The Fever
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Template:Infobox TTW season one The Fever is an episode of the television series The Twilight Zone.
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Details
Episode number:17
Season: 1
Production code: 173-3627
Original air date: January 29, 1960
Writer: Rod Serling
Director: Robert Florey
Music: stock (taken primarily from Jerry Goldsmith's "jazz themes", which are used as incidental music on many other Twilight Zones)
Cast
Franklin Gibbs: Everett Sloane
Flora Gibbs:Vivi Janiss
Synopsis
A man goes to Las Vegas, Nevada with his wife because she won a competition. The man quickly becomes addicted to gambling on the slot machine. He hears the slot machine calling out his name, and when he is almost out of money and the machine breaks down he becomes convinced that the machine is mocking him. He imagines the machine is chasing him, and then falls backwards out of the window to his death.
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."
Themes
A warning about the dangers of gambling. Similar themes are addressed in The Silence.
External link
- TV Tome episode page (http://www.tvtome.com/tvtome/servlet/GuidePageServlet/showid-237/epid-12601/)
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)
Back to: The Twilight Zone, Episode List, Season 1