Death of Baudelaire Parents

[MisterM]

I think it was esme.

[Charlie]

Sinister Duo.

Also, I'm proud of myself for this thread. I'm perfectly wonderful!

[emf3rd]

Hey, first post here! I've been lurking around the boards the last few weeks, and I'm really glad to have found out about this place at this time. Just a little introduction, as I plan on being somewhat frequent here

Long time fan of the whole series!

Anyway, I've always had this theory that this scenario happened;

The original owner, or latest owner, of 667 Dark Avenue's penthouse suit either mysteriously dies, or mysteriously disappears. Your call, but something V.F.D. related for sure happened, and not the good side. When the place went up for sale, Jacques Snicket persuaded his long time friend Jerome Squalor to purchase the suite, knowing he is incredibly rich, and that there is a secret passageway that leads from a broken down elevator shaft all the way to the Baudelaire's house, who are also connected to V.F.D. Jerome is able to get the letter that persuades him to purchase the property, however, tragedy befalls him when Esme shows up in his life. Good timing, right? Because coincidentally Jerome never gets the second letter that Jacques writes to Jerome, warning him of Esme's evil ways. They marry, and become the Squalors, owners of the 667 Dark Avenue penthouse suite. Esme hires a doorman to stand guard at the apartment building for when he needs to interfere with things (the hook handed man, Fernald.)

Some time later (1-10 years later), Beatrice meets Bertrand, falls in love, and washes on the shore of an island far away from the treachery of the world. They stay for a while, and create a few things such as the apple tree and the library, before they get pregnant with Violet, and decide to head back to the mainland after Ishmael arrived and a mutiny ensued. Once they returned to their 'abandoned house' (abandoned meaning all the good and bad side of V.F.D. thought they were deceased already from the ship wreck), Count Olaf hears about this. Him and Esme forge a message to Beatrice and Bertrand from 'V.F.D.', and they fall for it. Believing that someone they can trust is coming to visit on a specific day, they send their children away to Briny Beach to play, so they can have the house to themselves. Little did they know the house they had returned to was being spied on the last few weeks by Count Olaf as well. As they wait, and the day goes on, no one seems to arrive. The parents begin to give up hope, and leave to go elsewhere in the mansion. However, at that moment, there's three loud knocks on the door. Before they can respond, the door is broken in, and in walks Count Olaf holding a briefcase. As he enters the kitchen, he takes their brandy and pours himself a glass. Without using a coaster, he puts the glass down and holds the bottle. Olaf sets his briefcase down on the kitchen table and begins to open it just as the Baudelaire parents enter the room. Too shocked to move, the Baudelaire parents didn't have time to react before the man with a beard but no hair and a woman with hair but no beard enters as well, following Olaf in. The duo seize the parents, holding them back as Olaf raises out of his case a single match and a V.F.D. facecloth. He smirks and goes on a rant about how they knew this day would come and how foolish they were to have returned. How this is personal. For his parents, as well as him.

The Baudelaire parents manage to break free, and instantly they ran for the hidden passageway that lead to 667, which they falsely believed was a safe place. Escaping the duo in the nick of time, they found themselves below the floor inside the tunnel. From far off in the darkness, they heard the horrible noise of high heeled footsteps walking towards them. Esme approached, and with her a hand full of poison darts. After shouting about payback, she began firing them. Luckily the eldest Baudelaire's recognized the sound, and climbed back up the hidden passageway just as Olaf was stuffing the facecloth into the bottle of brandy, turning it into a molotov cocktail. He lights a match and brings it to the cloth. As it begins to burn, Olaf looks them in the eyes and all they can see is his shine. The man with a beard but no hair and a woman with hair but no beard then grabbed them and thrust the couple onto the floor of their house, their heads hitting the wood. Knocked out, Olaf threw the bomb, igniting the place on fire, and escaped down the now open hidden passageway. And once he and his crew were joined together with Esme, they closed the latch on the door and began the long walk back towards 667 Dark Avenue, laughing all the way. Now the Count hand to return to his home, and the duo had better things to do as well. But Esme stayed in the penthouse, alone that day, smiling and thinking to herself how soon all the wrongdoings against them would be fixed, and then no one could stop them.
----------------------------------

Just my take, it's quite an outrageous theory, but not unlike anything we've seen before I might add. I know it might not all make sense with how I worded it, but I think the timeline matches up somewhat and things fall in some kind of order. Anyway, done with this wall of text, hope I don't get in trouble for this! Just my take on the death of the Baudelaire parents!

[Dante]

That all fits together very well, emf3rd - welcome, by the way. Nothing to get in trouble about - writing a lot is not a crime, but I wonder if you might want to retell the story in fanfiction form? You've certainly got the details down. You've done a fine job at tying everything together - I'm certain that the role you envisage for 667 Dark Avenue here is either at least similar if not identical to what Mr. Handler intended, and by making the arson a conspiracy between Olaf, Esmé, and the sinister duo, you involve all of the main villains of the series, which would make for a satisfactory explanation. You've even made sure to involve the extra material from the BBRE. I'm impressed. The only thing that I think stands still to be explained is that you brush over the fourteen-year gap between the Baudelaires returning to their home and Olaf murdering them, which is why the murder of Olaf's parents is often envisaged as being a relatively recent event, I suspect - to explain why his actions are so recent. But perhaps you have a different idea?

At any rate, I think the fact that it's possible to put the details together like this is one of the reasons they weren't put together for us on the page. We're perfectly capable of coming to our own conclusions in ways that fit all of the evidence.

[Tryina Denouement]

Well, I always believed there was an assistant of Olaf's who was ordered to set the mansion on fire. I also considered that in the movie there was this really large magnifying glass at Olaf's house. I believed that it was Olaf. I don't have enough time to write a thesis, through.

[emf3rd]

Thanks! I had figured that during the time they returned to the mainland from the island, that's when people realized they had survived at sea and were alive. They also had Violet, Klaus, and Sunny during this time. Then word traveled to Olaf, who plotted his revenge from when he found out, and began spying and such on them to form a plan (as stated in the Dismal Diner.)

I too agree that a huge part of this series is that the answers aren't always clear, and sometimes you have to figure it out for yourself. If it's plausible, I will always listen to a theory!

Maybe I am confused on when exactly Olaf's parents died, but I am under the impression it's before Violet is born, which would mean even before their parents washed ashore on the island.

[Tryina Denouement]

Jan 17, 2014 16:53:03 GMT -5 emf3rd said:

Maybe I am confused on when exactly Olaf's parents died, but I am under the impression it's before Violet is born, which would mean even before their parents washed ashore on the island.

There was this event where the Baudelaire parents(or someone else) shot Olaf's parents with a harpoon gun. I forgot who exactly did it.

[Dante]

Poison darts rather than a harpoon gun, Tryina. It's a backstory event referred to multiple times in TPP, most notably Chapters... Nine and Twelve, I think? The timing is deliberately undefined, but the Baudelaire children refer in Chapter One to a time when their parents went to see La Forza del Destino, and combined with the fact that there doesn't appear to have been anything else that could have precipitated Olaf's actions, it's often thought that their assassination is recent. You'd have thought Olaf was a bit old to be an orphan, but Dewey is also referred to in the present as an orphan (Chapter Eight, I think), so in all likelihood Snicket is using it to refer to people whose parents died before their time. I should also point out that the Baudelaire children themselves never refer to living or being raised anywhere other than their mansion, so the Baudelaire parents in all likelihood must have returned there when Violet or at the very least Klaus was newborn; certainly they left the island before Violet was born.

[emf3rd]

Alright, so just to set it straight then;

When they got to the island, Beatrice was pregnant with Violet and with Bertrand. When they returned to civilization and their mansion, Violet was born. Then Klaus, and possibly Sunny. But soon thereafter they went to La Forza del Destino, which was the play where poison darts were brought in to kill Olaf's parents for undisclosed reasons, thus making Olaf an orphan and giving him an incentive for revenge against the children and their parents.

That seems like a pretty solid statement to me! But again, it really is up to interpretation a lot of the times.

[Dante]

I rather got the impression that Beatrice became pregnant with Violet while living on the island, as it sounds like she and Bertrand were there for a long time - but there's no clear evidence either way. There's some leeway to believe what you want, but I think the text does point us in certain directions.

[emf3rd]

Oh no, I completely agree with you, Violet was conceived on the island for sure. I was just saying Violet was born off the island, due to their final entry in the commonplace book ASoUE on the island indicating that right before they left they were picking out names for the unknown gender-ed baby.

[Miss Librarian]

The Molotov cocktail approach works well visually~

The idea that Bertrand and Beatrice were still alive after escaping the fire through the underground tunnel was one I liked to naively entertain. Alas, it was only influenced by the constant reminiscing scenes from the hopeful Baudelaire children. Esme with poisoned darts is a great replacement.

I too would like to see a fanfic take on this.

[Dante]

Olaf neither confirms nor denies anything in that passage; he's merely unwilling to give the Baudelaires the affirmation they want while he regards them as simply ignorant. It's true; they don't know anything. Why should Olaf be the only person who might want to burn the Baudelaire parents? Why should anyone have had to do it? The Baudelaires have no proof, merely assumptions, and those assumptions are small-minded and ignorant of the complications of the wider world. They may, nonetheless, be correct assumptions - but they aren't ones that Olaf can respect. That's how I read that passage.

[Dante]

I think your interpretation is a valid one, but I'm certain that Handler intended to leave this question open-ended, like many others.

[bandit]

I wasn't sure if this deserved its own thread, so I'll just put it in with the latest relevant discussion.

I recently got my mom to read ASOUE (aww yeah, jealous much?), so every once in a while I listen to the audiobooks with her. Whenever I'm there too, she asks a lot of questions, because ASOUE is the kind of series to prompt a lot of questions. During the first book I told her that the mystery of the Baudelaire fire is one of the open-ended questions that is never directly answered, but during the third book there's this passage (TWW, pp. 206-207):

"That's enough of your revolting talk, Olaf," [Mr. Poe] said sternly. "We've caught you now, and there's no way you'll be getting away. The Lake Lachrymose Police Department will be happy to capture a known criminal wanted for fraud, murder, and the endangerment of children."

"And arson," Count Olaf piped up.

My mom asked if Olaf was referring to the Baudelaire fire, and, um, I have no idea. I've heard that ASOUE was a much simpler story when Handler first went to work on it, and he wasn't really planning all the complex stuff with VFD, etc. So in this passage, was DH implying that it was just an assumed fact that Olaf had burned down the mansion, but it was later retconned to make the whole thing more mysterious? Or was DH just throwing out a coincidentally significant crime that Olaf had probably engaged in? Or can this be explained with something else entirely?