Professor Plum (comic)

*This article refers to the depiction of the character from the 2017 comic miniseries. For the main article about the character, see Professor Plum.*

## Relationships

### Family

* Ambassador Peacock (biological father; deceased)
	+ Mrs. Peacock, his wife (deceased)

## Source

**Professor Plum** is a character from the 2017 IDW comic miniseries written by Paul Allor. Plum is a pharmaceutical researcher whose been invited to a dinner party hosted by the mysterious Mr. Boddy. He is also an old friend of Dr. Orchid. After Mr. Boddy's death, Plum and Orchid decided to do their own investigation on the matter, only to discover some dark secrets from the past.

## Profile

### Appearance

Plum is a young man of Pakistani descent. He has black curly hair, a thick mustache and wears glasses. His attire is a purple jacket, a purple polka-dotted shirt, and gray trousers.

### Personality

Professor Plum is a highly intelligent, yet absent-minded and social ineptitude person. A genius polymath with an endless supply of trivia for any situation, Plum almost seems like he's going senile—constantly distracted and unable to read a room. But at least some of his scatterbrained nature may be an act—he has a past with Dr. Orchid that his fellow scientist would rather keep hidden, and when pushed, he's been known to display a shrewder, *darker* side.

Since he was a child, Plum is a believer in determinism, the doctrine that everything was following some kind of cosmic script.

## Background

Plum was the illegitimate son of Ambassador Peacock, who grew up in an orphanage aided by a regular grant from the Ambassador, much to the distaste of his wife, Mrs. Peacock. After Plum turned eighteen, the payments from Ambassador Peacock continued to him directly, but after twelve years — after Peacock was murdered — his widow Mrs. Peacock cut off the payments.  Unbeknownst to Plum, the reclusive Dr. Black and his adoptive daughter were keeping an eye on him throughout his childhood, making sure he was offered opportunities and scholarships that would lead him into pharmaceutical research. Working at Ludo University, Professor Plum collaborated with Dr. Orchid of the CDC on finding a way to grow the *Surobi zinnia* flowers in captivity, but their efforts met with failure thanks to a lack of sufficient samples.

## Role in the comics

### Clue #1

Ten months after the Ambassador's death, Professor Plum was invited, along with several other guests, to the home of Mr. A. Boddy for a dinner party. Meeting with Dr. Orchid in the foyer of the mansion, he greeted his old friend warmly, but was cut off when he began to speak of their shared history, Orchid not wanting the other guests to overhear. During the dinner, Plum was outraged when Mr. Green threatened Miss Scarlett to prove a point about the relative value of lives; after Mr. Boddy tried to calm things down by having Upton bring mango cheesecake for dessert, the Professor tried to entertain the guests with the "funny story" behind 90% of all mangoes sold in the United States coming from the same source, though Upton didn't find it particularly amusing.

Shortly after dinner, Plum was standing in the mansion's foyer with Orchid, Upton, Colonel Mustard, and Senator White, when a gunshot was heard; running upstairs to the house's library, the guests and the butler found Mr. Boddy dead of a gunshot wound, something that was quickly discovered to apparently be the work of Mrs. Peacock. Shortly after the police arrived, Plum spoke to Dr. Orchid about how he had always dreamed of living somewhere like Boddy's mansion; with the two scientists in seclusion together, the Professor asked Orchid whether she had followed through on her long-stated desire to slip laxatives into Mr. Green's food to prove that he was "full of" some euphemistic substance.

### Clue #2

Soon after Mrs. Peacock was herself killed, Detectives Ochre and Amarillo discovered Mr. Boddy's "blackmail room", containing large amounts of personal information on each of the guests, including Professor Plum; in his case, it included both video footage of Plum in the orphanage as a child, and a ledger detailing the 30 years of payments that had been made to the orphanage and the Professor from Ambassador Peacock, stopping the month after the Ambassador died. The detectives showed Plum the footage of himself as a child; he was unable to give them any insight into why Boddy would have such material, and was angered and upset by what he was shown, and when Upton offered Plum his services, the Professor angrily yelled at the butler to get him something to read.

Deciding to escape from the house and find out why Boddy had so much information about him on file, Plum recruited Dr. Orchid to come with him. The two made their way to the blackmail room, though Plum inadvertently allowed all the other guests to overhear their plan; and when they got there, they were encountered by Detective Ochre, who confronted Plum with the ledger of payments from Ambassador Peacock. Ochre suspected that Plum had killed Mrs. Peacock as revenge, either for keeping him from his father or purely for cutting off his money, which the Professor denied; when Ochre took out his handcuffs to take the two guests back to the interrogation room, Plum knocked him down with a book that he was holding, and the two academics fled out of the window, climbing to the ground via a drainpipe. Orchid and Plum took a moment to regroup in the mansion's greenhouse, but were shocked by what they found in there: a roomful of *Surobi zinnia* flowers, thought to be impossible to grow in captivity, and something that—according to Plum—"a lot of people would kill to control".

### Clue #3

Plum, shaken over having assaulted an officer of the law and being trapped by the flooded river, was slapped out of his panic by Orchid in order to plan their next move. When Orchid brought up the murderer on the loose, Plum confessed that he thought that *she* was the killer, but before he could explain the two were interrupted by Detective Amarillo, who believed them to have killed Ochre. The two scientists were forced to dive into the river to escape, much to the chagrin of Plum, who would rather have surrendered to the law; Orchid, however, pointed out that Senator White's deregulation would mean that Mr. Green and his ilk would be able to take full control of the *Surobi zinnia* and the "miracle drugs" extracted from it, persuading Plum to help get to the bottom of the mystery.

### Clue #5

The two found their way into the house's pantry, where Plum used ketchup to create an elaborate diagram on the floor, helping him to figure out how the various players in the house fit together, though not who was responsible for all of it—until, despite discouragement from Dr. Orchid, he decided to covertly follow Upton as he took pills upstairs, where he found Mr. Boddy to still be alive. Orchid nevertheless tried to persuade him not to enter the room and confront Boddy, but Plum was undeterred... and was quickly overpowered by the annoyed Boddy, who was irritated at having to confront the scientist ahead of schedule. Plum kicked Boddy in the shins and the two scientists fled to the pantry once more, only for Boddy to burst out of a secret passage and knock Plum out with a chemical-soaked rag.

### Clue #6

On awakening, the dazed Professor Plum revealed that he had deduced Mr. Boddy's true identity: he was, in fact, Dr. Black, the infamous and reclusive CEO of Black Pharmaceuticals. Though he had figured out Black's plan, which he was impressed by the audacity and brilliance of, Plum was taken aback at the revelation that Black intended to offer him employment—and that Orchid was, in fact, Black's adoptive daughter, who had been keeping Plum safe and under guard during the night's events. As he followed Black and Orchid through the tunnels leading away from the Boddy mansion, Plum realized the true genius of Black's plan: that "Mr. Boddy" and "Upton" didn't exist, leaving the investigators with no clues as to what had really happened. Though he was unimpressed by Dr. Orchid's request that he be part of their family, Professor Plum reluctantly agreed to work for Black—both for the money, for the opportunity to do good with the products of the *Surobi zinnia*, and for the fact that he had realized that if he refused, he wouldn't leave the tunnels alive.

## References

1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Clue #2
2. ↑ Clue #6