A Series Of Unfortunate Events Season 2: 10 Miserable Fan Theories You Don't Want To See
7. Mr Poe Is (Or Was) Part Of The VFD
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Mr Poe is one of the most infuriating people in the children's lives, a constant harbinger of doom whose coughing fits serve as a transition between one unfortunate event and the next, and he's brilliantly realised on the screen by K. Todd Freeman.
While he mostly just seems like an incompetent, spluttering fool, there is a school of thought that there's more to him than meets the eye. Namely, that he was once a part of the V.F.D, the mysterious organisation that haunts the background of the series (and should be far more prominent moving forwards).
We know that he's had the cough from a young age and that could mean he's been unwittingly involved with the V.F.D. since then. Given that the group are linked to the Baudelaire fire and numerous others, then he'd have been subjected to a lot of smoke, hence causing the cough.
Extrapolating this further, there's also the idea of Poe as a bad guy; that he's not really incompetent, but turned to the dark side from the V.F.D., and now works with Count Olaf. Although after witnessing him for a season, he'd have to be an even better actor than Olaf to pull that off.