Aliens almost always invade New York, with a secondary preference for rural America. They’re typically vanquished by a collaboration of cowboy sacrifice and eloquent leaders who restore order under the stars and stripes. The Eternaut, Netflix’s new sci-fi series that became a global hit this month, breaks this mould: giant alien bugs controlled by an unseen extraterrestrial overlord take over Buenos Aires. Victory always seems far away – it’s not clear that humanity will triumph.
Like the 1950s comic it’s based on, the series does not merely transpose alien invasion tropes on a new geography: it rewrites them. The Eternaut isn’t about a lone hero who saves the day – it’s a story about how ordinary Argentinians face existential threat. There is no single saviour in the story, according to the author, Héctor Germán Oesterheld: “The true hero of The Eternaut is a collective hero, a human group. It thus reflects, though without previous intent, my intimate belief: the only valid hero is the hero ‘in group’, never the individual hero, the hero alone.” The series’ tagline adopts this ethos: Nadie se salva solo – nobody is saved alone.
