Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Watching coverage of the Iberian peninsula’s blackout earlier this week, the thought briefly occurred to me that Netflix’s marketing campaign for its new sci-fi drama, The Eternaut, had gone too far. The six-part Argentine mini-series begins with an eerily similar electrical failure that plunges a city into chaos. Fortunately, there ends the parallels between real life and a story in which a power cut is only a precursor to a toxic snowfall that kills on contact.Comparisons with other apocalyptic TV series — including HBO’s The Last of Us — are, however, inevitable. Yet despite adhering to well-known formulas, The Eternaut isn’t just another derivative end-of-the-world yarn, but an adaptation of the graphic novel series considered to be a sort of urtext for the genre. First published in 1957, and then rebooted by its author Héctor Germán Oesterheld in 1969 as a more overt political allegory about military dictatorships, the comics were hugely successful in Argentina and highly influential on sci-fi writers beyond.The new dramatisation is updated to the present day, but likewise follows a group of friends in Buenos Aires trying to survive the devastation outside their windows. Having been playing cards when the deadly blizzard hit, the gang are left isolated and cut adrift from loved ones. Old bonds soon strain as host Alfredo (César Troncoso) attempts to implement a survival plan built on pragmatism and scepticism. “Right now, we’re all strangers to one another,” he tells a familiar neighbour.The Eternaut’s opening episodes are a patience-testing slow burn, but they effectively capture an atmosphere of confusion, fear and tribalism. Where many apocalyptic shows are set generations after the end of civilisation, this series places us in the days after, when the danger is still unknown, the horror unexpected. Only when one of the group, the quietly commanding ex-soldier Juan (the great Ricardo Darín), ventures out in search of answers — and his teenage daughter — do we get a sense of the scale of the cataclysm.Scenes of Juan trudging through a desolate, uncanny Buenos Aires dressed in an improvised spacesuit are imbued with visceral terror and unnerving beauty. Back in the shelter, the chilling circumstances occasionally give way to moments of warmth and compassion. Yet while the show is broadly interested in human nature and instinct in the face of adversity, the individual characters feel thinly sketched.The otherworldly presence that looms over the story, by contrast, derives its impact from its initial elusiveness. These invisible, insidious forces may be seen as a metaphor for how tyranny is often conducted in reality — not least by Argentina’s erstwhile far-right regime, who “disappeared” Oesterheld and thousands of other dissidents in the 1970s.★★★☆☆On Netflix now
