Relationship Spotlight: The Baudelaires & Count Olaf (A Series of Unfortunate Events)

Yep – another post-season-3 Series of Unfortunate Events write-up (note:  even though we do get a ring of what I’m about to talk about in the books, I feel it’s emphasized more on the show.)  This isn’t the sort of Relationship Spotlight that celebrates a fictional relationship I adore that makes me feel all squishy, as is the case with most of them.  Instead, it’s the kind that examines a relationship that just kind of fascinates me (see also, Tony and Sid on Skins.)  Spoilers for “The Carnivorous Carnival” through “The End.”

From the start, Count Olaf is an interesting villain for the Baudelaire orphans to encounter because there are drastically-different sides to him.  He’s a horrifically-hammy actor and chronically dumb, but at the same time, he’s genuinely frightening – not many baddies could forget they’re the one driving their own getaway car in one scene and pull off convincingly threatening a toddler with a knife in another.  This makes him a great contrast to Violet, Klaus, and Sunny, who are all well-spoken and intelligent and usually try to do the noble thing.  His oafishness is played for laughs, but then he goes menacing on them and you remember that these are children trying to escape a fortune-hungry murderer who’s fixated on them.

A running theme of the series is that the Baudelaires immediately recognize Count Olaf in every single disguise (because of his aforementioned terrible acting and general stupidity, all his disguises are laughably transparent,) but they can never get an adult to believe them, even the ones who care about them.  Perhaps this highlights the cleverness of the children, but it also shows what a horrible situation they’re in, because they see the writing on the wall every time and no one will listen.  For all of VFD’s background dealings with codes, secgret signals, and feats of daring do, the Baudelaires always have to save themselves.  Guardians come and go – they’re too frightened or skittish or naïve to be of any use to the Baudelaires, or they’re casualties of Count Olaf’s desire for the Baudelaire fortune.  In their lives, Count Olaf is the largest constant they have besides each other.

The show pulls some intriguing things out of the Baudelaires’ scenes with Count Olaf, beginning at the end of season 2 and carrying over into season 3.  I’m just captivated when, at the end of “The Carnivorous Carnival,” Count Olaf tasks the in-disguise Violet and Klaus with burning down Caligari Carnival.  Obviously, the kids don’t want to do it but feel like it’s the only way not to blow their cover.  Seeing their reticence, Count Olaf is so tender with them, admitting that it was hard for him the first time too and offering them his own lighter to get them started.  It’s an eerie moment that just gets even more twisted when it’s revealed that he already knows they’re the Baudelaires in disguise.  The man who burned down their house, killing their parents in the process, helps them to start a fire of their own?  Shiver.

This weird closeness between Count Olaf and the Baudelaires crops up again in both “The Penultimate Peril” and “The End.”  There’s of course the scene in which the Baudelaires try to talk Count Olaf down from firing the harpoon gun and he quietly says, “But it’s all I know how to do.”  They’re able to get their hands on the gun and it feels like it might be a real moment, but then everything goes wrong (as it always does.)

It’s when Count Olaf is at his lowest that he appeals most to the children.  When he’s captured by VFD to be put on trial, he dangles the promise of truth in front of them:  truths about their parents, about VFD, about everything they’ve investigated that’s been held tantalizingly out of reach.  He does the same thing in “The End,” similarly when he’s in greatest peril.  The Baudelaires are smart enough to recognize an obvious gambit when they see one, but that doesn’t stop them from being tempted.  They’re also smart enough to crave answers, and as wicked as Count Olaf is throughout the series, the prospect of real understanding when they’ve been kept so much in the dark is a seductive one. 

In the midst of these last-ditch efforts to save his own skin by giving the Baudelaires the knowledge they want, Count Olaf also positions himself, weirdly, as the only one they can genuinely trust.  Odd, coming from a villain who’s constantly using disguises to try and get them in his clutches so he can steal their fortune, but in a way, he wears his villainy on his sleeve with those transparent disguises.  Count Olaf both disgusts and terrifies the Baudelaires, but they know where they stand with him.  They know what to expect, unlike the guardians who let them down or the tangled web woven by the Volunteers who get them mixed up in all sorts of confusion without ever telling them anything.  In the middle of his own trial, Count Olaf accuses the assembled adults from past episodes of doing far more to help him than they ever helped the Baudelaires; through their ineffectiveness and/or incompetence, they cleared the path for him at every turn.

Now of course, this is as preposterous as it is gross.  Count Olaf is at the root of all the Baudelaires’ unfortunate events, and trying to promote this bizarre kinship between them, even as a ploy, is twisted.  The way the series presents it, I’d say it’s partly gaslighting (obviously,) but I also think Count Olaf may believe this, at least a tiny bit.  There’s the fact that no one ever really thinks of themselves as the villain of their own story, and we see plenty of scenes in the final episodes in which Count Olaf genuinely seems to relate to the Baudelaires, a kind of dark mirror of what they might have become had they made different choices.  In his justifications and self-pitying, he tries to claim that they’re really not so different, and at least a small part of him seems to think that’s true.

But what I really appreciate is that, however messy and complicated all this gets, the series doesn’t absolve Count Olaf or bring him into the fold.  His last scenes in “The End” are confusing and emotional for the Baudelaires, showing a side of him they’ve never so much as glimpsed before, and it throws them for a loop.  He does a noble thing (helping Kit,) but it doesn’t erase his crimes, and the lovely poetry he quotes in his last scene can’t change things either.  When he dies in the end, the Baudelaires seem, to me, kind of numb.  They don’t know what to think.  They’re still trying to process what they’ve just witnessed, and even apart from all that, Count Olaf has been such a major force in their lives for so long now that they can’t quite take in the fact that their time of running from him is finally over.

A fascinating relationship, charged with violence and manipulation, so complex even though it remains so clear on the face of it.  Bravo to everyone involved in bringing this dynamic to the screen.