#0553

What?

happy new years or whatever

Hi, @rghaga! The showrunner has explicitly said that Daniel Handler never told the other writers what was in the sugar bowl, so they came up with their explanation. So what we see in the show is only an hypothesis.

The importance of the Sugar Bowl

Whereas book readers never found out what was in the Sugar Bowl — the MacGuffin that both sides of VFD were after — viewers of the show did. In the series finale, it was revealed that the Sugar Bowl contained a cure and inoculation to the deadly Medusoid Mycelium.“The Sugar Bowl drove me crazy,” says Sonnenfeld, explaining why he decided to tie up this dangling thread.Of course, what’s interesting about this revelation is that there were already several cures for the virus floating around the show’s world, specifically horseradish and, as we find out in the finale, apples. That redundancy, it turns out, was on purpose.“I think [the contents of the Sugar Bowl] is also a little bit metaphorical in that it’s a lot of people fighting over things that they don’t have to fight over,” says Sonnenfeld. “What you find out is in the Sugar Bowl could definitely be manufactured, created, or duplicated independently of the Sugar Bowl.… It all ultimately is a certain amount of to-do about something that could’ve been fixed a different way.”While Sonnenfeld isn’t sure whether or not Handler intended for the Sugar Bowl to contain a cure, he does think the author was also using it metaphorically.

[“A Series of Unfortunate Events boss breaks down the ‘emotional’ series finale”, interview with Netflix series showrunner Barry Sonnenfeld by Chancellor Agard for Entertainment magazine (Link), January 03, 2019 at 06:16 PM EST]

[Liam R. Findlay from 667 Dark Avenue mesage board talked with show writer Joe Tracz (Link) and confirms that Daniel Handler never told the other writers if their solution was the correct one. It’s a reliable source, though by no means official]

As to my opinions about the sugar bowl, I believe that:

This theory is the most likely to be the true answer: (Link)The content of the sugar bowl is irrelevant and worthless because it’s being used as a bait by the volunteers to lure Olaf and his allies into certain places. V.F.D. higher-ups pretend the sugar bowl is a mysterious superweapon which will defeat the other side of the schism once and for all, but it’s actually an urban legend they designed to waste their time and resources.This allows volunteers to gather evidence on their enemies and to call the police on them. The trial at Hotel Denouement was an example of this type of scheme.

The idea that the sugar bowl contains some kind of antidote/immunity to the Medusoid Mycelium makes little sense. I’ve explained why in this article: (Link) Even in the show where this hypothesis is taken as canon, there are several glaring plotholes internal to the logic of the Netflix series. So it makes even less sense in book canon, which has a very different chronology.

However, if we believe that the content of the sygar bowl is irrelevant to the grand scheme of things, this actually opens up many possibilities. Because the content of the sugar bowl is unimportant, it wouldn’t really matter if a volunteer once used it as hiding place for something unrelated to its true mission as bait. Could Beatrice have hidden a core of bitter apple inside the sugar bowl at one point? Maybe, but it’s mostly trivia and it’s not the reason everyone is after it. They’re after it because they believe (mistakenly) that the sugar bowl contains something far more important than any antidote. It could also have contained a microphone, a tape recording, evidence on Lemony’s innocence (Link), even sugar… it really doesn’t even matter if said objects were withdrawn from the bowl after a while. The sugar bowl could have been used as a convenient luggage for all kind of less-important artefacts over the years. These contents could also have been used as red herrings by the volunteers to better hide the sugar bowl’s deceptive nature.

I’m not sure if it’s easy to tell it’s any different but today (and yesterday) have been an experiment with making watercolour brushes that use different grains. It means I can make something look more smooth, or more textured

and, I didn’t think to do it here but I could add scales, or, I can make things metallic, or wooden, all while still using a watercolour brush! Once I get the hang of it it’s going to be so so so so so fun :3