Adam (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

Adam is a fictional character in the fourth season of the 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 Professor 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 left over from the melee to create an army of monsters to set loose on Sunnydale. Buffy's effectiveness as a Slayer is 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 question tradition and authority, specifically institutional authority, which is a repeated theme on the show. Adam has a "design flaw": Adam finds Dr. Walsh unnecessary (his existence supplemented with technology), and as such kills her—a clear example of rejecting authority. Critical reception to Adam has largely ranged from mixed to negative. 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.

Adam makes his first appearance on the thirteenth episode of season four, "The I in Team". The first twelve episodes of the season establish the overarching themes, with increasing focus on the mysterious activities of the Initiative. Buffy and Willow begin attending college, an experience which overwhelms Buffy immediately as she finds herself far outside her comfort zone. In the season premiere, Buffy and Willow Rosenberg begin attending a challenging psychology class taught by Dr. Maggie Walsh (Lindsay Crouse). She also meets Dr. Walsh's teaching assistant Riley Finn (Marc Blucas) and they become attracted to each other. Riley is in charge of a military commando organization that hunts vampires and demons, and captures them for research. It is not revealed to audiences that Dr. Walsh is the head of the research branch of Riley's military organization, called the Initiative, until the seventh episode.

The Initiative's goals are gradually made clearer. A recurring character since the second season is Spike (James Marsters), a mercenary vampire who has fought both against and with Buffy in the past, depending on what suits his interests. Recently wanting to kill Buffy, Spike is captured by the Initiative before he can get to her and implanted with a chip in his brain that causes intense pain if he tries to attack humans to feed on them, or even to fight them. Buffy begins enthusiastically training with the Initiative, spending more time with Riley, and trying to impress Dr. Walsh. At different times, Willow, Xander Harris, and Rupert Giles caution Buffy that she does not know the Initiative's true motives and there are questions about their mission that are unanswered. Buffy begins asking questions during "The I in Team". After being sent after a Polgara demon, a being with a skewer in its arm, she wants to know why the demon must be captured alive and unharmed as she is used to killing demons. Her questions at first confound Dr. Walsh—who answers to no one—then cement Dr. Walsh's decision to remove Buffy from the Initiative. After a botched attempt to kill Buffy, Dr. Walsh consoles herself by going into laboratory room 314 and speaking to her pet project, Adam who is laying on a table, apparently unconscious. Adam rises and impales Dr. Walsh with the skewer in his arm—the one taken off the Polgara demon. His first word is "Mommy", which he says as Dr. Walsh falls to the floor, dead.

Riley, meanwhile, learns of Dr. Walsh's death and his comrades Forrest Gates (Leonard Roberts) and Graham Miller (Bailey Chase) suspect Buffy to be her murderer. Extremely agitated and showing signs of drug withdrawal, he follows Buffy and demands to know the truth in "Goodbye Iowa". None of them are aware of Adam until he re-emerges in the underground laboratories of the Initiative, killing Dr. Walsh's assistant and another soldier. He tells Riley that he knows Dr. Walsh created them both, that she gave Riley chemicals to strengthen him, which makes them brothers. When Riley refuses to acknowledge their bond, Adam skewers Riley, and knocks Buffy across the room while Forrest and Graham are trying to enter the locked door. Adam leaves and the Initiative are tasked with hunting him down and killing him. When one of Sunnydale's residents, Jonathan Levinson (Danny Strong), casts a spell making him the center of everyone's attention in "Superstar", Adam is the only character in town who realizes it is an illusion. He explains his insight by saying he is "aware". His uniqueness has set him apart. Adam is interested in how the illusion will play out, however, and watches it unfold. During the illusion, Jonathan—temporarily a part of the Inititative—discovers Adam's only weakness: a uranium power core source which, effectively, will never allow him to die.

Spike simultaneously discovers Adam to be communicating with the town's demon underworld, asking for favors through a charisma he has over them. Adam promises if Spike can drive apart Buffy and Riley and their friends, he will remove Spike's microchip. The plan to drive Buffy, Willow, Xander, and Giles apart works for a while; at their lowest, the four refuse to speak to each other, but each of them realizes in "Primeval" that they were manipulated by Spike and return, apologetic. They realize that Adam has been orchestrating the capture of the town's vampires and demons so he can release them in the Initiative; the Initiative's holding cells are becoming overcrowded and the soldiers spread very thin and overworked. The soldiers and demons will then proceed to kill each other. Adam then intends to use the resulting carnage to create an army of monsters much like himself.

Buffy, Willow, Xander, and Giles realize they must work as one unit to defeat Adam. They are captured sneaking into the Initiative, but Adam trips the power, releasing all the demons and a fight breaks out all over the facility. Buffy, Willow, Xander, and Giles get themselves into a room adjacent to 314 as Willow starts to cast the spell to join them all temporarily. Riley distracts Adam's demonoid minions while Buffy confronts Adam. However, Adam, after modulating his arm to dispense a minigun, is able to overpower her. Suddenly, the spell begins to work: to function as one unit, Willow becomes the spirit, Giles the mind, Xander the heart, and Buffy the hand, or strength of their ensemble. They work through Buffy to neutralize Adam, telling him "You could never hope to grasp the source of our power". Adam, alone but intrigued, shoots at them to no avail. Adam then shoots a missile, which is changed into doves, and his gun is reverted into his arm. They are able, through Buffy, to punch inside Adam's chest, remove his uranium core, destroying him.

Adam's most significant influence following his death is in the next episode "Restless", where the cost of defeating Adam is made apparent. Buffy's fourth season was a first in the series in that the Scoobies' defeat of the Big Bad did not occur in a two-part grand season finale. "Primeval" is not the last episode of the season. Joss Whedon felt so strongly about the importance of the four core characters that he dedicated the finale to exploring their development. "Restless" opens with Buffy, Willow, Xander, and Giles arriving at Buffy's mother's house still brimming with the energy of the spell that bound them together in "Primeval". Each of them falls asleep quickly, however, and their dreams are a pastiche of enigmatic episodes that both reveal much about each character, but also foreshadow what will occur in seasons to come. Their dreams also mirror their roles in the spell they performed to kill Adam. The magic they used to defeat the influence of science creates an inverse crisis, violating the series' set of laws. Both Riley and Adam, now only in human form, appear in Buffy's dream. They are wearing business suits, sitting together at a glass conference table as Buffy walks into the room, telling her they are naming things—as Adam did in the Garden of Eden—and making plans to take over the world. Buffy asks Adam what his name was before he was a monster, but he cannot tell her. Adam appears once more in the series as one of the faces of the First Evil, the seventh season's Big Bad, in "Lessons".