A Series of Unfortunate Events: Season 3 Books Included

January 1, 2019 5:33 PM - Season 3 (Full Season)

A bookish brother. An inventive sister. A baby with a wicked bite. This villain picked a fight with the wrong orphans.

Indiewire - ‘A Series of Unfortunate Events’ Review: Season 3 Serves Up a Righteous and Resplendent Ending

AV Club episode recaps

posted by oh yeah! (15 comments total)

I just finished binging this last night and I have so many thoughts. I will probably come back to this thread many times. I will say I haven’t read the books, but I didn’t see a “Show Only” thread.

For now, let me say that Neil Patrick Harris doing a Nathan Fillion impression made me laugh hysterically for several minutes.

Actually, this whole season was just a reminder of how great NPH is.
posted by chainsofreedom at 6:11 AM on January 2, 2019

I figured since this season is, as far as we know, the end of the series for Netflix, that book spoilers should no longer be an issue in the discussion so separate threads would be redundant.
posted by oh yeah! at 12:08 PM on January 2, 2019

Question: as someone who loved the first season and couldn't finish the second as I found it too tedious, would this one possibly work for me?
posted by litleozy at 3:42 PM on January 2, 2019

I think so, litleozy - this season is only 7 episodes long, and didn't stick to formula as rigidly as S2 did.
posted by oh yeah! at 4:28 PM on January 2, 2019 [1 favorite]

Also just finished! I have an impulse to go back and look for the point when Olaf first started mentoring the Baudelaires in between murder attempts. It certainly became more obvious after his henchfolk started bailing on him - but I think at least the end of the carnival, maybe before?
posted by mersen at 2:40 PM on January 6, 2019

I watched the whole season on New Year's Day. I definitely liked season 3 better than season 2, but nothing can top S1 for me. But I'm still not sure how I feel about the reveal of Beatrice's relation to the orphans.

See, back in the S1 show-only threads, after Mother & Father appeared, a book-reader posted a comment saying something like "I'm surprised they revealed the Baudelaire parents being alive so soon". Once I got to the episode that revealed that Mother & Father were actually the Quagmire parents, that comment was flagged as a book spoiler and deleted. But then a different book reader would join the discussion, and make a similar comment which would get flagged and deleted, until there was a mod-note reminding people it was a show-only thread. So, I assumed that we were eventually going to learn which one of the Baudelaire parents had survived the fire, and didn't realize that the appearance of Quentin Quagmire was the reveal of the "someone" who survived the fire.

And then the reveal that Lemony's beloved Beatrice was his friend's wife? At first I was just confused at the reappearance of Morena Baccarin, because I knew Lemony's Beatrice was definitely dead, and per above I was still kind of waiting for a surprise-not-dead-after-all Baudelaire parent, but, then I just felt confused because I was kind of squeaked out by all of Lemony's mourning of Beatrice when it turns out he wasn't the love of her life.

So, I'm still not sure how I feel about the conclusion of this series.
posted by oh yeah! at 4:03 PM on January 6, 2019 [1 favorite]

*squicked out, not squeaked, darn autocorrect
posted by oh yeah! at 6:18 PM on January 6, 2019

There's a lot of not-dead-after-all going around - after the Quagmire parent twist, I figured the Baudelaire parents were both very dead. But I'd forgotten between seasons that Lemony Snicket was also presumed dead, at least in some quarters.
posted by mersen at 5:14 AM on January 7, 2019

The way I understood the Lemony/Beatrice relationship is that they were engaged (remember Lemony said that the night at the opera ended two engagements), but after Lemony agreed to take the fall for the dart, he went on the lam. Beatrice then later married Mr. Baudelaire.
posted by chainsofreedom at 6:27 AM on January 7, 2019

This series is like a very large, ornately decorated cake, very much like the sort of thing they serve in the Niederegger cafe in Lübeck, which, if you are ever in Lübeck, I I highly recommend (it is easily the campest place I've ever been that was not openly gay, though for obvious reasons you'd need to be fond of Marzipan). But very large. Having eaten an awful lot of cake, but with an awful lot of cake left to eat, it remains as charming and ornate as ever but I'm feeling bloated and nauseous, but I don't want to just stop as it's a terrible thing to waste cake.

(As I type, they're still on the submarine. Hopefully they get off that wretched submarine at some point.)
posted by Grangousier at 2:03 PM on January 12, 2019 [1 favorite]

And I'm finished now. I have to say, the series is consistently beautiful, slightly less consistently entertaining, more arch than the entire McDonalds hamburger operation and it must have cost a tremendous amount of money to make. Very much like the last couple of seasons of Dr Who run by Steven Moffat, however one feels about the actual show, it's a minor miracle that it got finished at all. I'm very glad I saw it, but not at all sure that I'll ever do it again.

If Bryan Fuller ever finished anything, I suppose it would feel like this.
posted by Grangousier at 4:50 PM on January 12, 2019 [1 favorite]

I'm actually only halfway through Season 2—I started it recently because the release of Season 3 made me realize I hadn't gotten around to it—but I wanted to add something to what Grangousier said about this show being a minor miracle, and it is this: This is a TV show entirely about how people should read books. That's pretty choice and rare right there.

(I did read the entire series, but gave away almost all of my books before a cross-country move several years ago. This show is inspiring me to check them out from the library and read them all again.)
posted by ejs at 7:07 PM on January 14, 2019 [1 favorite]

Incidentally, it only struck me yesterday that the VFD are all insane people, not as good as the narrative would have you believe, even the ones who are coded as heroic. It had been nagging at me that they explicitly quote the last verse of This Be the Verse:

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.

While leaving out the first two:

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

For obvious reasons. Anyway, it took a prompt as blatant as that for me to notice it. I am slow.
posted by Grangousier at 1:03 AM on January 15, 2019 [3 favorites]

I just finished season 3 and now I'm going back to season 1. Ever since the books were released and I found them appealing but hard to get through for emotional reasons, I felt the same way about the series, but I started watching it again bc I've been trapped in my guest room trying to socialize some kittens. Once I finished season 3 I went back and restarted at season 1. I love how Daniel Handler created this coherent and interesting world and used it to tell a story that I find so humane and tender and also realistic and helpful, and then managed to see it through to the end twice. It's an amazing achievement. I wish I was back in college so I could write so many papers.

Before I watched this I couldn't bear to finish the books so I had read the Wikipedia summaries and I gotta say watching was a much better experience.

I too was thinking about if Lemony's love for Beatrice was inappropriate, but I concluded it was wholesome because he didn't bother her about it, he just tried to tell her story & do right by her kids. Ultimately that's the best anyone can do.
posted by bleep at 2:42 PM on December 31, 2019 [1 favorite]

Also I think it has a very important anti-fascism message, that people cant be fitted into boxes and sorted into piles of good & bad, and the way the well-meaning justice system can fail people when it can't account for that, and how devastating the result of that failure is.
posted by bleep at 2:47 PM on December 31, 2019 [1 favorite]