Argentina is no stranger to apocalypse. In a country with a recent history that includes genocide, war, social-economic meltdown and even a collapse of government it is almost natural that its most popular graphic novel of all time is a post-apocalyptic tale that features mass killing, foreign intrusion and a breakdown of society. Now, it has been made into a series for Netflix. Written by Héctor G. Oesterheld and drawn by Francisco Solano López, El eternauta was originally published in installments in 1957 in Hora Cero magazine. The story kicks off with a time-traveler named Juan Salvo, who appears out of thin air before Oesterheld’s eyes. He shares a strange tale in which snow begins to fall in Buenos Aires one night, instantly killing everything it touches. Survivors must then suit up in layers and gas masks to stave off death, only to discover an unimaginable danger. A regular family man, Salvo emerges as the leader of the resistance against what turns out to be an invading alien force. Leading an irregular army made mostly of civilians, Salvo will battle giant insects and mind-controlled humans in order to save his family. Expectations for this series were higher than any other popular book in Argentina. Several attempts, including a Lucrecia Martel film project, had already failed in a country where average production budgets don’t allow for the spectacular sci-fi visuals that the story demanded. But now the six-episode first season of the show directed by Bruno Stagnaro and produced by powerhouse production company K&S is finally here. And it’s everything it was supposed to be and more. A veterans’ tale Known for raw and realistic shows like Okupas and Un gallo para Esculapio, Stagnaro made a bold and successful choice: he brought the story forward to a contemporary Buenos Aires, with power-outages and cacerolazos. Played by the country’s biggest acting star Ricardo Darin, Salvo is now a divorced, middle-aged veteran of the Malvinas war, twenty years older than Oesterheld’s original young reservist. History has certainly helped Stagnaro: by pushing the story forward in time, his much older hero can now be a former soldier with actual experience in fighting a war against a powerful foreign enemy in a cold and deserted place. The addition of the Malvinas angle — Argentina’s only experience with war in the 20th century — certainly feels tailor-made. It also hints at a director’s trademark of shedding a special light on marginalized social sectors, just as he did back in the 1998 film Pizza, Beer and Cigarettes, an industry game-changer about a group of petty thieves in Buenos Aires. These are only some of Stagnaro’s sharply accurate updates to what up until now was regarded as a cemented, unchangeable classic. Like Salvo’s good friend and eminent scientist, Alfredo Favalli (César Troncoso), a lonesome genius and one of the most beloved original characters. Favalli is now a married and cranky analog hoarder that sees each of his scientific theories derailed by inconceivable phenomena. He’ll have his revenge, though, with Stagnaro’s retro-loving twist: old mechanical devices are the only ones functioning in this new, blacked-out world. Throughout the series, some Argentine rock and folk classics — Manal, Soda Stereo, Mercedes Sosa — poetically support the trick. Oscillating between smart, tuned-in dialogue — some very argento jokes really hit the mark — and jarring generic expressions that feel like global-audience designs, Stagnaro’s adaptation has expanded Salvo’s group of four card-playing friends and added two new veterans, only this time from economic disasters. Co-writer and actor Ariel Staltari plays Omar, an off-beat, difficult Argentine who moved to the US during the 2001 economic crisis and now keeps complaining about the country’s economy. Omar will find a friend in the other outsider within the group, a Venezuelan immigrant and food-delivery worker named Inga, played by Orianna Cárdenas. Their presence triggers what is perhaps one of the director’s most interesting political wedges into the original tale. Isolated together in a John Carpenter-influenced mood, the group’s unity quickly seems to crack under pressure, and at some point everyone starts to fend for themselves. Unlike the original protagonist, at first Darin’s Salvo has one single goal: finding his teenage daughter Clara (Mora Fisz). We’ll later find out that she was the girl we saw trapped inside a sailing boat on the River Plate — a truly desperate Stephen King-esque scenario. But sometime around the gripping fourth episode, Salvo enters the over-marketed motto of the series: no one gets saved alone. In other words, today’s menacing enemy is our violent individualism. A time-travelling warning Often seen as an anti-colonialist allegory, the 1957 original El Eternauta featured common people fighting a mass-murdering totalitarian invader who turned people into mind-controlled pawns. Decades later, it would be interpreted as a premonition of the state terrorism that would ravage 1970s Argentina. A horror tale that would again feature Oesterheld himself, by then a militant in the Montoneros resistance. The writer was disappeared by the military dictatorship in 1977, a fate he shared with his four daughters — two of them pregnant at the time. The Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo organization are still searching for Oesterheld’s two grandchildren, abducted at birth by military forces. His only living grandson Martín, a dictatorship survivor himself, was a top creative consultant for the show. Just as the original story — a warning tale from the time-travelling Salvo — became a sort of glimpse into Argentina’s future sink into genocidal political violence, Stagnaro’s adaptation runs a similar, contemporary path. His version, written several years ago, now feels almost like a time capsule from the past, a rather recent yet significantly different time in Argentina. Its depiction of today’s distrusting, poisonous social atmosphere in Argentina is eerily accurate, but so it is his belief that our very own tradition of solidarity, as analog as it may seem today, might just hold a key to surviving. Together.