The end of the world feels different when it's the Third World that's affected
A pioneering work of Argentinean science fiction, The Eternaut is a serialized comic strip published during the late 1950s and endowed later with a prophetic aura when its author, Héctor Germán Oesterheld, was kidnapped by his country's far-right dictatorship because of the political content of his stories and his participation in an armed resistance group linked to Liberation Theology. Just like what happened with his four daughters and sons-in-law, Oesterheld was never seen again. His legacy as a writer, however, has prevailed and risen to the status of legend.
After decades of frustrated attempts, The Eternaut has finally been given the live-action treatment, in the form of a Netflix series whose first season has just been released, while a second one is on its way. It tells the story of a group of middle-aged Porteños suddenly caught in the middle of an anomalous climatic event that, while devastating on its own, is only the prelude to a much bigger threat: an invasion of Earth by mind-controlling aliens. The source material also contains elements of time travel and multiverse travel, but the show's first season only gives very indirect hints of those plot points, preferring to start on a firm grounding by focusing the story on ordinary people's Herculean efforts to stay alive, stay together, and cling to hope.
Oesterheld wrote his masterpiece during the early period of the Cold War, when the terrifying prospect of nuclear fallout and nuclear winter was just entering the public consciousness, but his version of it is much more dramatic: the mysterious snowfall that opens the narration kills instantly with the slightest touch. That's the reason for the iconic image of the protagonist wearing a diving mask that used to appear on the covers of The Eternaut's collected editions. It's also an example of the story's aesthetic, distinguished by the creative use of common tools repurposed to deal with a world-ending catastrophe. The choice to follow characters with no specialized expertise or ties to the centers of power also sets The Eternaut apart from the tone that has become usual in the apocalypse disaster genre.
Because the process of adaptation inevitably recontextualizes every story, the TV version of The Eternaut doesn't evoke the fears associated with the Atomic Age that were so relevant to the comic's first readers. Instead, the imagery of snow in the middle of summer brings to mind the nightmare predictions about global climate change; the dread of stepping outside, the masses of dead bodies and the ubiquitousness of protective gear dig into the unhealed wounds we still carry from the coronavirus quarantine; and the scenes of social disintegration and the downfall of modern civilization carry painful echoes from the violent protests that shook Argentina as a result of the collapse of its economy at the turn of the century.
Maybe the choice to postpone all the time travel and multiverse travel until a later season was made to carefully steer the show's reception by today's viewers, who are yet to recover from Marvel exhaustion. This frees up much-needed space for the story to explore its large cast, which the production team has described as a collective hero as opposed to Hollywood's individualist bent. Much of the runtime is used in portraying the complicated evolution of personal relationships put under a strain that no amount of decades of closeness can prepare anyone for. Lifelong friendships are tested by the primal struggle for survival, and viewers can identify moments in the story when a survival strategy based on competition is pitted against one based on cooperation. Some pillage and some share; some swindle and some trust; some would sacrifice others for any reason and some would sacrifice anything for others. It's a truism of scriptwriting that true character is revealed at moments of crisis; in The Eternaut, a persistent state of crisis spreads everywhere and in doing so lays bare the spirit of a whole community.
Also, the tension is skillfully handled with a steady series of escalations: at first, the characters' sense of urgency is about staying indoors and not touching the deadly snow; next, about finding survivors without attracting the notice of hostile neighbors; next, about avoiding capture by the alien monsters that overrun the city; and finally, about thwarting the mind control conspiracy that might bring about the defeat of humankind. For us watching in Latin America, it's an added bonus that the action involves characters whose outlook on life and sensibilities are closer to ours. We've always watched the end of the world happen in New York or London, and such locations may as well be Mars to us. Bringing The Eternaut to worldwide streaming is one more step in the march of the ongoing Rainbow Age of science fiction, one of whose main features is what I like to call opening up the future to the rest of the planet. It's no small thing that this time, for a change, the heroes defending Earth speak Spanish and listen to tango.
Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.
POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.
