Two of my former TV critics, when I was Television Editor of the BJ, play a prominent role in a disturbing but revealing look at “The Twilight Zone.”

They are David Bianculli, the first TV critic the day that Channels television magazine was born on Super Bowl Sunday, 1980, and Mark Dawidziak, the man from New York City and Tennessee who succeeded David under my editing baton. With David, the BJ was a twilight zone of his making as he danced like a happy leprechaun and entertained the newsroom while I tapped my foot awaiting his column as the deadline approached.

David’s article appears as commentary in TV Guide magazine. It’s title is “We Crossed Over Into the Twilight Zone . . . and Never Looked Back.” David quotes Mark’s book, “Everything I Need to Know I Learned in the Twilight Zone: A Fifth Dimension Guide to Life.”

I asked Mark and David to list their favorite “Twilight Zone” episodes. Mark did. David, of course, missed another deadline, probably while entertaining his Rowan College students in New Jersey now that he no longer works for the New York Daily News. 

The episode that is on every list that I got from critics is “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street.”

It’s about an alien spaceship eventually revealed as the cause of the townfolks’ panic, shotgunning and mob rule that leads to hurling rocks at windows and hateful accusations at neighbors.

The episode has this chilling and maybe prophetic closing narration by Rod Serling:

“Prejudices can kill – and suspicion can destroy – and a thoughtless frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own – for the children – and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is – that these things cannot be confined – to the Twilight Zone.”

Sound scarily familiar to today’s real world?

“It’s a Good Life,” set in the sleepy town of Peaksville, Ohio, is about a community who lives are determined by the whims of an implacable, omnipotent monster, a 6-year-old angel-faced boy.

Rod Serling wrote the 1961 episode, based on a short story by Jerome Bixby.

It starred John Larch, Cloris Leachman and Billy Mumy, as the chilling child.

In 2003 “It’s Still a Good Life” aired with Leachman and Mumy more than 40 years later, the only stars to play the same characters in two episodes of “The Twilight Zone.” Mumy’s real-life daughter, Liliana Mumy, played Billy’s daughter in the four decades later sequel.

This isn’t a cornfield in Iowa like in “Field of Dreams.” It’s more like a field of nightmares cornfield.

What about you? Which “Twilight Zone” episode rummages through your brain in your sleep, and astounds you with the significance today of the Serling parables in them?