Characters of Smallville - Recurring Characters - Adam Knight

Adam Knight

Adam Knight appears in six episodes of season three; he is portrayed by Ian Somerhalder. Adam is first seen as a fellow patient of Lana’s at the Smallville Medical Center in the episode "Asylum"; he helps Lana get through her physical therapy after she was trampled by a horse. The two develop a friendship, which starts to grow deeper in the episode "Delete" when Lana offers to rent Adam the apartment above the coffee shop. In "Hereafter", Adam’s actions—specifically his injection of an unidentified drug—begin to arouse suspicion in Lana and her friends. It is revealed Adam died of a rare liver disease, and the injection of a drug given to him by LuthorCorp resurrected him, and is only thing keeping him alive. Lana discovers Adam has been keeping a journal of all her actions, as well as all of Clark’s, so she tries, and fails, to evict him. Lana asks Lex for help in getting rid of Adam, but he disappears before Lex can find him. In "Obsession", Lex tracks Adam’s whereabouts to a LuthorCorp lab run by Dr. Tang, where Dr. Tang has been keeping Adam alive against the orders of Lionel Luthor, who cut off his supply when he failed to uncover any new information on Clark. Adam eventually breaks out of his confinement in the episode "Crisis", killing Dr. Tang and the rest of the lab technicians. He kidnaps Lana and attempts to kill her, but Clark arrives in time to stop him. Without his serum, Adam’s body rapidly deteriorates until he finally dies.

When Adam Knight first appeared, there was internet speculation he was really Smallville's version of Bruce Wayne, based on the combination of the name of one of the actors to portray Bruce Wayne/Batman, Adam West, and one of Batman’s nicknames, "Dark Knight". The crew stated it was never their intention to reveal Adam Knight to be a young version of Bruce Wayne. The actual intention was for Adam to be Lana’s new boyfriend—a legitimate relationship—but the chemistry between Ian Somerhalder and Kristin Kreuk was not working. The creative team decided to bring the character’s storyline out of the romantic path and into a "thriller Pacific Heights direction". According to Gough, the character’s storyline degenerated into a science fiction story, and when that occurred, they decided they had to wrap it up quickly.