Not that this is a bad thing - far from it, in fact - but there are a number of telling similarities between the darkly mysterious and acclaimed Australian eight-parter The Kettering Incident, coming to BBC First next week, and 1990's Twin Peaks, the David Lynch and Mark Frost paradigm-shifting series. Both are stories about "missing" girls from small-town communities beset by "strangeness". In Twin Peaks, you will recall, the investigation into the murder of the seemingly innocent Laura Palmer revealed a dark, deeply troubled persona that lurked beneath the veneer of an otherwise wholesome American teenager.Ditto The Kettering Incident - except we're now in rural Tasmania and our victims here are apparently abducted, à la The X Files, by extraterrestrials. That, at least, is what we're led to believe given the strange lights dancing in the woods, but no matter: once the girls are gone, the masks come off and what's revealed is very, very unsettling.These aren't the only similarities. Like the town of Twin Peaks, Kettering is a logging community, and both series milk the surrounding forests and natural beauty for atmosphere and brooding malevolence.The story opens with Anna Macy (Elisabeth Debicki), a doctor suffering from migraines and baffling blackouts, returning to Kettering, the town she left when she was a teenager.Anna's homecoming coincides with a report that a young girl has gone missing. It's an incident that painfully echoes the disappearance of Gillian, a close friend of Anna's, some 15 years previously.Most of the townsfolk resent Anna's return, and some even believe she murdered Gillian. Others even suspect the two girls had contact with aliens.The fact that, after years in London, Anna also "sounds like a Pom" only adds to their seething resentment.Much of their antipathy, it must be said, is also directed at environmental activists who want to protect and preserve the surrounding forests.The only locals with any degree of sympathy for Anna are Chloe Holloway (Sianoa Smit-McPhee), an esoteric party animal who deals in drugs to raise cash in order to leave Tasmania, and Fergus McFadden (Henry Nixon), a childhood friend and now local cop. Anna also forms an alliance of sorts with Brian Dutch (Matthew Le Nevez), another cop, though somewhat bent.And that's about it, as far as familiar TV conventions go. The weirdness comes on slowly but surely. Blood samples mutate into different types, a woman receives a telephone call from a daughter who's been missing for years, healthy oysters become yellow with a toxic goo, strange mosses grow inside restaurant kitchens, and the nearby forest creeps ever closer into town.Like Twin Peaks, Kettering can be a hell of a place. As they say, there is something very, very strange in those old woods ...The first two episodes will be shown back to back on Wednesday (BBC First, DStv channel 119)..