ALyndon Johnson Rosales said "El Diablo" to Sarah Linden, in reference to the devil mask that Kris Echols and Jasper Ames wore while in the cage the night of the party.("El Diablo" is spanish for "The Devil")
AThe Killing is based on the Danish series Forbrydelsen, which was broadcast in the UK under the name "The Killing." That series also followed the police investigation of a murdered girl and people who have watched both series say that the first few episodes of the American version closely follow the opening episodes of the Danish series. When the Danish series was released there was no sense that this was related at all to Twin Peaks.Twin Peaks was an ensemble drama which looked at the residents of the eponymous town in the wake of the killing of high schooler Laura Palmer. Produced by David Lynch, the series had a heavy dose of surrealism and the supernatural including the use of ritual meditation to obtain clues, quirky characters such as the "Log Lady" who treated a piece of wood like it was her child, and prophetic dreams including the famous "backwards talking" dancing dwarf. Twin Peaks was about showing the dirty underbelly of American suburbia where, in Lynch's vision, the thin veneer of respectability hid all sorts of sordid happenings. In addition, Twin Peaks was a send up of night time soap operas and contained many of the staples of the soap opera genre such as multifarious romantic relationships, dastardly plots, amnesia, and shocking personality changes. Twin Peaks was very much an ensemble show and the ostensible star of the program, Kyle Machlachlan as FBI agent Dale Cooper, was one of the last characters introduced on the show, not appearing until more than halfway through the pilot episode.In contrast, The Killing seems to be a much more "straight" dramatic rendering of a murder investigation. It lacks the surreal and supernatural elements of Twin Peaks and while The Killing includes sub plots about the family of the murdered girl and a political campaign which gets caught up in the case, it seems to be very much more tightly focused on the lead investigator Sarah Linden. The pilot, for example, doesn't introduce any characters who are not connected to Linden for a full fifteen minutes and the beginning of the show follows her actions primarily. In addition, The Killing lacks the soap opera elements of Twin Peaks, and also seems to have different thematic goals. While Twin Peaks was about showing the pre-existing darkness in American suburbia, The Killing seems to be about examining how the tragic death of a young girl impacts those whose life she touched.The main similarity between the two seems to be the broad plot similarity of the investigation into a girls murder in the Pacific Northwest.
