takatoguil
Catastrophic Captain
Posts: 64
Likes: 40
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Post by takatoguil on Jan 3, 2019 10:52:45 GMT -5
Something I wonder about regarding both the show and the books is how the fungus didn't spread across the island once it was released. The Baudelaires would presumably have had to have lived off of apples (since they weren't immune), all the time they stayed there. Maybe fungus struggles to grow on sand and didn't quite reach any foliage, or perhaps it wasn't damp enough. Don't the books say that the fungus needs to be in dark places to thrive?
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Post by Agathological on Jan 3, 2019 15:48:14 GMT -5
One slight grievance is that the series nor the show portray Bertrand in any meaningful way. How did he and Beatrice get toghther?
Also, the show did seem to confirm that Beatrice did survive the fire in the books; with the White Faced Women saying that women are more resilient.
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Post by Hermes on Jan 3, 2019 18:06:15 GMT -5
Also, the show did seem to confirm that Beatrice did survive the fire in the books; with the White Faced Women saying that women are more resilient. I don't think so. At this point Olaf and co. think that one of the parents has survived, because of the Snicket tape. Given this, the WFW speculate that it's the mother, because women are more resilient. But in fact it seems that Jacques was referring to Quigley - and the things that made that problematic in the book seem to have been eliminated in the show.
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Post by Uncle Algernon on Jan 4, 2019 5:50:25 GMT -5
Also, the show did seem to confirm that Beatrice did survive the fire in the books; with the White Faced Women saying that women are more resilient. I don't think so. At this point Olaf and co. think that one of the parents has survived, because of the Snicket tape. Given this, the WFW speculate that it's the mother, because women are more resilient. But in fact it seems that Jacques was referring to Quigley - and the things that made that problematic in the book seem to have been eliminated in the show. You misread Agathological's message. They said the show "seemed to confirm that Beatrice survived in the books"; that is to say, regardless of whether any Baudelaire parent survived the fire in this continuity, we now have an official source telling us in exactly so many words "If a Baudelaire parent had survived the fire, it would probably be the mother".
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Post by gliquey on Jan 4, 2019 8:23:55 GMT -5
So I've finished the season and... it's like a chef's salad.
This season continued on adapting the spirit of the show faithfully while changing some of the details, and to that end I'm okay with some changes such as the death of the freaks in TSS, or the absence of Captain Widdershins. I'm also okay with a couple of the ambiguities being made explicit - Lemony being the taxi driver; Dewey being the father of Beatrice. Seeing the events of La Forza del Destino was exceptional, and something that I'm very glad was made more overt, though I would have preferred an ambiguity as to exactly who shot the dart that killed Olaf's father.
But the season had some missteps. Fernald's characterisation is a lot more subtle and meaningful in the books, because his villainy is a lot more overt. He throws himself into Olaf's plans without thought for the consequences, particularly without caring about Sunny's safety. In the Netflix series, I'm not exactly clear on why he would remain in Olaf's troupe when Olaf turned to such overt criminality and villainy, and it's not exactly a surprise in TGG when we learn that he has a good side.
The reveal of the sugar bowl's contents, however, is deeply unsatisfying. It's a couple of sugar lumps that immunise you from Medusoid Mycelium? Who cares? It's not a powerful device in its own right, only as a counter to a weapon, and it's hardly more useful than just keeping some horseradish on you at all times. It doesn't seem to fit the opera dialogue, which makes it sound like a weapon or something that gives someone immediate tactical victory, but it's only useful in combination with the mycelium. If the contents of the sugar bowl had to be revealed, the only ending I would have been happy with would be "it's empty" (such as if its original contents remained a mystery, but was revealed to have fallen out of the sugar bowl and been lost at the opera, or elsewhere on its journey).
I wasn't happy with the casting of Ishmael. He seems too happy and not serious enough. I wanted him to be depressed and lethargic from his long, troubled life, but he acts too cheerfully. Perhaps this is actually quite similar to the books, but I think the books give him a slightly more menacing aura than he can manage to pull off in the Netflix series. The revelation that he is the founder of V.F.D. is a poor one, and I'm pretty sure ATWQ mentions some very old historical figures who were part of V.F.D. (at least in implication), so it doesn't really fit that canon.
Finally, the series ends in an unambiguously happy way. If we were to be shown what happened to the Quagmires, and/or to Fernald and Fiona, I would rather it have been death at the Great Unknown. The troupe's ending was just too cheesy and I was expecting - and would have loved - a sudden interruption by Lemony saying "I wish I could tell you this is how it went, but that's not how the story goes". And also, the little we saw of the Great Unknown still revealed too much about it.
However, to end on a positive note, the adaptation of The Penultimate Peril was absolutely exceptional. It's a real shame you couldn't choose the order of the Violet/Klaus/Sunny concierge chapters (if this was made a year later, Netflix's interactive tech might have been good enough to include this feature quite easily - Black Mirror episode Bandersnatch was released a few days ago and is an absolutely incredible, deeply complicated "choose your own adventure" story). However, the Denouement triplets were brilliant. Dewey's death scene was a bit underwhelming in that it's not clear why Dewey couldn't simply move out of the path of the harpoon before it was shot, but it was still a hugely emotive scene. The episode's ending with the reprise of "That's Not How the Story Goes" was really, really good.
Olaf's death, and his reciting poetry with Kit, was excellent. Kit's own death as the Baudelaires begged her not to leave them was also very emotional in a different way. Lemony meeting Beatrice in the root beer float cafe was amazing. Overall, I'm happy with the season, but not with some of the characters' endings.
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Post by wordwhichheremeans on Jan 5, 2019 7:07:00 GMT -5
The reveal of the sugar bowl's contents, however, is deeply unsatisfying. It's a couple of sugar lumps that immunise you from Medusoid Mycelium? Who cares? The way I saw it is that the sugar bowl's contents allow you to weaponise the Medusoid Mycelium. Without it, if you released the Medusoid Mycelium into the wild you and your friends would have to be constantly eating horseradish - inconvenient and very risky. Sure, a horseradish factory could be useful, but it's a single point of failure - your enemies bring down that factory and it's all over. If you can immunise against the Medusoid Mycelium however, it's a game-changer. Once your side of the schism is immunised, you're free to take the Medusoid Mycelium and release it, knowing you and your friends are safe, while everyone else is wiped out (at least when they run out of horseradish). You and your friends are safe, living happily ever after, with nobody to bother you. And then at last, The World is Quiet Here. Which explains why both sides of the schism are desperately fighting for it. Why knowledge of what is inside it is on a "need-to-know basis". The 'noble' side, we hope, simply to guarantee that the Medusoid Mycelium can never be used. We hope. It doesn't explain everything - as Dante has identified, the biggest problem is that in the time before TGG everybody thought that the Medusoid Mycelium had been destroyed (thanks to the bravery of Fernald). But it does explain why TMWABBNH and TWWHBNB in particular are after it. And, Esmé is likely just angry because Beatrice stole part of her 'in' tea-set, and she wants it to be once again complete.
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Post by gliquey on Jan 5, 2019 8:42:52 GMT -5
And, Esmé is likely just angry because Beatrice stole part of her 'in' tea-set, and she wants it to be once again complete. This robs Esmé's character of any credibility at all - and like Count Olaf, she needs to be dangerous and evil as well as ridiculous. If she was the original owner of the sugar bowl then she had ample opportunity to consume some of the hybrid sugar, and so she's either immunised or an idiot. Hence, she has no more need for the sugar bowl - perhaps a desire to stop it from falling into the hands of the opposite side of V.F.D., so she can weaponise the Medusoid Mycelium (... which she doesn't think exists), but it certainly doesn't explain or justify her fervour in getting the sugar bowl back. Apart from jealousy and the fact she thinks the physical bowl itself is rightfully hers - but this is more ridiculous characterisation, and Esmé should be given at least a little bit of an important motive or her character is pointless.
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Post by Uncle Algernon on Jan 5, 2019 9:03:26 GMT -5
Apart from jealousy and the fact she thinks the physical bowl itself is rightfully hers - but this is more ridiculous characterisation, and Esmé should be given at least a little bit of an important motive or her character is pointless. I think it's more psychotic than ridiculous — and entirely fitting — that Esmé was mostly upset about the Sugar Bowl theft because somebody had dared steal from her, as opposed to anything about the Bowl itself or its potential contents. It's certainly plausible as the actions of the same woman who, in the previous episode, made a whole evil-gloating out of making a courtroom eat overly-peppered crow sausages.
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Post by Dante on Jan 5, 2019 9:07:16 GMT -5
There's a new interview with Barry Sonnenfeld at Entertainment Weekly which delves into some of their decisions around the finale of the series. Notably for me, he admits that the sugar bowl solution doesn't really make sense: Which is all very well as a post hoc rationalisation, but none of it finds its way into the show itself. If they were so intent on using the sugar bowl metaphorically, they should have leaned into it harder; given some reason for even the characters who know about its contents to want to find it so urgently despite the absence of the substance it's intended to counteract; set it up as a symbol of contention independent of what it contains (or who originally possessed it). Handler, at least, seemed to understand this by not revealing its contents in the books, clearly knowing that no answer could satisfy all the hints that he'd dropped as his intentions changed. I'd anticipated back in Season 2 that the show probably had its own original answer to the sugar bowl problem, and all along I was quite interested to see how the writers would solve some of the running mysteries, given the chance to construct an original mythology with its own set of clues. In this respect, I think they did an acceptable job on matters like the schism, the origins of V.F.D., the night at the opera. But I think their choice of approach to the sugar bowl and indeed the Great Unknown must have been different. It seems like they selected their answers on the basis of a belief that they were canon to the books; and that blinded them to the fact that those answers didn't actually make sense in the context of the show. The Medusoid Mycelium vaccine is an explanation related to the horseradish theory which makes even less sense in the books, but which either way is so inadequate that it destroys the entire logic of the adaptation of TGG and renders inexplicable the behaviour of those who are in the know. It really feels as if the preceding episodes were written before they'd actually decided on their answer. In actuality, Kit's behaviour in the opera house flashback proves that at that time, she cannot have known; she doesn't seem aware of the fact that Esmé's sugar is bitter, not sweet, and avoids drinking from a cup of tea which would have rendered her immune to a known biological weapon (had she done so, it would have ultimately led her to survive The End). If we grant that she did know the truth about the sugar bowl, her refusal to drink was either a petulance which ultimately killed her; or because she believed that that biological weapon was extinct, which would be inconsistent with her later drive to have the bowl retrieved at all costs. Could it be that Kit only learned the truth about the sugar bowl in-between TGG and The End? This suggestion is farcical, and in any case doesn't account for Beatrice's willingness to kill for the solution to a problem that didn't exist at the time. Unless Beatrice herself didn't know the whole truth! It's an absurd fix - but if they'd actually leaned harder into the idea of the sugar bowl as a metaphor for causes of conflict, a meaningless object in itself (in accordance with the presence of an Introduction to MacGuffins volume on Dewey's desk in the sub-basement), they might actually have pulled it off; just give reason to believe that nobody really knows the whole truth about the sugar bowl but is only acting on exaggerated whispers and rumours, and it would all have worked. (A similar hypothesis is the only viable solution to the canon sugar bowl mystery, as far as I'm concerned.) It would only have taken a few lines, and then they could have put whatever they wanted in the sugar bowl. Unfortunately, they chose a solution which makes sense only within the scene in which it is delivered, to facilitate exposition about a problem which only exists in The End. It's a local solution which doesn't work backwards. But there's also the Great Unknown - though in fact that's not the proper name for it. The name "the Great Unknown," and the idea that it's a metaphor for death (which is actually still too limited a conception, unless you agree that the Quagmires, Fiona, Hector, Fernald, and Widdershins are dead in canon) are all derived from its presentation in The End, while the idea that it's literally a sea monster derives from ATWQ. But that's not the role it plays in TGG at all. In TGG it's only "the question mark," an entity indeterminately either a sea monster or a submarine; a silent and eerie presence which represents the Baudelaires' questions, their ambivalence and fear about the answers which they might get, and it's emblematic of the bigger picture of V.F.D., its history, and the conflict around the Baudelaires outside of their personal relationship with Olaf. In its first appearance, it specifically appears after Olaf and his submarine have already arrived on the scene and are about to capture the Baudelaires; the way that it's even more enormous than the Carmelita, which dwarfs the Queequeg, illustrates in much the same way as the sinister duo that there are forces more significant than Count Olaf, which is why it's able to intimidate and overpower him. Notably, the TV series leaves the sinister duo namesless and without backstory or motivation; this seems like a clear double standard. And on the TV show - the Great Unknown doesn't appear in The End; it doesn't appear to ambiguously resolve the subplots of the off-screen characters; its behaviour doesn't even correspond to the Bombinating Beast of ATWQ. None of the context relating to its status as a metaphor for death or a sea monster from a prequel series is present, so on TV those elements are apropos of nothing - they're token inclusions which are used to facilitate an action sequence. From a symbolic presence which is used to illustrate a discussion on the philosophy of knowledge, parenting, and innocence versus experience - the question mark is reduced to a big ugly monster that's completely ineffectual. By taking the later context surrounding the Great Unknown and blindly writing that back into its appearance in TGG, it is greatly diminished. It's so disappointing. TSS and TPP are so careful and clever about where they're faithful and where they're original, and The End's flaws at least come from the attempt to abridge it. It's really just TGG which is such a botch, in a way that not only fails to respect the spirit of the original book but actually damages the rest of the series.
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Post by Uncle Algernon on Jan 5, 2019 9:19:19 GMT -5
I'm actually wondering how an adaptation of ATWQ spun off from the Netflix series would even work. It would need some serious retooling to make the plot of ATWQ make sense within a paradigm where Lemony was part of the first generation of Volunteers…
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Post by Liam R. Findlay on Jan 5, 2019 12:03:35 GMT -5
Is it such a loss that the Great Unknown is essentially absent? It was important to the way in which the books ended, but I don't think it was nearly as necessary to the more concrete ending of the show, which stands on its own feet without a big metaphor being needed to sweep characters under the carpet of ambiguity. It might have been nice to include, but I don't think its presence would have enhanced my enjoyment of the storytelling, given the less ambiguous path writers chose to take. I don't consider the sea monster to be the same as the books' Great Unknown, but rather spooky creature connoting mystery, and that was enjoyable enough for me- it wasn't distracting or poorly done, and it helped create an atmosphere. Perhaps them speeding away from it is a metaphor for how the show planned to speed away from an ambiguous ending (or a profundly mysterious / frustratingly disappointing ending, depending on your own reading)
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Post by Hermes on Jan 5, 2019 12:42:47 GMT -5
I think that if the GU had still swallowed the Quagmires and Fiona and co., and had also been unequivocally a Beast, that would have been destructive of the story, because it would have destroyed the point of 'Unknown'. (I thought for a while that you could get round this by the Jonah/Pinnochio route, but on reflection that wouldn't have worked unless they actually drew attention to the possibility, which would also have destroyed the point of 'Unknown'.) And many of us were afraid that this would happen. But as it is, when it takes a minor role in the story - I don't think it is a problem. It can be a Beast and still mysterious - mysterious in its origin, mysterious in its behaviour and so on. (I got rather a Lovecraftian vibe from the way it was described.) It doesn't represent the uncertainty of the future, so much as the general fact that there is much we don't understand, that not everything is part of our story. If we were just going with TGG I think that is how we would have understood it anyway. You misread Agathological's message. They said the show "seemed to confirm that Beatrice survived in the books"; that is to say, regardless of whether any Baudelaire parent survived the fire in this continuity, we now have an official source telling us in exactly so many words "If a Baudelaire parent had survived the fire, it would probably be the mother". My point was that the WFW isn't an official source, because she is just guessing. Regarding the Sugar Bowl, I'm reminded of A Private View, by Michael Innes, in which two sets of villains are chasing the same picture, one because it is a valuable old master which has been painted over, and the other because the painting-over is actually a diagram of a top-secret research facility. Esme owning (and consequently being concerned about) the bowl but not its contents solves a lot of the puzzles that arise in the books, in particular why Lemony actually felt guilty about stealing it from her. And it may have been a genuinely valuable bowl (or an essential part of a set that was valuable as a whole).
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takatoguil
Catastrophic Captain
Posts: 64
Likes: 40
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Post by takatoguil on Jan 5, 2019 14:51:40 GMT -5
I'm actually wondering how an adaptation of ATWQ spun off from the Netflix series would even work. It would need some serious retooling to make the plot of ATWQ make sense within a paradigm where Lemony was part of the first generation of Volunteers… Ishmael is a very old man. It's entirely plausible that at least one generation existed before Lemony did, especially since some adult volunteers are clearly a generation older than others.
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penguinnj
Bewildered Beginner
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Post by penguinnj on Jan 5, 2019 14:52:29 GMT -5
I am thrilled with the way the series turned out. I laughed, I cried, I applauded at the end- much like the opera The performances were just stellar. To be honest, I never liked The Great Unknown in the books- seemed like a combination of Handler writing his way out of a jam and plain overkill- there are plenty of metaphors for death and disillusionment in the books and I never thought they needed one more. The tie in to ATWQ worked well and was a delightful Easter egg and I'm happy to leave it at that- If the Widdershins and Quagmires all perished at sea, these books cross the line from dark humor to bloodbath. As for the Sugar Bowl- once again I am happy enough. I wanted a clear answer even if I disagreed with it. Frankly, as I know Dante has pointed out, I don't think Handler had a clear plan when he started and this was his chance to retcon a consistent- or fairly consistent- solution. I have no trouble in believing that Netflix Esme would go to extraordinary lengths to get back a stolen item without which her "in" tea set was worthless. She knows something valuable is inside and assures Beatrice at the opera it should be in her hands- whether she knows exactly what it is is an open question. Does Kit know at the opera or does she find out later? I think that is an open question but I lean towards she doesn't know. One of the bedrock beliefs of secret organizations is no one knows more than they need to know and for all of its fine qualities, VFD is no exception. I think it is perfectly possible Lemony and Beatrice are the only ones who know the full extent of what is in the sugar bowl at the opera and that works for me. I won't try to reconcile that with book cannon because I think any one solution is impossible in the books. And I would be willing to hand wave a lot of back engineered writing to get the answer to "what's in the sugar bowl?" "Sugar." Perfect.
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Post by gothicarchiesfan on Jan 5, 2019 15:03:14 GMT -5
I'm actually wondering how an adaptation of ATWQ spun off from the Netflix series would even work. It would need some serious retooling to make the plot of ATWQ make sense within a paradigm where Lemony was part of the first generation of Volunteers… Ishmael is a very old man. It's entirely plausible that at least one generation existed before Lemony did, especially since some adult volunteers are clearly a generation older than others. And of course, Ishmael (being Ishmael) could have merely been lying through his teeth.
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