Character Highlight: Adam Warlock (Guardians of the Galaxy)

*Adam-related spoilers.*

I seriously considered a Favorite Characters post here, but I held back, if only because we still haven’t seen very much of Adam yet. But as the MCU continues to evolve, I hope he stays in the mix, since he’s a fun new character who made his mark amid the understandable showcase storylines of the main Guardians’ swansong.

In one of Vol. 2’s several mid-credit scenes, we got our first glimpse of Adam. The Sovereign Ayesha is making a perfect being, christening him as he develops in a high-tech cocoon. And when he first appears on the scene, he seems to be the sort of perfect worth worrying about. He’s immensely powerful, with abilities of flight, super strength, and generating heat/energy blasts, and he’s all but unstoppable when he sets his sights on you. He handily tears up Knowhere and delivers a hard blow to the Guardians, bringing Rocket to the brink of death.

But for all his power, Adam isn’t a perfect being. He might have been, but the High Evolutionary forced Ayesha to remove him from his cocoon too early. As a result, he’s very childlike, a brand-new lifeform with the capacity to cause colossal damage but little understanding of the galaxy around him.

On Knowhere, Nebula is the only one to get a substantial hit against Adam, stabbing him through the chest, but while his Sovereign physiology allows him to heal from that wound, he’s startled and indignant at feeling pain. He’s deeply devoted to Ayesha, who he calls his mother, but he doesn’t really grasp the precarious situation they’re in with the High Evolutionary, and that the Sovereign’s very existence depends on pleasing the obsessive scientist. While he has power in spades, he lacks finesse and basic strategy—when Ayesha tells him to “show [a prisoner] we mean business,” Adam completely fries him, losing any shot they had at interrogating the guy. And after he does this, Adam looks proudly to his mother for approval.

Obviously, this makes for an entertaining character. It’s funny to watch Adam display the powers of a god and then act like a pouty kid or completely whiff an assignment because he doesn’t understand it. It’s endlessly irritating to the High Evolutionary, and even Ayesha’s patience with her beloved son grows thin.

More than just entertaining, though, Adam’s naivete is useful to the story. Because he’s fairly “innocent” in his understanding of things, that means he doesn’t actually have any political or strategic allegiance to the High Evolutionary. Rather, he thinks very simplistically: “Mother says do this, so I’ll do it and make her happy.” This leaves him open to new ideas from better sources, and when he’s without Ayesha, he’s able to look for someone else to devote himself to. I doubt Adam would’ve helped the Guardians in the end if he’d stayed in his cocoon until he’d fully matured.

So now, he has a chance to be and do better. An official Guardian now, I hope Adam grows and thrives under Rocket’s leadership, and I hope we get it see it from him sooner rather than later.