The Twilight Zone - Execution

I can think of few Twilight Zone episodes—Black Leather Jackets, Caesar and Me, The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine to name three off the top—that could better exemplify the show at its most average and unextraordinary as Execution. It just doesn’t reach out and grab you with its story or characters, and this coming from the first season when the show was just hitting its stride. I think visually it is rescued from the doldrums of Black Leather Jackets and Caesar and Me, but for the most part this could be the worst episode dealing with time travel. And never has an ending been more contrived and unsubtle in getting its point across. I have to admit that the reason I chose this as my next TZ episode to write about for the blog was it came to mind when I was putting together my write-up for Back There, due to Russell Johnson’s involvement in both that episode (which also deals with time travel but a bit more ambiguously) and Execution. All that said, Execution doesn’t even exist in the same playing field as Back There. Hell, Execution is minor leagues. Well, maybe it is peewee baseball. Just the same, that isn’t necessarily to blame the actors. They just didn’t have a lot to work with.

Salmi (the space pirate, Captain Tucker of Lost in Space fame) is a shady, disreputable, unapologetic, conscienceless criminal in 1880, being taken to a barren tree to hang for shooting a kid in the back. He is about to perish as the horse under him is popped on the ass but a scientist, played by Johnson, “rescues him” through a time travel machine, not realizing such a terrible mistake it was. Salmi let loose on New York City, unprepared and not ready for such activity (the “noise” of the city is tough on his ears), turning on Johnson because the scientist irritates him about good behavior, justice, and knowing right from wrong in conversation. This conversation, unwisely by someone who is supposed to be highly intelligent, is aggressively initiated by Johnson knowing that he’s felt this “disquiet, something in the eyes and face about him”—meaning Salmi—towards Salmi, and the results (Salmi breaking a lamp over his head, killing him, as Johnson went for a gun) are not the least bit surprising. I look down on Johnson and couldn’t necessarily feel sympathy because he just knew better and yet asserted his opinion on Salmi not taking into account, it seems, how this rather unpleasant-looking fellow might react. Wouldn’t precaution be the order of the day? If I felt some discomfort with this guy I plucked from 1880, wouldn’t I be careful how to address him? Yet Johnson goes right at him about conscience and proper civilized behavior. Salmi then retaliates with his retort on “well, Mr. Fancypants, how would you survive in the Old West where there’s cold, poverty, and lack of a good place to sleep?” and Johnson has nothing to say. In fact Johnson looks like a dummy when Salmi properly tones him down by telling him that he should step into that time travel contraption and journey backward to 1880 and see how he’d make out / survive.

I think the best sequence of the episode, besides the cool silhouette of hanging men, is Salmi’s terror on the city streets—a direct opposite reaction from FW Murnau’s Sunrise where the city is astonishing not horrifying—as he confronts the bright lights of neon, the harsh sounds of cars and the juke box, and a gunslinger on a television set. Breaking apart the juke box with a chair, shooting the television using Johnson’s gun (and then shooting at a cop), ripping apart a phone booth he gets “trapped inside”, and encountering another thief in the night when he retreats back to Johnson’s office; Salmi’s anguish and anxieties are heightened stylistically (in direction and performance). That alone pretty much saved it for me from totally just shitting on it. Johnson is so utterly wasted…I’m glad I have Back There to keep the sour taste out of my mouth. Salmi is good at heels so his “waste of humanity” suits his face and style, although I think he is also a rather effective actor in the right authoritarian part when need-be. I dug the shot of a fallen Johnson, the shattered lamp all around him, and the recording equipment playing back his reservations about the kind of man he used his time traveling machine on. The part with the burglar (complete with scar on the eye!) is just quite a loud point towards comeuppance. Salmi meets his 1960 counterpart in Than Wyenn and doesn’t outlast him…Wyenn strangles him with the rope from a curtain, pretty much a less flattering means of suffocation as compared to the “neck tie party” version of meeting his end in the Old West. Wyenn, then, inexplicably, turns on the machine and goes inside it! Then off he goes to the rope meant for Salmi, suffering the lynching meant for the crook he had just strangled! It is preposterous and highly implausible. I often do go with it, but this means of giving Wyenn justice is just too much to swallow. That said, seeing him in the Old West and the reaction of those who sentenced Salmi to die is rather amusing…it is quite an image.