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:
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“Ends in themselves, my letters plot no change;
They carry nothing dutiable; they won’t
Aspire, astound, establish or estrange.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)