The Fever

Cast

Franklin Gibbs: Everett Sloane
Flora Gibbs: Vivi Janiss

Synopsis

[Spoiler warningSpoiler warning]: Plot and/or ending details follow.

A man, Franklin, goes to Las Vegas, Nevada with his wife, Flora, because she won a competition. Franklin verbally protests gambling, but his wife is excited about their vacation. Franklin is given a coin by an odd man at the casino, who forces Franklin to play the coin in a slot machine. He wins and declares to his wife that they should put the winnings in their hotel room, and not put it back in the machine like the other people in the casino. As they are departing the casino, Franklin believes he hears someone calling his name. He continues to hear someone calling his name as he tries to sleep. Disturbed, he informs his wife that he cannot keep "tainted" money, and that he is going back down to the casino to get rid of it by putting it back in the machine. Later, Flora comes down to the casino, and finds Franklin playing the machine obsessively. Addicted to the machine, Franklin has spent a great deal of their money gambling on the machine. When Flora tries to coax him away from the machine, Franklin declares that he has lost so much money, that he has to try to win some of it back. He becomes enraged with Flora when she presses for him to leave the machine. He declares that the machine is "inhuman," that it "teases you, sucks you in." Others observe that Franklin has been playing on the machine for hours. Franklin continues to gamble on the machine in a frenzy. Flora informs him that it is 8:00 in the morning, but he continues to play. The "one-armed bandit" then takes Franklin's last dollar. Franklin begins yelling at the machine to give him back his "last dollar." He attacks the machine screaming that it took his last dollar - "That machine owes me a dollar!" Franklin is taken out of the casino screaming. Later in bed, Franklin tells Flora that the machine broke down deliberately. He proclaims that the machine was about to pay off, but broke down, taking his last dollar, so that it would not have to. Franklin then hears the machine again calling his name. He sees the machine coming down the hallway to his room. The machine comes to their room, where Franklin declares that the machine is "chasing" him. His wife, Flora, cannot see the machine, and believes that he is going crazy. The machine continues to follow Franklin, repeating his name over and over - "Franklin, Franklin, Franklin!" Franklin backs up towards the window, his hands over his ears, with the slot machine pressing toward him repeating his name. He crashes through the window, falling to his death. At the death scene, the police are standing over Franklin's dead body, discussing how his wife stated that he had not slept in 24 hours. The last scene shows the slot machine rolling up to the dead body, and spitting out Franklin's last dollar.

Irony: While the man thought that the machine was chasing him to haunt him, the slot machine was really chasing the man to give him back the coin that it previously "stole."

Trivia

"Serling celebrated [the signing of his new show, The Twilight Zone by spending a weekend in Las Vegas. While Carol Serling was having good luck nearby, he became enslaved by a merciless one-armed bandit, an incident he would turn into one of his first Twilight Zone episodes, “The Fever”... —Gordon F. Sander, excerpt from Serling: The Rise and Twilight of Television's Last Angry Man''.

Serling wrote an expanded ending to this episode when he adapted it to short story form. The addition read:

Flora Gibbs flew back to Elgin, Kansas, to pick up the broken crockery of her life. She lived a silent, patient life from then on and gave no one any trouble. Only once did anything unusual happen and that was a year later. The church had a bazaar and someone brought in an old used one-armed bandit. It had taken three of her friends from the Women's Alliance to stop her screaming and get her back home to bed. It had cast rather a pall over the evening." —Excerpt from “The Fever”, published in Stories From the Twilight Zone in April 1960.

In the Spongebob Squarepants episode Skill Crane, Mr. Krabs buys a crane game machine (in which you insert money to move a claw and get a prize). Squidward can't seem to win at it whereas Spongebob does so easily, and the losing drives Squidward crazy; he even believes the creaking of the swinging claw is saying his name, much like the slot machine coin sound.

In Disney's The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror at Disney's California Adventure after leaving the elevator you are directed down a hall, In one of the area's before you get to the hall leading to the exit is the slot machine from this episode.

External link

[TV.com episode page]

References

Sander, Gordon F.: Serling: The Rise And Twilight of Television's Last Angry Man. New York: Penguin Books, 1992.
Zicree, Marc Scott: The Twilight Zone Companion. Sillman-James Press, 1982 (second edition)

Twilight Zone links

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