In Netflix’s ‘The Eternaut,’ an Argentine comic goes global

A group of friends gather to play cards in their host’s cozy home when the power cuts. Cellphones die. An eerie snow falls all over the city, killing everyone it touches. The friends struggle to survive, their panic replaced by a growing awareness that humanity itself is at stake.

This is the premise of “The Eternaut,” a chilling dystopian drama out of Argentina that premiered its first season on Netflix on April 30. The six-episode, Spanish-language series with its mix of sci-fi elements and focus on human resilience has struck a universal nerve, rocketing to No. 1 among Netflix’s most streamed non-English-language TV shows within days. Netflix already renewed the show for a second season, with filming scheduled to start next year.

But “The Eternaut” has touched on something deeper in Argentina, where legendary comic-strip writer Héctor Germán Oesterheld penned the original graphic novel in 1957 — two decades before he was “disappeared” by Argentina’s military dictatorship, along with all four of his daughters.

Abroad, publishers are scrambling to keep pace with renewed interest in the source material. The Seattle-based Fantagraphics Books said it would reissue an out-of-print English translation due to the surge in US demand. At home, the TV adaptation has reopened historical wounds and found unexpected resonance at a moment of heightened anxiety about the state of Argentine society under far-right President Javier Milei.

“The boom of ‘The Eternaut’ has created a cultural and social event beyond the series,” said Martín Oesterheld, the writer’s grandson and a creative consultant and executive producer on the show. “It fills our hearts. It brings us pride.” For years, the surviving Oesterhelds resisted offers from Hollywood to adapt the cult classic, wary of the industry’s seemingly irresistible urge to destroy New York City and other Western centers in apocalyptic dramas.

To honour his grandfather’s creation, Martín Oesterheld said the show had to be filmed in Spanish, with an Argentine cast and set in Buenos Aires. “What he did was to do away with the representations of science fiction that we know in Europe and the United States,” Martín Oesterheld said of his grandfather. “He told it on our own terms, through things that we recognize.”

Netflix, pushing to expand beyond its saturated US market into previously untapped regions like Latin America, was a natural fit, he said. The streaming giant wouldn’t disclose its budget, but said the special effect-laden show took four years of pre- and post-production, involved 2,900 people and pumped $34 million into Argentina’s economy.

In the show, aliens wreak predictable mayhem on an unpredictable cityscape — wide boulevards, neoclassical buildings, antique pizza halls and grimy suburbs — lending the show a shiver of curious power for Argentines who had never seen their city eviscerated on screen.

The protagonists don’t play poker but truco, a popular Argentine trick card game. They sip from gourds of mate, the signature Argentine drink made from yerba leaves. The snowfall is uncanny, and not just because it kills on contact. Buenos Aires has only seen snow twice in the last century.

“From truco in scene one, which couldn’t be more Argentine, we see that ‘The Eternaut’ is playing with these contrasts — life and death, light and darkness, the familiar versus the alien,” said Martín Hadis, an Argentine researcher specializing in science fiction. “It’s not just a sci-fi story. It’s a modern myth. That’s what makes it so universal.”

In updating the story to present-day Argentina, the show brings the nation’s disastrous 1982 war with Britain over Las Malvinas, or the Falkland Islands, into the backstory of its hero, Juan Salvo, played by renowned actor Ricardo Darín.

Salvo, a protective father and courageous ex-soldier who emerges to lead the group of survivors, is haunted by the rout of his comrades sent by Argentina’s dictatorship to retake the South Atlantic islands. The defeat killed 649 Argentine soldiers, many of them untrained conscripts.

“The conflict in Las Malvinas is not closed, it’s still a bloody wound,” Darín told The Associated Press. “It’s bringing the subject back to the table. That has moved a lot of people.”

Faced with catastrophe, the protagonists rely on their own ingenuity, and on each other, to survive.

Associated Press