Joss Whedon's seminal supernatural TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer is surely one of the most influential genre shows ever produced, if not the definitive article. Everything from its format - primarily a mixing of high school drama and horror with a fair amount of comedy - to its slang-heavy, unique dialogue - Buffy characters are penchant-y for putting y's on the end of words that don't usually have them - have inspired a range of television shows ever since it first aired as a midseason replacement in 1997. However, the greatest cultural impact Buffy has made on TV is surely coining the phrase 'Big Bad.' A play on the Big Bad Wolf from fairy tales, the term was used both by fans and within the series itself to describe the main villain of an individual season of the show - and has since been adopted by TV fans worldwide. As the progenitor of the phrase, Buffy naturally has a bumper pack of brilliant Big Bads. So join us as we wield the strength and skill to look at a list of vampires, demons and the forces of darkness, from the littlest Bad to the best and Biggest Bad of them all.
7. Adam - Season Four
The story arc of Season Four largely revolved around Buffy and her friends discovering the Initiative, a super-secret off-shoot of the army who deal with the incarceration and experimentation of demons. Though the Initiative and Buffy seem to share a common cause, an experiment of theirs actually became the season's Big Bad; a Frankenstein's Monster made of bits of human being, demon and cybernetics known as Adam. Once created, the vengeful Adam felt isolated for being the only one of his kind and so rounded up a demon and vampire army to wage war on humanity, with the eventual aim to create more like himself. While a villain who's part Frankenstein, part-Terminator seems perfect material for Buffy (though oddly enough the show's previous foray into Frankenstein in Season Two's Some Assembly Required was also a dud) the combats and khakis of the Initiative just don't sit well in Buffy's supernatural, gothic-tinged world. In fact, Whedon himself realised the problems with Adam and had Buffy and company kill him in the penultimate episode of the series, rather than the finale - would you Adam and Eve it! Well, we've never heard of that happening elsewhere so at least he's number one in that category.