The End. This entry will contain spoilers, although if you are looking for an actual plot summary you’ll have to go somewhere else.

I finished it this morning, after rereading the entire series, including two rereadings each of The Unauthorized Biography, The Beatrice Letters, and The Penultimate Peril. I was spoiled before I started reading it, and I kind of intended to hate it, but I did not. I liked it very much. I usually don’t like heavy-handed political messages, but this is a book for kids, really, and as young adult books go, this one is subtle enough. You’ve got your anti-sectarianism message, your warning against abistinence-only education, and your warning against stupidity in the name of dogma. (If there was ever any doubt that the message of this series is something along the lines of “knowledge is power,” that doubt was pretty much obliterated when the kids were saved by a snake handing them an apple.)

And a lot less is left unresolved than I was led to believe by the spoilers, but you might only get that if you have recently reread everything. By the time I finished The Slippery Slope, I was pretty sure both Baudelaire parents were dead. Quigley points out to Violet that he is probably the survivor of the fire mentioned on page 13 of the Snicket file, and when you figure that Quigley has probably seen parts of the Snicket file since he was working with Jacques, you can probably trust his information. And I don’t think we were intended to think that one of the parents would be alive after that, because the kids really stop looking for them after that the end of that book. They are still looking for answers, and they still have a dim hope that maybe one of their parents survived via the underground tunnel, but a search for their parents is no longer a focus of the story.

I also read that we never find out who J.S. is, but after rereading The Penultimate Peril, I think we were all making that too complicated. It was Jerome Squalor and Justice Strauss. No further mystery.

I also figured out on a second reading that the letters to Beatrice were not the same as the letters from Beatrice, although first I thought it was just a time difference — that the letters from her were written earlier, when she was a little girl. But that doesn’t work because she mentions Violet, Klaus, and Sunny. So I guessed that there was a second Beatrice, and I figured she had to be a sibling, but I wasn’t sure if she was younger or older. Obviously I was wrong about who she was, but I was right that there were two of them (not counting the boat).

Obviously he left a lot of questions, but a lot was answered, too, even though some of the spoilers I read said that these questions were left hanging. We do know what happened to the Quagmires — they got swallowed up by the great unknowable, whatever that is. We do know that there is another hotel under the one that burned; that was answered in The Penultimate Peril, so it did not really need to be answered in The End. (And Snicket confirms that it is still there, and someone is still cataloguing, and it hasn’t been found.) We know what was in the sugar bowl (and I think it’s clear that Lemony Snicket has it, that he retrieved it from the pond and had it with him in the taxi when he tried to get the Baudelaires to leave the hotel with him). We know why Count Olaf felt entitled to the Baudelaires’ fortune, since their parents killed his parents and all.

We don’t know some other stuff, or at least I don’t, although I suspect I just didn’t figure it out. Who was the woman who retrieved the sugar bowl from the grotto and took it to Captain Widdershins? I think it was probably Kit Snicket, but I’m not sure. What was the message that Captain Widdershins and Phil left in the refrigerator for the orphans when they abandoned the submarine? I didn’t understand the code, but there was definitely a message. (Six lemon-lime sodas, a bit of soft cheese wrapped in wax paper, and a cake that said “Violet’s Fifteenth Date.”) What was up with the Poes?

And who was Bruce? I think Bruce was Lemony Snicket, but maybe that’s too easy, or too much thinking. Maybe he’s just another volunteer, albeit one who is sort of mysterious and who always seems to turn up at crucial moments.

And, of course, we don’t know what happens next. In the Beatrice letters, the poster and the coded message make it clear that the boat “Beatrice” sinks. The whisk, the hair ribbon, and Klaus’s glasses all float up into a cave somewhere, and the boat is in pieces. We know that little Beatrice somehow makes it to civilization, but are the Baudelaires dead? Did the great unknowable thingie get them? How could Beatrice have heard Sunny’s voice on the radio unless Sunny survived? Are they just separated, or are the older orphans dead?

Maybe that all comes in the next book.