I Really Love How A Series Of Unfortunate Events Worked Lemony’s Narration Into The Show By Just Having

I really love how A Series of Unfortunate Events worked Lemony’s narration into the show by just having him show up for casual exposition, without anyone noticing or acknowledging him. It’s such an integral part of the books, and the story really wouldn’t work as well without an outside narrator wandering in to deliver random tangents about philosophy and word definitions, and repeatedly warning the audience that the story is depressing as fuck.

But probably the best use of Lemony as a narrator is in the second episode of the Austere Academy, where they have Lemony doing his usual thing of showing up in Jacques’s cab to talk about philosophy, and Jacques starts whistling halfway through the monologue. Then Lemony clarifies he’s quoting something his brother said, and he’d give anything to sit and talk with him again. And then the monologue just… stops. The entire episode stops, just to linger on this one scene of Jacques and Lemony whistling a song together. Except they aren’t whistling together, Jacques is driving an empty cab down an empty road and whistling to himself, because Lemony isn’t there. He’s telling the story from a decade in the future, Jacques is long dead, but Lemony needs to pretend otherwise for just a minute. Then the story can continue. It almost feels like he’s stalling, in a way - Lemony wants to live in this moment of Jacques being calm and safe, because in this moment, Jacques is alive, but the story is inevitably moving towards his death.

It’s a really important moment, and honestly might be my favourite scene in the whole show. Lemony’s grief and how it colours every part of the narrative is such an integral part of the story; he’s telling a story about three children he cares about going through hell, and that story begins with the death of the woman he loved, has his brother’s murder in the middle, and ends with his sister’s death. Lemony isn’t involved in the story personally, he’s just the guy telling it in the aftermath, but he’s never a detached narrator. He knows the entire story, and he spends the whole time grieving for things he hasn’t told us yet.