Faith and the Fifth Dimension: "Execution" (April 1, 1960)

Is Joe Caswell the "evil man" Rod Serling says he is?

Joe Caswell (Albert Salmi) was supposed to spit at the Bible.

In the script of “Execution” CBS censors reviewed, according to Martin Grams Jr. (in The Twilight Zone: Unlocking the Door to a Television Classic), Caswell spat at the Scriptures the preacher (Jon Lormer) holds at the scaffold and sneered, “That book ain’t going to help.” The network asked Serling to change both the line and the spitting. Serling lost the latter but kept the former.

Even without spitting, Caswell’s disrespect for the preacher and his book are clear, and probably reinforced, for much of the American TV audience in 1960, Serling’s description of Caswell as an evil man.

“When the good Lord passed out a conscience,” Serling says in his opening narration, “a heart, a feeling for fellow men, [Caswell] must have been out for a beer.” Serling says Caswell is destined for “the dark eternity of all evil men.”

To be sure, the crime of which Caswell has been convicted and for which he is about to hang, shooting a man in the back, is no admirable or praiseworthy action. And Caswell’s declaration that he’d do it again, given the chance, doesn’t make us think much of him, either.

But is he an “evil man?” Is the truth about Joe Caswell just that simple?

“That book,” the Bible, often draws a bright and clear line between “good people” and “evil people.”

God “watches over the way of the righteous,” the psalm-singer declares, “but the way of the wicked will perish” (Psalm 1.6).

“Woe to the guilty!” says the prophet Isaiah. “How unfortunate they are, for what their hands have done shall be done to them” (Isaiah 3.11).

Jesus anticipates, at the Last Judgment, separating “people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats,” and the “accursed” “will go away into eternal punishment but the righteous into eternal life” (Matthew 25.32, 41, 46).

My hunch is Joe Caswell heard plenty of people like the preacher and the judge (Fay Roope) call him an evil man, and invoking the Bible to back up their judgment of him.

But would a completely, irredeemably evil man be able to make the speech Caswell makes to temporal scientist George Manion (Russell Johnson, playing a professorial scientist four years before Gilligan’s Island)?

When Manion tells Caswell he’s going to try and send the condemned man back to 1880—back to the very moment Caswell was hanged, if possible—to ensure justice is served, Caswell pushes back against the professor’s smothering self-righteousness:

Mister, you're just talkin' words! Justice, right and wrong. They sound good in this nice warm room and a nice full stomach, just a few feet away from a soft bed. They sound nice, and they go down easy! But you just try 'em on an ice cold mesa, where another man's bread or another man's jacket stands between you and stayin' alive.

It puzzles me that Serling could write off a character for whom he’d written such a speech as, in the end, nothing more than an “evil man.” As New Testament professor A.J. Levine has written in many of her books, “God forbid we be judged by the worst thing we’ve ever done.”

Nothing Caswell says justifies or excuses his crimes. But in this moment, Caswell gives a raw and powerful voice to a protest against stark and simplistic divisions between “good people” and “evil people.” In this moment, he’s shouting on behalf of all people who struggle to get by. He’s bellowing a belief that life is supposed to be about more than just surviving—not just for “clean-faced, Johnny-come-lately dandies” but for everyone.

I don’t believe the Bible’s strict delineations between the good and the evil, the righteous and the wicked, are distinctions anyone but God is entitled to draw. I believe God calls and commands us to act with kindness and mercy toward all, as God does (Matthew 5.45; Luke 6.36), and to confess and repent of our own sins before condemning others for theirs (Matthew 7.3-5; Luke 6.37).

Maybe we should take Serling at his word. Joe Caswell is a fictional character, after all. Fictional people can be irredeemably evil, should their creators choose them to be so.

But when it comes to real people, that’s a choice our Creator has not made.