“Leviathan Five.” An episode of Kraft Suspense Theatre (Season 1, Episode 14). First air date: 30 January 1964. Arthur Kennedy, Andrew Duggan, John Van Dreelen, Harold J. Stone, Frank Maxwell, Robert Webber (prosecutor), Frank Overton (the defense), Judson Laire. Teleplay: Berne Giler, David Giler, and William P. McGivern. Story: Berne & David Giler. Director: David Lowell Rich.

   Four men are standing trial for murdering another man. All five had been working in a high-security installation 1,500 feet underground when an earth displacement blocked the elevator and airshafts to the surface. Being scientists, they start calculating how long they have to live before help arrives.

   No matter how they figure it, unless one of them dies they’ll all suffocate. When it is suggested that someone could sacrifice himself (they have a gun) if he draws the short stick, one man refuses on moral grounds to be part of any plan involving suicide.

   The group then devises another approach — whoever is selected won’t kill himself but instead will wait until everybody has retired from the main area (to conserve air), fetch the revolver, and go to another man’s cubicle (chosen at random), where he will shoot that person, return to the common area, wipe the gun clean of prints, go back to his own cubicle, and pretend innocence.

   And so it comes to pass — except, as we learn later, the man who dies was not chosen at random ….

   This description makes the play sound like a whodunit, which it is — but, at the same time, it isn’t. The main thrust of the story is to explore such heavyweight ideas as: What is the difference between murder and execution? Can five men behave as a sovereign nation, making their own laws and deciding who lives and who dies?

   If a man consents to sacrifice himself, can his death at someone else’s hand be deemed a murder? If one man commits murder, can three other men who never wielded the weapon be held equally responsible? Isn’t this a nation “under God” and His laws?

   As I say, ponderous matter for a one-hour TV drama; yet the script smoothly proposes them all without bogging down in pointless moralizing.

   Although it’s never mentioned in the play, the term “leviathan” in the title must be a reference to English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes’ dubious conception of government: “For by Art is created that great Leviathan called a Commonwealth or State (in latine Civitas) which is but an Artificial Man; though of greater stature and strength than the Natural, for whose protection and defence it was intended; and in which, the Sovereignty is an Artificial Soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body ….”