and of course I know that solutions to these mysteries have been proposed over the years. But none of these solutions are really definitive, because TBL was designed to be a great anagram. Just as you can form multiple words from a set of letters, and each word will have a different meaning, TBL was designed to be understood in different ways depending on the premises adopted by the reader when reading each letter.
This is the great theme of Beatrice's letters and it is clear that this derives from the multiple meanings of the word "letter".
The two main meanings are:
1 - a symbol usually written or printed representing a speech sound and constituting a unit of an alphabet
2 - a direct or personal written or printed message addressed to a person or organization
Daniel Handler's idea was to create a work in which these two meanings of the word letters could be used to form anagrams, literal and conceptual anagrams. We see that this was his idea when we read BB to LS # 2:
"The wooden box on your desk marked" letters "is full of letters. But all the letters are jumbled together, and I cannot determinie what the letters would spell if I put them in the proper order. The only letter missing is the one I sent you. Either it never arrived or you took it with you. "
I think these are one of the coolest parts of TBL. Beatrice Jr logically uses and takes advantage of the multiple meaning of the word "spell" in line with the multiple meaning of the word "letter". This is beautiful. Note these two definitions of "spell" that I would like to highlight:
1 - to make up (a word).: What word do these letters spell?
2 -: to add up to: mean; to communicate or convey (as an idea) to the mind. .: "Crop failure was likely to spell stark famine." .: "That summertime combination of hot temperatures and equally hot tempers can spell trouble."
In other words, Beatrice could be saying that she was unable to spell out the different possible literal anagrams formed by a set of letters (A - Z) in a box, or she could be saying that there were several messages written in a box, which could mean several different things depending on the order and premises you decide to adopt. And the fact that Daniel Handler chose these words for Beatrice Jr to write, only highlights his intention to create multiple meanings for TBL.
Now, note Lemony's letter to the Editor. Lemony wrote:
"... The Beatrice letters could explain the beatrice letters and even the letters of Beatrice, no matter which letters they are, and no matter what order the letters are in. I immediately began work on the file."
When quoting the order of letters, Daniel Handler makes a clear allusion here to anagrams. After that, Lemony wrote:
"For many years I thought if I collected all thesse letters and their accompanying ephemera - a phrase witch here means" documents and items which I feared had vanished, and may soon vanish again "- I could put all of them in the proper order, as if solving anagram by putting all of the letters in the right order.But letters are not letters, so the arrangement of letters is not as simple as the arrangement of letters, and even if it were, the arrangement of these letters could spell more than one thing, just as there is more than one Beatrice, and so the mystey could become two mysteries, and each of these mysteries could become two mysteries, until the wole world is engulfed in mysteries, as it is now. "
(It is interesting that after this passage I found a message from Daniel Handler for me. He said to me:
"No matter what documents you investigate, and what objects you retrieve, you NEVER ANSWER THE QUESTIONS THAT ARE MOST IMORTANT TO YOU." )
This consideration shows that the beauty of TBL is to try to form literal and conceptual anagrams, and not to discover which of the meanings is right.
A chronology/reading order of Lemony Snicket’s works
The works of Lemony Snicket are often a conglomeration of documents from various sources and authors, frequently presented out of order. The following article intends to better classify the aforementioned documents by determining when they were written, forwarded, read and later made available to the general public (e.g. “us”, the readers).
This list has two purposes:
it can be used as a reading order suggestion for people who may want to experience the narrative in a more chronological manner
it is an attempt to put various events in relation to one another and create a more coherent picture of Lemony’s life, particularly regarding the various documents scattered across Lemony Snicket’s un-Authorized Autobiography and The Beatrice Letters.
This list is neither official nor to be taken as granted. In order to make sense of the chronology, some arbitrary decisions and interpretations had to be made. If you do not agree with the logic of the chronology, please feel free to express your views in the comments.
A quick reminder on the abbreviations used within this article:
For futher references, please also refer to the timeline (Link) whose purpose is to classify events within the series which do not match the creation/publication of a particular document.
More after the cut.
Before “All The Wrong Questions”
An unnamed member of V.F.D. writes a letter to secretary J. regarding the potential recruitment of a young volunteer (LSUA, p.52). The youngster in question is implied to be Daniel Handler himself (according to LSUA’s index).
Lemony meets Beatrice for the first time then sends her an apology note (TBL, LS to BB #1).
During “All The Wrong Questions”
NA (although the supplementary material FU:13SI happens between “When Did You See Her Last?” and “Shouldn’t You Be In School?”).
Between “All The Wrong Questions” and “The Bad Beginning”
Lemony writes to Beatrice about an upcoming expedition (TBL, LS to BB #2).
The official V.F.D. disguise kit manual is written (LSUA, pp.99-108). The recruitment guide (LSUA, pp.189-191) could also have been written at the same time. NB: the disguise kit manual and the recruitment could actually be much older than that. However the disguise kit manual mentions sugar bowls, which implies that it would have been written at around the same time period as the earliest mentions of the sugar bowl (first vineyard letter, LSUA, pp.84-86, see below). Note that sugar bowls are never mentioned in “All The Wrong Questions”, which seems VFD’s obsession with the sugar bowl only started after Lemony graduated and became a dramatic critic.
Lemony writes to Beatrice to warn her that he will soon be appointed as dramatic critic for the “Daily Punctillo” (TBL, LS to BB #3).
Beatrice writes a poem hidden inside the booklet of her play (TBL, last pages) but Lemony fails to notice it.
Lemony writes to Beatrice to schedule a date where he plans to ask her hand in marriage (TBL, LS to BB #4).
Lemony writes a letter regarding his childhood memories to Dr. Charley Patton ( LSUA, pp.8-21) before his intended marriage to Beatrice. An unidentified person will later make notes to this letter, remarking on inconsistencies in Lemony’s testimony.
Lemony writes a scathing review of Olaf’s new play (LSUA, p.77-79), also announcing his upcoming marriage to Beatrice.
Jacques (who is currently working inside the Queequeg) learns of Lemony’s review and writes his brother a letter, telling him 1) to go to Damocles Dock in order to plan his exile, 2) not to contact Beatrice ever again. He also mentions that Lemony should expect to get fired from the Daily Punctillo very soon.
The next day, Eleonora publishes a retractation and announces Lemony is fired (LSUA, p.80). She also announces the beginning of a new column by Geraldine Julienne.
The same week, Lemony manages to slip his rebuttal to Eleonora’s retractation into a morning edition of the newspaper (LSUA, p.81). Eleonora submits a second retraction in the evening edition (LSUA, p.82) and confirms that Geraldine’s column is scheduled to begin the next day.
The Vineyard of Flagrant Drapes writes a letter to Lemony, urging him to cancel the wedding as Olaf plans to crash it (LSUA, pp.84-86). This letter is later acquired by the Duchess of Winnipeg somehow.
After the debacle, Lemony is forced to hide in a VFD headquarter. During that time, the (real?) Captain S. writes instructions to Lemony so he can escape from the country on the Prospero (LSUA, pp.109-111), remarking on Lemony’s firing, and includes tickets with the letter (LSUA, pp.112-113). This letter and the tickets are sent to Larry in Damocles Dock so he can give them to Lemony when he gets there.
A crisis meeting is held with different members of VFD. J., the secretary, writes a live transcript of this meeting (LSUA, pp.33-47). It appears that the “J.” and “K.” characters present at the meeting are not Jacques and Kit, although Daniel Handler appears to be there. Several photographs (LSUA, pp.48-51) will later be added to this transcript. Olaf and Esme crash the meeting, threatening to light it on fire unless the volunteers agree with their demands.
After the meeting, the volunteers have no safe place left in the vicinity. Lemony has nowhere to go. He receives a break-up letter from Beatrice, brought to him by carrier pigeons, and answers back with a coded letter regarding her co-star’s possible duplicity (TBL, LS to BB #5).
Lemony then supposedly receives Jacques’ letter around that time and goes to Damocles Dock. Larry gives Lemony the Captain’s letter and the tickets.
A photograph of the ship is taken on the day it leaves port (LSUA, p.91). The Daily Punctillo publishes an article about the ship’s mysterious departure (LSUA, pp.93-95).
Lemony writes to Beatrice to warn her of an upcoming danger (TBL, LS to BB #6). It seems likely that this message was sent some time before Sunny’s birth but there’s also an argument for Violet’s and Klaus’.
During “The Bad Beginning”
As soon as her learns about the Baudelaire fire, Lemony dispatches Brett Helquist to draw the scene of the crime. Helquist draws the smoldering remains of the Baudelaire mansion and writes a letter to Lemony with said drawings enclosed (LSUA, pp.182-183). He plans to discuss both documents at the Valorous Farm Dairy where a meeting with Lemony Snicket and photographer Meredith Heuer has been set.
Lemony writes an early draft of the first chapter of “The Bad Beginning” (LSUA, pp.177-178). Babs later receives this early draft and writes a note to Hal (LSUA, p.176) so he can add it to the Snicket file. Lemony also writes a letter to his sister (LSUA, p.192) announcing his intention to write a book on the Baudelaire case.
Between “The Bad Beginning” and “The Reptile Room”
The new dramatic critic of the Daily Punctillo (not Lemony) writes a scathing review of Al Funcoot’s play. Enraged that Olaf is being criticized, Esme writes to Geraldine Julienne to pressure Eleonora Poe into firing the dramatic critic, as well as to enquire about Jerome Squalor’s habits. The critic is fired by Eleronora Poe. Geraldine answers Esme’s letter (LSUA, p.119-120), confirming the new critic’s firing, with a menu of the restaurant at which Jerome usually eats (LSUA, p.121).
Gustav Sebald writes a movie script to warn Montgomery Montgomery of his new assistant and of the survivor of the Baudelaire fire (LSUA, pp.61-65).
The movie is shot. A photograph of a toddler helping Gustav build the snowman is taken, with Gustav not actually appearing in the picture as he was hidden behind the snowman (LSUA, p.71). A photograph of the actor playing Young Rölf is later taken (LSUA, p.53 and p.57). Other miscellaneous pictures of the production are taken during that time (LSUA, p.68, p.69, p.70).
Lemony realizes that Montgomery Montgomery does not know the Sebald code and that the plan needs to be changed. He schedules a meeting with Gustav Sebald near the Swarthy Swamp. On his way to the meeting, Gustav is spotted by Olaf who drowns him.
Lemony arrives at the appointment and waits nineteen hours for Gustav Sebald in the Swarthy Swamp. To pass the time, he writes a letter to the cheesemakers (LSUA, pp.55-60). Lemony is unaware that Gustav is actually already there, drowned at the bottom of the swamp.
Between “The Reptile Room” and “The Wide Window”
A review of “Zombies in the Snow” by Lena Pukalie (an anagram of real-life film critic Pauline Kael) is published (LSUA, p.165) and finds its way to Lemony’s commonplace book.
During “The Wide Window”
A photograph of the Baudelaire orphans on Damocles Dock is taken by a mysterious person. Two copies of this photograph later end up in possession of K./R. (who later sends it to Olivia Caliban a.k.a Madame Lulu).
Between “The Wide Window” and “The Miserable Mill”
Jacques Snicket visits Olivia Caliban at Caligari Carnival and asks her if his brother is alive. She gives him a copy of the photograph which R. sent to her, indicating that Lemony may be currently tracking down the Baudelaire orphans from his taxi. Jacques leaves to investigate Dr. Montgomery’s house as he knows that a book on the secret Mortmain Mountains is kept there. When he arrives, he is surprised to find Quigley. Jacques gives his copy of the photograph to Quigley.
Olaf’s henchmen kill Firstein in Paltryville, intent on replacing him with the Bald Man under the pseudonym of Flacutono. They use the the lumbermill’s machines to destroy Firstein’s remains. Jacques learns of Firstein’s death and leaves for Paltryville, instructing Quigley to stay behind. In Paltryville, Jacques manages to send his investigation to the Daily Punctillo for an article. But Jacques is discovered by Olaf’s agents and has to flee. Because the body parts are unindentifiable, Detective Smith covers up the murder as the accidental death of an unknown person. Sir does not explain his foreman’s sudden disappearance to the workers. The Daily Punctillo uses Smith’s version for its final version of the article (LSUA, p.118). An earlier edition of Jacques’ article did survive (LSUA, p.117).
Jerome and Esme spend an evening together, at the end of which Esme bullies Jerome into marrying her.
Jerome schedules a wedding at the Vineyard of Flagrant Grapes where Esme hopes to receive the sugar bowl (perhaps because she expects Jacques to attend his friend’s wedding). The vineyard writes back, confirming the wedding but declining Esme’s request (LSUA, pp.84-86). Somehow the Duchess of Winnipeg later manages to get her hand on this letter. Jerome also sends a wedding invitation to Jacques Snicket. Fernald starts working as a doorman at 667 Dark Avenue in order to intercept any letter Jerome may be supposed to receive.
The Duchess fears that keeping the two vineyard letters is no longer safe for her. Unaware that Isaac Anwhistle is dead, she writes a letter to Kit Snicket, asking her to archive the two vineyard letters (LSUA, p.83).
Jacques finds out that Esme plans to marry Jerome in order to access the old V.F.D headquarter at 667 Dark Avenue. Fearing the worst, he writes Jerome a letter (LSUA, pp.122-124), but the wedding happened so quickly that Jerome was probably already married by the time Jacques found out about his engagement. Sometime during Jerome’s and Esme’s honeymoon, Jacques’ letter is intercepted by Fernald who works as a disguised doorman. Fernald and Olaf’s allies analyze Jacques’ letter and find out the village where he is hiding.
Between “The Miserable Mill” and “The Austere Academy”
An unnamed person adds a photograph of the Quagmire triplets (with a note) to the “Zombies in the snow” file in the Sebald archives (LSUA, p.70). This is because the movie was made for Montgomery Montgomery and Quigley Quagmire eventually escaped from his childhood home to Montgomery’s house.
Lemony Snicket writes Sally Sebald to inform her of Georgina Orwell’s death. Sally answers, informing him of the circumstances in which the survivor of the Baudelaire fire was hidden (LSUA, pp.66-71). Sally also finds the photograph of the Quagmire triplets inside the file and does not understand what it’s doing there. Lemony will later replace the photograph of the triplets with a photograph of people “around the same age”.
During “The Austere Academy”
At this point in time, first editions of “The Bad Beginning” and “The Reptile” apparently already exist. We see excerpts of these two books later on in other documents. This edition finds its way to a library which has recently been overtaken by the tweed-coat-wearing librarian. This is a contentious topic as “The Reptile Room” mentions Klaus and Violet reflecting on its events “years later” even though only a few months/weeks have passed at the time of the book’s publication. One can only assume that these passages are either:
the result of Lemony making reasonable assumptions on Klaus’ and Violet’s future,
additions which Lemony made years later as he kept updating the books with new details of his investigations (in which case what we, the readers, are reading is not the first edition of the book read by Al Funcoot’s fan, bur rather a later edition). This is plausible because “The Bad Beginning” got an updated edition called “The Bad Beginning: Rare Edition” with additional notes regarding Lemony’s more recent findings on the events depicted in the book.
Al Funcoot (probably Olaf under a pen name) writes to one of his fans, ordering him to investigate the fate of Montgomery’s collection of reptiles. The henchman goes to his local library and reads excerpts of “The Reptile Room” (LSUA, pp.147-148).
The henchman (now disguised as a cow) roams the surrounding of Lousy Lane, looking for survivors of Montgomery’s collection. The henchman noticeably hears the Dissonant Toad who is repeating something he once heard Olaf say. Supposedly the comment made by Olaf on how incovenient it is to drown someone happened the night of Monty’s murder. The toad was in the Reptile Room that night and heard Olaf kill Montgomery, after which he wondered aloud how he was going to dispose of the body. The henchman disguised as a cow also spots the Mamba du Mal as well as other reptiles. The henchman later reaches the Valorous Farm Dairy but does not dare approach the location.
The henchman disguised a cow sends Al Funcoot his own report of the events (LSUA, pp.145-153). The information from his report will later be used by Olaf’s allies to find and kill the survivors of Montgomery’s collection. Only the Incredibly Deadly Viper is now safe for now at the Valorous Farm Dairy.
Growing frustrated with his unsuccessful hunt for the Incredibly Deadly Viper, the henchman disguised as a cow finally works up the courage to ask the cheesemakers about the reptiles. Suspecting his ill intentions, the cheesemakers immediately write a postcard to Lemony so he can be warned that Olaf’s henchmen are looking for reptiles near the Valorous Farm Dairy (LSUA, pp.155-156).
Lemony writes a letter to the Duchess, announcing his intention to attend her Masked Ball (LSUA, p.144) even though the survivors of Montgomery’s collection are being hunted.
Supposedly the events of the Masked Ball happen soon after (Lemony flashes back to the Masked Ball in the beginning of the eleventh chapter of “The Austere Academy”). After the Masked Ball, Coach Genghis arrives at Prufrock Prep (fourth chapter of “The Austere Academy”).
Between “The Austere Academy” and “The Ersatz Elevator”
Jerome, who never received Jacques’ letter, writes Jacques to announce Esme their plans to adopt some children (LSUA, p.125).
Quigley, growing impatient, reads an article of “The Daily Punctillo” which describes his siblings’ kidnapping. He leaves for Paltryville.
Jerome writes a letter to Jacques Snicket, lamenting the fact his friend wasn’t present at his wedding (LSUA, p.125). Esme is planning to acquire the custody of the Baudelaire orphans during that time.
During that time, the tweed-coat-wearing librarian seems to change jobs as he now works at Prufrock Prep. Carmelita Spats runs into him, which earns him an appareance in her autobiography (LSUA, p.171).
During “The Ersatz Elevator”
The Duchess (or somebody impersonating her) writes a letter to Lemony (LSUA, pp.25-28). This letter was supposedly written during the “first few days” that the Baudelaire orphans spent with Esme and Jerome at 667 Dark Avenue (mentioned in Chapter Three of “The Ersatz Elevator”), before Gunther’s arrival.
At the In auction, the Esme Squalor fan club bids on the corpse of the Mamba du Mal. This is reported by the In Auction catalog (LSUA, p.164) and Lemony includes a page of the catalog in his commonplace book.
Lemony sends the cheesemakers a note (LSUA, p.159) with the contents of his commonplace book (LSUA, pp.161-175). The excerpts contained in the commonplace book are intended to warn the cheesemakers of the reptiles of montgomery’s collection and the secret messages/codes they can communicate. One of the excerpts is a newspaper describing how the Mamba du Mal was killed and auctioned.
At the Valorous Farm Dairy, the meeting planned by Meredith, Brett and Lemony goes haywire as they have been spotted by the villain disguised as a cow. The dairy is burned down by the villain but Meredith manages to take one last photograph of the dairy before the fire (LSUA, p.185). The three volunteers flee. Lemony leaves a copy of his drawing of the burned down Baudelaire mansion behind in the commotion.
Detective Smith covers up the arson when reporters of the Daily Punctillo come to investigate the fire. He provides the reporters with Brett’s drawing, unaware that it actually concerns the Baudelaire mansion. The drawing may have ended up in the archives of the Daily Punctillo. The Daily Punctillo publishes an article on the “accident” (LSUA, p.184).
During “The Vile Village”
Lemony receives the suspicious letter from the Duchess at Veblen Hall while he’s interviewing witnesses about who was driving the car on the day the Quagmire triplets were smuggled out of the city by Olaf. He fears that someone may be impersonating the Duchess and writes a note about it (LSUA, p.30).
While the Baudelaire orphans are working at the Village of Fowl Devotees, Arthur Poe meets his sister Eleonora Poe in Damocles Dock. Their conversation is recorded by a mysterious individual (LSUA, pp.134-137). The transcript of the recording is later found by an unnamed individual.
During “The Hostile Hospital”
Olaf (under the alias of Al Funcoot) knows that the Baudelaire orphans are probably somewhere in the Hinterlands and that they’ll soon try to use a telephone or a telegram machine. In order to thwart them, he writes to Eleonora Poe under the alias of Al Funcoot, convincing her to publish articles about the danger of telephone poles and fake telegrams, and later writes to an unnamed person about said article. Esme also manages to phone/write Geraldine Julienne, ordering her to lock up Eleonora Poe once the articles are published.
Eleonora writes to Arthur Poe, warning him of the danger of fake telegrams. The telegram sent by the Baudelaire orphans in the Last Chance General Store (LSUA, p.140) reaches Arthur’s bank some time later and is as such ignored.
During "The Carnivorous Carnival”
While the Baudelaire orphans try to use the phone at Caligari Carnival, the unnamed person chops down the telephone poles. This ends the connection, leaving the Baudelaire orphans confused as to why the person on the other end isn’t responding anymore. Later on, the unnamed person writes back to “Al Funcoot” (LSUA, p.132-133), thanking him for the article.
Kit roams the financial district looking for scraps of newspapers. She writes a note about that to the cheesemakers (LSUA, letter on pp.75-76). The note and the scraps of newspapers are later found by an unknown person (LSUA, note to file on p.75).
During “The Slippery Slope”
Geraldine Julienne locks up Eleonora in the basement of the Daily Punctillo’s building. Eleonora sends a telegram to her brother (LSUA, p.141), but the message is ignored by Arthur Poe on the account of her article.
During “The Grim Grotto”
As he’s following the Baudelaire orphans’ footsteps, Lemony writes a letter to his sister Kit Snicket, instructing her to meet him at the Hotel Denouement, and slips it into the pages of the manuscript (end of Chapter Five) of “The Slippery Slope”. It’s extremely unlikely Kit ever received the manuscript as she seems to believe her brother is dead in “The End”. Indeed the V.F.D. meeting scheduled at Hotel Denouement happens during “The Penultimate Peril”, which would leave barely a day for said manuscript to be forwarded to Kit. One can only assume that the letter was kept within the manuscript and never removed (for sentimental reasons?). Interestingly the letter does not specify a date and “Hotel Denouement” could refer to the underground library beneath the pond rather than the building on the surface, which means that said meeting could have been scheduled much later than the building’s eventual destruction.
Arthur Poe sends a thank-you letter to Eleonora (LSUA, pp.138-139), including the two telegrams he received (LSUA, pp.140-141).
During “The End”
Remora slips on a banana peel and quits his job at Prufrock Prep. Kit Snicket is hired to replace him and teaches at Prufrock Preparatory School for a few days. This supposedly happens during the “days” the Baudelaire orphans live with the Islanders doing pretty much nothing on the Island (this undefined time period is described in Chapter Five of “The End). A photograph (LSUA, p. 127 and p. 142) is taken of Kit “supervizing” the children during gym class. Genghis and Tench no longer teach at Prufrock, so without anyone to teach them the Prufrock students just sit around looking at a camera during their gym class. During that time, Kit also seems to write a note (LSUA, p.154) about receiving the postcard intended for Lemony by the Prufrock librarian.
The Daily Punctillo publishes an article warning parents about their children reading forbidden books. The Spats parents send that article to Nero who subsequently fires Kit Snicket and writes back to the Spats parents in gratitude (LSUA, pp.129-131).
After “Chapter Fourteen”
Lemony eventually publishes an updated edition of “The Bad Beginning” with additional notes (The Bad Beginning: Rare Edition) in which he announces his intention to release the thirteenth and final volume of “A Series Of Unfortunate Events”.
Lemony is officially declared by the authorities. The Daily Punctillo publishes an official declaration of death, announcing a burial even though no body was identified (LSUA, p.3, see also the back cover with Lemony’s note). Lemony attends his own burial where photographs are taken (LSUA, p.4 and p.7). Lemony writes a note to explain the photograph and the Daily punctillo clipping and adds it to the Autobiography file (LSUA, pp.5-7).
Beatrice Baudelaire Jr eventually learns of his uncle and his research on the Baudelaire file. She starts tracking him down and sends him several letters (TBL, BB to LS #1, #2, #3, #4 and #5). Lemony does not answer these letters as he believes the author of these letters to be Esme impersonating Beatrice Baudelaire Sr.
Beatrice Baudelaire Jr eventually meet in person at a party. During the party, Beatrice Baudelaire Jr writes her uncle an apology note (TBL, BB to LS #6). Daniel Handler later writes about this party (LSUA, pp. ix-xvii and p.193) and the autobiography is finally published.
Lemony decides to publish the letters of both Beatrices and writes a letter to his editor (TBL, foreword). The final volume of “A Series of Unfortunate Events” (including “Chapter Fourteen”, which seems to have been written conjointly with Beatrice Baudelaire Jr) and “The Beatrice Letters” are then published.
Who is it? What is it? Does it even matter? There is no greater mystery than the nature of the unknowable.
"We saw that on a radar screen," Violet remembered. "Captain Widdershins refused to tell us what it was."
"My brother used to call it 'The Great Unknown,'" Kit said, clasping her belly as the baby kicked violently. "I was terrified, Baudelaires.”
[The End, Chapter Thirteen]
The basis of the theory rests on a Doylist perspective as it tries to rationalize the relevance of “All the Wrong Questions” pertaining to “A Series Of Unfortunate Events”. Daniel Handler had to be careful while writing the second series as he was juggling with two conflicting goals:
The nature of the question-mark was a symbolic representation of Death and the Unknowable, and had to remain that way in order for “A Series Of Unfortunate Events” not to be ruined,
Fans were disappointed by the number of unresolved plotholes in “A Series Of Unfortunate Events” and Daniel Handler wanted to throw them a bone by expanding the lore and providing more hints to these mysteries.
So there was only one compromise possible: add more details to the lore of the Great Unknown but in a way which would leave the final fate of the characters in “The End” still very ambiguous. That was the mission “All The Wrong Questions” had to accomplish. Yet it’s still very ambiguous whether the infamous Bombinating Beast really is the question-mark which shows up on the sonar screens of the submarine in “The Grim Grotto” and “The End”. So why write “All The Wrong Questions” at all?
This article posits that there are more connections between the plot of both series than initially believed, if one digs hard enough. We just have to follow the clues to paint a more global picture. Here are all the smaller mysteries we have to investigate before rendering our final verdict:
How many question marks are in “The Grim Grotto” and “The End”?
Why are Ellington’s eyebrows shaped like question marks?
Was the question-mark-shaped entity a submarine or an animal?
To whom did the Carmelita octopus-shaped submarine belong?
What exactly happened to Fernald and Fiona?
More after the cut.
NB : This article is dedicated to @snicketstrange (a.k.a. Jean Lúcio). Please check out his Tumblr page for more amazing theories about the mind of Daniel Handler (and incidentally Lemony Snicket). There’s also a Youtube page (Link) if you speak Portuguese. Jean, thank you for your invaluable help in researching this topic, particularly regarding the nature of sonars.
How many question marks are in “The Grim Grotto” and “The End”?
Surprisingly, I have issues with this line of reasoning. Not because there isn’t a connection, but because there is evidence for two Bombinating Beasts showing up in “All The Wrong Questions”:
The proper Bombinating Beast from the legends of Stain’d-by-the-Sea (which we will name OBB, as in “Original”),
The genetic monstrosity created by Hangfire through experiments (which we will name CBB, as in “Copied” or “Clone”), which he planned to use to impersonate the OBB.
It’s pretty much established at this point. We see in “Shouldn’t You Be In School” that the CBB was still “immature” according to Ellington, and it’s very much implied that the tadpole who bit Lemony’s finger in “When Did You See Her Last” was the CBB at an even earlier stage. A significant amount of time happens between the two books, to the point Handler released a spin-off called “File Under: 13 Suspicious Incidents” to account for what the characters did in the meantime. Supposedly the CBB had time to grow. So it wouldn’t make sense for Stain’d-by-the-Sea to have legends about the terrifying Bombinating Beast if that thing was just a tadpole in recent history.
How Hangfire managed to create the CBB is left unexplained by Daniel Handler. It still seems to be somewhat related to the OBB because the whistle inside the statue seems to work on it, so there’s something similar about the way the two creatures function. My guess is that, though the OBB was lost to time, some fossilized eggs remained and Hangfire managed to find and hatch one. Much ado is made about the book “Caviar: Salty Jewel of the Tasty Sea” which used to be in Dewey’s library in Stain’d-by-the-Sea. All we know about the book is that it has a chapter dedicated to the tanks being used when the sturgeons are young. My guess is that the book is where Hangfire found the necessary information.
So the question remains: who showed up in “The Grim Grotto” and “The End”: the OBB or the CBB? Since one is essentially the child of the other, and since the entity shows up no less than three times (twice in “The Grim Grotto”, once in “The End”), there’s a possibility that both the OBB and the CBB showed up in separate instances and that characters mistakenly thought it was the same entity each time.
Why are Ellington’s eyebrows shaped like question marks?
Believe it or not, TBB is only compared to a question mark once in the entire series.
Supposedly sailors still saw the Bombinating Beast, swimming with its body curled up like an underwater question mark, although with the sea drained, I couldn’t imagine that this could be true, at least not anymore.
[Who Could That Be At This Hour ?, Chapter Four]
Interestingly it’s rather Ellington who is compared to a question mark, far more often than the Beast. Usually next to a mention of a smile which “could mean anything”.
“Hello,” she said, “I’m Ellington Feint,” and I sat up to get a better look at her. It was not so dark that I couldn’t see her strange, curved eyebrows, each one coiled over like a question mark. Green eyes she had, and hair so black it made the night look pale. She had long fingers, with nails just as black, and they poked out of a black shirt with long, smooth sleeves. And right before she started climbing down the ladder, I saw her smile, shadowy in the moonlight. It was a smile that might have meant anything. She was a little older than me, or maybe just a little taller. I followed her down.
[Who Could That Be At This Hour?, Chapter Seven]
But instead I just looked at the person with her back to me. Next to her were a large, striped suitcase and an oddly shaped case perfect for holding an old-fashioned record player. Hanging from her shoulder was a green purse shaped like a long, zippered tube as she stood and looked at the shelves filled with stenciled bags of coffee. Then she turned around, and I paid attention to her dark, dark hair, and her eyebrows, each one coiled over like a question mark, and her green eyes underneath.
“Lemony Snicket,” she said.
“Ellington Feint,” I said, and it was only then that I saw that smile of hers, the one that could have meant anything.
[Who Could That Be At This Hour?, Chapter Eleven]
If you want to know the truth, I was thinking about Ellington Feint, a girl with strange, curved eyebrows like question marks, and green eyes, and a smile that might have meant anything.
[When Did You See Her Last?, Chapter One]
And there was a girl standing in front of me. Her green eyes were the same, but her hair wasn’t black, not now. It was blond instead, so blond it looked white. Her fingers were still slender, with long black nails again, and over her eyes were strange eyebrows curved like question marks. She was using the same smile, too. It was a smile I liked. It was a smile that might have meant anything.
[When Did You See Her Last?, Chapter Seven]
The something else was a girl, taller than I was or older than I was or both. She had curious eyebrows, curved and coiled like question marks, and she had a smile that might have meant anything.
[Shouldn’t You Be In School?, Chapter One]
“Are you awake?” I asked me, but it wasn’t me who was talking. It hadn’t been all along. I turned my head and ached and blinked and found myself staring into a pair of green eyes. They blinked below a pair of eyebrows curled up like question marks, and after she blinked, the girl gave me a smile that might have meant anything.
[Shouldn’t You Be In School?, Chapter Eight]
Ellington moved her mug to the center of the table. Her eyebrows, curved like question marks, felt like they belonged to all the questions in my mind, and then she gave me her smile, the one that might have meant anything.
[Shouldn’t You Be In School, Chapter Nine]
“It’s all a big question mark,” Jake said, with a grim grin, and I gave him a fraught frown to match. Question marks made me think of Ellington Feint’s curved eyebrows, and the smile she always gave me, that could have meant anything. It made me unsteady to think of all of it, and the train rattling made me feel unsteadier still.
[Why Is This Night Different From All Other Nights?, Chapter Seven]
“This is the only place on the train where you can find coffee,” I said, and showed her the tiny folded cup. She raised her curious eyebrows, shaped like question marks, and finally gave me the smile she always gave me, the smile that could have meant anything.
[Why Is This Night Different From All Other Nights?, Chapter Eight]
I reached out to her, and she moved violently away from me. I had to grab the chain that bound her hands, in order to look into her eyes. Her curled eyebrows had always reminded me of question marks, but now they just looked furious. You’ll never see Ellington Feint smile again, I thought to myself, but it was a moment before I could bring myself to reply. “I hoped it wasn’t true,” I said finally.
[Why Is This Night Different From All Other Nights?, Chapter Thirteen]
So at this point it looks like Lemony/Handler is throwing far more clues towards Ellington having something to do with the mysterious question mark featured in “A Series Of Unfortunate Events” rather than TBB itself. Why is that?
On one hand, there’s some semblance of symbolism going on there. In Lemony’s adolescent mind, he’s the detective and Ellington is the designated “femme fatale” of noir literature, somebody dangerous you can’t trust or understand, and who usually has hidden and nefarious motives. So of course she’d be associated with question marks and an undecipherable mind. She represents the Unknown, and the primal fear which goes with that.
Except readers end up realizing that Lemony has it wrong. Although Ellington lies often, her motives are neither hidden nor difficult to understand: she’s a traumatized child desperate to find her father. That’s what she presents herself as and she acts accordingly. It’s actually Lemony who fits the role of the “homme fatal” to Ellington: his motives are shrouded in mystery because of his association with VFD (other youngsters in the series call him out on it) and he ends up betraying Ellington for his own ends. Lemony is essentially projecting his own duplicity and manipulative nature on Ellington. She’s a mirror to his own sins.
So if Ellington is a clue to understand the true nature of the entity, it’s not just a clue which relates to the plot. It also functions as a key to understanding the symbolism and psychology of the entity. Our educated guess, therefore, would be that characters assume a lot of things about the entity which are just plain wrong, and that they are projecting their own identity on it.
Was the question-mark-shaped entity a submarine or an animal?
The following reasoning was helpfully worked out for me by Jean Lúcio (aka @snicketstrange on Tumblr), a prominent member of the Brazilian Snicket fandom. What he realized is that there are two kinds of sonars: active (emitting a sound and listening to its echo) and passive (listening to sounds in the vicinity). Both have merits: the active one is more efficient as it will detect objects for you even if there are silent, and the passive one is more discreet as it allows you to stay silent.
So in “The Grim Grotto” it seems that both Olaf and Widdershins assume the entity uses a passive sonar. Both of them insist that the people inside the Queequeg/Carmelita do not make any sound in order to remain undetected by the entity.
Why does that matter, anyway?
Well, as it turns out, some animals do have a “bio-sonar”… but there is no instance of a passive bio-sonar. All animals capable of echolocation function according to the principles of an active bio-sonar. They emit a sound and listen to its echo. It doesn’t matter if an item in their vicinity is silent, they will detect it all the same.
So we can infer two things from Juan Lúcio’s reasoning:
Widdershins was not lying, he sincerely believed the entity was or could be a submarine. If he knew for sure that the entity was an animal, he would not bother telling his crewmates to stay silent as it would be pointless. As a submariner, it can be assumed he knew how the bio-sonar of large marine animals functioned. Olaf is a trickier case as he’s been shown to be book-dumb in that he’s ignorant about many things. But his behavior regarding the entity is extremely similar to Widdershins so it’s likely he had the same line of reasoning.
The entity definitely detected both the Queequeg and the Carmelita… and chose not to attack them. Which would at least imply that the entity is far less malevolent or aggressive than initially suspected. Both submarines were spared.
So all of a sudden we have a lot more information about the entity.
This is where the constant comparison of Ellington to a question mark starts making sense. There’s a clear parallel between the way Ellington and the entity are treated:
Lemony is a liar and a manipulator, so he assumes that Ellington is a liar and a manipulator.
Widdershins and Olaf are shady people piloting a submarine, so they assume the entity is a submarine piloted by somebody shady.
So that’s what we can at least assume about the entity: the first guess is usually wrong. Confronted with the Unknown, the brain starts going crazy with theories which reveal our deepest insecurities. This is how bigotry works: when people are confronted with something they neither know nor understand, they assume the worst about it by default, because, deep down, they know on a psychological level that they are themselves capable of horrible, terrible things. It’s a survival instinct to assume the worst about what we don’t know. And one of the main themes of “A Series Of Unfortunate Events” is bigotry.
To whom did the Carmelita octopus-shaped submarine belong?
The origin of Olaf’s submarine is one of “The Grim Grotto”’s most easily forgotten mysteries, but it’s enough of a riddle to warrant suspicion. The nefarious villain seems to acquire a deadly submarine at the moment he needs it the most. More surprisingly, it seems that Olaf acquired it in a very short amount of time: barely a day goes by between the last moment the Baudelaire orphans see him at the top of Mount Fraught and the time they meet him again in “The Grim Grotto”. Of course it’s possible he may have acquired that submarine much earlier and simply put it in storage somewhere, but there’s a catch to that explanation: the submarine requires the hard labor of several child slaves to move. And we see that some of the children moving the oars of the submarine are the Snow Scouts whom Count Olaf kidnapped at the end of “The Slippery Slope”. So it would have been tricky for Count Olaf to move the submarine anywhere without the extra child slaves… which points to Olaf acquiring the submarine only recently.
And what do we know about that submarine? Not much.
"This submarine is one of the greatest things I've ever stolen," he bragged. "It has everything I'll need to defeat V.F.D. once and for all. It has a sonar system, so I can rid the seas of V.F.D. submarines. It has an enormous flyswatter, so I can rid the skies of V.F.D. planes. It has a lifetime supply of matches, so I can rid the world of V.F.D. headquarters. It has several cases of wine that I plan to drink up myself, and a closet full of very stylish outfits for my girlfriend. And best of all, it has plenty of opportunities for children to do hard labor! Ha ha hedonism!"
[The Grim Grotto, Chapter Nine]
"We'll see about that," Olaf said, grinning wickedly. "I'm going to lock all of you in the brig, which is the official seafaring term for Jail."
"We know what the brig is," Klaus said.
"Then you know it's not a very pleasant place," the villain said. "The previous owner used it to hold traitors captive, and I see no reason to break with tradition."
[The Grim Grotto, Chapter Nine]
It’s unlikely that Count Olaf stole the submarine from either side of V.F.D. At this point in the series, Olaf is still loyal to his bosses (The Woman With Hair But No Beard and the Man With Beard But No Hair) so if they had a submarine and he needed it for a scheme, he would have just asked for it. Since he was looking for the sugar bowl and the Queequeg, they had no reason to refuse him. It’s also unlikely that the submarine was stolen from the “noble” side of V.F.D. because Captain Widdershins seems to recognize it as a threat immediately when its icon shows up on the Queequeg’s sonar screen, and doesn’t contradict the Baudelaire orphans when they assume it’s a submarine piloted by Count Olaf. If Olaf had stolen the octopus-shaped submarine from the other side of the Schism, Captain Widdershins could have mentioned it in passing. In fact, the Captain mentions a number of “gone” submarines who were built by V.F.D. and doesn’t include the octopus-shaped one in the lot. Which implies its origin is altogether different.
"The amount of treachery in this world is enormous!" he cried. "Aye! Think of the crafts we saw on the sonar screen! Think of Count Olaf's enormous submarine, and the even more enormous one that chased it away! Aye! "There's always something more enormous and more terrifying on our tails! Aye! And so many of the noble submarines are gone! Aye! You think the Herman Melville suits are the only noble uniforms in the world? There used to be volunteers with P G. Wodehouse on their uniforms, and Carl Van Vechten. There was Comyns and Cleary and Archy and Mehitabel. But now volunteers are scarce! So the best we can do is one small noble thing! Aye! Like retrieving the sugar bowl from the Gorgonian Grotto, no matter how grim it sounds! Aye! Remember my personal philosophy! He who hesitates is lost!"
[The Grim Grotto, Chapter Five]
To whom did that submarine belong before Count Olaf stole it, then? And why does the Captain seem to have a passing knowledge of its history?
What we know so far is that the previous owner:
Was evil enough to use child slaves,
Was obsessed with traitors within its own organizations to the point he had secured a place to lock up suspicious members,
Was wary of aerial threats,
Had gathered an enormous amount of matches to light a lot of fires,
Had someone in the crew who liked wine,
Had an octopus-shaped costume for some reason.
There happens to be another organization in Lemony Snicket’s world which fits nicely into this description: Inhumane Society. Let’s go down the list:
Hangfire uses child slaves in “Shouldn’t You Be In School”;
Nurse Dander keeps Ellington on watch in “When Did You See Her Last”
V.F.D. has Hector investigate from his balloon as part of its plan in Stain’d-by-the-Sea in “Who Could That Be At This Hour?” and “Why Is This Night Different From All Other Nights?”
Hangfire commits arson in “Shouldn’t You Be In School?”
Ellington mentions that Armstrong Feint used to like wine in “When Did You See Her Last?” and indeed we see Hangfire has poured himself a glass of wine when Lemony meets him at the end of the book,
Stain’d-by-the-Sea’s industry revolves around octopi and Hangfire is obsessed with the town.
So it’s tempting to believe that Hangfire built this octopus-shaped submarine for Inhumane Society back in its heydays. Why didn’t we see this submarine in “All The Wrong Questions”, you ask? Well, there is no sea in Stain’d-by-the-Sea by the time Lemony arrives, and almost the entire series happens there, so naturally Hangfire had no use for the submarine there. However Hangfire does a lot of background scheming and his plan is years into the making, so it’s reasonable to suppose that a submarine could have been useful to him in other places. Hangfire is persuaded that Killdeer Fields was flooded because Stain’d-by-the-Sea was drained. How did he come to that conclusion? Well, maybe he investigated the area of Killdeer Fields with a submarine to track down the origin of the flooding. It’s also possible he spent some years roaming the ocean in a submarine to look for the OBB or its eggs, before getting back to Stain’d-by-the-Sea to create the CBB. There are a lot of possibilities. The submarine was probably put in storage somewhere in Killdeer Fields for later use.
So it’s highly possible that Olaf stole the submarine from whatever remains of Inhumane Society, as Hangfire is dead by the time the events of “The Grim Grotto” occurs. We know that Beatrice and Olaf were investigating a “strange forest” at the end of “All The Wrong Questions”, and we see Lemony immediately stepping into the Clusterous Forest with the Bombinating Beast statue. Coincidence? Probably not. He went in to reunite with Olaf and Beatrice and decide what to do with the statue. Which means Olaf got a lot of intel about Inhumane Society from Lemony. Widdershins is also very much involved in Lemony’s investigation in “When Did You See Her Last?”, so he would also know a lot about Inhumane Society. That would explain why he seems to know so much about the octopus-shaped submarine and who is piloting it.
What exactly happened to Fernald and Fiona?
On a last note, we also have to understand what exactly happened to Fernald and Fiona after “The Grim Grotto”. At the end of the book, it seems that Fiona has truly betrayed the Baudelaire orphans and joined Olaf’s side of the Schism for good. But that’s not congruent with what happens next.
"These people are associates of ours," Dewey said fiercely. "They won't fail us."
"Ha!" Count Olaf said. "You can't rely on associates. More comrades have failed me than I can count. Why, Hooky and Fiona double-crossed me just yesterday, and let you brats escape! Then they double-crossed me again and stole my submarine!"
"We can rely on our friends," Violet said quietly, "more than you can rely on yours.”
[The Penultimate Peril, Chapter Nine]
Fiona’s second betrayal is as sudden as the first. It took less than twenty-four hours for her and Fernald to escape with Olaf’s submarine. Why? Fernald and Fiona change loyalties twice throughout “The Grim Grotto”, but they appeared to have made up their minds. Interestingly, Olaf seems to conflate this act of betrayal with Fiona’s decision to let the Baudelaire orphans escape. Which is interesting because as far as we’re aware it was not Fernald who did that, only his sister. But Count Olaf believes that letting the Baudelaire orphans escape was a concerted plan on their part. Was it?
Well, let’s put it this way: without Fiona’s intervention, the Baudelaire orphans were pretty much screwed. Count Olaf had managed to get the Queequeg in his clutches. The only reason they even managed to escape is because Olaf foolishly left Fiona without supervision after he had ordered her to emprison the Baudelaire orphans in the brig. But that’s only because he trusted her.
Now let’s pause and think: what would have happened if Fiona hadn’t betrayed the Baudelaire orphans? From Fiona’s and Fernald’s perspective, it was extremely unlikely that the Baudelaire orphans had enough time to find an antidote for Sunny, cure her, and escape. Esme had already realized Fiona and Fernald were out of the brig, and it was only a matter a time before she understood they were lying to her. Time was running out and as soon as Olaf realized Fernald had let the Baudelaire orphans escape from the Carmelita to the Queequeg, things would take a turn for the worse. Fiona pretended to defect to the other side of the Schism to stall for time. It’s pretty explicit in the passage where she lies to Esme that this is a spur-of-the-moment decision. Things were not looking great for Fernald’s initial plan to escape with Fiona and her friends. It was dangerous and not really feasible.
So a reasonable person, trapped in such a situation, would naturally change plans. The issue is that by that time Fiona and Fernald were busy diverting Esme and didn’t have time to warn the Baudelaire orphans that they had changed strategies. Here’s what Fiona and Fernald probably decided off-screen while Klaus and Violet were busy curing Sunny:
Fiona would pretend defecting to Olaf’s side for much longer than anticipated,
Fiona would not tell the Baudelaire orphans that it was a ruse, for their shock and horror would make Olaf and Esme believe that the defection was genuine,
Using that newfound trust, Fiona would let the Baudelaire orphans escape with the Queequeg in the nick of time,
As soon as the Baudelaire orphans escaped, Fiona and Fernald would use the chaos and confusion to steal the octopus-shaped submarine for themselves.
All in all, a much greater plan. And it has an added benefit, too: capturing the octopus-shaped submarine would allow Fiona and Fernald to free the slave rowers. Such a noble deed would be enough to convince Fiona to let her friends hate her.
There is some reason to believe that Fiona and Fernald indeed freed the child slaves because Kit Snicket never mentions an octopus-shaped submarine in “The End”. It’s as if it disappeared. Fiona and Fernald apparently found their way back to Captain Widdershins in some other way. Probably aerial.
You're volunteers, ready to face the challenges of a desperate and perplexing world. You must go to the Hotel Denouement, and Quigley must go to the self-sustaining hot air mobile home, and I must go to a coral formation of dubious quality where an inflatable raft should be waiting. But if Quigley manages to construct a net big enough to capture all those eagles, and I manage to contact Captain Widdershins and have him meet me at a certain clump of seaweed, we'll be here on Thursday. Hector should manage to land his self-sustaining hot air mobile home on the roof, even with all of us aboard."
[The Penultimate Peril, Chapter Two]
But the Baudelaire orphans, of course, had no living parents, and their closest friends were high in the sky, in a self-sustaining hot air mobile home, battling eagles and a terrible henchman who had hooks instead of hands, so the acquaintance of Dewey Denouement, and the comforting words he had uttered, were a blessing.
[The Penultimate Peril, Chapter Eight]
"So do our friends," Violet said. "They're flying across the sea as we speak, and by tomorrow, their self-sustaining hot air mobile home will land on the roof."
"Only if they've managed to survive my eagles," Count Olaf said with a growl.
[The Penultimate Peril, Chapter Nine]
So it’s interesting that by the time Olaf arrives in “The Penultimate Peril” he knows Fiona and Fernald escaped with the octopus-shaped submarine and still believes his plan to take the hot-air mobile home with trained eagles will succeed. Why is Fernald enacting Olaf’s plan even though he’s already defected?
A possibility is that Fernald and Fiona were on their way to help the Quagmires and Hector fight the eagles, but that Isadora and Duncan, recognizing the face of the hook-handed man, flipped out and attacked him first. It’s unlikely that Fernald ever truly tried to harm the Quagmires directly as this conflicts with how Kit Snicket describes the incident:
"I failed you," Kit said sadly, and coughed. "Quigley managed to reach the self-sustaining hot air mobile home, just as I hoped he would, and helped his siblings and Hector catch the treacherous eagles in an enormous net, while I met Captain Widdershins and his stepchildren."
"Fernald and Fiona?" Klaus said, referring to the hook-handed man who had once worked for Count Olaf, and the young woman who had broken his heart. "But they betrayed him–and us."
"The captain had forgiven the failures of those he had loved," Kit said, "as I hope you will forgive mine, Baudelaires. We made a desperate attempt to repair the Queequeg and reach the Quagmires as their aerial battle continued, and arrived just in time to see the balloons of the self-sustaining hot air mobile home pop under the cruel beaks of the escaping eagles. They tumbled down to the surface of the sea, and crashed into the Queequeg. In moments we were all castaways, treading water in the midst of all the items that survived the wreck.”
[The End, Chapter Thirteen]
It’s obvious we’re missing much of the story there as the Baudelaire orphans are not direct witnesses to it, but it’s obvious Fernald truly put his villainous ways behind him. The absence of the octopus-shaped submarine in this tale supports that. If it had been present, the circumstances of the Queequeg crew would have been much less desperate. Instead of staying on a sinking and damaged submarine, Captain Widdershins and his allies would have just gone to the octopus-shaped one. It’s possible Fernald and Fiona couldn’t use that submarine anymore because they didn’t have enough rowers after they freed the children.
Connecting the dots
We see that just by reading “The Grim Grotto” and “The End” back in 2006, careful readers would have been able to work out that the entity is more likely to be an animal and to be less aggressive than initially believed. That’s pretty much the best way to work out Widdershins’ change of behavior regarding the entity between both books. “All The Wrong Questions” was only meant to provide more clues to a mystery whose solution had already been carefully implied, and to expand on the mythology of the entity.
Here’s an attempt at explaining what actually went down during “The Grim Grotto” and “The End”.
Following the events of “All The Wrong Questions”, Ellington eventually escaped from the prison cell with Kit Snicket thanks to the skeleton key in Ellington’s bag. Kit and Ellington, before going their own ways, exchanged a good deal of information. Kit Snicket could not help noticing Ellington acted extremely angry towards Lemony and VFD in general.
In the following years, Ellington worked tirelessly to recover her father’s remaining assets as well as uncovering the secrets of Inhumane Society. Though the book Caviar: Salty Jewel of the Tasty Sea was destroyed, she had had the opportunity to read some chapters Lemony hadn’t. No one knew about the CBB more than her. With some effort, she managed to find the animal hiding in the Clusterous Forest, as well as the Bombinating Beast statue that Lemony had buried there. With the statue, she was now in control of the CBB. Eventually she managed to track down an octopus-shaped submarine which used to belong to Hangfire, only to lose it to Count Olaf.
As Olaf escaped with the submarine (now rebaptized the Carmelita), Ellington pursued him. She used the statue to control the CBB, ordering it to seize the Carmelita. The CBB first encountered the Queequeg in close vicinity to the Queequeg. Unsure whether these two crafts were allied with each other, Ellington ordered the CBB to stand down. Captain Widdershins mistook the question-mark shape on their radar for an enemy submarine. Later, Ellington witnessed the Queequeg being attacked by the Carmelita, and decided to approach the CBB to scare Count Olaf and help the crew of the Queequeg. Count Olaf also assumed the mysterious entity was an enemy submarine.
The Queequeg eventually escaped from the clutches of the Carmelita. While making their way to the Hotel Denouement, Olaf, Esme and Carmelita Spats realized the Baudelaire orphans’ absence and were betrayed by Fernald and Fiona who let the imprisoned youngsters start a mutiny. Ellington followed the entire mutiny from afar. The youngsters were released. Esme, Olaf and Carmelita fled. The octopus-shaped submarine was eventually given back to Ellington Feint who promised to help Fernald and Fiona if they were ever in trouble.
Much later, Fernald and Fiona tried to track down Hector’s hot-air mobile home to warn him of an impending eagle attack. Isadora and Duncan attacked Fernald, believing him to have been sent by Olaf and his allies, which complicated Quigley’s plan to catch the eagles in a big net. Fiona and Fernald ended up landing on the Queequeg which had also been looking for the hot-air mobile home. Hector’s balloon fell down on the Queequeg a short time after that.
Fernald reconciled with his stepfather and told Captain Widdershins about the mysterious woman named Ellington Feint who had helped them with her strange, unidentified submarine craft. Captain Widdershins realized this helpful young woman had been behind the appearance of the question mark on the radar and that the entity hadn’t been hostile after all. Kit Snicket, however, thought differently. She was highly suspicious of Ellington’s intentions and thought she had been using Fernald and Fiona as a bait to find the Queequeg and kill more volunteers.
An argument occurred: as the Queequeg began to sink due to serious damage, the entity came back. Captain Widdershins thought Ellington had sent the CBB to save them, while Kit thought she had sent the CBB to eat them. Kit ended up escaping on her own ship, while the others took their chance with the CBB. But, in an ironic twist of fate, what showed up on their sonar screen may not have been Ellington’s CBB. It could just as easily have been the OBB, which leaves the fates of these characters even more uncertain and perilous.
Fiona Widdershins' life was plagued with abandonment issues. Her birth father is unaccounted for, her mother died when she was very young, her only sibling disappeared and her stepather left her stranded on the Queequeg without so much as an explanation. It's no wonder that Fiona snapped when she finally got her brother back and decided to stay with him at all costs. It's the tragic tale of a broken childhood, and a broken family.
But the topic of Mrs Widdershins' untimely demise is interesting from a narrative point of view. Why did Daniel Handler decide to make Fiona and Fernald's mother such a big deal in the first place? Surely the tension between the Captain and Fernald was enough to explain the trauma inherent to the Widdershins family drama. Adding a mysteriously departed mom on top of it is kind of overkill.
The Netflix adaptation attempted to give us some resolution by turning Fernald into a lab assistant at Anwhistle Aquatics and giving the Captain the subplot of his wife's disappareance. That's all well and good, and satisfying from a narrative perspective, but the books have their own separate canon.
Surely there's a reason why this subplot was included in the books. Daniel Handler probably had a resolution in mind but decided not to include it (just like he never confirmed that Lemony was the taxi driver from "The Penultimate Peril", for example). So why did he think Mrs. Widdershins was important? What's the missing story behind her death? Her demise looms in the background of the Widdershins family dynamic like the missing piece of a very important puzzle. It seems inoccuous, but it's probably the key to understanding everything. So what really happened to her? And how would it help us rationalizing the actions of Fernald and his stepfather?
Although the following hypothesis will mostly focus on Mrs. Widdershins, we will also try to answer a number of burning questions regarding the Widdershins family, including but not limited to:
How did Fernald lose his hands?
Who killed Gregor Anwhistle?
Who burned down Anwhistle Aquatics?
Why did Fernald betray his stepfather and join Olaf's troupe?
More after the cut.
There are some interesting tidbits of chronology to be found in the Widdershins legacy, so let's try to organize events in the right order.
We don't know anything about Fernald's and Fiona's birth father. Apparently Handler chose to make the Captain their stepfather to better explain why the relationship between Fernald and the Captain turned sour so quickly. Indeed if you look at the chronology it turns out that the Captain is only older than Fernald by a few years. So basically the Captain became Fernald's stepfather when he had barely entered adulthood. Fernald probably never saw him as a proper authority figure, which would explain why his bossy attitude particularly annoyed him.
For more details on Fernald and the Captain's age, please refer to this article : (Link).
Although not traditional, the family was originally a happy one:
"I found something else," Violet said, handing her brother a crumpled square of paper. "Look." Klaus looked at what his sister had given him. It was a photograph, blurred and faded with four people, grouped together like a family. In the center of the photograph was a large man with a long mustache that was curved at the end like a pair of parentheses – Captain Widdershins, of course, although he looked much younger and a great deal happier than the children had ever seen him. He was laughing, and his arm was around someone the two Baudelaires recognized as the hook-handed man, although he was not hook-handed in the photograph – both of his hands were perfectly intact, one resting on the captain's shoulder, and the other pointing at whoever was taking the picture – and he was young enough to still be called a teenager, instead of a man. On the other side of the captain was a woman who was laughing as hard as the captain, and in her arms was a young infant with a tiny set of triangular glasses.
[The Grim Grotto, Chapter Twelve]
This does beg the question: who took the photograph and towards whom is Fernald pointing? Who’s this assumed friend of the Widdershins family? More on that later.
Then the questionable death of Mrs Widdershins took place:
"Phil!" Violet cried. "What on earth are you doing here?"
"He's the second of our crew of two!" the captain cried. "Aye! The original second in the crew of two was Fiona's mother, but she died in a manatee accident quite a few years ago."
"I'm not so sure it was an accident," Fiona said.
[The Grim Grotto, Chapter Two]
The Captain and Fernald seemed to get along well when Mrs. Widdershins was alive. Then the relationship changed.
"You?" said Olaf's henchman. "What happened to Widdershins?"
"He disappeared from the submarine," Fiona replied. "We don't know where he is."
"I don't care where he is," the hook-handed man sneered. "I couldn't care less about that mustached fool! He's the reason I joined Count Olaf in the first place! The captain was always shouting 'Aye! Aye! Aye!' and ordering me around! So I ran away and joined Olaf's acting troupe!"
"But Count Olaf is a terrible villain!" Fiona cried. "He has no regard for other people. He dreams up treacherous schemes, and lures others into becoming his cohorts!"
"Those are just the bad aspects of him," the hook-handed man said. "There are many good parts, as well. For instance, he has a wonderful laugh."
[The Grim Grotto, Chapter Ten]
It’s jarring that Fernald cites the Captain’s behavior as the main reason he joined Count Olaf’s troupe. Why would he suddenly resent his stepfather when he used to actually like him? In fact, he seems to think so little of him that he considers Olaf an upgrade. What made Fernald change his mind about his stepfather so quickly? There could be three explanations for this: either the Captain’s behavior changed dramatically after his wife’s death, or Fernald learned something about the Captain which redefined the relationship entirely. The third option is that Mrs. Widdershins’ death was so traumatic an ordeal that it severed any affection between Fernald and the Captain.
As one can imagine, it’s easy to posit that these three hypotheses could combine themselves. There are things about Mrs. Widdershins’ death which Fiona does not know and which severely damaged the bond between a stepfather and his stepson. A huge disagreement occurred over her untimely end, and feelings were hurt. Now there’s one legitimate reason for Fernald to be upset at the Captain: he’s lying about the true circumstances of his wife’s death. Fiona was already questioning the official version while she was devoted to V.F.D. and her stepdad, so it’s safe to assume that Fernald does not believe this story either.
Although Fernald's eventual defection clearly has much to do with what happened at Anwhistle Aquatics, it's clear that the death of Mrs Widdershins is equally important in the matter. Is it possible that the two events are linked? In fact, it's likely. The composition of the Queequeg's crew of two is especially revealing:
"Aye! The original second in the crew of two was Fiona's mother, but she died in a manatee accident quite a few years ago." [...] "Then we had Jacques!" the captain continued. "Aye, and then what's-his-name, Jacques's brother, and then a dreadful woman who turned out to be a spy, and finally we have Phil! Although I like to call him Cookie! I don't know why!"
[The Grim Grotto, Chapter Two]
Now there is someone apparently missing from this list: Fernald. After his mother died, it would seem likely that her son would replace her as the second-in-command in the crew of two. Fernald remembers the Captain bossing him around. It's possible that Fernald was indeed a member of the Crew of Two and that the Captain is omitting him out of shame, but that’s unlikely. You see, Fiona is in the room with the Captain while he is listing these people. If he had “forgotten” to name Fernald, she would have corrected him immediately. But no, the list appears to be correct in Fiona’s own assessment. For some reason, Fernald was NEVER considered a member of the Crew of Two, even though he was old enough and had the qualifications. The Captain immediately replaced Mrs. Widdershins with Jacques Snicket.
And that’s really telling, because we know Jacques was occupying this position at a time where Fernald was already part of Count Olaf’s troupe. Here’s a passage from a letter which Jacques sent Lemony from the Queequeg. At that point in time, Fernald was probably starring in Olaf’s play “One last warning to those who try to stand in my way”:
Under normal circumstances, new volunteers like ourselves would not receive disguise training until our years of apprenticeship were finished, but we have not been under normal circumstances for quite some time. For instance, currently I am under sixty feet of water, rather than under normal circumstances.
[Lemony Snicket’s un-Authorized Autobiography, p.96]
The two actresses playing the Defenders of Liberty now have their faces painted a ghastly white color, and the part of the Little Snicket Lad, once played by the young actor pictured here, has been replaced by a sinister-looking person far too old for the part (also pictured here).
[Lemony Snicket’s un-Authorized Autobiography, p.78]
[NB: The picture in question depicts a young man in a fedora who looks eerily similar to the way Brett Helquist draws Fernald in the official illustrations of the original editions]
And that means something very significant: that Fernald left the Queequeg a short time after his mother’s death, to the point that he was never considered a second in the Crew of Two. As we know, Fiona is barely older than Violet even though she was born before Lemony’s and Beatrice’s break-up (that is, before Jacques became a secon-in-command in the Crew of Two).
So we've established, chronologically, that the fire at Anwhistle Aquatics and Mrs. Widdershins' demise are part of the same debacle. Is there a reason for a second in the Queequeg's Crew of Two to be involved in Gregor Anwhistle's research?
Potentially yes. Anwhistle Aquatics, for some reason, was built upon a subterranean grotto which could only be accessed by deep-sea divers. You'd need a submarine to get there. The grotto was arranged to conceal specimens of the Medusoid Mycellium securely: the spores can't travel by water, so making sure that only deep-sea divers can access it makes complete sense. Shortly after they visit the grotto, Violet and Klaus are able to safely contain the infestation in a submarine helmet. It's probably the only way safe for the fungus to be handled. Therefore, in order to make his experiments on the Medusoid Mycelium securely, Gregor Anwhistle would need constant access to a V.F.D. submarine and its crew, making long trips from the research center to the grotto.
This is why we need to understand what truly happened during the fire. The Queequeg's crew didn't just have access to Gregor Anwhistle's research center: they were heavily involved in it. They knew exactly what he was doing and the Widdershins family perhaps even had a hand in it.
So let's imagine that Mrs Widdershins wasn't just a submarine operator. She was a scholar. She was one of Gregor Anwhistle's assistants, and, more importantly, one of his accomplices. Gregor Anwhistle took the photograph of the Widdershins family.
"I think the ruby ring is very in," Esmé purred. "It would look wonderful with my flame-imitating dress."
"That was my mother's," Fiona said quietly.
"She would have wanted me to have it Esmé said quickly. "We were close friends at school."
[The Grim Grotto, Chapter Thirteen]
And if you think that's doubtful, ask yourself this: why is Fiona a mycologist? And why does the Queequeg's library contains so much information on mushrooms in general and the Medusoid Mycellium in particular? This library is a legacy of Mrs Widdershin's works on the Medusoid Mycellium. She knew everything. And that is exactly why Kit Snicket targetted the Widdershins family when she reached a disagreement with Gregor Anwhistle. Kit definitely had Gregor Anwhistle murdered. The reason she specifically asked the Captain and Fernald to commit this crime is because they had easy access to Anwhistle Aquatics (through their submarine) and to Gregor (through Mrs Widdershins).
Violet smiled. "Precisely," she said. "A Hobson 's choice is something that's not a choice at all. It's an expression our mother used to use. She'd say, 'I'll give you a Hobson's choice, Violet – you can clean your room or I will stand in the doorway and sing your least favorite song over and over.' "
Fiona grinned. "What was your least favorite song?" she asked.
" 'Row, Row, Row Your Boat,' " Violet said. "I hate the part about life being but a dream."
"She'd offer me the Hobson's choice of doing the dishes or reading the poetry of Edgar Guest," Klaus said. "He's my absolute least favorite poet."
"Bath or pink dress," Sunny said.
"Did your mother always joke around like that?" Fiona asked. "Mine used to get awfully mad if I didn't clean my room."
"Our mother would get mad, too," Klaus said. "Remember, Violet, when we left the window of the library open, and that night it rained?"
[The Grim Grotto, Chapter Seven]
We may never know what truly happened at Anwhistle Aquatics that terrible night. We can only makes hypotheses. But here's our proposition.
Kit Snicket eventually realized Gregor wouldn't listen to reason. In order to stop his bioweapon project, she needed to come up with a way to burn down Anwhistle Aquatics and murder Gregor. That way, the research would be lost forever. Kit then reached out to the Captain, who had both access to the research center and a wife who was part of Gregor's inner circle. The Captain accepted the mission and even enlisted the help of his stepson. He told Fernald that his mother was under a corrupting influence and that she had been brainwashed by Gregor. She needed to be saved from herself.
In the final analysis – a phrase which here means "after much thought, and some debate with my colleagues" – Captain Widdershins was wrong about a great many things. He was wrong about his personal philosophy, because there are plenty of times when one should hesitate. He was wrong about his wife's death, because as Fiona suspected, Mrs. Widdershins did not die in a manatee accident. He was wrong to call Phil "Cookie" when it is more polite to call someone by their proper name, and he was wrong to abandon the Queequeg, no matter what he heard from the woman who came to fetch him. Captain Widdershins was wrong to trust his stepson for so many years, and wrong to participate in the destruction of Anwhistle Aquatics, and he was wrong to insist, as he did so many years ago, that a story in The Daily Punctilio was completely true, and to show this article to so many volunteers, including the Baudelaire parents, the Snicket siblings, and the woman I happened to love. But Captain Widdershins was right about one thing. He was right to say that there are secrets in this world too terrible for young people to know, for the simple reason that there are secrets in this world too terrible for anyone to know, whether they are as young as Sunny Baudelaire or as old as Gregor Anwhistle, secrets so terrible that they ought to be kept secret, which is probably how the secrets became secrets in the first place, and one of those secrets is the long, strange shape the Baudelaire orphans saw, first on the Queequeg's sonar, and then as they held the porthole in place and stared out into the waters of the sea.
[The Grim Grotto, Chapter Thirteen]
The Captain betrayed his wife's confidence by sneaking into the research center to set a fire while Fernald murdered Gregor. Then they retreated to the safety of the Queequeg. However things didn't go as planned. Instead of fleeing the flames, Mrs Widdershins threw herself into them. She was desperately trying to save Gregor's research in order to duplicate it. In spite of her family's insistence, she never came back to the Queequeg. She died in the fire. Fernald and the Captain agreed to never tell Fiona what had transpired.
"Our stepfather knew Jacques Snicket," Fiona said. "He was a good man, but Count Olaf murdered him. Are you a murderer, too? Did you kill Gregor Anwhistle?"
In grim silence, the hook-handed man held his hooks in front of the children.
"The last time you saw me," he said to Fiona, "I had two hands, instead of hooks. Our stepfather probably didn't tell you what happened to me – he always said there were secrets in this world too terrible for young people to know. What a fool!"
"Our stepfather isn't a fool," Fiona said. "He's a noble man. Aye!"
"People aren't either wicked or noble," the hook-handed man said. "They're like chef's salads, with good things and bad things chopped and mixed together in a vinaigrette of confusion and conflict."
[The Grim Grotto, Chapter Ten]
This is why the relationship between the Captain and Fernald never recovered. Fernald could never forgive the Captain for starting the fire which killed his mother. Although the Captain certainly never intended for Mrs Widdershins to die, his responsability in his wife's death was inevitable.
Interestingly this tragic death would explain A LOT about Fernald's decision to join Olaf's troupe. After all, one can understand why killing Gregor Anwhistle was necessary. It's morally ambiguous, for sure, but it's not a good enough reason to join a criminal gang. But if you add the trauma of losing a mother on top of this shady assassination, things start to make more sense. You see, Fernald and Olaf had a big thing in common: both lost parental figures in a shady assassination scheme orchestrated by members of V.F.D. The Baudelaire parents killed Olaf's parents at a opera house. Count Olaf used this connection, this proximity in background, to warp Fernald's feelings. He turned him against his stepfather and V.F.D. in general by sharing some aspects of his own backstory.
"Fiona!" the hook-handed man cried. "Is it really you?"
"Aye," the mycologist said, taking off her triangular glasses to wipe away her tears. "I never thought I would see you again, Fernald. What happened to your hands?"
"Never mind that," the hook-handed man said quickly. "Why are you here? Did you join Count Olaf, too?"
[The Grim Grotto, Chapter Ten]
It would also explain why Fernald is reluctant to share some aspects of his past with Fiona (such as the way he lost his hands, for example) even though she knows about the Anwhistle fire. Although she's begun to scratch the surface, there are simply aspects of the murder which are worse than she thinks and which Fernald is not ready to divulge. Indeed Fiona could very much blame both Fernald and the Captain for her mother's death. Her stepbrother fears that. It's likely that the reason he lost his hands has as much to do with their mother than it has to do with Gregor. If we had to guess, we'd say he burned his hands trying to rescue his mother at Anwhistle Aquatics.
What makes this theory credible is the cover story which the Captain used to explain away his wife's disappearance. More specifically, it involves a manatee. And a manatee shows up in another dubious disappearance story :
"Have you lived your whole life on this island?" Klaus said.
"Yes," Friday said. "My mother and father took an ocean cruise while she was pregnant, and ran into a terrible storm. My father was devoured by a manatee, and my mother was washed ashore when she was pregnant with me. You'll meet her soon. Now please hurry up and change."
[The End, Chapter Three]
"Oh, Ish," he said, his eyes shining bright, "I told you many years ago that I would triumph over you someday, and at last that day has arrived. My associate with the weekday for a name told me that you were still hiding out on this island, and–"
"Thursday," Mrs. Caliban said.
Olaf frowned, and blinked at the freckled woman. "No," he said.
"Monday. She was trying to blackmail an old man who was involved in a political scandal."
[The End, Chapter Eleven]
However this story is later proven to be untrue: Miranda Caliban and her husband were on opposite side of the schism which divided the island. Thursday left with the Baudelaire parents, while Miranda remained on the Island with their daughter. She made up the entire story. It's a little too much of a coincidence that two different disappareance cover-up stories share the exact same weird detail about a manatee.
"Have you been here before?" Violet asked. "No," Kit said, "but I've heard about this place. My associates have told me stories of its mechanical wonders, its enormous library, and the gourmet meals the islanders prepare. Why, the day before I met you, Baudelaires, I shared Turkish coffee with an associate who was saying that he'd never had better Oysters Rockefeller than during his time on the island. You must be having a wonderful time here."
"Janiceps," Sunny said, restating an earlier opinion.
"I think this place has changed since your associate was here," said Klaus.
"That's probably true," Kit said thoughtfully. "Thursday did say that the colony had suffered a schism, just as V.F.D. did."
"Another schism?" Violet asked.
"Countless schisms have divided the world over the years," Kit replied in the darkness. "Do you think the history of V.F.D. is the only story in the world? Bu: let's not talk of the past, Baudelaires. Tell me how you made your way to these shores."
[The End, Chapter Eight]
"Occasionally someone leaves," Ishmael said, and looked down at the Incredibly Deadly Viper, who gave him a brief hiss. "Some time ago, two women sailed off with this very snake, and a few years later, a man named Thursday left with a few comrades."
"So Thursday is alive," Klaus said, "just like Kit said."
"Yes," Ishmael admitted, "but at my suggestion, Miranda told her daughter that he died in a storm, so she wouldn't worry about the schism that divided her parents."
"Electra," Sunny said, which meant "A family shouldn't keep such terrible secrets," but Ishmael did not ask for a translation.
"Except for those troublemakers," he said, "everyone has stayed here. And why shouldn't they? Most of the castaways are orphans, like me, and like you.
[The End, Chapter Ten]
At this point, it seems more likely to be one of those memetic code phrases which V.F.D. likes to use. "Eaten by a manatee" is a slang term that adult volunteers use to hide something horrible from their children. So what does "eaten by a manatee" mean, exactly? Surely it doesn't mean "dead", as Thursday was clearly alive and well when Miranda started spouting those lies. "Eaten by a manatee" is not used to cover up deaths, it's used to cover up betrayals. Instead of telling young volunteers that someone went to the other side of the schism, parents tell them the person was "eaten by a manatee". It's the ultimate way to sever the parental bond. It's common to tell someone who betrayed you: "you're dead to me". V.F.D. takes the expression to its literal extreme.
So when the Captain affirms that his wife was eaten by a manatee, he means that she actually betrayed the organization. It's not obvious because she didn't go to Olaf's side of the schism (as Fernald did later) but rather to the other side of another schism: that is, she chose Gregor's side in his feud against Kit Snicket. There are indeed multiple schisms within the history of V.F.D. The schism between the "noble" and "villainous" side is the first one and the most important one, but the "noble" side suffered other disagreements: Ishmael vs the Baudelaire parents on the Island, Kit vs Gregor, Lemony vs his mentors in "All The Wrong Questions", Dashiell and Theodora vs Gifford and Ghede, etc.
And on that topic, the newspaper clipping which Violet Baudelaire found in the grotto is especially revealing:
" 'VERIFYING FERNALD'S DEFECTION,' " she said, reading the headline out loud, and then continued by reading the byline, a word which here means "name of the person who wrote the article."
"By Jacques Snicket. It has now been confirmed that the fire that destroyed Anwhistle Aquatics, and took the life of famed ichnologist Gregor Anwhistle, was set by Fernald Widdershins, the son of the captain of the Queequeg submarine. The Widdershins family's participation in a recent schism has raised several questions regarding..." Violet looked up and met the glare of Olaf's henchman. "The rest of the article is blurry," she said, "but the truth is clear. You defected – you abandoned V.F.D. and joined up with Olaf!"
[The Grim Grotto; Chapter Ten]
Violet missed the point of the article entirely. The text clearly mentions a “recent” schism; that is, not the original one which happened while Dewey and Kit were about four years old and which split the organization into two. The “recent” schism is clearly the one which divided the “noble” volunteers into Gregor’s followers and Gregor’s adversaries. And note that this is the “Widdershins family” who is involved in that particular schism; not just Fernald.
"You should have seen the fire," he said quietly. "From a distance, it looked like an enormous black plume of smoke, rising straight out of the water. It was like the entire sea was burning down."
"You must have been proud of your handiwork," Fiona said bitterly.
"Proud?" the hook-handed man said. "It was the worst day of my life. That plume of smoke was the saddest thing I ever saw." He speared the newspaper with his other hook and ripped the article into shreds. "The Punctilio got everything wrong," he said. "Captain Widdershins isn't my father. Widdershins isn't my last name. And there's much more to the fire than that. You should know that the Daily Punctilio doesn't tell the whole story, Baudelaires. Just as the poison of a deadly fungus can be the source of some wonderful medicines, someone like Jacques Snicket can do something villainous, and someone like Count Olaf can do something noble. Even your parents –"
[The Grim Grotto; Chapter Ten]
As Fernald warns the Baudelaire orphans, the newspaper clipping is propaganda meant to disguise the volunteer’s more questionable behaviours. It purposedly fails to mention that the Captain helped start the destruction of Anwhistle Aquatics, for example. So the author clearly wants us to question the official narrative. And for some reason, as Fernald starts defending his own version of the events, he starts spewing unsavory revelations about the Baudelaire parents. Why would he do that? Is he projecting his own family issues on the Baudelaire legacy? That would be fitting. We already know that the Captain did morally questionable things for V.F.D. It’s not a big leap to assume that his wife committed some crimes of her own.
Hello. On of of your posts i saw someone mentioned "Baudelaire brothers" implying that one of the siblings is trans(pre-transition FtM from what i could tell. Is it Violet?). This theory is new to me and i'd like to know where it comes from and what hints the books give about it. I have not finished ATWQ, The Beatrice Letters and other side works, so i never noticed any hints but i am very interested to know if there are any. Thank you very much for all the awesome posts!
Hello, @g-octavius. I think you’re referencing this Q&A:
But this “Baudelaire brother” business is not a theory per se. The person who asked me this question clearly meant “Baudelaire siblings” but I didn’t have the heart to correct him/her.
Canonically there are 0 hints that one of the Baudelaire siblings is transgender. There is, however, an amusing typo in “The Penultimate Peril”:
“Please,” Sunny said, joining her sisters.[The Penultimate Peril, Chapter Nine]
Gasp! Klaus was transgender all along! Just kidding, the author made a mistake writing this. Thank you very much for your support, have a good night (wherever you are)!
I read your post on when/where VFD was created, and I was wondering about what Lemony Snicket said on page 208 of "shouldn't you be in school?" about disappearing and reappearing due to schisms and arguments, doesn't that mean that even before the schism there had already been multiple VFDs and that therefore the fire-fighting and fire-starting sides are only branches of one of the VFDs? Could there be many different VFDs all around the world, without knowledge of each other?
There are indeed several schisms mentioned in the series. Schism is accepted by volunteers in the plural sense.
“Exactly,” I said,watching Ellington frown out of the corner of my eye. “We represent the true humantradition, the one permanent victory over cruelty and chaos. We’re aninvincible army, but not a victorious one. We’ve had different names throughouthistory, but all the words that describe us are false and all attempts toorganize us fail. Right now we’re called V.F.D., but all our schisms andarguments might cause us to disappear. It won’t matter. People like us alwaysslip through the net. Our true home is the imagination, and our kingdom is thewide-open world.”[Shouldn’t You Be In School?, Chapter Nine]
“I could tell you stories, Baudelaires,” Count Olaf said in a muffledwheeze. “I could tell you secrets about people and places that you’dnever dream of. I could tell you about arguments and schisms thatstarted before you were born. I could even tell you things aboutyourselves that you could never imagine.[The End, Chapter Seven]
So it seems that volunteers and villains alike use the word “schism” to describe any argument which tears the organization apart, forcing people to choose sides. It’s part of the traditional V.F.D. slang. This is confusing because there’s clearly a difference between THE Schism™ and a schism. This confusion might explain why Jacques tells Jerome that Olaf is responsible for a schism:
For years this organization has behaved in ways that were as noble as they were secret, but recently this organization has experienced a schism, a word which here means “a member suddenly behaving in a greedy and violent manner thus dividing the organization into two arguing groups”. The member I am speaking of—I will just call him O, though currently he prefers S—has recently done a great deal of vicious, unfair and impolite acts that I shudder to describe.[The un-Authorized Autobiography, p.123]
He carefully “a” schism, not THE schism. The original schism happened when Kit and Dewey were four years old, so it’s extremely unlikely that Olaf (who was also a child at a time) had anything to do with it.
“So I’m told,” Kit said. “I was four years old when everything changed. Our organization shattered, and it was as if the world shattered, too, and one by one the safe places were destroyed. There was a large scientific laboratory, but the volunteer who owned the place was murdered. There was an enormous cavern, but a treacherous team of realtors claimed it for themselves. And there was an immense headquarters high in the Mortmain Mountains , but-”[The Penultimate Peril, Chapter Two]
“I scarcely remember it,” Dewey said. “I was four years old when the schism began. I was scarcely tall enough to reach my favorite shelf in the family library-the books labeled 020. But one night, just as our parents were hanging balloons for our fifth birthday party, my brothers and I were taken.”[The Penultimate Peril, Chapter Eight]
Other events which have been referred to as schisms include:
The feud between Ishmael and the Baudelaire parents while they were on the Island
The mutiny started by some of the Islanders against Ishmael’s regime while the Baudelaire orphans were on the Island
Fiona’s betrayal at the end of “The Grim Grotto”
“That’s probably true,” Kit said thoughtfully. “Thursday did say that thecolony had suffered a schism, just as V.F.D. did.”“Another schism?” Violet asked.“Countless schisms have divided the world over the years,” Kit replied in the darkness. “Do you think the history of V.F.D. is the only story in the world? But let’s not talk of the past, Baudelaires. Tell me how you made your way to these shores.”[The End, Chapter Eight]
Finn had said that they needed to make a choice, but choosingbetween living alone on a coastal shelf, endangering themselves andtheir injured friend, and participating in the island’s mutinous plan, didnot feel like much of a choice at all, and they wondered how many other people had felt this way, during the countless schisms that had divided the world over the years.[The End, Chapter Eight]
Only Violet felt asif their friendship were more volatile, as if Fionafit her like the wrong glove, or as if their friendship had a tiny flaw – aflaw that might turn into a schism.[The Grim Grotto, Chapter Seven]
That being said, all the smaller schisms mentioned clearly happen AFTER the original schism. So even if some passages may be confusing as to whether the schism mentioned is the original one or one of the later ones, pretty much every character agrees that the original Schism™ is the one which happened when Kit and Dewey were four years old. It was also the most important as it split the organization into a fire-starting “villainous” side and a fire-fighting “noble” side. Interestingly it’s always the “noble” side which seemed to suffer internal schisms after that, while the “villainous” side remained united and homogenous. It’s possible that the fire-starting side was at a significant numerical disadvantage originally but grew stronger and bigger as the fire-fighting side split apart.
“It was not always this way, Baudelaires,” Dewey said. “Once there were safe places scattered across the globe, and so orphans like yourselves did not have to wander from place to place, trying to find noble people who could be of assistance. With each generation, the schism gets worse. If justice does not prevail, soon there will be no safe places left, and nobody left to remember how the world ought to be.”[The Penultimate Peril, Chapter Eight]
Were they schisms before the Schism™? Perhaps. But we have very little information on what the organization was like before that. Most of it comes from Lemony’s and Kit’s mouth, and they’re consumate liars who use the V.F.D. propaganda to their own ends. It’s likely that V.F.D. was pretty shady and corrupt to begin with and that the schism was inevitable, with one wanting to reform the organization’s horrible policies and the other side wanting to turn it into a straight-up crime syndicate.
I don't think you've answered this (so if you have I am sorry) but why is Olaf so open with the Quagmires? I feel like in E.E they say that they've learned so many terrible things and they were successfully able to research VFD -- why did Olaf keep the Baudelaires in the dark?
Good question. Olaf indeed shared a lot more with Isadora and Duncan than he ever did with the Baudelaire orphans. However I think the information Isadora doesn’t want Duncan to reveal is just examples of threats Olaf made to them. He promised the Quagmires he would do terrible things to them and Isadora doesn’t want to verbalize them. It would make them real.
“How will he do that?” Violet asked.“The police have been informed of your kidnapping, and are on the lookout.”
“I know,” Duncan said. “Gunther wants tosmuggle us out of the city, and hide us away on some island where the police won’t find us. He’ll keep us on theisland until we come of age and he can steal the Quagmire sapphires. Once he has our fortune, he says,he’ll take us and–”
“Don’t say it,” Isadora cried, covering herears. “He’s told us so many horrible things. I can’t stand to hear them again.”
[…]
Duncan flipped the pages of his notebook, and his eyeswidened as he reread some of the wretched thingsGunther had said. “I don’t know,” he said.“He’s told us so many haunting secrets, Violet. So many awfulschemes–all the treachery he has done in the past, andall he’s planning to do in the future. It’s all here in this notebook–from V.F.D. all the way to thisterrible auction plan.”
[The Ersatz Elevator, Chapter Eight]
This passage is important as it basically explains how Olaf plans to really get his hands on the fortunes once he gets custody of the orphans. Basically his only option is to engineer Stockholm Syndrome: weaken his captives’ will little by little and brainwash them until they begin to act as his minions and obey his orders. This is definitely what he and Esme were trying to achieve with Carmelita Spats. The idea is that by the time she came of age she’d be so fanatically devoted to Olaf that she would just hand over her fortune to the troupe.
The trouble is that Olaf WANTS to enact this plan but is just too emotional to get through with it. The orphans remind him too much of himself when he was younger, so he lashes out at them constantly. This is why Esme and Olaf broke up. Esme was 100% committed to pretending being good parents to Carmelita while Olaf found the entire ordeal insufferable. Parenthood is his trigger. It’s ironic because Olaf, by treating the Baudelaire orphans so terribly in “The Bad Beginning”, might have done them a favor. He was so mean and brutal that brainwashing them was impossible. They saw right though him immediately.
I think the reason that Olaf shared these things with Isadora and Duncan is that he doesn’t feel so intense a connection with them as he does with the Baudelaire orphans. It was the Baudelaire parents who destroyed Olaf’s family, not the Quagmire parents. Olaf gets defensive and tight-lipped around the Baudelaire orphans because he’s feeling too many emotions.
Another reason Olaf disclosed so much to Duncan and Isadora is that he was underestimating them. They were simply less resourceful orphans than the Baudelaires. He didn’t think there was much risk in revealing so much about himself.
Hey! Love your blog. I was wondering if you had any idea if the Baudelaire's were home-schooled before the fire? If not, why hadn't anyone from their past life come to help them? Okay, thanks so much!!
From the way they speak about Prufrock, Violet and Klaus definitely went to school at one point.
“Maybe I don’t knowwhat ‘cakesniffer’ means,” Klaus said, “but I think I can translateour new school’s motto.”
[The Austere Academy, Chapter One]
Klaus gave his baby sister a little kiss on the top ofher head. “At least we get to go to school,” he pointed out.“I’ve missed being in a real classroom.”“Me too,” Violet agreed. “And at leastwe’ll meet some people our own age. We’ve only had the company of adults forquite some time.”“Wonic,” Sunny said, which probably meant“And learning secretarial skills is an exciting opportunity for me,although I should really be in nursery school instead.”
[The Austere Academy, Chapter Three]
So I don’t know whether they were homeschooled at one point, but Prufrock definitely wasn’t the first school they attended. Sunny, however, is a more complicated case. She’s very young, so it’s ambiguous whether she attended nursery school before “The Bad Beginning” or not. Probably not.
As to the other people in the Baudelaire orphans’ lives, this is handwaved in the first book:
In the time since the Baudelaire parents’ death, mostof the Baudelaire orphans’ friends had fallen by the wayside, an expressionwhich here means “they stopped calling, writing, and stopping by to seeany of the Baudelaires, making them very lonely.” You and I, of course, wouldnever do this to any of our grieving acquaintances, but it is a sad truth inlife that when someone has lost a loved one, friends sometimes avoid theperson, just when the presence of friends is most needed.
[The Bad Beginning, Chapter Three]
Depressingly realistic: people hate misery. The people who were not part of V.F.D. just dropped them out of sheer indifference, and the people part of V.F.D., well… had everything to do with the Baudelaire orphans being put in Olaf’s care:
“Once there were safe places scattered across the globe, and so orphans like yourselves did not have to wander from place to place, trying to find noble people who could be of assistance. With each generation, the schism gets worse. If justice does not prevail, soon there will be no safe places left, and nobody left to remember how theworld ought to be.”“I don’t understand,” Violet said. “Why weren’t we taken, like you?”“You were,” Dewey said. “You were taken into the custody of Count Olaf.
Hi! (I apologize for how speculative this question is but I'm too curious about it) Not sure if you talked about this already but the last question you answered got me thinking: from what we already know about it, what's your opinion about "Poison For Breakfast"? The format seems a bit different from the other Lemony Snicket books so what do you think we can expect from it?
For one thing, it seems to be a one-shot rather than a series, which is a new direction for books set in the Snicketverse. The synopsis sounds very original (it’s like a future murder victim investigating his own demise), so I’m excited for it. I’m glad Daniel Handler doesn’t feel pressured to release a series just for the sake of it. He’s been careful not to milk his own cash-cow franchise and only releases books set in the Snicketverse when he has good ideas for it.
However I don’t except “Poison for breakfast” to contain many references to ASOUE and ATWQ. The book is perhaps too short for cameos/allusions. I do think that V.F.D. will have something to do with the reasons behind the poisoning, though, on the simple basis that V.F.D. is behind everything and has been known to deal with poisons before.
