Anne Francis is extremely sympathetic as the central character in this Kafkaesque story. It's not presented in an eerie or horrific fashion, but matter-of-factly with standard police procedure and a trial. In that way, it is more compelling than if hopped-up or exaggerated.
Lack of gimmicks is an important feature here: we're presented with a simple situation: Anne accidentally drives onto the wrong ramp entering the freeway, resulting in a crash into oncoming traffic and the death of her husband. She's charged with murder, as the district attorney and investigators suspect she wanted to kill her husband.
The major case against her is instigated by her volunteering to take a couple of lie detector tests, which she flunks; the machines indicating she's lying when asked she denies murdering her husband.
Those polygraph machine results end up being the crucial factors during her trial, even though they were technically inadmissible as evidence they were crucial in convincing the district attorney to charge her with the crime and they also caused her to doubt herself and ultimately submit a false confession. Only Merrills skillful questioning in her defense gets her off.
I suspect that being made as an episode of this old-fashioned type of tv series proved to make the show more powerful than if it were a far-fetched emotionally-overheated modern approach, say an Oliver Stone conspiracy-theory minded production. Namely, it really seems so clear-cut and believable that the viewer is easily put on the hot seat with Anne.
Watching it for the first time, some 60 years after broadcast, I was struck with an unexpected prescience here, as hinted by the episode's title. Long before artificial intelligence became the phrase of the year, this year, the natural apprehension of mankind about the potential for machines (eventually intelligent computers) to take over the world and displace mankind was there, now magnified immeasurably. I would guess that a new movie or tv show on this subject would take the paranoid Oliver Stone route rather than the staid but supremely effective manner of a Kraft Suspense Theatre.