Plot
In 1880 a man 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 1959, 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 Caswell's 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 the Professor, hitting him on the head with a desk lamp. Caswell flees from the laboratory into a busy street, but becomes 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. Suddenly a thief enters the lab. Caswell fights with the thief, but the thief gets the upper hand in the fight and strangles Caswell with the cord used to open the from the window curtains. As the thief 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.
Read more about this topic: Execution (The Twilight Zone)
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
““The plot thickens,” he said, as I entered.”
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)