VTVL?

In discussion about the winged flyback strategy for reusable first stages, it's been remarked that when what you want to do is climb out of the atmosphere, a simple vertical takeoff rocket stage with no wings or airbreathing engines is the most efficient. The arguments for that make sense to me.

The trick is making the first stage reusable. What would you do, have it drop vertically back down and land on the launch pad using the takeoff engines to kill velocity at the last moment?

It occurs to me that my problem here is I don't have any feel for how the descent part would work. I'm no aerospace engineer, but I've seen enough planes flying and rockets going up that I have some intuition for how those work. I've never seen or really even imagined in detail a rocket going down.

So how would that work? Would the first stage be restricted to climb only and let the upper stage do all the horizontal acceleration? Would it stay upright on the way down? Would air resistance soak up most of the velocity? Would there be aerodynamic or thermal problems?

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