Snickety Spoilers

I've just finished Netflix's delightful A Series of Unfortunate Events.  While I absolutely loved it, it did leave me with a few questions, the answers to which were more difficult to find than one might expect.  Because, I'll admit, there were a few relationships and plot point that I was not 100% clear on, and because it's been on my mind, here now are explanations for anyone else.

100% Spoilers Ahead.

There were once three siblings, the Snickets.  They were Jacques, Kit and Lemony.  Lemony fell in love with Beatrice.  Beatrice, though she did love him back, could not marry him for some undisclosed reason.  Instead, she married Bertrand Baudelaire and they had three children, Violet, Klaus and Sunny.

The Snickets and the Baudelaires, along with Count Olaf and others, were part of a secret organization, called the Volunteer Fire Department, or V.F.D.  The VFD's mission was to put out figurative fires in the world.  But a schism developed within the VFD, with some members wanting to 'fight fire with fire', thinking it would be OK to kill bad people, and others insisting that the ends did not justify the means.  This came to a head when Beatrice stole a sugar bowl.

What's so special about the sugar bowl?  Well, there is a special mushroom which is exceedingly poisonous and the fungus can spread very fast.  Seems some of the bad VFD members wanted to use this fungus to wipe out bad people.  To combat this, the Baudelaires had created an immunity drug in the form of the sugar in the sugar bowl.  Anyway, the two sides now actively went to war with each other.

The Baudelaires were killed when their house was burned down, leaving their three children as orphans.  Enter Count Olaf, who wants to keep the children so that he can plunder their inheritance.  This begins the events of the books, wherein the children go from location to location, always plagued by and then escaping Count Olaf.

Many members of the VFD tried to help the children, especially Jacques and Kit Snicket, both of whom lost their lives in the process (Jacques killed by County Olaf and Kit killed by the accidentally released fungus).  Lemony did try to help, and offered the children a ride away from one perilous location.  But the children declined, as they thought another person was going to help them get justice.  Lemony, in what appears to be an act of cowardice, flees, leaving the children to find disaster once again.

The children do escape that calamity and make it to a secluded island, where they meet the founder of the VFD, the former principal of Prufrock Academy, where most of the VFD's attended, and the principal handpicked the clever ones to be part of the VFD.

Kit also makes it to the island, pregnant.  She is exposed to the fungus, but Count Olaf, in a final act of heroism before dying, prolongs her life long enough for her to give birth.  The Baudelaire children begin to raise the baby there on the island, and name her Beatrice, after their mother.  After a year, they leave the island.

There's some confusion at this point, as it seems the Baudelaires get separated from the child.  But in the last scene of the show, we see that she has sought out her uncle, Lemony Snicket.  It's interesting to note that he here finds out that the very children he abandoned, saved and raised his sister's child, who is named for the woman he loved.  He then takes it upon himself to trace the entire story of the Baudelaire orphans, and that detective work is the subject of the series.