Season 1, Episode 28
Written by Charles Beaumont – Directed by John Brahm – Starring Larry Blyden and Sebastian Cabot
After dying in a shootout with the police, a thief finds himself in a strange new world where his every wish is granted.
I’m learning that The Twilight Zone enjoys getting metaphysical. “A Nice Place to Visit” goes straight for the afterlife, but uses it to ask a more existential question: if you could have absolutely everything you’ve ever wanted, would any of it still mean anything?
After Rocky Valentine dies, he awakens to find the mysterious Mr. Pip waiting for him. Pip is friendly and accommodating, but also cryptic about exactly where Rocky is and why he’s there. It’s another setup I’ve started to recognize from the series: one character dropped into an unfamiliar reality while someone else seems to understand the rules but isn’t particularly interested in explaining them.
Larry Blyden brings a tremendous amount of physical energy to Rocky. I had thought perhaps he was a dancer. I looked him up and turns out that Blyden was an accomplished Broadway performer, and you can see some of that theatricality in the way he moves through the episode. Rocky is restless and animated, bouncing between confusion, suspicion, excitement, and eventually frustration.
Once he begins to understand his situation, Rocky does exactly what you might expect. He surrounds himself with all the things he wanted while alive: money, gambling, expensive cars, women. Every desire is immediately satisfied, and for a while he can’t imagine anything better.
That’s where the episode’s central idea begins to emerge. Desire only means something when there’s a possibility of not getting what you want. Winning loses its thrill when losing is impossible. Possessions become meaningless when nothing has to be earned. What initially looks like paradise gradually becomes something far emptier.
The problem for me is that the episode becomes fairly one-note once that idea is established. Much of the story consists of Rocky discovering the rules of this new world while the audience is already several steps ahead of him. The more perfect everything appears, the easier it becomes to anticipate where the story is heading.
By the time the final revelation arrives, it feels less like a shocking Twilight Zone turn than confirmation of something I’d already figured out. There’s an interesting idea underneath it all about desire, satisfaction, and whether getting everything you want might be its own kind of punishment. I just wish the journey toward that idea had surprised me more.
Twilight Zone Verdict: Okay
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