Summary
The Eternaut gets off to a slow, steady start in Episode 1, raising many intriguing questions but providing no answers at all.
People are always calling me a killjoy for disliking snow, but I’d like to point my detractors to The Eternaut. In this Argentinian Netflix series, the snow is deadly. By the end of Episode 1, “A Night of Cards”, it has killed a bunch of people, potentially even most of Buenos Aires. Nobody knows why yet, which is the show’s most essential driving mystery for the time being, but it still feels like a told-you-so moment either way. The snow is no good for anyone, least of all in the height of a South American summer.
To be fair, this premiere is weird before the snow starts. In a cold open, three girls are on a boat throwing a leaving party for one of their number — her name is Tati — when they spot the aurora borealis, crackling with emerald intensity mere feet away. Odd. Then, at least one of them, the one still on the deck, seems to collapse. It’s all very strange and urgent. Maybe we’ll return to this later.
Juan and his friends have no idea this is going on. They’ve assembled for a late-night game of cards while the news crackles with word of a fire at the electrical station. Whiskey lubricates their banter. It’s clear to the audience, just from the tone and the opening scene, that something very weird is going on. But these men don’t mind. Unusually for a post-apocalyptic story, though, they switch on pretty quickly. Soon, the power goes out completely. Shortly after that, it starts to snow. The men recognise the strangeness of this immediately, and when they peer out of the window and see a neighbor collapse, they intuit in about five seconds that the snow must be toxic and deadly.
I’m glad about this. There’s no need to linger in the disbelief phase, especially not in a six-part series. There’s no time. The point is made very clear when Ruso, one of the dudes, starts frantically worrying about the safety of his family and rushes outside to his immediate death. The stakes are established for everyone. Now it’s time for the paranoia to set in.
I thought The Eternaut Episode 1 was going to spend at least a couple of installments being a paranoid chamber piece, but it doesn’t. We get a bit of that when there’s a knock on the door, which turns out to be Ingrid, the woman who delivered the whiskey. But she’s quickly allowed in, and her excuse about being safe in the garage trying to repair her bike seems to hold water. You can see some of the group dynamics emerging in this exchange, too. Tano is particularly panicked. Juan is a little more heroic and even-keeled.
That garage provides a way out. And Juan needs one, since his daughter, Clara, tends to get up early. With the sun creeping over the horizon now and people beginning to greet the day — including an elderly couple over the road who open their window and fall dead across its sill — Juan needs to cover the kilometers between here and his ex Elena’s house to ensure they don’t go outside. Naturally, I wondered if Clara might be one of the girls aboard the boat at the start.
To navigate the streets, Juan needs a suit, which the others help to create. It isn’t much, just layers of clothing tied together with bits of plastic, and a gas mask Tano has never used, fitted with a filter that might not work. But it’ll do. It’ll have to. There’s a bit of a disagreement when Juan is leaving, when another of the group, Omar, holds him at gunpoint to try and steal the suit because it was apparently his idea, but it’s very half-hearted. The real desperation of a survivalist drama hasn’t set in yet. One gets the sense it’s coming, though.
The Eternaut Episode 1 ends with Juan leaving the house and heading out into the frigid streets, where dogs and their owners are piled dead in the street, cops dangle out of their crashed patrol cars, and protestors are buried with their placards beneath a layer of snow. Juan noted earlier that the older snow changes color, like it’s losing strength, and Tano had earlier theorized that the power might have been knocked out by an intense electromagnetic pulse. Important clues or red herrings? It’s difficult to say for now. But as Juan marches out into the convincing carnage, we might start to get some answers.
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