A
casino is a “facility which houses and accommodates
certain types of gambling activities”
according to Wikipedia.
It’s a venue, in
essence, connected to a human vice, and
perhaps that connection helps to explain why the casino is such an oft-seen
locale in cult-television history.
The
casino is a place where people seem to lose their moral rudder, and put financial
security (and sometimes even personal dignity…) on the line. That high-risk, low-reward equation offers
intrepid writers plenty of material to work with.
An
early episode of The Twilight Zone (1959 – 1964) called “The Fever” (by Rod
Serling) aired on January 29, 1960, and prominently featured a casino. Here, a morally-upright man named Franklin
Gibbs (Everett Sloane) scolds his wife Flora Gibbs (Vivi Janiss) about her
relatively innocuous gambling at a Vegas casino.
In short order, however, Franklin finds
himself wholly seduced by a malevolent slot machine or “one-armed bandit.”
Serling reportedly based “The Fever” -- which culminates with a walking, talking
Slot Machine -- on his own experience in Vegas. Here, Franklin can’t turn away from the
desire to “win” and he is finally stalked to his death by the ambulatory slot
machine.
In
1972, another horror anthology, Ghost Story/Circle of Fear (1972 –
1973) prominently featured a casino.
In “Time
of Terror” starring Patricia Neal, the Vegas casino at the center of the action
is actually a kind of Purgatory, a middle-ground between life and death.
Neal’s
character, Ellen Alexander, learns that her husband has “checked out” of the
casino, and furthermore that her own Keno number has been called.
This means she is heading to the afterlife,
and that her husband is, separately, heading back to Earth. The exit to the casino in "Time of Terror" is a revolving door
that leads back to Earth, and the site of the deadly car accident that took Ellen’s
life.
In
1978, Glen Larson’s Battlestar Galactica (1979 – 1980) featured a a casino on the planet
Carillon that is actually a deadly trap for the comfort-starved survivors of the
Colonies.
In "Saga of a Star World" the Carillon casino is administered by insectoid Ovions, and it offers games, night club acts, and
enough food to feed the starving rag-tag fleet.
But underneath this extra-terrestrial Sin City, the Ovions are secretly capturing revelers, taking
them to a subterranean basement, and feeding the humans to their hatching
young. I still remember how terrifying I
found this casino trap as a kid in 1978.
In
1979, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (1979 -1981)
premiered a story called “Vegas in Space” about a casino on an orbiting satellite,
Sinoloa. There, twentieth-century
astronaut Buck Rogers (Gil Gerard) could game the casino because all the games
are computer-based, and seemed to require no thought at all on the part of the
players.
In
1989, Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987 – 1994) broadcast a surreal episode called “The Royale” which finds Commander Riker (Jonathan Frakes), Lt. Data (Brent Spiner) and Lt. Worf (Michael Dorn) trapped in a bizarre casino that had been constructed on a distant alien
world.
The only entrance and exit to this facility -- like “Time
of Terror" -- is a mysterious revolving door, seemingly between realities.
To escape from the Royale, Riker, Data and
Worf learned that they must pose as “foreign investors” and purchase the
hotel and casino from its current owners.
To do that, however, they have to earn some gambling winnings.
Casinos
have also appeared on The Incredible Hulk (1978 – 1981), The
X-Files (1993 – 2002), Dark Skies (1996 – 1997), Angel
(1999 – 2005) and Smallville (2001 – 2011) among other series.
In many of these programs, the casino represents
a dramatic test for the protagonists, and there is a lot more at stake than
money…