"Back There"

Time Traveler Pete Corrigan (Russell Johnson) has drinks
with John Wilkes Booth (John Lasell)

“Back There”
Season Two, Episode Forty-nine
Original airdate: January 13, 1961

Cast:
Pete Corrigan: Russell Johnson
John Wellington/John Wilkes Booth: John Lasell
Policeman (William’s Grandfather): James Lydon
Police Sergeant: Paul Hartman
William: Bartlett Robinson
Patrolman: James Gavin
Mrs. Landers: Jean Inness
Lieutenant: Lew Brown
Lieutenant’s Girl: Carol Rossen
Chambermaid: Nora Marlowe
Butler: Pat O’Malley
Jackson: Raymond Greenleaf
Millard: Ray Bailey
Whittaker: John Eldredge

Crew:
Writer: Rod Serling (original teleplay)
Director: David Orrick McDearmon
Producer: Buck Houghton
Associate Producer: Del Reisman
Production Manager: Sidney Van Keuran
Director of Photography: George T. Clemens
Art Direction: George W. Davis and Philip Barber
Set Decoration: Henry Grace and H. Web Arrowsmith
Assistant Director: Darrell Hallenbeck
Casting: Ethel Winant
Editor: Leon Barsha
Sound: Franklin Milton and Charles Scheid
Music: Jerry Goldsmith

And Now, Mr. Serling:
“In this rather posh club, you’ll see a group of men argue a somewhat metaphysical subject like time travel.  One of them maintains it’s possible to go back in time, make a few changes in history, and as a result do quite a job on the present, in this case the assignation of one Abraham Lincoln.  Next week, a story called ‘Back There.’  I’d like you all to come with us, I think you’ll find it a most exciting journey.  Thank you and good night.”

Rod Serling’s Opening Narration:

“Witness a theoretical argument, Washington, D.C., the present.  Four intelligent men talking about an improbable thing like going back in time.  A friendly debate revolving around a simple issue: could a human being change what has happened before?  Interesting and theoretical because whoever heard of a man going back in time, before tonight that is.  Because this is…The Twilight Zone.”

Summary:

Corrigan and William the Butler

April 14, 1961, Washington, D.C.  Four intellectuals are seated around a card table at the prestigious Potomac Club.  Two of the four men find themselves hung up on the subject of time travel.  One of the men argues that it is possible to change the events of the past if given the opportunity to travel back in time.  The other man, Pete Corrigan, says that history simply cannot be altered.  The argument continues late into the night when finally Corrigan says that he is tired and politely excuses himself from the table.  On his way out he accidentally runs into the house butler, William, who spills coffee all over him.  William apologizes but Corrigan brushes the incident off and assures William that no harm has been done.
                Upon stepping outside Corrigan experiences a dizzy spell.  Cut to a shot of a streetlight.  The light changes from an incandescent light bulb to flickering candlelight.  After recovering from his dizzy spell, Corrigan immediately notices that something is wrong.  He pounds on the door to the Potomac Club but no one answers.  He decides to go to his apartment.  When he knocks on his boardinghouse a woman answers.  She is immediately suspicious.  Corrigan enters and for a moment doesn’t recognize the place.  He asks the woman if she has a room and, after he tells her that he is a war veteran, she says that she does.  A young woman and a soldier dressed in uniform walk down the stairs.  They mention something to the woman about attending a play and shaking hands with the president.  Corrigan then realizes that this is April 14, 1865, the day that President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, and that these two are headed to the performance of Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theatre where the president was gunned down by John Wilkes Booth.  Corrigan races to Ford’s Theatre and bangs on the stage entrance door, hoping he can somehow present the president’s assassination. 
               

Some time later, Corrigan is brought in before the local Police Sergeant.  The patrolman claims that Corrigan was making trouble at Ford’s Theatre so the theatre manager clubbed him over the head and called the police.  Corrigan pleads with the sergeant to have extra security placed around the president.  The sergeant throws Corrigan in the drunk tank to sleep it off.  Just then a man waltzes into the courtroom and makes his way over to the sergeant.  He claims his name is John Wellington and that he is here to look after the man who was just placed into custody.  He says that the man may possibly be a mentally unsound war veteran and may need someone to care for him.  The sergeant agrees and releases Corrigan into the custody of Wellington.  After they leave the courtroom the security guard asks the sergeant if maybe Corrigan wasn’t on to something when he claimed that Lincoln would be shot.  The sergeant dismisses this as drunken gibberish and tells the rookie policeman to stay in line.
                Back in Wellington’s room, Wellington pours Corrigan a drink.  He inquires as to why Corrigan thought the president would be murdered.  They discuss the subject for several minutes before Corrigan begins to feel lightheaded and realizes that he has been drugged.  He tries to stand but topples to the ground.  He awakes to knocking at the door.  Moments later the door opens and the housekeeper and rookie police officer rush in and pick Corrigan up off the ground.  The officer tells Corrigan that he has been all over town trying to convince officials to place more security around Lincoln, to no avail.  Corrigan tells the officer to go by himself.  Corrigan then discovers a handkerchief given to him by Wellington with the letters JWB.  He then realizes that the man who freed him from prison and drugged him was actually John Wilkes Booth, the actor who assassinated President Lincoln.  Then he hears the news.  The president has been shot.  He is too late.  After the housekeeper and the policeman leave, Corrigan has an emotional breakdown and begins beating on the wall.  Moments later he realizes that he is no longer beating on the walls of Booth's apartment but on the front door of the Potomac Club.  The butler answers the door but Corrigan immediately notices that is isn’t William but a man he has never seen before.  He asks the man about William but the man says that there is no William on staff.
               

William, the Intellectual

Corrigan walks into the study and over to the card table.  The men have switched the subject from time travel to money.  That’s when Corrigan sees William.  But he is no longer dressed in a Butler suit.  Instead he is dressed as a sophisticate in a suit and tie.  He goes on to say that he inherited his fortune from his grandfather he was once a rookie police officer in the city.  On the night of Lincoln’s assassination his grandfather went around the city trying to warn officials that the president would be shot.  Though he didn’t succeed he was awarded and eventually became Chief of Police and, through real estate, managed to make a fortune and retire.  Corrigan is dumbfounded.  He asks William if he remembers spilling coffee on him earlier that evening.  William is insulted and brushes Corrigan off as a nuisance.   The other men also ridicule him to themselves.  Corrigan reaches into his coat pocket and pulls out the handkerchief with Booth’s initials on it.  He then realizes that he has changed history but he alone bears the burden and can never share it with anyone.

Rod Serling’s Closing Narration:
“Mr. Peter Corrigan, lately returned from a place ‘back there,’ a journey into time with highly questionable results, proving on one hand that the treads of history are woven tightly and the skein of events cannot be undone, but on the other hand, there are small fragments of tapestry that can be altered.  Tonight’s thesis to be taken as you will, in the Twilight Zone.”

Commentary:
In “Back There” Russell Johnson makes his second appearance on The Twilight Zone.  In Season One’s “Execution” (also directed by McDearmon) Johnson plays a scientist who builds a time machine which pulls a man out of the nineteenth century American West into a twentieth century inner city.  Only later does Johnson find out that the man is a soulless murderer.  In “Back There” Johnson is the one who travels through time, only this time he travels from present day 1961 back to 1865 to stop a murderer, as if to make amends for his tragic mistake in the previous episode. 
                As is the case with most time travel stories on The Twilight Zone, “Back There” does not rely on machinery to get its protagonist from one age to another.  Corrigan simply steps out of the Potomac Club and, after a faint dizzy spell, finds himself in another century.  This follows in the footsteps of episodes like “Walking Distance,” “The Last Flight” and “The Trouble with Templeton” in which characters just sort of wander into another time.  Serling and producer Buck Houghton were wise to realize the show’s limited budget and chose not saturate episodes, especially ones with traditional science fiction themes such as time travel, with ornate special effects.  The only visual evidence of the time travel process that the audiences witnesses here is that of a single streetlamp dissolving slowly from a modern electric light bulb into a burning candle, thus transporting the audience and our protagonist from then present-day 1961 back to 1865.

Unfortunately, unlike the three aforementioned episodes, which use time travel as a device to explore the various psychological states of each of the main characters (nostalgia, cowardice, loneliness) “Back There” lacks the emotional wisdom found in these stories.  Its focus, instead, is on the time travel paradox, a theme that was already exhausted even in 1961.  It really isn’t much more than a thin story stretched around the idea stated at the beginning of the episode: can a person change history if they were able to travel back in time, intentionally or unintentionally.  And so Corrigan spends much of the episode running around Washington D.C. trying to stop the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, with the audience thinking that perhaps he will indeed prevent it and thus return to an alternate 1961, one that has no concept of Lincoln’s assassination because it never happened.  The twist is that he does not succeed in preventing the president’s assassination and he returns to a 1961 almost identical to the one he left.  The only difference is that William, the former houseman at the Potomac club, is now a prominent member of the club (and kind of a snooty one).  This isn’t a bad twist but not one that really stays with the viewer after the episode is over and, unfortunately, it is all the episode has to offer.
                This episode holds a resemblance to the Season Four episode “No Time like the Past.”  In this later episode the main character, played by Dana Andrews, uses a time machine to travel through the recent past attempting to prevent certain atrocities.  He first ventures to Hiroshima to warn people of the encroaching nuclear attack that will demolish their city but he fails to persuade them to leave.  He then travels to Germany circa 1939 and tries to assassinate Hitler but he is informed upon by a Nazi devotee.  Next he travels to 1915 and tries to prevent the bombing of the Lusitania.  Again he fails.  He finally decides to travel to a small town in Indiana at the end of the nineteenth century to seek out a simple existence.  He eventually learns from a history book he brought with him from the twentieth century that the local schoolhouse will burn down because of a kerosene spill.  He tries to prevent the catastrophe only to end up being the cause of it.  He then decides not to meddle with history any longer.  Overall, this episode isn’t much better than “Back There” but the hero comes off as far more compelling than Pete Corrigan, something Serling might have taken into consideration when he reused this same theme for this Season Four episode.
                While “Back There” fails to be a memorable episode it isn’t without its high points.  Of the performances most seem to be uninspired but Bartlett Robinson gives two brief but solid performances as William the butler at the beginning of the episode and as William the elitist once Corrigan has returned from 1865.  But ultimately, the only thing that really stands out in this episode is a haunting original score from Jerry Goldsmith.  This same score was later recycled for some of the show’s most memorable episodes. 

Grade: C

Notes: 

Illustration by Earl E. Mayan for "Back There,"
from Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone
by Walter B. Gibson
(Grosset & Dunlap, 1963)

--As mentioned, Russell Johnson also appears in the Season One episode “Execution.”
--Bartlett Robinson also appears in the Season Three episode “To Serve Man.”
--David Orrick McDearmon also directed Season One’s “Execution" and Season Two’s “A Thing About Machines.”
--John Lasell also appeared in an episode of Rod Serling's Night Gallery titled "Little Girl Lost" (no relation to the third season Zone episode). 
--Lew Brown also appeared in an episode of Rod Serling's Night Gallery titled "You Can Come Up Now, Mrs. Millikan." 
--“Back There” was adapted into a Twilight Zone Radio Drama starring Jim Caviezel (Falcon Picture Group, 2002).  
-- "Back There" was adapted into a short story by Walter B. Gibson for Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone (Grosset and Dunlap, 1963).

--Brian Durant

"A Thing About Machines"

Richard Haydn as the bitter Barlett Finchley.

"A Thing About Machines"

Season Two, Episode 40

Original Air Date: October 28, 1960

Cast:

Bartlett Finchley: Richard Haydn

Edith (the secretary): Barbara Stuart

TV Repairman: Barney Phillips

Intern: Jay Overholts

Policeman: Henry Beckman

Girl on TV: Margarita Cordova

Crew:

Writer: Rod Serling (original teleplay)

Director: David Orrick McDearmon

Producer: Buck Houghton
Associate Producer: Del Reisman
Production Manager: Sidney S. Van Keuren

Director of Photography: George T. Clemens
Art Direction: George W. Davis and Phil Barber
Set Decoration: Henry Grace and H. Web Arrowsmith
Assistant Direction: Darrell Hallenbeck
Casting: Ethel Winant
Editor: Leon Barsha
Sound: Franklin Milton and Charles Scheid

Music: Stock

And Now, Mr. Serling:

"These are familiar items, I'm sure. Television set, electric razor, clock, typewriter, the normal, everyday accouterment that are part and parcel of twentieth century progress. But next week you'll see them under different circumstances and in a totally dissimilar guise. They'll be machines, but they'll also be monsters. Our story is called 'A Thing About Machines' and it'll be here waiting for you in The Twilight Zone."

Rod Serling's Opening Narration:

"This is Mr. Bartlett Finchley, age forty-eight, a practicing sophisticate who writes very special and very precious things for gourmet magazines and the like. He's a bachelor and a recluse with few friends, only devotees and adherents to the cause of tart sophistry. He has no interests save whatever current annoyances he can put his mind to. He has no purpose to his life except the formulation of day-to-day opportunities to vent his wrath on mechanical contrivances of an age he abhors. In short, Mr. Bartlett Finchley is a malcontent, born either too late or too early in the century and who in just a moment will enter a realm where muscles and the will to fight back are not limited to human beings. Next stop for Mr. Bartlett Finchley. . . The Twilight Zone."

Summary:

            The opening scene immediately establishes what the remainder of the episode repeatedly hammers home: Bartlett Finchley, a wealthy, reclusive bachelor whose occupation involves regular commentary on culture, is an unrepentant snob prone to sudden bursts of violent anger. Finchley exchanges barbed witticisms with the television repairman, a familiar figure in the large, solitary home as Finchley repeatedly assaults his television when it does not work according to the standards he has set for the electrical and mechanical appliances in his home. After the television repairman has left, Finchley smashes a tolling clock with a fireplace poker to drive the point home.

            Finchley's next human encounter, this time with his personal secretary (who promptly quits on him after suffering one too many of his insults), reveals Finchley's true dilemma. Not only has Finchley possessed a lifelong inability to effectively use machines, he now believes the machines have gained sentient life and are conspiring not only to malfunction but to cause him bodily harm. 

            Finchley's typewriter writes on its own: GET OUT OF HERE FINCHLEY. His television displays a dancing woman alone on a stage who looks straight at him and utters the same threatening message. In a panic Finchley attempts to call old friends from his little black book. None, however, have time for the curmudgeon. Blaming the telephone itself for this embarrassment, Finchley tears it from the wall. That does not, however, stop the phone from working. A voice on the other end screams at him to get out. The sound of police sirens outside calls Finchley to the end of his driveway where a policeman and a crowd have gathered because Finchley's car has rolled itself out into the street, almost hitting passersby. It seems Finchley's car, too, has been causing trouble as only a few days before the car's steering wheel turned itself in Finchley's hands as he was pulling the vehicle into the driveway and a headlight was broken as a result. It hit Finchley where it hurts most, his wallet. After resolving the issue of the car, all-the-while spewing insults and threats to the people gathered near his home, Finchley decides the only logical thing to do is to drink himself to sleep.

            He awakens hours later. Rising groggily and going upstairs to his bedroom, Finchley is greeted with a frightening adversary, his electric razor has gained life of its own and begins attacking him. The razor chases Finchley downstairs and out of the house where the car takes its turn tormenting the man, chasing him up the street and through backyards where it eventually knocks Finchley into a swimming pool and drowns him. When the ambulance and the police arrive to retrieve the dead man, they wonder why Finchley's body stayed on the bottom of the pool instead of floating up. It seems as though something were holding him down.

Rod Serling's Closing Narration:

"Yes, it could be. It could just be that Mr. Bartlett Finchley succumbed from a heart attack and a set of delusions. It could just be that he was tormented by an imagination as sharp as his wit and as pointed as his dislikes. But as perceived by those attending, this is one explanation that has left the premises with the deceased. Look for it filed under M for machines, in the Twilight Zone."

Commentary:

"In that one brief, fragmentary moment that lay between life and death he saw the headlights of the car blinking down at him through the water and he heard the engine let out a deep roar like some triumphant shout."
           -"A Thing About Machines" by Rod Serling, More Stories from the Twilight Zone (1961)

            Author Marc Scott Zicree, in The Twilight Zone Companion, was short and sharp in his review of "A Thing About Machines": "Although the concept of 'A Thing About Machines' is a clever one and some of the effects are fun (who couldn't help but love the image of an electric shaver slithering down a flight of stairs?), neither the writing, direction, nor performances are able to give the show any real vitality." 
            Zicree is right on the money.

            The problems with the episode are many but fortunately for series creator Rod Serling, this one appears to be an anomaly among his work for the series, particularly during the early seasons. If fault can be made of Rod Serling's style of drama, it is that his scripts can be overly "talky," as exemplified by "A Thing About Machines." The problem is that the incessant talking, after the first scene, does little to move the plot forward other than to pad out the time limit required for a half-hour show. For a show like The Twilight Zone, a show that thrived on the fable-like quality of its scripts, the script for "A Thing About Machines" is especially threadbare and struggles to remain interesting for more than ten minutes. As Zicree states, the main interest in the episode after the first few minutes are the effects of the machines coming to life to attack Finchley, and these are reasonably well done. Unfortunately, on the higher resolution of today's home videos, the fish line attached to the electric razor can clearly be seen holding the razor upright and pulling it down the stairs.

            Also, the characters are one-dimensional and the viewer doesn't like Finchley. Unlike some of Serling's other so-called "hopeful loser" characters, Finchley starts unlikable and doesn’t change or transform from his trip into the Twilight Zone other than to go from living to dead. It renders the episode not only thin on plot but also thin on character and asks the viewer to remain tuned in to this drama for the sole reason of seeing what everyone knows is coming all along: the machines kill Finchley. Few if any viewers can relate to Finchley nor is there any semblance of humanity about the man to elicit viewer sympathy. If anything, we want to see Finchley hurt and punished. Unlike other episodes which generate a similar response in the viewer, think "Death's-head Revisited" or "What You Need,"the effect simply doesn't come off and the viewer is left feeling bored with the whole thing.

            Serling didn't even feel it necessary to tack on one of his twist endings, which even by this point in the show’s history had become a defining characteristic of the series. The one truly unnerving effect in the episode is Margarita Cordova dancing on the television and stopping to look straight out at Finchley and tell him to "get out of here." It is an effectively bizarre choice and the one truly imaginative spot in an otherwise predictable episode.

            It is interesting to note that this episode resembles a story written by another of the show's contributing writers, Richard Matheson. Matheson published a story titled "Mad House" about an aspiring writer/college professor who is victimized by steadily progressing and nearly uncontrollable bouts of rage that not only cost him his job and destroy his marriage but imbue the everyday objects in his home with a malevolence aimed at destroying him. In Matheson's story, not only do machines attempt to inflict pain (instead of a typewriter typing out a threatening message, there is a grisly scene of a typewriter shredding the character's fingers with its metal keys), but so do simple, inanimate objects, including a pencil that breaks and stabs and a deadly straight razor (similar to the electric one in Serling's script) that ends the character's life in a gut-wrenching moment of pain, regret, and helplessness. Matheson's story had seen three printings before Serling brought his vision of killer household machines to the show. "Mad House" was originally published in the January/February, 1953 issue of Fantastic. It was reprinted twice, in Matheson's first hardcover book, Born of Man and Woman (Chamberlain Press, March, 1954) and the abridged paperback reprint of the same collection, Third from the Sun (Bantam, February, 1955). Though Serling certainly took his vision in a different direction for the show it is reasonable to assume that Serling had at least read the Matheson story if not consciously borrowed the germ of the story altogether. The genius and horror of the Matheson story is that the malevolent objects are not the scorned avengers of Serling's version but are products of the character's own rage and negative energy. The resulting death is that of being consumed by one's own hatred for oneself.

            The only other interesting aspect of the episode is an ending which confused some viewers upon initial telecast. As written, Finchley is knocked into the swimming pool and the car enters the pool on top of Finchley to hold him down until he is drowned. As filmed, it is a tad confusing as the viewer never sees the car enter the pool after knocking Finchley in. It simply stops on the edge. A subtle hint is given when Finchley's body is found and the water is shown to be pouring out of the car as though it had recently been submerged. Perhaps it was a bit too subtle and probably a bit too clever on top of the already predictable drama beforehand.

            Though author Marc Scott Zicree bemoans the direction of the episode, it must be said that David Orrick McDearmon was basically attempting to spin straw into gold with this assignment. The director turned in two other fine episodes for the show, the previous season’s "Execution" and the following season two episode "Back There." British born actor Richard Haydn plays it so that Finchley never seems to have a moment when he lets that high cultured, snobbish exterior down, even in moments when he is alone and in fear of his life. Hadyn’s fussy mannerisms found early success on radio and later became a fixture in anthology television, appearing in Playhouse 90, Lux Playhouse, and G.E. True Theater, as well as finding roles in popular television shows Burke's Law, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Man from U.N.C.L.E., Bewitched, and Bonanza. He found occasional supporting roles in impressive films ranging from Disney's Alice in Wonderland (1951), voicing the Caterpillar, to Mutiny on the Bounty (1962) and The Sound of Music (1965). He sat in the director's chair for three features in the late 1940s and early 1950s, including the Bing Crosby vehicle Mr. Music (1950). Hadyn died on April 25, 1985.

            Barbara Stuart is refreshing as the working woman who's finally had enough of Finchley's condescending remarks. The talented character actress amassed over a hundred television credits from the early 1950s until 2004. Her other genre credits include appearances on One Step Beyond and Batman. She died on May 15, 2011.

                 The one familiar face in the cast is that of Barney Phillips as the television repairman. Phillips appeared in four episodes of The Twilight Zone and "A Thing About Machines" is certainly the worst of the lot. He also appeared in the first season's "The Purple Testament,"season four's excellent "Miniature," and, most memorably, in the second season fan favorite "Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?" as an alien moonlighting as a short order cook in a remote diner and revealing himself by displaying a third eye on his forehead.

            In all, it seems that "A Thing About Machines" got the short end from the start. The stock music cues are uninspired and unremarkable except for the fact that they are used as predictably suits the episode. Like all of producer Buck Houghton's episodes, its looks great and the wonderful MGM backlot is in fine form. The episode, however, lacks complexity or the simple moral quality of Serling's best scripts. Serling's creative muscles were likely being stretched too thin by the enormous amount of material he was obligated to provide for the show. Fortunately, Serling amassed an extremely talented supporting crew of writers for the first season (Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont) and would add another to the stable in George Clayton Johnson, soon to make his script writing debut in season two's "A Penny for Your Thoughts" after previously selling two short stories that Serling adapted into season one’s "The Four of Us Are Dying" and "Execution." Of course, Serling was far too talented a writer to produce disposable fodder for the show with any regularity and he would turn in one of his finest efforts with "Eye of the Beholder" just two episodes later.

Grade: D

Notes:

-Director David Orrick McDearmon also directed season one's "Execution" and season two's "Back There."

-Actor Barney Phillips also appeared in season one's "The Purple Testament," season two's "Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?" and season four's "Miniature."
-Henry Beckman appeared in Rod Serling's "They're Tearing Down Tim Riley's Bar" for Night Gallery.

-"A Thing about Machines" was adapted as a The Twilight Radio Drama starring Mike Starr.
-Rod Serling adapted his teleplay into a short story for More Stories from the Twilight Zone (Bantam Pathfinder, April, 1961).

-JP

"Execution"

Albert Salmi and Russell Johnson

"Execution"

Season One, Episode 26
Original Air Date: April 1, 1960

Cast:
Joe Caswell: Albert Salmi
Professor George Manion: Russell Johnson
Paul Johnson: Than Wyenn
Judge: Fay Roope
Reverend: Jon Lormer
Bartender: Richard Karlan
Old Man: George Mitchell
Cowboy: Joe Haworth

Crew:
Writer: Rod Serling (based on an unpublished story by George Clayton Johnson)
Director: David Orrick McDearmon
Producer: Buck Houghton
Production Manager: Ralph W. Nelson
Director of Photography: George T. Clemens
Art Direction: George W. Davis and Merrill Pye
Set Decoration: Henry Grace and Keogh Gleason
Assistant Director: Kurt Neumann
Editor: Joseph Gluck
Sound: Franklin Milton and Philip Mitchell
Music: Stock

And Now, Mr. Serling:
"This may look like some kind of kooky greenhouse. Actually, it happens to be a conveyance, a mode of travel, time travel. And next week you'll see Albert Salmi take an extended journey from 1880 to 1960. I hope then next week you'll be able to take another walk with us into The Twilight Zone. (Serling vanishes from within time machine). Hey, where did everybody go?" 

Rod Serling's Opening Narration:
"Commonplace, if somewhat grim, unsocial event known as a necktie party. The guest of dishonor, a cowboy named Joe Caswell, just a moment away from a rope, a short dance several feet off the ground, and then the dark eternity of all evil men. Mr. Joe Caswell who, when the good Lord passed out a conscience, a heart, a feeling for fellow man, must have been out for a beer and missed out. Mr. Joe Caswelll, in the last quiet moment of a violent life."

Summary:
    The year is 1880 and on a bleak patch of land a murderer named Joe Caswell is being hanged for shooting a man in the back. Caswell is an unrepentant man with a twisted way of seeing the world. Before he is to be hanged, Caswell is given two opportunities to show his true nature. Even in the moments before his death, he is a mean and bitter man, shunning a preacher's attempt to say a prayer over him and mocking the man he killed. Then comes the time to slap the horse and hang Caswell. Except something extraordinary happens instead. Though the men turn their eyes away from Caswell at the moment of his hanging, when they look again his body has vanished.
    Caswell wakes up on a couch in a dark laboratory. He is greeted by a scientist named George Manion. Manion shows Caswell a large, glass-enclosed structure in the center of the room and informs Caswell that he, Caswell, has been the subject of an extraordinary experiment. Manion has constructed the world's first operative time machine and with it has pulled Caswell out of the past and into the present, which happens to be eighty years in Caswell's future, the year 1960. While looking over Caswell, however, Manion notices the rope burn along Caswell's neck and it is apparent to Manion that he may have made a mistake with the man he pulled out of the past.
    Later, Manion is alone in his laboratory and dictating details into his tape recorder. Caswell has told him a lie about who he is and what he was doing when Manion pulled him into the future. Manion is very suspicious about what Caswell told him because of the rope burns and also because Manion simply doesn't like the look of Caswell. Caswell has the look of a killer.
    When Manion pushes Caswell into admitting that he was at the end of a rope when he was pulled into the future, Caswell reacts violently, attacking Manion and killing him by bludgeoning him with a desk lamp. Caswell panics and runs from the laboratory and into the streets of New York City. There, Caswell is bombarded with the loud sounds and bright lights of the city. He angrily lashes out at everything. He gets trapped in a phone booth and must break through the glass to escape. Caswell eventually stumbles into a bar, empty except for the bartender. There, Caswell is confronted by the sounds of a loud-playing jukebox. As the bartender watches in horror, Caswell smashes the jukebox into silence with a chair. When the bartender starts to object, Caswell brandishes a gun and demands a drink. Then he spies the television mounted above the bar and the bartender reluctantly turns it on. On it, an actor dressed as a cowboy on the set of a western program pulls one of his pistols and fires it at the screen. Horrified, Caswell pulls his own pistol and shoots the television screen. The bartender yells for the police. Caswell flees back out into the street, brandishing his gun, waving it around, and scaring the people on the street. He is nearly hit by a car and shoots into the windshield.
    Finding his way back to Manion's laboratory, Caswell pleads to the dead man to come back to life and help him. In walks an armed hood named Paul Johnson. He has come to rob the office. He thinks Caswell has come to do the same and holds him at arm's length with his gun. Caswell knocks the gun from Johnson's hand and the two men struggle over the weapon. Johnson eventually gets the upper hand and strangles Caswell to death with a length of cord from the blinds covering the window. Johnson then continues what he came to do and attempts to get into a file cabinet but cannot find the right set of keys. He sees a panel of knobs on the wall and turns them. Electrical machinery can be heard turning on and humming idly. Johnson's eye is drawn to the time machine in the center of the room and he cautiously steps inside the structure only to realize too late that he has inadvertently activated the device. The machine seals Johnson inside and he vanishes. He is thrown back to 1880, the exactly moment when Caswell was pulled into the future, putting Johnson's neck into the hangman's noose meant for Caswell. The three men in the hanging party look astonished, unable to figure out what has happened. They say a prayer that they have not killed an innocent man and then they cart Johnson's body away. Justice, of a very strange sort, has been served.

Rod Serling's Closing Narration:
"This is November, 1880, in the aftermath of a necktie party. The victim's name, Paul Johnson, a minor-league criminal and the taker of another human life. No comment on his death save this. Justice can span years, retribution is not subject to a calendar. Tonight's case in point, in The Twilight Zone." 

Commentary:
    "Execution" is the second contribution from Twilight Zone writer George Clayton Johnson and the episode has a great deal in common, both in theme and style, with his first contribution, "The Four of Us Are Dying." When Johnson originally made his way to California in the late fifties, he broke into film and television by selling short fiction and story treatments. His first sale was the story that became Ocean's Eleven (1960) starring Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis, Jr. 
    For The Twilight Zone, Johnson proceeded in much the same way. Through his connection to writer Charles Beaumont, Johnson was able to get his foot in the door at Cayuga Productions and get a few of his story treatments into the hands of series creator Rod Serling and producer Buck Houghton. It was Beaumont and fellow friend and Zone writer John Tomerlin that encouraged Johnson to take the leap into writing teleplays. During the second season, Johnson sold a story titled "Sea Change" to producer Buck Houghton. After getting resistance from show sponsor General Foods about the gruesome nature of the story, in which a man's severed hand grows a body and attempts to kill off its double, Houghton asked Johnson to buy the story back. Johnson agreed to do so under the provision that Houghton buy another story Johnson had prepared, "A Penny For Your Thoughts," and that Johnson be allowed to write the teleplay. It took Houghton more than a week to agree but it is doubtful he ever regretted the decision. Clayton Johnson became one of the core contributors to the series, crafting a small number of exceptional episodes over the course of the second and third seasons. For now, however, he was still only a contributor of stories.
      Clayton Johnson falls into the category of science fiction and fantasy writers who are not overly concerned with the explanation of how something may be possible but rather with the consequences were such things possible. This approach is why Johnson fit The Twilight Zone so well, as it is fundamentally a show about ordinary people experiencing extraordinary events. In "Execution," he gives us a time machine and uses it as a plot device for furthering the notion that the battle of good and evil that exists within each human being is timeless. Thematically, the episode functions primarily as a condemnation of senseless violence and is probably the most violent episode to air on the series.
    "Execution" is also the first western-themed episode since "Mr. Denton on Doomsday." The western theme is one which Rod Serling, and occasionally other writers for the show, felt comfortable enough revisiting for it to become its own subcategory within the show's broad range of subject matter, much like the war episodes or the doomsday episodes. Unlike the majority of other western-themed episodes, however, "Execution" is also a time travel episode and affords the audience an opportunity to view the juxtaposition between the past and the present, viewed through the perspective of an unrepentant killer in the form of cowboy Joe Caswell. It is the fable-like quality, and the somewhat simplistic nature of the plot, that lends "Execution" its similarity to "The Four of Us Are Dying." More so than that, it is in the filming techniques of the episodes where the greater similarity lies. Though the episodes were directed by different directors (John Brahm directed "The Four of Us Are Dying" and David Orrick McDearmon directed "Execution"), both episodes posed their respective directors similar challenges. Both required special effects which worked better if the effect was not explicitly shown. As stated before in previous posts, it was important for each episode that required special effects to not overdo the effects for fear of the episode falling into a laughable state. This is also true of "Execution," and the effects are wisely executed in a subtle way. When showing Joe Caswell's body disappearing from the hangman's noose, a shadow is shown on a large boulder disappearing instead of attempting to make actor Albert Salmi disappear. The disappearing effect which had to be achieved later on the character of Paul Johnson within the time machine was a much easier set piece in which to manage the effect.
    The most commanding sequences of "Execution" are the scenes in which Caswell is thrust into the bustling city at night. Like director John Brahm's work on "The Four of Us Are Dying," director McDearmon, and photographer George T. Clemens, use extreme camera angles and frenetic camera movement to convey the mindset of Caswell as the city's noises and lights bear down on him. One of the more recognizable effects reused from "The Four of Us Are Dying" is the image of floating neon signs.
    As stated previously, the primary theme of the episode is the innate urge for violence in each human being and the struggle to control that urge. Early in the episode actor Russell Johnson, as scientist George Manion, states that "I fear that I have taken a nineteenth century primitive and released him in a twentieth century jungle. And God help whoever gets in his way."  Serling chose to highlight this line by repeating it again later in the episode and it perfectly illustrates the theme both writers were trying to achieve.

    Albert Salmi (1928-1990), who went on to appear in two additional Twilight Zone episodes, "A Quality of Mercy" and "Of Late I Think of Cliffordville," is the outstanding actor of the episode and not surprisingly since he is given the meat of the dialogue and nearly all of the screen time. Salmi does an exceptional job in the role and, though he is undoubtedly a human monster, even manages to elicit a bit of pathos from the viewer when describing the hardscrabble existence of a cowboy in the Old West. Salmi was a fine actor who achieved critical acclaim early in his career when he portrayed Smerdyakov in 1958's The Brothers Karamazov. His performance was recognized for its excellence by the National Board of Review. Salmi went on to amass a number of credits on television over the next three decades, appearing in classic genre anthology programs such as Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, One Step Beyond, and Rod Serling's Night Gallery, in a Rod Serling-scripted western titled "The Waiting Room." After seeing his excellent performance in "Execution," it is easy to imagine that his biggest presence on the small screen would be in westerns. Salmi appeared in classic westerns such as Have Gun - Will Travel, Wagon Train, Gunsmoke, Bonanza, and Rawhide. He guest-starred on several other classic television programs, a few of which include The Fugitive, Combat!, Hawaii Five-O, and Knight Rider. Samli's life ended on a terribly tragic note. Long suffering from clinical depression, Salmi took the life of his estranged wife, Roberta, before turning a gun on himself on April 22, 1990 in their home in Spokane, Washington. Salmi was 68.

    Russell Johnson (1924-2014) achieved television immortality when he portrayed Professor Roy Hinkley (sometimes Hinckley) on Gilligan's Island from 1964 to 1967. Before that, Johnson was a prolific actor appearing in a number of television shows and genre films. In the same way that Albert Salmi excelled at portraying rough and tumble cowboys and soldiers, Johnson excelled at portraying clean-cut intellectuals. His other claims to genre fame are his appearances in films such as It Came From Outer Space (1953), This Island Earth (1955), and Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957). Johnson also appeared in an episode of Boris Karloff's Thriller, "The Hungry Glass," starring alongside William Shatner, Elizabeth Allen, Donna Douglas, and Joanna Heyes, whose husband, Douglas, director of some of the great episodes of The Twilight Zone, was behind the camera. Johnson also logged appearances on Alfred Hitchcock Presents ("Vicious Circle") and The Outer Limits ("Specimen: Unknown"). Johnson returned to The Twilight Zone a year later for another time travel episode, "Back There," this time playing a man who goes backwards in time without the aid of a time machine. 

    Overall, "Execution" is a capably produced episode, well acted, and containing some good dialogue in the classic Serling style. One of the more memorable moments connected to the episode wasn't in the episode at all but rather in the promotional teaser for "Execution" that originally aired at the tail end of the previous episode, "People Are Alike All Over." In it, Rod Serling stands within the glass-enclosed time machine and, after delivering his preview of the episode, disappears before the viewer's eyes. A similar effect was created for Serling's first on-screen appearance in an episode when he appears and then disappears as a figment of the author's imagination at the end of the season one finale, "A World of His Own."
    Though writer George Clayton Johnson did not contribute as many episodes as his friends and fellow writers Charles Beaumont and Richard Matheson, the quality of his work made up for the low quantity. Very little of what he contributed to the series was below average and most was well above. "Execution" doesn't stick in the memory quite like some of Johnson's other episodes, such as "Nothing in the Dark," "A Game of Pool," or "Kick the Can," but it's still a memorable episode and one that packs a pretty good punch. 

Grade: C

Notes:
--Albert Salmi appeared in two additional episodes of The Twilight Zone, "A Quality of Mercy" from Season Three and "Of Late I Think of Cliffordville" from Season Four. He also appeared in an episode of Rod Serling's Night Gallery titled "The Waiting Room."
--Russell Johnson also appeared in "Back There" from Season Two.
--David Orrick McDearmon also directed "A Thing About Machines" and, again with Russell Johnson, "Back There" from Season Two.
--Than Wyenn appeared in an episode of Rod Serling's Night Gallery titled "The Doll," based on the story by Algernon Blackwood.
--"Execution" was adapted into a Twilight Zone Radio Drama starring Don Johnson.
--As stated by Martin Grams in his book The Twilight Zone: Unlocking the Door to a Television Classic (OTR Publishing, 2008), actor Neville Brand was originally cast in the role of Joe Caswell, even rehearsing with the cast and crew, before calling in sick and having to be replaced with Albert Salmi. Brand would later appear in the controversial fifth season episode, "The Encounter."

--JP