Original artwork, not a still
Baldrick, believe me: eternity in the company of Beelzebub and all his hellish instruments of death will be a picnic compared to five minutes with me... and this pencil... if we can't replace this dictionary.
— Blackadder · 1983
Behind the line
What it means
Our interpretation.
The threat starts at the scale of damnation and ends with an ordinary pencil. Blackadder's imagination has become more productive than the dictionary-writing effort, which is exactly the problem: he needs thousands of words and has mostly found insults. Leaving out the pencil loses the joke's collision between magnificent language and a very small, immediate object.
Context reviewed
In context
Spoilers for BlackadderShow the scene
In ‘Ink and Incapability’, the second episode of Blackadder the Third (1987), Baldrick has burned Samuel Johnson's dictionary, mistaking it for an unwanted story. Blackadder has promised to recover it before Johnson discovers the loss. Faced with rebuilding an enormous work from memory, he threatens Baldrick with a fate worse than eternal torment. The instrument that gives the speech its payoff is the very pencil they need for the impossible replacement job.
Sources (2)
- Ink and Incapability — episode subtitle transcriptBlackadder the Third — Ink and Incapability; quoted conversationReference checked
- Blackadder the Third — WikiquoteInk and IncapabilityReference checked
Context reviewed
