Blackadder

About the series

Contains story spoilers.

Blackadder is a historical sitcom franchise that recasts Edmund Blackadder and his servant Baldrick across sharply different eras. The 1983 The Black Adder places Edmund as a prince at the court of Richard IV, scheming for status but repeatedly undone by his own poor judgment. In ‘The Queen of Spain’s Beard,’ the king arranges Edmund’s marriage to Infanta Maria Escalosa to secure Spain’s support against France; Edmund first imagines a beautiful match, then recoils when he meets his bride. The Tudor Blackadder II changes the balance: Edmund is now a clever courtier attempting to stay in favour with Elizabeth I, while the prince’s ambitions have become social survival near a volatile monarch. Each new period resets rank and danger rather than continuing one uninterrupted biography.

The Tudor court’s danger is just as real within its farcical world. In “Chains,” Blackadder and Melchett are kidnapped by Prince Ludwig, who demands a ransom. Elizabeth decides to spend the money on a party instead. The captives bargain with their jailer, then work together to overpower the guards and escape. Back at court, Blackadder identifies Ludwig disguised as Nursie and attacks him, apparently saving the gathering. The reassurance lasts only until the scene after the credits: the court lies dead, and Ludwig stands over them dressed as the Queen. Edmund’s cleverness can win him an argument or expose a disguise, but it cannot make royal favour dependable. The period’s childish monarch and competing courtiers make every attempt to secure his position vulnerable to someone else’s whim.

The Regency series gives Edmund a different kind of leverage: he is butler to the extravagant Prince Regent George. In “Dish and Dishonesty,” he tries to protect George’s income by securing a parliamentary seat for Baldrick, only to discover that his candidate has voted against the Prince’s interests. In “Ink and Incapability,” George’s patronage brings Samuel Johnson’s dictionary into the household, where Baldrick burns the only copy. Blackadder is left trying to reconstruct an immense work because neither his employer nor his assistant can be trusted with it. When George runs out of money, Edmund attempts to arrange a profitable marriage to Amy Hardwood, but the highwayman called the Shadow interferes. The intelligent servant can see what is wrong with the people around him; recognising their stupidity does not give him the money or rank needed to live independently of them.

Blackadder Goes Forth relocates the familiar trio to a British trench on the Western Front in 1917. Captain Edmund Blackadder wants to avoid the next ‘big push’; Lieutenant George is eager and sheltered, while Private Baldrick is doggedly loyal but unreliable. Their superior General Melchett directs the men from a distant château, with Captain Kevin Darling handling the paperwork and sharing Blackadder’s rank but not his exposure to the front. That imbalance supplies the series’ recurring target: the men ordered into danger have to obey commanders who remain far from it. Blackadder’s attempts to escape are not one continuous caper but a set of plans repeatedly swallowed by the army’s routines, misunderstandings and absurd reversals.

In “Captain Cook,” painting and cooking offer possible ways of avoiding the front; Blackadder keeps looking for an assignment that might save his life. “Corporal Punishment” makes his avoidance of orders more dangerous still. He shoots a carrier pigeon carrying the instruction to advance, then cooks it to destroy the evidence. It turns out to be Melchett’s beloved Speckled Jim. Melchett presides over the court-martial while George’s incompetent defence helps condemn Blackadder to a firing squad. A last-minute intervention by George’s uncle, the new Minister of War, saves him. George and Baldrick have actually forgotten to send their appeal, so Blackadder retaliates by volunteering them for a dangerous mission. Survival depends on a family connection and luck, while the commanding officers lavish more concern on one pigeon than on the men under their authority.

Another escape attempt takes Blackadder and Baldrick into the Royal Air Corps in “Private Plane,” where being shot down and captured replaces trench danger with captivity behind German lines. “General Hospital” then offers Blackadder a spy hunt closer to home. With George recovering from an injury, Blackadder interrogates Darling and begins a relationship with Nurse Mary Fletcher-Brown. He eventually accuses Mary of spying, while a patient with an obvious German accent turns out to be a British agent. Blackadder wins an intelligence appointment and Mary is taken away for execution, but George then reveals that he has been sending letters to his uncle Hermann in Munich. The apparent triumph collapses into another command failure: ordinary correspondence has been carrying information to Germany while the investigation concentrated on finding a suitably suspicious person.

“Goodbyeee” removes the distance that has protected Darling: Melchett sends him to the front just before a major attack. Blackadder tries feigning madness, but discovers that Melchett has punished soldiers who used the same trick. He calls in a favour from Field Marshal Haig, who merely recommends the failed disguise again. George’s earlier enthusiasm gives way to fear as he remembers the friends he has lost; Darling admits that he wanted to survive, return home and marry. With the whistle about to sound, Baldrick offers one last plan, but there is no time to hear it. The four men climb from the trench and charge into gunfire. Their advance slows, then fades into a quiet field of poppies. The ending leaves their deaths implied, without another comic reversal to bring them safely back.