Summary
The ending of The Eternaut is full of striking visuals and ideas, but unfortunately, it fails to really answer any of the key questions raised by the series.
I’m not sure what I was expecting from the ending of The Eternaut, but it probably wasn’t what we got. The Netflix series entered Episode 6 with all kinds of interesting ideas and developing plot threads, and, frankly, almost none of them are satisfactorily answered by the finale. That’s a shame, because the show has been mostly excellent, and my curiosity was piqued. If a second season is commissioned on the back of this ambiguity, perhaps it will have all been worth it, but that doesn’t help us much in the meantime.
We’ll do our best to break it all down regardless, but there’s going to be a fair helping of speculation involved in this, which is unavoidable. It’s more interesting to read than bellyaching, though.
Home Sweet Home
The cold open this time is another of Juan’s “visions” — but is it, really? He recalls meeting a woman in the mall before the world ended, and her necklace lingered in his mind. It was the three figures hand-in-hand, the same jewelry worn by the woman who perpetrated the mass shooting at the mall in the previous episode. What happened to her? How did she go from being a nice lady in the mall to a cold-blooded killer?
This mystery obviously sits with Juan, who feels uncomfortable after being relocated to Campo de Mayo. He can probably see the same spiral occurring in Clara, who hasn’t been the same since she mysteriously turned up. Of course, we, the audience, have enough information to know that something much more sprawling and sinister is afoot, and that multiple people, including Clara and Lucas, are under the thrall of the alien intelligence. But what are they up to? What’s the endgame?
Juan wants to leave with Clara to get her the peace and quiet he thinks she needs to recuperate, but the general consensus is that it’s safer to stay with the military. Especially since the military have a plan.
A Trip Downtown
The incredibly flimsy plan is as follows. The military intends to use a train to bust through the downtown checkpoint so that they can use a radio tower to send a nationwide signal urging survivors to assemble at Campo de Mayo. It’s not the most sophisticated operation in the world, but you can kind of see the logic behind it. It’s impossible to buy into, though, because one of its main proponents is Lucas, who we know isn’t in his right mind. If he’s so keen on the idea, the idea must be of value to the invaders.
Nobody else knows this, of course. Even we don’t know quite how many of the people at Campo de Mayo are under the aliens’ sway. So, naturally, the mission goes ahead. And not only does it go ahead, it includes the people who were reluctant to participate, such as Tano, whom Lucas had very suspiciously volunteered as an engineer despite knowing that he had been declared medically unfit to do his military service.
Juan, Tano, Lucas, Omar, Inga, and Pablo all set out for the train yard, where they hook up a couple of carriages and set their sights on the downtown radio tower. They see military planes overhead, which is a little suspicious. In the train car on the way there, they sing the episode’s title, a song called “Cold Tomato Juice”.
Ricardo Darín in The Eternaut/El Eternauta Season 1. Cr. Mariano Landet/Netflix © 2025
A Successful Mission
The fact that the mission goes so smoothly only makes things more tense. The train barrels through the barricade without issue, which everyone is thrilled about, and there isn’t a bug in sight. The radio tower is climbed. The message goes out. It’s even heard back in Campo de Mayo, where another celebration ensues.
But you can see all the weird stuff brewing. Pablo is taken away in another group, and later so is Inga. A nearby stadium is glowing with a bright blue light. So many people present are behaving in slightly off-kilter ways, especially Lucas, who struggles to follow a card game — a callback to the very first episode — and gets so angry about it that he stabs Omar in the side.
Juan and Tano pursue Lucas to the roof, where they find him talking gobbledygook on the ledge. With a parting comment about how bright the sky is, he jumps to his death, and from their vantage point, Juan and Tano see the obviously possessed locals rounding on them. They’re forced to fight their way back to the train, dragging Omar with them. Only Franco, the soldier Juan recognises without realizing why, and a journalist named Ruperto Mosca, who is writing down everything that just happened, make it back with them.
Too Many Loose Ends
Juan, realizing something is amiss, jumps off the train to go and investigate the stadium. Franco goes with him. And this is where things get weird, with the ending of The Eternaut refusing to really explain anything it’s showing us.
In short, the stadium has been taken over by human collaborators and bugs alike, all of which seem to be controlled by a mysterious figure within a gazebo emanating blue light. We barely catch a glimpse of this creature, but it has a long, many-fingered arm that plays the entranced drones like an instrument. The appendages look a little human-like, but so many of them in the same place is deeply off-putting.
Juan is quick to intuit that this is the real enemy, which raises some interesting questions. Since the finger monster looks nothing like the bugs, it raises the possibility that Earth isn’t the first planet this thing has colonized. It could have stopped off somewhere else first to recruit the bug army, which it then transported to Earth. The sky is red with spacecraft plummeting through the atmosphere, like we saw in Episode 4.
This scene, looking down from the balcony backdropped by the red sky, gives Juan a realization. He recognizes Franco because he has been here before. He has lived through this already. Juan hasn’t been having PTSD-induced flashbacks. He has been seeing the future.
What now? The Eternaut ends with a lingering shot of Clara, learning to shoot — against Juan’s advice — back at the resistance camp. She, too, must be under the thrall of Fastest Finger First. But what next?
Season 2, anyone?
