Voir Best of The Outer Limits (New Series), Vol. 1 - Episode 12

Adam (Jake McKinnon) is a powerful and generally good-natured robot. One evening while his creator a university professor named Dr. Link (Don Mackay) adjusts his programming Adam goes wild. He assaults and kills Dr. Link destroying the lab in the process. Accused of the murder Adam goes quietly into police custody. When Dr. Link's daughter Mina (Cyndy Preston) reads about her father's death she contacts Detective Barclay (Eric Schneider) who is in charge of the case and they visit Adam in his cell. The robot replays his memory of the previous night for them but finds no record of his outburst. Mina tells him that Dr. Link is dead and asks Adam to keep searching for the missing information. She needs it for the hearing which will determine if Adam is so dangerous should he be destroyed. Mina hires Thurman Cutler (Leonard Nimoy) a washed up civil liberties attorney to argue in favor of Adam. It soon becomes apparent however that Cutler is more interested in his own notoriety than in justice. He wants to convince the judge that this machine has legal rights and deserves a murder trial. This can only mean a media circus. The hearing proves eventful. One of the security guards perjures himself trying to make Adam appear dangerous. An experiment performed on Adam's hardware causes the robot to go berserk in the courtroom. Though traumatic for everyone present the experiment stimulates Adam's memory so that he remembers having killed Dr. Link. Mention of the funding for Adam makes Cutler suspicious of its source. Cutler and Mina discover that a defense contractor had been funding Dr. Link's work. At that point Col. Birch (Nathaniel Deveausx) who has been watching the hearing closely reveals to Cutler that Adam was being retrofitted for military purposes -- he's being turned into a killing machine. The robot's gentle side was interfering with the conversion so Dr. Link was trying to obliterate it. The military fears that if the case goes to trial all this information would appear in the press and national security would be in jeopardy. Birch threatens to ruin Cutler if he continues. The next day Cutler tells Adam that he will do his best to get a murder trial but that he probably won't be able to defend him. The robot shows the court his memory sequence of Dr. Link's death and the crowd is timid. Adam describes the dream-like state he was in when Dr. Link was trying to obliterate it. The military fears that if the case goes to trial all this information would appear in the press and national security would be in jeopardy. Birch threatens to ruin Cutler if he continues. They wait nervously to hear the outcome. Mina is so frightened she wants Adam to run away with her. He wants very much to be accepted as human and feels that will happen only if he acts with dignity and faces his fate. The judge rules that the robot will have his murder trial. As they leave the courtroom the waiting crowd rushes toward Adam. In the process they knock Col. Birch down in the street directly in the path of a speeding police van. The driver tries to brake but skids toward Birch. Adam seeing this breaks free of his police escort pushes Birch to safety and is hit by the van. This act of human bravery kills him.