The Twilight Zone: Execution
Jan. 27th, 2026 07:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerRod Serling going “on-set” for his next episode preview for “Execution” and standing in what he said was a time machine did get my attention last week. I was still left guessing how that tied into the compact episode title, which at least could have got my attention before as I kept glancing back at the list of contents on the back of my old first-season DVD set.
The episode itself opened in the past the time machine was said to link to, and the past involved a noose being strung up over a tree branch. I’m afraid I did think of the nastiness of lynchings and the people The Twilight Zone hasn’t put on screen yet before a decided effort was made to establish the man about to have the horse taken out from under him deserved that. (A judge was in attendance, and a minister too.) At the fatal moment, though, the condemned man just sort of faded out...
The lab-coated scientist who’d brought the condemned man to the Twilight Zone’s present (where, for a little while, I wondered if his lab-office was the C-57-D interior “redressed”) didn’t need all that long to figure out just what had been about to happen, even if this didn’t help him all that much afterwards. The time traveller’s panicked reactions to his future then had me wondering about stock footage that had been in a previous episode, but with the rampage over (and a reminder the time and place he had come from was being recreated on television on a regular basis) and things getting back to where they’d started there was a grim twist ending we were instructed to see as fitting. While I did think back to a Twilight Zone episode that involved “time travel” without a machine to invoke the “science fiction” label, I did sort of appreciate the label showing up without space travel being involved.
The episode itself opened in the past the time machine was said to link to, and the past involved a noose being strung up over a tree branch. I’m afraid I did think of the nastiness of lynchings and the people The Twilight Zone hasn’t put on screen yet before a decided effort was made to establish the man about to have the horse taken out from under him deserved that. (A judge was in attendance, and a minister too.) At the fatal moment, though, the condemned man just sort of faded out...
The lab-coated scientist who’d brought the condemned man to the Twilight Zone’s present (where, for a little while, I wondered if his lab-office was the C-57-D interior “redressed”) didn’t need all that long to figure out just what had been about to happen, even if this didn’t help him all that much afterwards. The time traveller’s panicked reactions to his future then had me wondering about stock footage that had been in a previous episode, but with the rampage over (and a reminder the time and place he had come from was being recreated on television on a regular basis) and things getting back to where they’d started there was a grim twist ending we were instructed to see as fitting. While I did think back to a Twilight Zone episode that involved “time travel” without a machine to invoke the “science fiction” label, I did sort of appreciate the label showing up without space travel being involved.