‘A Series of Unfortunate Events’ was right to change the books’ ending

The television adaptation of Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events is, much like the books it is based on, true to its name. Most of the action and drama contained in it can be boiled down to a literal series of very unfortunate events that occur in the lives of its heroes, the Baudelaire orphans, as well as most of the people surrounding them. 

The Netflix show aired its third and final season at the beginning of the new year, and its finale is surprisingly more optimistic than the books’ ambiguous ending. When the books were published, the fate of the Baudelaires and its overarching moral was left open-ended. The Netflix series ends with decades-old mysteries solved, backstories filled in, and a reunion so sweet it almost comes out of left field. Still, the story’s lessons on the great disappointments and gentle virtues of life were conveyed.

The book ending was appropriate for 2006. The series ending is appropriate for now. 

When I first read A Series of Unfortunate Events, I was squarely within its target demographic of bookish, nerdy children who were just getting hip to the idea that the world they lived in was a total shitshow. Snicket’s literary references, big words, dark asides, and morbid preoccupation with death was catnip for kids like me. You know. Budding pedants.  

Not every story ends where you want it to end. Sometimes, there really are no answers. 

In each book, the Baudelaires are light years ahead of the grown-ups around them, using their skills of research and invention to uncover truths about Count Olaf, VFD, and the reality of their increasingly dire circumstances. Meanwhile, the adults sit around with their thumbs up their asses, discounting everything the children say by default of it being said by children. The fact that the Baudelaires are right and still lose is central to the series — it’s also the universal experience of being a child. 

That experience of being young, correct, and punished is what made me love A Series of Unfortunate Events. The book ending (spoilers ahead) wherein the Baudelaires are alone at sea with a baby and no land in sight introduced me to another great fact of life: Not every story ends where you want it to end. Sometimes, there really are no answers. 

Some of the lasting mysteries of the book are cleared up in Netflix’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. What happened with the box of darts at the opera? Beatrice Baudelaire and Lemony Snicket killed Count Olaf’s father. What was in the sugar bowl? An inoculation against the medusoid mycelium. What happened to Count Olaf’s theater troupe? They went on to perform in several successful theatrical productions. 

And the big question, did the Baudelaires survive fleeing the island? Yes, and they lived on to raise Kit Snicket’s child to be a new kind of volunteer. 

It makes sense that a TV show would have a more traditionally satisfying ending than a series of very weird books from the ’00s. Books and television are entirely different mediums and have different storytelling expectations. I do think, however, considering author Daniel Handler’s association with the series, that the Netflix ending says more about what the story was always about than it does about changing things for a television audience. 

A Series of Unfortunate Events always took place in a world that at first glance seems unlike our own but is in fact alarmingly similar. Strip away the melodrama and the occasional musical number, and it’s set in a world where the wicked are often rewarded, one’s heroes fall indiscriminately, and truth means little in the face of propaganda and ignorance. 

In that world and in ours, that feeling of being both righteous and wronged doesn’t seem quite so childish anymore. It’s painfully familiar for many people in our exact times to find themselves in the position of the Baudelaires, to have done their research and made their contributions only to have their careful work decried as fake news.

That feels like hope. And god, isn’t hope important right now? More than ever? 

We are currently caught in an uphill battle against blowhards who don’t read, and it has become so much harder to find a place in the world that feels, in the parlance of VFD, quiet. An ambiguous ending to the story of three intellectually curious children who spent three seasons crusading against a cabal of dummies wouldn’t feel satisfying now, to us, as adults. 

But knowing that in the end — the real end — they prevailed? That the cure for the fungus was found, the cycle of violence broken, and the baby at the end of it all grew up to be just as clever and correct as the heroes who raised her? That feels like hope. And god, isn’t hope important right now? More than ever? 

When I finished reading A Series of Unfortunate Events I had grown from being a pedantic child into an equally pedantic young adult. I’m not very inclined to apologize for preferring the company of people who are interested in the truth, who research carefully, and who prefer a quiet world. Those values and tools are some of the only things that ground me now that the media landscape has taken a bizarre turn into whatever apocalypse of anxiety and lies we’ve wound up in. 

I like the Netflix ending. I don’t like it just because it satisfies my curiosity or ties a bow around the story of the Baudelaires. I like it because it tells me that what the Baudelaires stand for mattered in the end. It tells me that even through a series of unfortunate events, being well-read and careful and sure, being able to make a decent ceviche under duress, are things that will eventually prevail. Even if it’s a fantasy, that’s just nice to think about these days.

Still no idea what the Great Unknown really is though. I’ll leave that one to the message boards.