End of Blackadder

I've always enjoyed the Blackadder series on YouTube. It's Rowan Atkinson being a whole lot more intellectual than ever was as Mr. Bean—lots of quick, scathing wit. If you're not familiar with the series, the basic idea is that Atkinson's character (Blackadder) begins as a member of the minor nobility during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. His descendants (and the descendants of his idiot companions) keep reappearing down through history.

Anyhow, the series was enough fun on YouTube that I got a copy of a DVD from the public library. It's apparently a pretty popular series, because the only one I could find was the very last one, set during WWI. Great fun. Blackadder kills (and eats) a carrier pigeon that was bringing orders to attack—and learns that the pigeon was the general's only boyhood friend (thus getting himself sentenced to death by firing squad, only to slip out of that one at the last second).

In fact, that's the whole point of the series. Through unlikely turns of events, Blackadder is always finding himself at the point of disaster, only to escape at the last possible second. He's the only thinking person on the screen; his manservant Baldrick is the walking definition of "numb" and his lieutenant is the kind of idiot who keeps writing war plans to an uncle in Berlin.

All was great fun until the final episode. The soldiers are ordered to go over the top, and Blackadder's attempts to wiggle out keep misfiring. Long-time fans keep expecting a last-second solution to his problem, but then things go all pear-shaped. The men begin talking about how their sunny hopes for a quick end to the war have been destroyed. Almost everyone they know or care about has been killed. (Historical fact: something like one in every eight men in WWI survived uninjured. In most units, over half of the men were killed.) Out of options, they finally go over the top into no-man's land, armed with rifles and handguns, and the final credits show a field of poppies in a field in Flanders.