The Fever (The Twilight Zone)

"**The Fever**"
"The Fever"
The Twilight Zone episode
Episode no.	Season 1; Episode 17
Directed by	Robert Florey
Written by	Rod Serling
Production code	173-3627
Original air date	January 29, 1960
Guest appearances
	Everett Sloane as Franklin Gibbs; Vivi Janiss as Flora Gibbs;
Episode chronology
← Previous; "The Hitch-Hiker"	Next →; "The Last Flight"
	The Twilight Zone (1959 TV series, season 1)
	List of episodes

"The Fever" is the seventeenth episode of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone. It originally aired on January 29, 1960, on CBS. The complete, original text for this story was run in the debut issue of Harvey Kurtzman’s Help!, cover dated August, 1960.

Opening narration[edit]

Mr. and Mrs. Franklin Gibbs, three days and two nights all expenses paid at a Las Vegas hotel, won by virtue of Mrs. Gibbs's knack with a phrase. But unbeknownst to either Mr. or Mrs. Gibbs is the fact that there's a prize in their package, neither expected nor bargained for. In just a moment, one of them will succumb to an illness worse than any virus can produce. A most inoperative, deadly life-shattering affliction known as the Fever.

Plot[edit]

Franklin Gibbs and his wife Flora go to Las Vegas because she won a slogan contest. He detests gambling, but his wife is excited about their vacation. In a casino, she puts a nickel in a slot machine and Franklin admonishes her for wasting money. She convinces him to let her pull the arm since she already put the money in, but wins nothing on the spin. Happy that his point was made, he implores her to go back to their room so they can get ready for dinner. As they walk, Franklin is given a coin by a drunk man who makes him use it in another machine, which displays a sign reading Special Jackpot $10,000.00. He wins and tells his wife that they should keep the winnings and not lose it back like other people. As they depart, Franklin believes he hears the slot machine calling his name in a monstrous-sounding voice.

Franklin continues to hear this as he tries to sleep. He gets out of bed, telling his wife he cannot keep "tainted" money, and that he is going to get rid of it by putting it back in the machine. Later, Flora goes to the casino and finds Franklin playing the machine obsessively. When Flora tries to coax him to stop, he declares that he has lost so much that he has to try to win some of it back. He becomes enraged when she presses him to leave; he declares that the machine is "inhuman," that it "teases you, [...] sucks you in." The casino workers watch and talk about him as he constantly plays and ignores his wife's pleas to go to bed. When Franklin puts his last dollar into the machine, it suddenly malfunctions and the reels will not spin. He loses his temper, knocks the machine over, and is taken screaming out of the casino.

Later in bed, Franklin tells Flora that it was about to pay off, but deliberately broke down so that it would not have to give him his money. He then hears the machine again calling "Franklin!" Then, to Franklin's horror, he sees the slot machine, which has over its coin hopper a hood with a large smile etched onto it, coming down the hallway toward their room, pursuing him; but Flora cannot see it. The machine hounds Franklin toward the window, repeating his name over and over. He crashes through the glass and falls to his death. The police stand over his body, noting that his wife had stated that he had not slept in 24 hours. A casino manager comments that he's "seen a lot of 'em get hooked before, but never like him." The last scene shows Franklin's last dollar rolling up and spinning out flat near his outstretched, dead hand. The camera pans in the direction from which the coin had come and there sits the slot machine, 'smiling'.

Closing narration[edit]

Mr. Franklin Gibbs, visitor to Las Vegas, who lost his money, his reason, and finally his life to an inanimate, metal machine, variously described as a "one-armed bandit", a "slot machine", or, in Mr. Franklin Gibbs' words, a "monster with a will all of its own." For our purposes, we'll stick with the latter definition because we're in the Twilight Zone.

Episode notes[edit]

In Serling: The Rise and Twilight of Television's Last Angry Man, Gordon F. Sander wrote, "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 slot machine was reused in the later episodes "A Nice Place to Visit" and "The Prime Mover".

This is one of several episodes from Season One with its opening title sequence plastered over with the opening for Season Two. This was done during the Summer of 1961 to help the Season One shows fit in with the new look the show had taken during the following season. This is also one of three Season One episodes with Marius Constant's theme instead of Bernard Herrmann's over the closing credits.

References[edit]

External links[edit]

"The Fever" at IMDb

v t e The Twilight Zone (1959) episodes
Season 1	"Where Is Everybody?" "One for the Angels" "Mr. Denton on Doomsday" "The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine" "Walking Distance" "Escape Clause" "The Lonely" "Time Enough at Last" "Perchance to Dream" "Judgment Night" "And When the Sky Was Opened" "What You Need" "The Four of Us Are Dying" "Third from the Sun" "I Shot an Arrow into the Air" "The Hitch-Hiker" "The Fever" "The Last Flight" "The Purple Testament" "Elegy" "Mirror Image" "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street" "A World of Difference" "Long Live Walter Jameson" "People Are Alike All Over" "Execution" "The Big Tall Wish" "A Nice Place to Visit" "Nightmare as a Child" "A Stop at Willoughby" "The Chaser" "A Passage for Trumpet" "Mr. Bevis" "The After Hours" "The Mighty Casey" "A World of His Own"
Season 2	"King Nine Will Not Return" "The Man in the Bottle" "Nervous Man in a Four Dollar Room" "A Thing About Machines" "The Howling Man" "Eye of the Beholder" "Nick of Time" "The Lateness of the Hour" "The Trouble with Templeton" "A Most Unusual Camera" "The Night of the Meek" "Dust" "Back There" "The Whole Truth" "The Invaders" "A Penny for Your Thoughts" "Twenty Two" "The Odyssey of Flight 33" "Mr. Dingle, the Strong" "Static" "The Prime Mover" "Long Distance Call" "A Hundred Yards Over the Rim" "The Rip Van Winkle Caper" "The Silence" "Shadow Play" "The Mind and the Matter" "Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?" "The Obsolete Man"
Season 3	"Two" "The Arrival" "The Shelter" "The Passersby" "A Game of Pool" "The Mirror" "The Grave" "It's a Good Life" "Deaths-Head Revisited" "The Midnight Sun" "Still Valley" "The Jungle" "Once Upon a Time" "Five Characters in Search of an Exit" "A Quality of Mercy" "Nothing in the Dark" "One More Pallbearer" "Dead Man's Shoes" "The Hunt" "Showdown with Rance McGrew" "Kick the Can" "A Piano in the House" "The Last Rites of Jeff Myrtlebank" "To Serve Man" "The Fugitive" "Little Girl Lost" "Person or Persons Unknown" "The Little People" "Four O'Clock" "Hocus-Pocus and Frisby" "The Trade-Ins" "The Gift" "The Dummy" "Young Man's Fancy" "I Sing the Body Electric" "Cavender Is Coming" "The Changing of the Guard"
Season 4	"In His Image" "The Thirty-Fathom Grave" "Valley of the Shadow" "He's Alive" "Mute" "Death Ship" "Jess-Belle" "Miniature" "Printer's Devil" "No Time Like the Past" "The Parallel" "I Dream of Genie" "The New Exhibit" "Of Late I Think of Cliffordville" "The Incredible World of Horace Ford" "On Thursday We Leave for Home" "Passage on the Lady Anne" "The Bard"
Season 5	"In Praise of Pip" "Steel" "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" "A Kind of a Stopwatch" "The Last Night of a Jockey" "Living Doll" "The Old Man in the Cave" "Uncle Simon" "Probe 7, Over and Out" "The 7th Is Made Up of Phantoms" "A Short Drink from a Certain Fountain" "Ninety Years Without Slumbering" "Ring-a-Ding Girl" "You Drive" "The Long Morrow" "The Self-Improvement of Salvadore Ross" "Number 12 Looks Just Like You" "Black Leather Jackets" "Night Call" "From Agnes—With Love" "Spur of the Moment" "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" "Queen of the Nile" "What's in the Box" "The Masks" "I Am the Night—Color Me Black" "Sounds and Silences" "Caesar and Me" "The Jeopardy Room" "Stopover in a Quiet Town" "The Encounter" "Mr. Garrity and the Graves" "The Brain Center at Whipple's" "Come Wander with Me" "The Fear" "The Bewitchin' Pool"