Adam (Buffy The Vampire Slayer)

Adam (Buffy The Vampire Slayer)

Adam is a fictional character in the fourth season of the fantasy television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Portrayed by George Hertzberg, he is a monster created from a man and the collected parts of demons, vampires, and technology: the product of a perverse experiment carried out by military scientists. The series' main character, Buffy Summers, encounters and ultimately defeats him in the fourth season. Adam is the creation of Dr. Maggie Walsh (Lindsay Crouse), the head of a military-like organization called The Initiative that studies how to alter the harmful behavior inherent to demons. Adam and the Initiative are the fourth season's primary antagonists, or Big Bad.

The premise of the series is that Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) is a Slayer, endowed with superhuman strength to fight vampires and evil creatures in the fictional town of Sunnydale. In the fourth season, Buffy begins attending college, where she discovers that her psychology professor, Walsh, is a scientist for the Initiative. Adam is Dr. Walsh's horrible masterpiece, an allusion to Frankenstein's monster, whose first conscious act is killing his creator. Adam's search for understanding himself and his true nature, combined for his penchant for chaos, leads him to orchestrate a massacre between demons and humans, after which he will be able use body parts leftover from the melee to create an army of monsters to set loose on Sunnydale. Buffy's effectiveness as a Slayer is an increased because her close friends and family, called the Scooby Gang, assist her in her battles. By the end of season four the members of the group have become estranged and must come back together in order to defeat the apparently invincible Adam.

Buffy studies scholars have critically examined the character of Adam, noting that he is a clear reference to Frankenstein's monster. Throughout the action of the novel, the monster constantly asks what he is and why he was created, much like Adam. Whedon wanted Adam to be inquisitive and introspective, directing George Hertzberg to "find the stillness" in the character. The presence of Adam also serves to questioning tradition and authority, specifically institutional authority, which is a repeated theme on the show. Adam has a "design flaw": Adam supplants Dr. Walsh's existence with technology, finding her unnecessary and killing her—an act of questioning authority. Critical reception to Adam has been largely mixed, with critics' opinions ranging from negative to positive. Some commentators felt his subplot was confusing and unconvincing. Others enjoyed the concept and praised the make-up and special effects used to create the character.