Mrs. Caliban = Mrs. Widdershins?

At first glance, the two do seem to slot rather well, and indeed this is what I thought when I first read the book; however, I think that there are quite a few problems with that idea, so the Calibans and the Widdershins might be best suited to being parallel cases, much like the many other stories in The End that merely share a single feature or event.

For example, why was Mrs. Caliban off on a cruise with her former husband who left her and her children (causing her to marry Widdershins) and given Friday's age can't actually be Friday's father? Mrs. Caliban's reason for telling Friday that Thursday was dead was because a schism had divided him and Miranda (p224), but that says nothing of her silence on her three other family members outside the island. I believe the correct form of address for a widow is usually her late husband's surname, so why is she taking her former husband's name to pose as a widow rather than her current husband's, and indeed, why is she known to Kit by her former husband's name rather than her current husband's? Why don't the Baudelaires recognise her from the photograph of the family on the Queequeg (while that photograph was taken more than ten years ago, they recognised Fernald and Widdershins himself)? Fiona's statements make it sound like Mrs. Widdershins is definitely dead and that the accident was in fact murder, whereas Lemony's later statement more implies she's alive and that the death was therefore fake, and Lemony's statement (as quoted above) implies that Captain Widdershins entirely believed that it was a manatee accident that killed his wife, but since he wasn't around at the time, Mrs. Caliban being off on a cruise with her former husband for some reason, then who told him, and what made Fiona suspicious (and why doesn't she mention losing another sibling, the one her mother was pregnant with)? When Kit mentions meeting an associate for Turkish coffee on page 167, she mentions it was "the day before I met you, Baudelaires," and if Thursday is Widdershins (which just isn't implied, and in any case, his surname should be Caliban, for the usual widow-naming convention I mentioned above, plus it'd make him Olivia's brother, which while the two knew each other as children isn't implied by Fiona's mention of Lulu), while this does fall in a gap of time where Widdershins wasn't around in TGG, it makes her callous for sipping Turkish coffee with him while the Baudelaires and his own stepdaughter had been abandoned (and captured) and for apparently ignoring any questions about Fiona, about the Baudelaires' abandonment, when she met them, and also makes it odd that she needs to go off and search the ocean to meet him again after less than twenty-four hours. Another reason Thursday can't be Widdershins is that Thursday was shipwrecked on the island at the same time as Miranda, but left (p224), but at the time, Widdershins had Fiona to care for as well on the Queequeg, wouldn't have been taking cruises, and was indeed implicitly aboard the Queequeg when he lists the former seconds of the crew of two from Mrs. Widdershins to Phil.

I think that even if Handler intended Mrs. Caliban to be Mrs. Widdershins, there are too many inconsistencies and mistakes for it to work practically. It'd work if Miranda abandoned Fernald and Fiona and Widdershins forever while pregnant with the child of Captain Widdershins, ran away with the former husband who left her, and then got shipwrecked. And that not only assumes some fairly inexplicable actions on the part of Mrs. Widdershins, but also makes the story far more convoluted than it needs to be and far more convoluted than it's implied to be. I think that the Caliban backstory is just another parallel to the story of the Baudelaires, just like the history of Ishmael and like the other islanders have histories that match up with Kit's or Olaf's.

Since Miranda and Captain Widdershins are both inventors of the manatee accident story, wouldn't it make more sense for them to be siblings than for Thursday to be married to Mrs. Widdershins?