The Twilight Zone Goes West--Part 2

The second of The Twilight Zone's Western-themed episodes was "Execution," which aired on April 1, 1960. This one is a time travel story, so the Wild West is the setting only for a few minutes at the beginning and the end. So I suppose it's a judgement call as to whether it truly qualifies as a Wild West-themed story. But it's my blog, so my decisions, by golly, are final. 

Joe Caswell (played by Albert Salmi) is a murderer about to be at the receiving end of a well-deserved hanging. But the moment the rope snaps tight around his neck, he's teleported nearly a century into the future via a time machine.

It's at this point that the episode becomes fun on a meta level. The inventor of the time machine is a scientist played by Russell Johnson, who is a little more than four years away from playing the Professor on Gilligan's Island. Johnson was an excellent character actor, so it's always fun to see him play a character role in his pre-Gilligan days. But seeing him play a scientist is even more fun. I half-expected the time machine to be made out of coconuts.

The story, written by Rod Serling and based on a short story written by George Clayton Johnson, is not a classic, but it's still a good one. Johnson's character gradually realized he's brought a brutal thug into modern day. Caswell soon murders him, goes out onto the streets of New York and suffers a nearly crippling culture shock from the lights, cars and other bizarre things he's not equipped to understand.

Salmi's performance as Caswell is great--he actually manages to generate a small level of sympathy for the time-lost outlaw. But the ending, involving Caswell's encounter with a modern day killer and an inadvertent activation of the time machine, tries a little too hard to be ironic and--I think--comes across as contrived.

But Salmi and Johnson bring enough life to their characters to still make it an enjoyable half-hour.

By the way, this was the first of two appearances that Russell Johnson made on The Twilight Zone. He'd return the next season in yet another time travel story, in which he fails to save Abraham Lincoln from being assassinated. It's no wonder the one thing the Professor never tried on that island was building a time machine out of coconuts and going back to keep the S.S. Minnow from sailing off on that three-hour tour. He already knew that mucking about in time never ends well.