the parents' will question

[A comet crashing into Earth]

Aug 12, 2014 9:45:27 GMT -5 Hermes said:

Well, not every volunteer knows every code, as witnessed by Monty not knowing Sebald Code, but it does make it unlikely. 

To be fair on Monty, though, he can't very bell be expected to notice a tiny, well-concealed coded message in an attentive movie when watching it for entertainment. Perhaps the Sebald code or other means of communication were already known to Monty, whose miss was due to just not listening quite well enough to everything when something ringed. I do agree, I'm just playing the devil's advocate.

[gliquey]

(The Penultimate Peril, pg 192)

"I'll never forgive myself for letting that idiotic banker take you away from me" - Justice Strauss

"And I'll never forgive myself [...] for walking away from you children" - Jerome Squalor


------


Jerome certainly seems to have more of a reason to apologize: he did choose not to take care of the Baudelaires when they wanted to go running after the Quagmires. Justice Strauss was probably experiencing "meaningless regret", as you say.



I'm assuming you're get the mill "business arrangement" thing from somewhere outside of the books, as I cannot recall anything that explicitly says that in 4 itself (and I've read the book recently). The way Sir acts does make you think that for him, it was about hiring staff rather than adopting orphans. But in 5, Mr. Poe seems surprised that Sunny was doing administrative work so I would have thought that he was probably unaware of the children all doing labor.



The Hector thing, again, might be cleaned up from outside influences, but from just the 13 books, this is what I've got relating to him:

• He is a protagonist
  
• He is up-to-date on what has happened to the Baudelaires, and has heard of the initials V.F.D., but only after they explain it to him on their first day (walking home after the council meeting)
• He escapes with Duncan and Isadora, who know (at the very least) more about V.F.D. than the Baudelaires
• Olaf talks about "finally catching up" to the hot air home just a few days after they escape (in 10)
• Duncan and Isadora (I vaguely recall from 12) have been trying to help V.F.D. - presumably with assistance from Hector
• In 13, the Great Unknown thing essentially gets rid of the Quagmires and Hector

[Dante]

Aug 12, 2014 10:51:31 GMT -5 gliquey said:

I'm assuming you're get the mill "business arrangement" thing from somewhere outside of the books, as I cannot recall anything that explicitly says that in 4 itself (and I've read the book recently). The way Sir acts does make you think that for him, it was about hiring staff rather than adopting orphans. But in 5, Mr. Poe seems surprised that Sunny was doing administrative work so I would have thought that he was probably unaware of the children all doing labor.

Ultimately, what Mr. Poe thought of things must remain somewhat mysterious, but Sir's behaviour is completely unambiguous in the matter: He was making a business arrangement. "So when Mr. Poe gave me a call, I worked out a deal. The deal is this: I will try to make sure that Count Olaf and his associates never go anywhere near you, and you work in the lumbermill until you come of age and get all that money." Never does he imply that he has any personal tie to the Baudelaires. Charles later says to him, of the Baudelaires, "They should be treated like members of the family," and Sir replies "They are being treated like members of the family. Many of my cousins live there in the dormitory." This indicates that the Baudelaires are absolutely not Sir's family members. (Additional evidence for which is that the cousins in the dormitory would also be the Baudelaires' family members and potential guardians, but we never hear of them.) Notably, also, in Chapter Thirteen, Mr. Poe expresses no surprise or disapprobation at any point of the fact that the children were working in the lumbermill. Evidently something extraordinary was happening here. Possibly Mr. Poe's surprise in TAA was on the grounds that Sunny was meant to be undergoing schooling in that book; the arrangement wasn't a business one, which it was in TMM. This explanation is admittedly a little clunky, but it is the closest to a canonical explanation that we have. In almost every respect it is simply what we get on the page.

[Hermes]

Lemony in TUA does say that he thinks Monty never learned Sebald code, though I'd agree that he may be overinterpreting. But bear in mind that he is actually at a film by Sebald, where volunteers who know the code might reasonably be expected to be on the lookout for it; it's different when the code is just slipped into a conversation.

My feeling is that both Justice Strauss and Jerome are retconned a bit in TPP: Strauss was not really to blame for letting Mr Poe take the children (though wasn't the main cause of her guilt her part in the marriage?), and Jerome did offer to adopt them, only failing to to so because they insisted on searching for the Quagmires (which was, after all, definitely unsafe).

We know that Hector was a volunteer from ATWQ. (It's also hinted at in TSS, where one of the sinister duo refers to Hector and the Quagmires as 'those volunteers', but that might just mean that he had become one by volunteering, as Hal, Strauss and Jerome later do, and as the Baudelaires themselves do in a way.) That H had been a volunteer from his youth was rather a shock to many of us when we read WCTBATH, and puts his actions in TVV in rather a different light.

[colette]

Jun 2, 2014 16:58:58 GMT -5 Hermes said:

Now, it's true that at that point they could have been sent to Justice Strauss, but bear in mind they wanted to go to VFD, to investigate the mystery of its name.

I think that Justice Strauss' house isn't a save place for them. It would be extremely easy to find them.