The Twilight Zone, S1E28, "A Nice Place to Visit"

Opening: Portrait of a man at work, the only work he’s ever done, the only work he knows. His name is Henry Francis Valentine, but he calls himself “Rocky”, because that’s the way his life has been – rocky and perilous and uphill at a dead run all the way. He’s tired now, tired of running or wanting, of waiting for the breaks that come to others but never to him, never to Rocky Valentine. … A scared, angry little man. He thinks it’s all over now, but he’s wrong. For Rocky Valentine, it’s just the beginning.

“A Nice Place to Visit,” like “I Shot an Arrow Into the Air,” is an episode that mostly just spins its wheels waiting for its plot-defining twist, but it offers the viewer a pretty good time in the process. For me, it never rises above solid fun—there’s a (much) more problematic but also more thoughtful spin on the same theme a few episodes from now, in “The Chaser”—so it’s somewhat slight, but it’s well-executed, has a reasonable core concept, and fits comfortably somewhere in the middle of the Twilight Zone pack.

This isn’t an out-and-out comedy episode, but it feels as much like one as any story of eternal damnation could. The structure is that of a joke, complete with a (literal) hell of a punchline. Rocky’s desires are mostly played for laughs, with the episode repeatedly emphasizing that he’s not just meanspirited, acquisitive, and violent, he’s also just a crass guy with cheap tastes, someone whose “heavenly” apartment comes with ribbed satin walls, pin-up oil paintings, and loud checked suits.

There’s a conflation of morals, class, and taste here that I’m not wild about, but it feels of a piece with the episode’s determinedly light tone. We have to not mind the fact that Rocky Valentine is condemned to hell, and so “A Nice Place to Visit” tries very hard to avoid giving him any redeeming characteristics—even anything neutral like refined or homey tastes or a liking for natural beauty (aside from beautiful women).

Rocky Valentine (Larry Blyden¹) does have plenty of authentically awful traits. He commits very thoroughly to calling Pip (Sebastian Cabot²) “fats” or “fatso,” he unhesitatingly tries to rob at gunpoint someone who seems to only be helping him, he wins forty grand in an hour and isn’t too flushed with the thrill of victory to forget to warn one of his “stacked broads” not to steal from him, and—even before he knows that everyone else in this world is a prop rather than a person—he gleefully bullies the street cop that Pip humorously shrinks down for his entertainment. (To be fair, one did shoot him. I’d probably hold a grudge too.) He’s a jerk, and his biggest pleasure in life—one that becomes bitter in death—is winning. The endless parade of beautiful young women he summons up aren’t even really there for enjoyable sex, they’re there to flatter his ego, to give him the rush of “being a big man with a chick.”

Rocky’s moral good points may be nil, but he does have one classically dramatic virtue, and that’s the fact that he has a surprising amount of self-awareness. When he looks back at his life, he knows he’s looking back at a long stretch of self-interested, petty criminality; when he tries to figure out why he’s in heaven, all he can think is that he must have done something really good once, but he’s damned if he can remember what. (Okay, I’m going to stop these puns now.) He’s genuinely curious about the explanation here, enough that he seeks out the Hall of Records to look up the file they have on his life.

Naturally, it starts with: “Age of six, slaughtered a small dog.” The fact that it then goes to a minor convenience store robbery is kind of (unintentionally?) hilarious; it’s a real de-escalation on child Rocky’s part. I can’t emphasize enough how much I’d prefer people steal rather than slaughter small dogs.

It only takes three entries before Rocky realizes that this is not encouraging reading and there’s probably not any heavenly behavior forthcoming. In general, I find Larry Blyden’s performance as Rocky fine but unremarkable, but he’s very good at showing how baffled and unnerved Rocky is by all this.

Before we get to the ultimate payoff, I should mention that the intro and outro to this episode are jarring in relation to the rest of it. Rocky is a deeply unpleasant person, but the intro—which feels more like Serling than Beaumont, oddly enough—paints him with some degree of compassion. It emphasizes Rocky’s fear and exhaustion and lucklessness, not his vindictiveness and casual cruelty. It doesn’t make it sound as though Rocky’s “rocky” life is his own fault or a flaw of his perception, even when it would take just a simple tweak—from that’s the way his life has been to that’s the way he thinks his life has been—to remove that hint of genuine narrative pity.

Compare it to the intro to “What You Need,” which positions Fred Renard in a similar light but also emphasizes his sourness and the chip on his shoulder, the “Escape Clause” intro that perfectly captures Walter Bedeker’s abiding narcissism, or the savagery of Arch Hammer’s introduction in “The Four of Us Are Dying.” Those episodes do a better job of gearing you for their erstwhile protagonist’s narrative comeuppance. Rocky’s could just as easily be positioning him for a redemption arc. It’s not a major flaw, but it’s odd, and it’s even odder when we get to the closing narration, which once again invokes the intro’s portrayal of Rocky and then is like, “Well, now he’s damned for all eternity. See you next week, folks.”

On the bright side, as far as hells go, Rocky’s honestly isn’t too bad. He just needs to develop some interests that aren’t as likely to lose their luster through rigged repetitions. You know what, Rocky? Now’s a great time to learn a foreign language. Or travel. Or pick up a book. (Of course, I guess if his luck is really that rocky, the setup of his afterlife could change the instant he starts coping with it better.)

And now the punchline, one made even more famous via The Good Place³, which even has the same “formerly helpful afterlife figure bursts into evil laughter after the revelation that the protagonist isn’t in heaven after all.”

A month of non-stop, effortless victories at the tables and the slots have made those thrills go stale, even though Rocky continues to plug away at them with more and more resignation and resentment. He even plays cards with the women in his apartment—which is how we find out that other pleasures, too, have lost their charm. There’s a weird pathos to how cheered Rocky is by the sudden manifestation of a pool table and then how dispirited he is when his break instantly sends all the balls careening into their pockets. It’s a brief but very effective illustration of exactly why what would be cool once is utterly joyless in the long run.

His last scene with Pip is a good one, with one of his best lines—“When you win every time, that’s not gambling, it’s charity!”—and a brief, fun detour into the prospect of planning a bank robbery like it’s an escape room. It says a lot about how run down Rocky is by “heaven” that he’s outright asking to go to hell because he suspects he’d be happier there … and Pip’s reaction is the glorious height of Sebastian Cabot’s performance in this episode: “Heaven? Whatever gave you the idea that you were in heaven, Mr. Valentine? This is the other place!”

We end with Pip laughing uproariously as Rocky tries the doorknob to no avail, stuck forever in his gilded cage. There’s sometimes a fine line between humor and horror, and this ending works by planting itself right on that narrow divide. There’s not much more to it than the joke, but at least the (mean) joke is a pretty funny one.

Closing: A scared, angry little man who never got a break. Now he has everything he’s ever wanted – and he’s going to have to live with it for eternity – in The Twilight Zone.

Directed by: John Brahm

Written by: Charles Beaumont

Up Next: “Nightmare as a Child”

1. Blyden did a lot of anthology work, and we’ll see him again in “Showdown with Rance McGrew.” He also hosted What’s My Line? and did a significant amount of work on Broadway. ↩︎
2. Cabot had many screen appearances, including Emmy-nominated work in Family Affair, but I know him best as a voice, especially in Disney’s The Jungle Book. He was also in AHP‘s “A Bullet for Baldwin,” and I see I correctly noted in that write-up that he walks away with this episode. ↩︎
3. I was about to note that Schur had obviously seen this episode, but apparently I may be wrong. Well, if he hasn’t, that’s weird. They shouldn’t let you write that much TV without having seen all the classic Twilight Zone episodes. I could live with assuming Curry Barker probably didn’t see “The Chaser” before making Obsession, but I was annoyed to find out that his only experience with “The Monkey’s Paw” seems to be a Simpsons “Treehouse of Horror” episode riffing on it. This ignorance of the classics is shocking! Am I so out of touch? No, it’s the children who are wrong. ↩︎