V.F.D. - Sugar Bowl

Sugar Bowl

A mysterious sugar bowl is of value to members on both sides of the schism, of which it is stated to be the cause and serves as a MacGuffin to drive the story in later books. Despite it and its contents being pursued by volunteers, villains, and the Baudelaires, its significance is never revealed and it does not appear in the final book of the series, although the books suggest that the sugar bowl contains an antidote for the fungi medusoid mycelium. The one hint to its true meaning is the remark, "it isn't the sugar bowl that's important, it's what's inside it". It said in The Slippery Slope that the sugar bowl was thrown out the window of the V.F.D. headquarters in the Mortmain Mountains (in the Valley of Four Drafts) by one of the members (of V.F.D) into The Stricken Stream. The man who threw the sugar bowl out the window might have been Dewey Denouement. In The Penultimate Peril, the Baudelaire children conclude that Dewey Denouement dropped the sugar bowl into the pond that contains the secret catalog of V.F.D.'s story, which also becomes the final resting place of Dewey Denouement himself.