Does A Series of Unfortunate Events Have a Happy Ending?

Does A Series of Unfortunate Events have a happy ending?

Lemony Snicket warned viewers from the first episode, and at the opening of nearly every episode after it, that this story does not have a happy ending. The third and final season of Netflix’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, released in January 2019, delivers exactly that. Viewers who came looking for a clean reward for the Baudelaire orphans will find something closer to an elegy.

The short answer to whether A Series of Unfortunate Events has a happy ending is no, though the ending is not empty. The season provides conclusions, backstories, justifications and resolutions, and it answers almost every running thread in the story. Whether that is satisfying depends on the viewer. Some will be glad to have the puzzle solved. Others will feel, with some justice, that they were punished for caring about the characters.

The look of the show has not slipped. Season two earned praise for Esmé Squalor and Carmelita Spats and for its set design and cast, and season three keeps those strengths. The colors still recall a Wes Anderson film, set against a murky, hopeless backdrop. Craft is not the issue.

What is missing is novelty. There are no stand-out set pieces on the order of the earlier seasons’ musical numbers, kooky Olaf disguises or over-the-top invented backstories. Neil Patrick Harris, who plays Count Olaf, gets less room to show off, because the season is hurrying toward its finish. There is also much less comedy, which makes the run harder to watch.

A season built to answer questions

The final season undoes the show’s own formula of Olaf scheming, a witty escape, and some tragic figure falling along the way. That change is a trade. The series gives up its rhythm for growth, and for answers the audience had waited a long time to receive.

Those answers are substantial. The season explains the origins of V.F.D., what happened at the opera house and the mycelium that serves as the series’ weapon of mass destruction. It reveals Lemony Snicket’s backstory and the reason he has gone to such lengths to tell the tale. It even reveals what is in the sugar bowl, something that readers of the books never learned.

For many, this was the first time a season of the show was not a binge. The reason was not quality but weight. Very few happy moments appear, the ones that do are fleeting, and the sense of a payoff grows dire as the episode count shrinks toward the finale. For a series that seemed to be hitting its stride, the sudden finality adds to the sadness.

The sugar bowl and the Medusoid Mycelium

The final season tells the full story of Lemony and Beatrice. Lemony was in love with the Baudelaire children’s mother, Beatrice. At the opera house she accidentally killed Olaf’s father while trying to steal the sugar bowl, and Lemony took the blame, which launched his life on the run. Olaf, disheartened by those events, turned to evil and developed a hatred of the Baudelaire family, above all Beatrice’s children.

Esmé also turned to evil, though her motive is smaller and stranger: she mostly wanted the sugar bowl back because it completed her tea set. Her obsession with perfection drives much of her behavior. The bowl itself is the cause of the schism inside V.F.D., since members disagreed on how it should be used, even as everyone prized it for what it held.

That content is revealed in the show and not in the books. The bowl holds sugar, but sugar laced with an inoculation against the Medusoid Mycelium, the deadliest spores in the world, which could kill billions if spread. The twist follows. The season also shows that a cure for the mushroom is easy to find: horseradish, perhaps wasabi or anything spicy, or even apples. The deadliest weapon in the series can be treated with ordinary food.

That is on purpose. The show is obsessed with mystery, research and puzzle solving, with finding the truth with a capital T, and it keeps teaching that finding the truth means very little in a world run by absurdity. V.F.D. is, in effect, fighting over nothing, and only the audience can see it. The pointlessness is the point: groups can fight bitterly over something that does not matter.

Beatrice, Kit Snicket and the last scene

At the end, Lemony is caught at last by the person who has been following him: Beatrice Baudelaire, his niece, now a pre-teen. Kit Snicket, Lemony’s sister, who served as hero and mentor to the Baudelaire children this season and was played by Allison Williams, gave birth to Beatrice before her own death. The Baudelaires adopted the baby and named her after their mother.

The two sit down to recap the events that brought them there, and Beatrice goes further, implying that she, Sunny, Violet and Klaus went on to have many more adventures. It is a gentle note after a hard season, and it closes the frame of the story without erasing what came before.

Why the finale hurts: nobody listens, and nobody is right

A good deal of the series’ charm comes from its headstrong characters and from authority figures who refuse to listen or who are playing for the wrong side. The supreme judges overseeing Olaf’s trial, who turn out to be his pseudo-parents, are the clearest case. The finale confirms that V.F.D. was always about picking sides. There is no right and wrong, no good and evil, only one organization that fractured among people with different moral compasses and different self-interests.

Daniel Handler, the author behind the books, never meant to hand out answers; the idea was to let readers find the solutions they wanted. The show is so meta, with its self-references to V.F.D., J.S. and the sugar bowl, that a viewer has to watch almost every detail. It also asks the viewer to accept an absurd world where people ignore facts to fit an agenda, which can feel uncomfortably familiar.

Nobody listens to the Baudelaire children until the penultimate episode, which features Olaf’s trial. The scene is heartwarming and also a piece of razzmatazz, a spectacle that makes viewers feel for everyone leading up to the moment of justice, which is then proven fruitless. That leads to the hotel fire, the point at which the series accepts that there are no good guys. Olaf starts the fire with the children’s help, hoping to escape unharmed. Justice Strauss offers the chance to obey the law, but after all that has happened the characters have concluded that there is no justice in this world.

The fire destroys many of the people the audience has come to know, though the show leaves it unclear who survives. As the children and Olaf leave, nearly every character they have met is warned and forced to choose how to get out. Whether each one makes it is left to them.

The big reveals of the final season

• Where V.F.D. began. The origins of the organization and the split over the sugar bowl.
• The opera house. Beatrice accidentally killed Olaf’s father while trying to steal the bowl, and Lemony took the blame.
• The Medusoid Mycelium. The series’ weapon of mass destruction, with a cure as ordinary as horseradish or apples.
• The sugar bowl. It holds sugar laced with an inoculation against the mycelium, a detail the books never revealed.
• Lemony’s story. Why he tells the tale, and his love for Beatrice.
• The last scene. Beatrice Baudelaire, Lemony’s niece, catches up with him.

The final verdict on the series finale

It is a bleak ending, and it will not satisfy everyone. Some resolutions are hard to accept, and for many viewers the lingering feeling is something close to trauma. The truth, as the show frames it, is that everything is pointless and tragic, with few concrete motivations but plenty of concrete Easter eggs.

That is also why the ending fits. A series about absurd authority and well-meaning adults who fail children could hardly conclude with a reward. The story spent three seasons telling viewers not to expect one.

For anyone ready for the allegories, the wordplay and the references to classic works of literature, the finale rewards the trip. Season three stays packed with such touches. It is not a cheerful watch. For fans of the books, none of this will come as a surprise, and for viewers who knew the story mostly through Netflix, the sad feeling arrives all at once as everything ties together and falls apart.

Sources

• A Series of Unfortunate Events (TV series), Wikipedia — cast, series run and finale details