Plot
A man convicted of murder, Adam Grant (Weaver), tries to convince those about to execute him that the world all around them is just his recurring nightmare. The story opens with the jury finding Grant guilty of murder. He laughs uncontrollably and then rants that he refuses to die again. He claims that the district attorney and lawyers are all people he has known in his past who are playing parts in his dream.
Speaking to others including his cellmate and the district attorney he points out obvious logical errors accepted as normal by those around him such as the fact his arrest, trial and execution are happening on the same day and the fact the prisoners seem to stereotypically look like what you'd see in a story. The district attorney is persuaded to visit Grant by his friend a reporter who is questioning reality based on the unlikely perfect life he enjoys. He speaks to Grant but does not believe him. He asks if he cares about dying if it's all a dream. He explains that he cannot get a decent night's sleep because he always wakes up screaming. He tells the district attorney to go home and he will find that what he thought was for dinner will be something else. This happens and unnerves the district attorney, who discusses the issue with a friend. The friend reasons that the man's claims constitute reasonable doubt as to his sanity, and that the district attorney should ask the governor to issue a stay of execution. With reservations, he places the call and asks the governor to do so as Grant is being prepared for execution. He tells the reporter that the governor said he would make the necessary phone call. The stay of execution arrives too late, and we discover that Grant was correct: the world was a dream for them and a nightmare for him. Everything vanishes and goes dark.
Grant then finds himself in the courtroom being sentenced to death for murder again, with the same people in different roles (e.g., a fellow inmate is now the judge behind the bench).
Read more about this topic: Shadow Play (1961 The Twilight Zone Episode)
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)
“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)
“The westward march has stopped, upon the final plains of the Pacific; and now the plot thickens ... with the change, the pause, the settlement, our people draw into closer groups, stand face to face, to know each other and be known.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)