Opening: 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 men, must have been out for a beer and missed out. Mr. Joe Caswell, in the last, quiet moment of a violent life.
“Execution” starts out like one of the show’s periodic mini-Westerns, and it’s remarkably good at establishing its setting and tone; it grounds us in Joe Caswell’s context, not Professor Manion’s, and that’s one of the episode’s strengths. It’s a perfectly good time travel story that’s very satisfying in its fish-out-of-water way, but it never loses sight of its morally dubious protagonist’s roots. To some extent, it feels like a Western all the way through, and the clash between Manion (Russell Johnson1) and Caswell (Albert Salmi2) isn’t just present vs. past or good vs. bad, it’s also East vs. West.
And though Caswell loses, the Old West wins. Yes, we have the usual hallucinogenic TZ/AHP soundstage cityscape made up of endless tilted neon signs, and we have modern conveniences and cool rationality. But cool rationality gets beaten to death with a lamp, pulling a gun can still end an argument, brutality and opportunistic theft are constants across time and space, and fate is starker and more mysterious than anything under Manion’s control.
In The Twilight Zone Companion, Marc Scott Zicree dings Serling’s adaptation of the original story for shoehorning in a second murderous thief at the end—originally, Caswell ended up back in the noose—but while I agree that shoehorning makes things messy, I find it appealingly messy. If you end with Caswell returned to his execution, then the incident, to the Old West crowd, is a baffling blip. But to hang a man, see his body vanish, and then have an unknown man suddenly hanging there in his place … that captures a real and haunting sense of mystery.
I love that we end with that, with the “necktie party” genuinely struggling to make any sense of this on a cosmic level. Not only do they not know what’s happened, they’ve killed a man they’ve never even met, and they have no idea of the moral significance of that. Even the reverend (John Lormer3) isn’t sure whether or not they’ve angered God. Serling’s voiceover provides a possible answer, but they can’t hear it, and their awe and terror has a lot of weight. It doesn’t have the impact of the end of “The Lonely,” but it’s working in the same territory, and I appreciate it.
Ambivalence, like ambiguity, needs to be used carefully—too much ambiguity tips over into “I have no idea what’s happening,” and too much ambivalence tips over into “maybe I don’t know how I feel about this, but also I have no idea why I should care.” For my money, “Execution,” like “The Sixty-Millimeter Shrine,” gets the balance right. It’s not a neatly closed time travel loop, it’s something weirder, something that touches at least a little on how we feel about death, retribution, and who gets (or deserves) either one.
The outro talks about death as a form of justice, but the only people who deliberately dole it out that way, with the best of intentions and as a “public service,” don’t exactly wind up feeling good about it. They wind up haunted, reverent, and uncertain of the state of their own souls. Both the murderers pay with their lives, with Caswell even poetically dying by a rope, if not the one he was condemned to, and that suggests fate’s hand at work—but it also means that the universe takes the murder of the callous, violent Caswell (a man already marked for death) as seriously as it takes the murders of Caswell’s own, much more innocent victims.4
It’s kind of funny that while we have time travel here, the somber “there are some things man should not meddle with” lesson applies more to death than to Manion’s experiments. Go ahead and try to invent time travel, just stop killing each other: reasonably good advice.
Themes and intriguing messiness aside, this is also just a solid episode—and a surprisingly fun one, considering it starts and ends with an execution and packs a few more bodies in between the two.
Visually, the episode is really strong, with four implicit genre shifts—Western to science fiction to frenetic realism to crime—all handled without missing a beat. (Although I will admit that Manion’s lab makes me laugh. It’s entirely possible that the inventor of time travel would also need a bunch of vials of mysterious chemicals to, say, power the machine, but it also feels like the set designer just threw every known kind of lab together to make the ultimate in SCIENCE!) There are also a couple of memorable shots, like the shadow of Caswell’s hanging body suddenly becoming the shadow of an empty noose.
Albert Salmi keeps Caswell unpleasant but still charismatic, and he makes the most of his physicality. Caswell has a little more going for him than most TZ bad guys cruising for some comeuppance: Serling is clear on his faults—Caswell’s indifference to his victim’s father is particularly repugnant—but he also gives him, at least, the virtue of a certain kind of physical courage. He’s straightforward, pithy, and unapologetic in the face of death, waving off any prospect of consolation and facing down any condemnation with little more than a shrug: “How about it, can’t we get it over with?” There’s a weird dignity to that, and it also means that when we finally do see him with shredded nerves, overwhelmed by the noisy, terrifying future and begging a dead man for help, his panic has more of an impact.
I also like that while Manion assumes that Caswell’s “primitive” attitudes and brutality will make him a 20th century menace, it’s ultimately the other way around: all the technological developments we take for granted wind up victimizing Caswell. To be fair, Manion is not well-positioned to appreciate this, since Caswell first fulfilled his prediction by beating him to death with a lamp.
Russell Johnson isn’t as vivid in his role as Manion, but to be fair, he has a much more stripped-down, restrained part. Manion exists to be the calm, square-jawed embodiment of 1960 science and reason, and Johnson portrays that well enough. He’s particularly good in the moments when you can really see it sinking in that his grand triumph has turned sour: there’s some great facial acting when he first spots the rope burn on Caswell’s neck. He also throws in some nice grace notes, like looking reluctantly charmed when Caswell is startled and fascinated by the lighter. He just wanted to play tour guide! It’s not his fault he got the world’s worst tourist!
The scenes between the two of them have a nice spark, too. It helps that their big confrontation features some of Serling’s best, most evocative dialogue for the episode: “I know all about right and wrong. Once there was a deputy sheriff in Dodge City who tried to beat the difference between them into my back with a wet rope. I know all about right and wrong.”
Again, there’s more pathos for Caswell than you might expect: compare him to the antagonist in “What You Need,” for example, who was also selfish, embittered, and opportunistic, but who didn’t have the same depth or get the same benefits of Serling’s eloquence. And while Caswell is conveniently ignoring the fact that even by the standards of his own time, he was a horror, he’s probably right that Manion’s life of relative ease, comfort, and civility is very different from his, and that Manion doesn’t necessarily know what he would be like under harsher circumstances.
The time travel aspects of this episode are right up my alley. “Execution” leans into its premise of an Old West brute popping into the (then-)modern day, and both Salmi and the script are clearly interested in getting the details right. I already mentioned Caswell’s strangely endearing reaction to the lighter—“That’s fire right out of the air”—but we also great beats like his uncomprehending horror at the dead Manion’s voice coming out of the tape recorder, gravely intoning his faults, or his bafflement at the pour spout on the whiskey bottle. My favorite scene for this is probably his confrontation with the poor bartender who gets his jukebox trashed, his life threatened, his liquor stolen, and his TV shot out.
I already mentioned that the last-minute inclusion of the thief—Paul Johnson, only named in the closing voiceover—is kind of clumsy, but “kind of” is putting it nicely. It really is a jarring plot development, and coming so soon after “Long Live Walter Jameson,” it’s also part of an odd trend of “third-act killers unconnected to the main plot.” (And why exactly is Paul Johnson assuming that this random scientist has a wall safe full of cash?) On the other hand, like I said, I personally find the thematic messiness this creates to be chewier and more intriguing than a more streamlined plot would have been.
If this particular trade-off between structure and theme doesn’t work for you, I can see the episode falling flat—and if, on top of that, you truly dislike spending any time with Caswell, it’s probably even worse than flat. I had remembered this episode as being on the weak side because those elements didn’t work as well for me the first time around. I’m glad writing these reviews gave me an excuse to revisit this one and revise my opinion of it.
Closing: This is November 1880, 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.
Directed by: David Orrick McDearmon
Written by: Rod Serling
Up Next: “The Big Tall Wish”
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Anthologized
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I actually like the addition of our 20th century killer as it seems to say, “the Old West has nothing on the Naked City.” The past, despite the rose colored glasses of many earlier westerns, was raw and violent, and the present, despite men inventing TVs and time machines, was no better. Manion could have very well been Paul Johnson’s victim instead. (Hey, I have a colleague at work named Paul Johnson! I don’t think he’s a killer.)
But the core of this is simply a notion that sometimes there is cosmic justice. It might be interesting to see how often Serling leans into that and how often he leans into the notion that there is no justice in a capricious universe.
Russell Johnson, like many character actors of his time, did a lot of westerns – the photo on his wiki is from a western and not the more obvious choice – but clearly he was quickly typecast as the scientist type, having already played one in the semi-classic This Island Earth. His wiki also notes he was a fighter pilot in WWII and shot down on a strafing run in the Philippines. I doubt he and Serling compared notes about such things, but it is an interesting coincidence.
(Hey, I have a colleague at work named Paul Johnson! I don’t think he’s a killer.)
Probably best to keep an eye on him just in case.
I heard Alan Sepinwall talk about Serling’s sense of justice recently (on Screen Drafts), since he’d just published his Serling biography, and his observation was that Serling very, very rarely kicks a sympathetic character when they’re already down. I haven’t run the numbers on this, but I’d believe it: Serling really had a soft spot for his down-and-out characters, as long as they had flashes of real decency. So it may just be that the ones who do get kicked hurt so much that they overshadow all the ones who, like Denton earlier this season, find their lives improved by the brush with the uncanny.
Johnson’s fighter pilot history is really interesting! I went down a little bit of a wiki rabbithole with him and the rest of the Gilligan’s Island cast, actually (for no apparent reason, I was obsessed with that show as a kid and had taped all the episodes).
Of course every so often you get something like the astronauts who cease to exist or a whole plane full of people who did nothing wrong besides fly too fast.
Given the rather tepid quality of Gilligan’s Island, the cast is pretty accomplished. Alan Hale Jr is not quite the actor his dad was, but his resume is pretty interesting pre-Gilligan. (I wasn’t obsessed with the show, but I can probably tell you the plot of every episode, the three reunion movies, and five or six episodes of the cartoons.)
I think it’s the pitiable quality that saves some of them: the more control a character has, and the better they’re doing, the less protected they are. The astronauts are usually feeling pretty good, or at least pretty accomplished, before things go south. (Our poor zoo exhibit in the last episode is a notable exception, of course–and it may matter that Serling adapted that one but didn’t originate it.)
I enjoyed this one very much, there are definitely messy elements but I ended up mostly enjoying them for their strangeness – I’ve never seen a time travel plan that is “I will randomly grab any guy at all from the past” before, for example. The universe enacting cosmic justice across the timelines was a cool ending.
My favourite bit though, as a noted hater of jazz, was the destruction of the jukebox. I would do the same!
I really like the idea of the random grab, too! (The past as claw machine game!) You could get a lot of mileage out of that in different scenarios.
Now I’m just picturing you watching the jukebox desctruction and hooting and hollering: “Finally, someone’s doing it!”