"The Deprogrammers", Outer Limits, Ma6 26, 1996, starring Brent
Spiner. From Wiki:
Earth is under alien occupation and the human race has been
conditioned for slavery, unable to think for itself or disobey an
order. One human, the slave of an important ruler, is captured by a
small band of rebel humans who try to break the conditioning and
restore his free will.
Opening narration
"At what point does a human being's free will cease to exist? And if
we have forfeited our free will... are we still human?"
Plot
Evan is a slave in the mansion of a harsh-ruling alien. Like all
other slaves ("Jollem"), he has been "programmed" to not feel
anything, and to take everything his master says, as a fact without
question.
Later, Evan is captured by a resistance movement led by Trent Davis
(Brent Spiner), who call themselves the vindicators, or the
deprogrammers. At first, he is completely vegetative towards them.
Not even pain will make him flinch. But during the course of days, a
little by little, the resistance manages to wake up the parts of his
mind that have been silenced by the programming. He is slowly
introduced to his past life, a successful military career, and to his
wife, who is also working with the resistance movement.
The resistance aims to restore the meaning of what it means to be a
human, by the means of military power. Finally, when Evan comes to
realize that his master actually was responsible of killing all the
children of the world, including his daughter, he becomes apparently
sympathetic to the goals of the vindicators, despite occasional
quirks in his thinking.
Evan infiltrates back into the mansion of the alien, bringing with
him a vial that is camouflaged as a vial of seragon oil, a substance
the alien is particularly fond of. He drops the vial into the bath
the alien is taking, and combines it with another substance, making
the bath become solid, trapping the alien there. Then he kills him,
and returns to the place of the vindicators, carrying the head of the
alien with him in a bag.
At the moment of joy and success, another alien steps in to which
Prof. Davis asks if "milord" is pleased. Apparently Davis had been a
slave to the alien all along and used Evan as a pawn to kill his
rival. The alien says the resistance is small and at the moment will
not be a threat to him, and Evans is reprogrammed again.
