A Nice Place to Visit

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The Twilight Zone original series Season one (1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5) Fall 1959 – Summer 1960 List of The Twilight Zone episodes
Episodes: 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

“A Nice Place to Visit” is an episode of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone.

[edit] Details

Episode number: 28
Season: 1
Production code: 173-3632
Original air date: April 15, 1960
Writer: Charles Beaumont
Director: John Brahm
Music: Stock

[edit] Cast

Rocky Valentine: Larry Blyden
Mr. Pip: Sebastian Cabot

[edit] Synopsis

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

At the start of the episode, the protagonist Rocky Valentine, played by Larry Blyden, is shot and killed by a police officer. He later wakes up to find himself seemingly unharmed by the encounter. He is in the company of a pleasant individual named “Pip”, who proceeds to grant Rocky whatever he desires. Rocky immediately assumes he has died and gone to Heaven. Later, he becomes so thoroughly bored by always having his whims satisfied and predictably winning at anything he attempts, he finally begs Pip to send him to the “other place” (referring to Hell). Pip then reveals that "this is the other place!" Valentine tries vainly to leave while Pip laughs uproariously.

[edit] Trivia

"A Nice Place to Visit" was also singled out for its brazen sexual innuendo. Program Practices requested that Larry Blyden not refer to a girl as "a broad ... really stacked," even though the crudity was essential to establishing the unsavory qualities of Blyden’s character. Nor could the protagonist refer to a party as "a ball," since that word had more than one meaning. In another "Nice Place" sequence, a voluptuous young lady tends to Blyden’s every need, then says "is there anything else I can do for you?" CBS’s comment: "Please be certain that the girl’s third speech be delivered in a sweet manner, as described." — an excerpt from Hal Erikson’s article "Censorship: Another Dimension Behind the Twilight Zone", published in the October 1985 edition of The Twilight Zone Magazine.
Rod Serling himself was offered the role of Rocky Valentine, but declined.
This episode inspired the song "Hell Hotel", an unreleased track recorded by a then-unsigned They Might Be Giants for their 1985 demo tape.
An idea similar to the one exhibited in this episode is also evident in the song "Permanent Vacation" by American rock band R.E.M.
In one "episode", The Scary Door, a fictional TV show in Futurama that parodies The Twilight Zone, a man wakes up after a car accident to find that he is in a casino and wins the jackpot on a slot machine, causing him to think that he is in heaven. He wins a second time and, finding it boring, realizes that he is in hell. A male flight attendant then tells him that he isn't in heaven or hell, but on an airplane. The man then looks out the window and sees the wing is being attacked by gremlins and promptly informs the attendant. The attendant refuses to believe him for the sole fact that he is Hitler. He then proceeds to beg his new seatmate Eva Braun to believe him, who then pulls off her mask to reveal she is actually a person with the head of a fly.
A spoof of this episode can be found in the webcomic 8-Bit Theater. In one comic, a character named Thief (who is, naturally, a thief) dies and is told that he is now in Hell. Looking around, he sees unimaginable riches, and realizes that everything he can imagine, he owns. He remarks that this doesn't seem like Hell, only to be told that there is nothing to steal.
In 1965 a slightly modified version of this story was told on the radio program "Theater Five". The episode title is "The Land of Milk and Honey" and retains all of the important aspects of the Twilight Zone episode, including the innuendo and the surprise ending.
Ray Kurzweil's 1999 book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, contains the text, "Take death, for example. A great deal of our effort goes into avoiding it. We make extraordinary efforts to delay it, and often consider its intrusion a tragic event. Yet we would find it hard to live without it. Death gives meaning to our lives. It gives importance and value to time. Time would become meaningless if there were too much of it. If death were to be indefinitely put off, the human psyche would end up, well, like the gambler in the Twilight Zone episode." Kurzweil's reading of this passage also makes up track 12 of rock band Our Lady Peace's 2000 album, Spiritual Machines, and is entitled "R.K. on Death."