Is anyone watching The Eternaut on Netflix?


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Posted by blindness on May 12, 2025 at 09:32:30

Three episodes in and I am quite happy with it.

The source material is a weekly Argentinian comic publication originally published in the late 50s, then redone in shorter form and more abstract art and supposedly (I just skimmed through that version) more overtly political tones in '69. The writer, Hector Oesterheld was later hunted down by the Argentinian junta and killed for his politics.

The series does a great job in staying true to the Oesterheld's vision, telling an epic story from the point of view of a handful of ordinary people muddling through what's happening around them. At least the first three episodes in all you're seeing is the margins of events and how ordinary people navigate them (which is admittedly my favorite form of storytelling for these kinds of stories, and it is the flip side of Netflix's version of the 3 Body Problem, which had all the central characters at key positions of a developing epic). The pace suggests to me that this should in principle be at least a 5 season series, if not a couple more, since the source material is an epic.

I think it is very well done. It is made in Argentine by a crew who understand and revere the comic, obviously. They have taken a lot of liberties with the set-up and the characters, but everything they've done seems like an improvement to me. There are also updates that had to be made to bring the story to contemporary times.

If you haven't read the source and if you are not particularly curious about it, I think watching the series with no preconceptions might be especially rewarding. I would highly recommend it, with the assumption that the rest of the season (6 episodes altogether) holds up the same way.


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