There's been some flack drawn from fans for the Race Lift characters like Mr. Poe, Uncle Monty and Aunt Josephine are getting for the series. However, in the books, Uncle Monty is said to be the children's "late father's cousin's wife's brother" and Josephine is said to be their "second cousin's sister-in-law", making both of them related by marriage, not blood. Therefore it makes sense that neither Monty nor Josephine would look anything like the Baudelaires.
Mr. Poe's solitary good idea in the first season is to compare the handwriting of Josephine's alleged suicide note against something else she'd written to check for forgery. Unlike evaluating child welfare or investigating crime scenes or even having basic human common sense at all, being able to spot forgery is an expected career skill for a banker.
The Hook-Handed Man is shown to be the only adult who can understand Sunny's baby talk. He's revealed to have a sister in the series, and the books make it explicit that she was an infant when he was a teenager, providing him with an excuse to understand her.
Lemony's quietly sighing and leaving right before the Baudelaires are told of their parent's deaths references the fact that he was once in love with their mother, the Beatrice mentioned in the dedications that precede the episodes. He can't bear to see the children of the woman he still loves thrown into such a painfully cruel situation.
One might wonder why Violet and Klaus bring Sunny along on various dangerous excursions, but as early episodes have Sunny get suspended in a birdcage and stuffed into a suitcase after getting left alone, her siblings are understandably reluctant to let her out of their sight.
Eleanora Poe finds the kids in episode 8 "by accident" when she goes to investigate the accident at Lucky Smells. While she states she had a hunch, any reasonable person would know by now that misfortune and accidents follow the Baudelaires very closely.
In Episode 3, there is a picture of Monty and the Baudelaire parents locked in a piano. This is a clever way of not revealing that the parents shown on-screen are the Quagmires, not the Baudelaires.
Lemony reveals early on in the first season that one of the personal touches in his room is a blurred photo of Beatrice. Viewers who had read the books might assume that this was merely to conceal the fact that Beatrice is the Baudelaires' mother, which hadn't been revealed at that point in the show. Instead, much like Monty's photo of the piano, it allows viewers to continue believing that the Quagmire parents are really Mr. and Mrs. Baudelaire.
In "The Miserable Mill", Klaus' trigger word for his hypnosis is "Lucky". Luckily (pun not intended) and tragically at the same time, few would describe him as lucky in the foreseeable future.
The theme song "Look Away". At first it's saying that, literally, yeah, this is a really sad story, so you should look away and go do literally anything else to avoid having to deal with the sadness. But eventually it comes to the point where the opening is actually mocking you, in a sense, because throughout the series plenty of characters do exactly that: they look away from the unfortunate children, they ignore it, and it's that willful ignorance that keeps the Baudelaire children in their perpetual state of misery. Nobody tries to help them, nobody even realizes they need help. The opening is mocking the Adults Are Useless Trope! Emphasized more when the Baudelaires finally come face-to-face with Lemony himself. He offers them a chance to escape from being accused of murder, but they don't, because they refuse to look away from the problem they're facing.
It could also be viewed as insulting the audience, as in no matter what awful things happen, they KNOW you're not going to look away. You're going to keep on staring open-mouthed until the next episode comes on. Looking away is the one thing you WON'T do, no matter what, and the show knows it.
Klaus has his thirteenth birthday in "The Vile Village Part 2," and Mr. Poe mentions Bar Mitzvahs as part of the Running Gag that everyone in the show is Ambiguously Jewish. Bar Mitzvahs are an official passage into adulthood. After this episode, the Baudelaires are not assigned any more legal guardians.
In The Hostile Hospital, the alias Klaus chooses as his doctor disguise is "Doctor Faustus," referencing the play. Olaf later reveals that he's seen through Klaus's disguise without any on-screen epiphany, so he apparently saw through the disguise right from the start. Being an actor, it's implied that he recognized the reference.
During that VFD reveal video, they show a few members in various disguises that Count Olaf had already used, and for a moment it seems like Olaf is just choosing from a random Veritably False Disguise each time to hide, and they all have a wardrobe they're used to using. Then consider the depiction of the circus freaks: they are downtrodden people who think they're irredeemable, and willing to join anyone who gives them any sense of belonging (despite the evil), and Count Olaf was just what they wanted to be and told them what they wanted most. In fact, that's actually what Count Olaf has been doing throughout the entire series: each of his disguises has been tailor made for the guardian of the children, not for the children themselves. While not particularly good enough for the kids to see through, the guardians would get a first impression of him and he would play along so they wouldn't want to doubt who he is.
Coach Genghis saved Vice Principal Nero from having to do work in hiring a new gym teacher. He was a blustering strongman type character, motivational speaker, so into himself, and he at least pretended to acknowledge Nero's talent, helping alleviate any self-doubt he ever had. Him arriving in Nero's life was ideal for him.
Then there's Captain Sham with Aunt Josephine. The peg leg disguise and invented backstory works because Josephine felt a loss at sea which she could identify with, and who was there to admire her, when she probably wasn't expecting anyone to be able to "rescue" her again.
Monty saw Stefano as a rival scientist out to steal his work, in a sense having so much pride in himself and such an inflated sense of importance that he was certain that rival scientists were after his work that he didn't doubt it when Olaf provided the excuse.
Detective Dupin and Chief Luciana go to the Village of Fowl Devotees after they have some foreign kids arrive who they're all unsure about. Who better than an exotic professional to arrive and confirm all their biases?
Shirley is tailormade to be the most absurd accusation the children could possibly make. It's a person who not only looks absolutely nothing like Count Olaf (they're not even the same gender), but also doesn't appear to be directly involved with the children in any real way. Even if the adults believe that Klaus is being hypnotized, Dr. Orwell is the one they'll consider the villain. It's the most effective way of destroying the Baudelaires' credibility at a time when the adults are beginning to expect him. This also allows him to operate the hypnosis unsuspected, which gives him the opportunity to swoop in as Sir's savior, offering to take those pesky orphans off of his hands.
Günter was made to be generically fashionable in a way that Jerome can’t seem to understand, so he didn’t question his presence when Esmé supported it.
While Olaf is a lousy actor, the one he always understands best is people. It was the one thing Lemony could never understand and the one thing that probably made Olaf be seen as an important part of the VFD pre-schism; most of the other volunteers are bookish introverts to various degrees who struggled with negotiating with ordinary people. But Olaf knew people all right, and he could play them like a fiddle. It’s a skill that you can’t just learn from a book and that makes it something the ‘good’ side of the VFD would never value.
The appearance of Beatrice Baudelaire II in the end (a detail from "The Beatrice Letters") filled in the knowledge gap that prevented Lemony from finishing the series after "The Penultimate Peril." A long gap was implied because Lemony didn't know there was another Beatrice until she revealed herself.
The relatively happy ending of the Baudelaires surviving (at least for a while) seems to contradict Lemony's repeated promises that there would be no happy endings. But when Lemony told us that, he himself didn't know what happened to the Baudelaires after "The Penultimate Peril" because he had lost the trail.
In Season 2 when Jacques had Olaf in jail, and asked if he wanted tea, Olaf replied with, "No, you always make it too bitter." The sugar they created as a cure is stated by Esmé to be bitter, like the apples.
From the CMOA page: "Aunt Josephine stands up to Count Olaf instead of letting him take the orphans, even if it was mainly to correct his grammar." Rewatching the scene where Aunt Josephine stood up to Olaf, pay attention to where she starts turning from cowardly to fierce and formidable. She doesn't get upset at his grammar usage, she gets mad at him telling her that he fed Ike a number of beef tamales. Earlier in the same episode, Aunt Josephine mentions in passing that that was the food he ate before he died. That that was the food that cause the leeches to swarm. He hadn't made a grammar mistake prior to that, she stood up to him because he'd just admitted to killing Ike!
"He's ambiivalent! ... ambiiguous!..." ("Ambidextrous.") "Ambidextrous!" ... Olaf tries to describe Kevin... and he's not entirely wrong about any of those.
Telling the Denouements apart. Frank is more commanding and domineering while ordering the Baudelaires around, giving them simple orders and replying curtly to questions. While Ernest is more friendly, he is also more inquisitive and vague, attempting to squeeze information out of them in his first scene.
When asked "Are you Frank or Ernest", Dewey Denouement is the only one not to answer in the affirmative.
There's a Running Gag throughout the series where Count Olaf constantly gets the words "figuratively" and "literally" mixed up. The only time he gets it right is after he's shot by Ishmael, when he says "you literally started it!" It's possible that he was getting it wrong on purpose all along as part of his deliberately anti-intellectual stance, but he reflexively uses it correctly when in great pain and distress.
Lemony's lyrics in the song at the end of the first season about his beloved Beatrice being cold in the ground forever have a different meaning to those who've read the books: they're an apology, and a promise. After all, he'd just spent the entire first season cruelly teasing that the Baudelaire parents actually survived, when they were in fact the Quagmire parents. He's saying he won't pull the same trick again - Beatrice Baudelaire is most definitely dead.
The “that’s not how the story goes” song has several layers of this. It isn’t sung in The End, so of course “there’s no happy endings, not here and not now” - the story isn’t over yet. In addition, the end of the series is bittersweet. “You might hope that justice and peace win the day, but that’s not how the story goes” is about the rigged trial and Count Olaf’s death by harpoon gun.
In 'The Bad Beginning: Part 2,' after Klaus tells him he will never touch their fortune, Olaf says he'll "touch whatever [he] want," while gripping Violet's shoulder. Minutes before he plans to forcibly marry her.
After their wedding is performed, he actually attempts to kiss Violet, although he quickly abandons that effort after she winces and turns away.
At first it seems like the Expository Theme Tune is just being sung by Neil Patrick Harris. Which makes sense, everyone loves the man's singing. Then in the second episode of each part, a segment of it gets sung in the voice of whatever disguise Count Olaf is wearing that episode. Suddenly the lyrics telling you to "Look away" are less the traditional warnings by Lemony Snicket to not bear witness to this terrible story, and more Count Olaf himself singing and trying to scare off the viewer so fewer people will know what schemes he's up to. It's worth noting that this only happens in episodes 2, 4, 6, and 8. Episodes 1, 3, 5, and 7 are sung in his own voice. Why? Well, you don't see Count Olaf in disguise until after the theme for those episodes. Further confirming this is that the theater troupe plays it as Diegetic Soundtrack Usage as the curtain rises on "The Marvelous Marriage", implying he wrote it.
Bonus points when you realize the name he gives as the play's author is a sly anagram for "Count Olaf".
Also, looking at the opening lyrics that way gives a little sense to the line from the (surprisingly non-downer final episode"Our story ends in tragedy upon a coastal shelf." From the point of view of the Baudelaire's and the audience, that is a sad bit, but it isn't the very end and it has some better elements. From Olaf's point of view it's both the end of the story and a tragic one at that.
Violet and Klaus are inordinately lucky that Orwell threw Sunny up in the air as she fell into the furnace rather than gripping onto her.
Much like the Baudelaires, the Quagmires have been losing guardians to mysterious circumstances at an alarming rate, but they don't seem to have a single clear instigator along the lines of Count Olaf. The implication is that their lives are being manipulated from the shadows, and given the rash of children orphaned by fires, it's probably safe to assume they're not the only ones; even if the Baudelaires had managed to stop Count Olaf for good at some point, their lives probably wouldn't have been any less tragic.
