A Series of Unfortunate Events Season 2 Review

So we begin the next round of unfortunate adventures in the life of three orphans, Violet, Klaus, and Sunny. The fabulous first season left everyone counting down until season 2, which covers _The Austere Academy, The Ersatz Elevator, The Vile Village, The Hostile Hospital, and The Carnivorous Carnival_. Last season was graced with Joan Cusack, while this season has the perfect addition of Nathan Fillion as Jaques Snicket.

The Baudelaires are moved from one crazy scenario to the next, while Snicket and his fellow conspirers track down Count Olaf and his miscreants.

The snappy dialogue is full of references and unabashed self-awareness. The stories are as fun as they are unlikely, while keeping a fast paced rhythm as the children bounce from one theory to the next.

There’s just enough hope to keep you going, just enough heroes to enjoy the villains, and just enough solutions to handle the problems.

The orphans consistently run into dreamers hoping to escape, usually because of fear. It’s amazing how the Baudelaires are stuck in this battle between heroes and villains, while constantly being in the care of sad and timid guardians. Some of their guardians step up and show startling bravery in the face of extreme circumstances.

The first season set up the Baudelaires in a boarding school, along with fellow orphans Duncan and Isadora (was Snicket a ballroom fan?). Klaus and Violet are determined to save their new friends from Count Olaf, who is after the Quagmire fortune as well as the Baudelaire fortune.

Violet invents gadgets and fixes everything as they go from a crab infested shack to a fatal test to an elevator shaft. Klaus pieces together the vague clues and hints of their parents past that sends them on their dark hunt down the rabbit hole.

And Sunny chews her way through life, unless she’s driving a firetruck of course.

Lemony Snicket, or Daniel Handler, wrote books about bad things happening to good people. His books follow a string of clues and hints that almost fit together. Truth and a happy ending are at the tip of your fingers… but that’s not the point of these books. These stories teach kids perseverance and how to handle bad news.

Snicket fills his stories with explanations and definitions and reflections, rambling through this thoughts on the eventful situations while telling them. It’s an odd narration, but that’s exactly the style he’s meticulously exploring.

I love the costumes and the set, they create an amazing cartoonish world and show how passionate the filmmakers are about this project. In a world of CGI, it’s refreshing to see a real set portrayed so extensively.

The Baudelaires are surprisingly respectable looking in their uniforms and suits, despite their circumstances, until they get to the carnival and then they get to take a page out of Olaf’s book and live in costume. Interestingly enough, they start to understand Olaf and his crew a little better when they’re in costume. They’ve spent so much time evading the villains, it’s time for psychological warfare. But we’ll see how the children handle Olaf as his determination increases with each miserable book.

The children live in a world full of incompetent adults who occasionally utter profound statements about life. They watch people full of good intentions try to stop the villainous Count Olaf. They see people spread evil, ignore evil, or just simply give up.

But the Baudelaires cannot give up. They must evade Count Olaf and discover their parent’s mysterious secrets, including the secret of their survival…