The conceit is original, and brilliantly executed; the characters' voices – from the toffish tones of Joy's ineffectual husband, Dennis, to the complaints of her put-upon secretary, Barbara – ventriloquised with flair.
Shearman felt that the episode had "an overwritten quality", citing the Polaroid Man's dialogue as the main example of this; he also believed that the development of Catherine Black as a character seemed poorly executed, with the character lacking enough depth to "retain the audience's sympathies".
"When you have the right people making decisions and the players executing with character, it propels you to success," Chiarelli said.
The pilot pulsates with ideas, language and intrigue; Here Was a Man, the episode of Wild Bill Hickok's murder, is an object lesson in how to build up to and execute a character's assassination; The Trial Of Jack McCall, on the acquittal of Hickok's murderer, with its bleak ruminations on justice and the failures of law, remains the best episode in the show's run.
"With the state seeming to execute this character for dissent, many people realise they have keys of their own.
As the National got going at Chichester, he scored again in Arden's The Workhouse Donkey (1963), as a blustering Labour politician, Alderman Butterthwaite, another northern character part executed with a high degree of absurd and demonic rascality.
"You could be the killer, or you could be the victim, but you're driven to act by whatever character you get," she said, adding that Mr. Smith would be on hand to quietly give participants any additional information they might need to execute their characters' roles.
The action itself, executed by unnamed characters, is classically simple.
Here is the definition of a word EMIT-Q which when executed emits the single character Q: EMIT-Q 81 ( the ASCII value for the character 'Q' ) EMIT ; This definition was written to use the ASCII value of the Q character (81) directly.
Karloff's character is executed just before his pardon comes through, giving the local mad scientist (the avuncular Edmund Gwenn) a chance to bring the unjustly condemned man back to life with a new technique he has developed.
