Back in the 1880s, just after a man without conscience is dropped from a lone tree with a rope around his neck, a scientist pulls him into 20th-century New York City.

Serling wrote this script based on a George Clayton Johnson’s bare bones, present-tense treatment for a TV script, complete with an indication of where the commercial break should go. For this episode, Serling filled in the flesh and cut the fat from a bare bones, present-tense treatment by George Clayton Johnson. The treatment appeared in Johnson’s 1977 retrospective collection of scripts and stories, and in Volume 9 of Serling’s collected Twilight Zone scripts, Johnson commented that “Rod took my idea and went off to the races with it. He had a remarkable knowledge of what would and wouldn’t work on television, and he took everything that wouldn’t work out of ‘Execution’. He worked like a surgeon; a little snip here, a complete amputation over there, move this bone into place, graft over that one. When he was done, my little story had grown into a television script that lived and breathed on its own.” Serling also added a nice twist at the end that, for us, warranted the TV episode an Eloi Honorable Mention.
Rod Serling wrote this script based on a 1960 Twilight Zone episode of the same name, but I’m uncertain whether the story was published before Johnson’s 1977 retrospective collection.
Michael Main
Caswell: I wanna see if there are things out there like you described to me. Carriages without horses and the buildings that rise to—

Professor Manion: They’re out there, Caswell. . . . Things you can’t imagine.

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Variants

(1)
  1. “Execution” by Rod Serling, directed by David Orrick McDearmon (CBS-TV, USA, 1 April 1960).
  2. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . written by Rod Serling
    George Clayton Johnson (based on a work by)
    . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . directed by David Orrick McDearmon
    . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . created by Rod Serling [uncredited]
    . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . hosted by Rod Serling

Previous Works

based on a treatment by George Clayton Johnson, later published as “Execution