Episode no. Season 1
Episode 26 Production code 173-3628 | Directed by David Orrick McDearmon Original air date April 1, 1960 | |
Written by Rod Serling
Story by George Clayton Johnson | ||
"Execution" is episode 26 of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone. It features Albert Salmi, who also plays the lead character in the Season 4 episode "Of Late I Think of Cliffordville".
Plot
In 1880, an outlaw cowboy named Joe Caswell is about to be hanged for murder. But as the noose tightens around his neck, he suddenly disappears and finds himself in 1960, in the laboratory of Professor Manion. Manion explains that he used a time machine to pluck Caswell from the past. But when Manion sees Caswell's rope burns around his neck, and hears his admission that in his life he had murdered over twenty men, he knows he must try to send Caswell back.
The discussion leads to an argument. Caswell attacks Manion, killing him with a desk lamp. He then flees from the laboratory into a busy street, but is so overwhelmed by the lights and the noise that he returns to the lab. Caswell, distraught and desperate, breaks down, pleading for the dead scientist to help him.
A thief named Paul Johnson enters the lab. Caswell fights with Johnson, but Johnson gets the upper hand and strangles Caswell with the cord from the window curtains. As he tries to find Manion's safe, he accidentally activates the time machine and is sent back to 1880, appearing in the noose intended for Caswell, just in time to be hanged. The witnesses to the hanging are shocked to see a stranger's body, in strange clothes, in place of Caswell's. They question whether this was the Devil's work or some other power's, and whether they have just executed an innocent man.