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Post by Foxy on Mar 20, 2019 10:51:35 GMT -5
This week has my most unbelievable moment from the entire series: Count Olaf cutting the porthole with a sword! I don't understand how this is possible. It boggles my mind!
What does everyone else think?
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Post by Dante on Mar 21, 2019 5:29:15 GMT -5
Submitted for consideration under "Something else": Sunday does not exist in TGG. My analysis on the subject is comprehensive and enormous. I'm putting it below the spoiler bar below, but I encourage anyone interested in the chronology of the series to take a closer look, and see if they can find any hole in my research. TGG opens on Saturday, and concludes on Tuesday; there are markers in the text for Saturday, Monday, and Tuesday specifically. But Sunday is never mentioned in the novel, and when you try to determine when it would have occurred, you run up against a blank wall. TSS concludes on Saturday, and this lines up with TGG; "Today's Saturday," Widdershins confirms on page 44; and the book at least begins in the daytime, as the Baudelaires are able to comfortably view the distant scenery of the Hinterlands on page 12. By page 202, when the Baudelaires and Fiona are being taken aboard the Carmelita, we hear Esmé saying "it's Monday already!" So at some point between pages 12 and 202, an entire day passes. Furthermore, when the Baudelaires pilot the Queequeg back out into the open ocean on page 311, "Night had fallen - Monday night", and 313 has them silently sail "All night long and into the morning," Tuesday morning, as called for in the Volunteer Factual Dispatch on pagae 260 (and the opening of TPP agrees that it is Tuesday).
Why am I talking so much about Monday? Because it helps to establish how much time needs to have passed between pages 12 and 202. And in this regard there is another crucial factor in determining the chronology of TGG: Sunny's infection with the Medusoid Mycelium, of which it is famously said on page 105, "A single spore has such grim power / That you may die within the hour." Now, I have proposed in the past that "you may die within the hour" gives us some leeway, and this is important in The End; but for the purposes of TGG, page 225 agrees that Sunny has a "crucial hour", and Violet remarks on page 242 that "Sunny's hour must almost be up." We choose to believe that the Baudelaires' timekeeping is reasonably accurate, and so we must also conclude that only a single hour passes between the point at which Sunny is infected with the Medusoid Mycelium, and the point at which she is cured. The latter can be pinpointed definitively as being on page 254; when precisely Sunny was first inflicted with a Medusoid Mycelium spore is unclear, but can be absolutely no later than page 180, the point at which Fiona and the Baudelaires notice the Medusoid Mycelium growing on the inside of Sunny's diving helmet, and Sunny begins to cough and remarks that she's feeling unwell. So 180 to 254 take a single hour.
What events occur during this crucial hour? The Queequeg is immediately captured by the Carmelita, the Baudelaires and Finoa are imprisoned in the brig, helped to escape, and return to the Queequeg. This period covers Esmé's statement that Monday has arrived, and therefore the hour cannot begin much before midnight Sunday at the earliest. After Sunny is healed, the elder Baudelaires then research for an indeterminate amount of time, but when Sunny returns to the scene, she characterises her absence as a "brief nap," on page 271, which she followed with some light cooking. Taking into account the fact that, during this period, the Baudelaires were supposed to be being interrogated for the location of the sugar bowl, we cannot presume it to have been a particularly extended period of hours before Olaf "stopped by the brig", per page 277; and nor does it seem to be a particularly lengthy confrontation when Olaf subsequently raids the Queequeg to recover its valuables and the Baudelaires. This is immediately followed by the Baudelaires' escape from the Carmelita, at which point, as discussed above, Monday night had already fallen. In short, it's difficult to conceive of Sunny's infection with the Medusoid Mycelium as having taken place much later than midday on Monday; the period of her infection was one hour, and it's difficult to argue for the succeeding events leading up until Monday night as having taken longer than two or three hours, and it would be fair to argue for much less.
Let's travel back a bit. Can we determine when Saturday ends and Sunday starts? No, but we can make a few general readings. For starters, a "few hours" pass on page 70 while Violet performs some mechanical repairs, Klaus researches, and Sunny cooks with Phil, and through to page 71 is a passage stating that "the afternoon turned to evening", while Phil states on page 80 that "Tonight, the only dessert we have is gum", further solidifying this as a late mealtime during evening or night. More important is when Widdershins sends the younger members of the crew to "get some shut-eye" on page 108, which Snicket describes as "bedtime" on page 109; this is evidently Saturday night, then. We are then told, on page 111, that the Baudelaires and Fiona passed "deeper and deeper into slumber for several hours, and they probably would have slept much longer if the children hadn't been awakened". The implication, it seems to me, is that they are probably awakened before dawn on the following day.
How long does the Gorgonian Grotto excursion last? Widdershins helpfully informs us on page 117 that "The oxygen systems in your helmets provide plenty of air for a short journey!"; they also recharge in the air, so we are allowed a short journey both to and from the grotto. It is only, per page 134, "a few minutes" after they arrive and begin searching the grotto that the Medusoid Mycelium enters its waxing phase. On page 145 Fiona characterises the waxing phase as potentially lasting "a few minutes, or a few hours. It could even be a few days." Per 151, they then spend "the next few hours" searching some more. Sunny provides them one snack and one meal; I think the Baudelaires only eat five separate occasions, most of them quite light meals, over the entire several days of the story, so if we can cut a day out of this plot then it would obviously be to their benefit. There then follows on page 155 "a lengthy period of studying and note taking, whisking and mixing" which presumably does not take more than another few hours; and when the Medusoid Mycelium finally wanes, Fiona characterises the cycle of waxing and waning as "a fairly short cycle", on page 164. It's not clear, incidentally, when exactly the Medusoid Mycelium spores would have entered Sunny's diving helmet; it's also not clear if they follow a similar cycle of waxing and waning, though as there is no underground for them to retreat into then at all times the fungus's presence in her helmet would be fairly obvious and I doubt that there's anything to glean here. After what can only be another short journey back, from what we know of the diving helmets' oxygen capacity, the Baudelaires and Fiona return to the Queequeg and Sunny's infection with the Medusoid Mycelium is confirmed, locking us into the one-hour period discussed above. So, how long do the Baudelaires and Fiona spend between waking and returning to the Queequeg? I think that a short journey through a pitch-black cave in a diving suit with limited oxygen capacity cannot be longer than an hour (this appears to agree with real-world diving practices); a few hours of searching the grotto, constricted by the Medusoid Mycelium's growth, I cannot put at longer than three hours, and the process of researching this evidence and preparing a meal I think a person would be very generous as allowing two hours for. Throw in another hour to discuss and dine, and the entire excursion looks like perhaps seven hours, at an upper limit. Hold on, though! Wasn't this meant to carry us from before dawn on Sunday until midday Monday at the earliest? How did seven hours start looking more like thirty or so? But hold on; if it were, say, to be thirty-one hours - 5am Sunday to 12 noon Monday, for instance, and that's being generous - and you then deducted the seven hours in question, what would that get you? Twenty-four straights hours missing... Now, I'm aware that this has been a very lengthy analysis. But do you see the general trend of the narrative analysis here? The chronology of the book is actually quite coherent if and only if you assume that Sunday does not exist. The Baudelaires sail down the Stricken Stream on Saturday; work on the Queequeg through to the evening; wake up before dawn on Monday; spend the bulk of the day in Gorgonian Grotto; are held captive on the Carmelita for a period of roughly an hour; and escape on Monday night, to sail to Briny Beach for Tuesday morning. ...Returning to the official poll options, though, the porthole business is very silly. Once the Queequeg is captured by the Carmelita, the broken porthle is the exlusive method of access and egress to the Queequeg; every time someone enters or leaves that submarine, it's through that broken porthole, and they do so with great ease and dexterity each time. So it was a huge porthole and Count Olaf cut a massive hole through it; makes one wonder how the Baudelaires even hefted it back into place, or just how much gum was involved in the process. I think I see why the Netflix series didn't use this device. |
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tonyvfd
Catastrophic Captain
Posts: 80
Likes: 17
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Post by tonyvfd on Mar 22, 2019 0:42:10 GMT -5
I have to agree with the porthole
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Post by Carrie E. Abelabudite on Mar 23, 2019 10:13:00 GMT -5
What I find unbelievable is the Medusoid Mycelium - not the fact that it exists, but a lot of things about the way it is described. When someone is infected with the MM, the caps and stalks of the mushroom physically grow in their throat, and this is visible to any onlooker. Despite the constant references to the fungus being poisonous, this makes it sound like it kills its victims by suffocation regardless of its properties, since they simply wouldn't be able to breathe with their airways obstructed like this.
I had never noticed the 'Sunday not existing' discrepancy. Dante, was this the timeline problem you were referencing in the TRR reread thread? The only solution I can think of is that the Baudelaires and Fiona slept through the entire day, and it took a much longer amount of time to get to the point in the Gorgonian Grotto where the children had to get out of the submarine than is implied. The description of them sleeping for 'several hours' sounds more like it's a normal overnight period, but there really isn't any other way to resolve this. The problem with the timeline in TSS-TPP is that Handler locks in a specific period of time over which these books should be set with the Verbal Fridge Dialogue, then the plot doesn't actually need that amount of time. If he'd had a better idea of where he was going to go with the rest of the story in TSS, he probably could have made the VFD meeting at Hotel Denouement a couple of days earlier.
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Post by Mr. Dent on Mar 23, 2019 19:54:49 GMT -5
The Qweegle or whatever is too hard to pronounce. Or spell.
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Post by Dante on Mar 24, 2019 3:50:07 GMT -5
What I find unbelievable is the Medusoid Mycelium - not the fact that it exists, but a lot of things about the way it is described. When someone is infected with the MM, the caps and stalks of the mushroom physically grow in their throat, and this is visible to any onlooker. Despite the constant references to the fungus being poisonous, this makes it sound like it kills its victims by suffocation regardless of its properties, since they simply wouldn't be able to breathe with their airways obstructed like this. This is definitely an issue in how we talk about the Medusoid Mycelium, as well; we tend to treat it more as a disease, referring to "infections" and "cures," even though that's not strictly how it operates. Nonetheless, it's still the best way of describing it, as the fungal affliction in question is pretty well analogous to a disease with a vaccine, or a poison with an antidote. It is indeed the timeline problem I was referring to recently; I think I'd not long since discovered it at that point. I actually have an old document in which I've jotted out the full fixed timeline from TVV through TPP, as it happens (did you know that TVV opens on a Wednesday? Neither did Handler). On that I've indicated an opinion that the Baudelaires spend all Sunday in the grotto; I think this is likely closer to what was intended, actually, as page 249 has Violet say "I turned fifteen sometime when we were in the grotto, and I forgot all about it." The Baudelaires sleeping through the entire day is how I was originally planning on introducing the problem, though, and with the exception of Fiona then I think it's even reasonably credible. I think you're essentially right in your diagnosis of the problem, anyway; Handler allowed for too much time to pass until the trial, and the result was that even with TGG stretching out time to the point where it challenges credulity, he still had to have the trial moved forward a day (though I think he did a good job justifying it). |
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