#duchess of winnipeg
I scroll through the ASOUE tag on Tumblr at least once a day and when I do I see dozens upon dozens of posts of people asking for season 3 of the Netflix adaptation of ASOUE to answer all their questions. Specifically, I see people asking about whether we’ll find out what’s in the sugar bowl or why the Duchess of Winnipeg gave Lemony Snicket the ring in the first place or whether Count Olaf actually did kill the Baudelaire parents, the list goes on.
But as I read these posts and I reread the books I have to say… I don’t want to find out the answers to everything. And I really hope the Netflix series doesn’t answer them all. Because that’s probably the greatest lesson of all in the stories: that life doesn’t have all the answers and is often incomplete and unfulfilling.
As the Baudelaire children have their grand adventures and seek escape from Count Olaf and his troupe of horrors, they are plagued with dozens of questions that seem to follow them throughout the story: Why does Count Olaf do this? What does the eye mean? What does VFD stand for? Why did their parents lie to them about all this? What is in the sugar bowl?
And for the most part, their questions are answered. It is a story after all and stories have to have some sort of resolution. But as our questions are answered even more questions appear. Even with the resolution of A Series of Unfortunate Events and The Beatrice Letters and The Unauthorized Autobiography, we still do not know much of anything about the VFD or have answers to most of the in-series questions left unresolved at the end of The End.
But that’s the way life is. Life doesn’t answer all your questions in a neat little bundle at the end. Life isn’t beholden to the same conventions as literature - because as much as we’d prefer it not to be so, life isn’t a story it’s an ongoing journey paved by the questions we ask and receive along the way. And much like a dissatisfying answer to a long-held question, it ends when it ends, whether we’ve resolved all of our sub-plots or not. A Series of Unfortunate Events purposefully doesn’t answer all of the questions by the end of the series because life never answers all the questions and if the Netflix series were to attempt to change that - to fix it - as I’ve seen people suggest, then I think that would do a great disservice to the thematic integrity of the series and the lessons Handler has taught through this book in general.
