Slackin’ with the Sleuth: reviewing Netflix’s “The Penultimate Peril”
One of the difficulties befalling any adaptation of "A Series of Unfortunate Events" is that you're actually putting three stories on screen: there's the conflict between Olaf and the Baudelaire orphans, then there are the obscure, offscreen manipulations of V.F.D. in the background, and finally there's Lemony's own past which is only alluded to through brief glimpses in his narration. We saw that the Netflix series, particularly in Season 2, sometimes extended the V.F.D. subplots at the expanse of the main Baudelaire story. Fortunately, the long pay-off of Lemony's elusive past is considerably more well-handled as it comes to a close in Netflix's version of "The Penultimate Peril". Let's analyze the writers' best effort under the cut.
The chronology of "A Series Of Unfortunate Events" is, to put it simply, a mess. Part of it is the consequence of Lemony's deliberately opaque style which makes it difficult to determine which characters he's really talking about, or when and where each event of his past is supposed to happen. The datation of Olaf's parents' murder, for example, has been a topic of contention for years amongst fans. Streamlining the entire sequence of his life into something more straightforward is far from a bad idea for this adaptation. "A Series Of Unfortunate Events" wasn't written to be read, but rather to be re-read. Understanding the bigger logic of the books' subplots is a reward for the more careful, compulsive readers. It's essentially marketed to bookworms and people whose idea of fun consists in literary commentary. But while readers alays have the opportunity to put down their book and search for earlier passages in order to understand his ramblings, the framework of a Netflix television show doesn't really lend itself to that. While it's always possible to binge-watch and rewatch, searching for individual scenes is more of a chore. In order for viewers to even engage with Lemony's complicated backstory, a more accessible timeline was essential. From the reactions of several watchers who have not read the books, the Netflix show is succesful in this attempt. Most show-only fans agree that the late-series are interesting and make mostly sense. Their experience is definitely less frustrating than the readers' post-series backlash a few years prior.
The opera house sequence is the series' most ambitious scene yet. It combines a great number of separate events into one: there's the obvious murder of Olaf's parents, of course, but also the theft of Esme Squalor's sugar bowl, Kit's romance with Olaf, Esmé' and Olaf's start of darkness, Lemony's decision to flee after being framed and his break-up with Beatrice. All of which happened at different in the books' timeline. It's a simplification but it's a highly effective one (as show writer Joe Tracz explained (Link), Bertrand was left out of the scene as it already had too many characters).
Ambiguity and unknowability are essential themes in the original series, but this vagueness came at a cost, namely that of character development. Even if these mysteries are mostly treated as jokes and McGuffins, the fact remains that many important characters (Olaf, Kit, Dewey, Esme, Lemony, etc.) make their decisions based on the answers to these mysteries. So it's difficult to empathize with them when we can't understand them. The chase for the sugar bowl is absurd, and therefore their actions are absurd. This, we think, is the real reason why the end of the series displeased so many fans. Not because it left us with mysteries, but because some of these unsolved mysteries actively removed us and disengaged us from the narrative. Why should we care about Lemony's tragic devotion to the woman he loved when we don't event know why the break-up happened? What are we even supposed to think about Esme's character when she won't reveal why the sugar bowl is important to her? How can we make our own opinion of the Baudelaire parents when we don't really know why they killed, or hat kind of persons ther victims were?
The Netflix series elegantly solves these issues in short scenes. There's still enough ambiguity here; Esme's personality can be interpreted in different ways, for example. On one hand, fans could say she's a shallow, materialistic woman who genuinely refuses to let go of a sugar bowl on the basis that it's hers, hers, hers. On the other hand, one could say the sugar bowl is just a totem, a symbol: what Esme is truly mad about is that people dismissed her as an idiot who couldn't take care of the sugar bowl properly, that her friends distrusted her and betrayed her, and that Beatrice/Lemony despised her enough to try murdering her. Same goes for Beatrice: sure, the death of Olaf's father was a tragic accident, but she still tried to kill another person. She can't reasonably be called innocent. So in that respect the writers gave the characters enough reality to flesh them out while preserving the moral ambiguity of their backstory. On that aspect, we do have to admit that the series is truly superior to the books. It's just as thought-provoking, but also more humane.
Less succesful is the writers' decision to give a resolution to the mystery of the sugar bowl. This is not a mystery which particularly needed solving, because it's not rooted in the characters' actions and motivations. All we really need to know is that the sugar bowl is "the most important thing in the world", and that's it. People want it for different reasons which are theirs and theirs alone: once you possess "the most important thing in the world", all your dreams can come true. As we've seen, the character who wants it the most is Esmé, and understanding her motivations does not necessirally require us to know what's inside it. Fear of abandonment, feelings of betrayal and pettiness are enough to explain her obsession. It's not the sugar bowl, it's what it meant to her.
More irritatingly, I very much doubt that the answer given in the series came from Daniel Handler himself. We have to remember he was "fired" from the staff of writers on Season 3, something he was oddly nonchalant about. This is strange considering he's spoken at length about his (understandable) bitterness after being fired from the writing staff of the 2004 Paramount movie. It's becoming clearer and clearer that somehow the decision suited his own purposes.
My own hypothesis is that Daniel Handler actively wanted to detach himself from Season 3 and that the "firing" was more of a mutual decision. We can only surmise what happened, but it's very probable that the other writers wanted to solve certain mysteries he preferred to leave ambiguous. The fact is that, if the author had wanted to give a clear-cut answer to the sugar bowl mystery in the books, he would have. He had a choice between resolution and ambiguity, and he made it. Though he revealed that he had his own opinion on what the sugar bowl really was, and that "one fan a year" usually finds the "real" solution, the mystery was written in a deliberately ambiguous way which allowed a multitude of answers. The author enjoys fans ho find the "real" solution and fans who come up with their own unique, personal ideas equally. It's his idea of fun, because literary analysis should be fun, and if there's one thing he enjoys, it's literary analysis. He doesn't want the conversation to end. So although he'd be willing to recognize that he kind of messed up by not developing some characters enough, it's extremely unlikely to us that he would write an obvious answer to something that he himself aknowledges as a MGuffin. Hence his decision to leave the writing staff after Season 2, as a way to disengage himself from whatever the writers wanted to include, and to preserve the intended ambiguity of the books' ending. It was also a tactful way of not throwing his fellow writers under the bus, as he respected their personal intention to solve the mystery. A clear case "I'm not going to stop you, just please leave me out of it and we can remain friends".
[Update: Liam R. Findlay from 667 Dark Avenue mesage board talked with show writer Joe Tracz (Link) and confirms that Daniel Handler never told the other writers if their solution was the correct one. It's a reliable source, though by no means official]
[Update: Here’s an interview where series showrunner Sonnenfeld clarifies that the solution given in the show was not confirmed by Handler (Link)]
The question remains: did the writers ask Daniel Handler what the sugar bowl contained, and did he even answer? We personnally doubt it. The canon of the series has been entirely reworked at this point. It's faithful to the books when it comes to themes, emotional resonance, political messages... but it's UNBASHEDLY unfaithful when it comes to plotting. Take Jacquelyn, who's revealed to be the infamous Duchess of Winnipeg. Now, in the books, the first name of the Duchess of Winnipeg is an unsolved mystery. Did the series solve it? No, because fans of the books know that canonically Jacquelyn was only created for the Netflix show and that the first name of the Duchess starts with an "R." It's show-canon, not book-canon. By that standard, we shouldn't trust the show to give us any supplementary information on the books. The show did not solve the sugar bowl mystery any more than it solved the mystery of the Duchess' first name.
On top of that, the explanation given in the show is not even that good from a purely internal perspective. If Beatrice wanted access to the hybrid, why couldn't she just steal some sugar from the bowl then give it back to Esme? If Kit had a cup of tea seasoned with the hybrid at the opera house, shouldn't she have been immune to the mushroom when she arrived on the island? Knowing Esme had tried to immunize her, what did she have to lose by drinking it? And if Beatrice succesfully managed to replicate the hybrid, why is the capture of the sugar bowl still so important? Its content could have been replicated by everyone! The idea that the sugar bowl contains an antidote to the Medusoid Mycelium is a popular hypothesis amongst fans, but a very flawed one. It's of course possible that Daniel Handler committed bad writing and that his own solution to the mystery is full of plotholes. But it sounds more likely that the Netflix writers just looked at a page of popular fan theories and just picked the one they liked the most. What tips it off for us is that supporters of this theory usually posit that the sugar bowl contains a bitter apple core hich was used to replicate the hybrid... while the show writers complicated things by saying it contained sugar made from the apples. This sounds more like another fan theory which proposes that the sugar bowl is a decoy used to deceive the other side of the Schism and that it only contains bland, normal sugar. So what we're dealing with here is probably the awkward combination of two popular fan theories which don't really make sense when taken together. Why would the writers choose to do that? My personal guess is that Handler truly didn't tell them and that they tried to combine the two most popular fan theories in order to please a maximum number of people. It's not a case of show canon extending book canon, it's fanservice. Not that fanservice is necessiraly bad, but you have to aknowledge it at what it is. We just wish the writers had integrated it a little better within the canon of the show's universe. It's possible they argued about which theory was better, just like the fans. And instead of a Schism, they had to settle for a compromise.
Speaking of compromises, the Netflix writers also decided to stop all pretense concerning the identity of the mysterious taxi driver. It's probably a good call, as they had already shown Lemony's face throughout the entire series. It's too difficult to engage viewers for hours of content if the "voice" of the series is faceless. An actor like Patrick Warburton was desperately needed to elevate the deadpan narration of Lemony Snicket. The grounbreaking, surreal nature of the encounter is intact as we get to see fictional protagonists (the Baudelaire orphans) suddenly interact with their equally-fictional author (Lemony). But this time, the writers make up for the loss of ambiguity by bringing something more to the table as replacement. We get to see a young, unaware version of Lemony speak with his sister Kit, and later Justice Strauss. These scenes include some of the series' best writing and will produce a lot of waterworks for sure. It's the perfect way to explain why Lemony decided to dedicate his life to the Baudelaire chronicles: it emerges diegetically from the onscreen plot itself. Justice Strauss passing down the torch of chronicling the Baudelaire orphans' lives to Lemony makes perfect sense: if there's someone who tried to shed some truth and justice on the Baudelaire case, it's her.
But as we approach the end of the Netflix series, we must look at it as a whole: was the denouement of this penultimate episode sufficient for the emotional pay-off of “The End”? More on the next review.
Autumn is the mellower season... by Nadine
Via Flickr:
"Autumn is the mellower season and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits." Island Dolls Nuan Nuan and Mian Mian
