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.
Professor Manion: They’re out there, Caswell. . . . Things you can’t imagine.
Nowadays, we all know that Doc Doom is far too smart to think the most profitable way to use his time platform is by sending three of the FF into the past with orders to bring back Blackbeard’s treasure (while keeping the fourth member of their team captive). And yet, the story has a charm that stems from the causal loop of Ben Grimm’s presence in the past actually causing the legend of Blackbeard, which in turn caused Doom to send the loveable lunk back.
As early as the 1930s, stories have addressed the issue of the Earth moving to a different position when a time traveler moves through time. This story addresses the issue by saying that the time traveler appears only once per year, but that doesn't really solve the problem for so many reasons, starting with the fact that a given position on the surface of the Earth will not be at “the same” position in the subsequent year.
Oh, and Dave’s grandfather had a plot to go back and kill Hitler, but that’s not really relevant to Zelda (and Cassie and Walter and John and Charlie).
Sadly, the story comes close to being a slick static timeline, but alas, the writers could not follow through.