Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Watching coverage of the Iberian peninsula\u2019s blackout earlier this week, the thought briefly occurred to me that Netflix\u2019s 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 \u2014 including HBO\u2019s The Last of Us \u2014 are, however, inevitable. Yet despite adhering to well-known formulas, The Eternaut isn\u2019t 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 H\u00e9ctor Germ\u00e1n 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 (C\u00e9sar Troncoso) attempts to implement a survival plan built on pragmatism and scepticism. \u201cRight now, we\u2019re all strangers to one another,\u201d he tells a familiar neighbour.The Eternaut\u2019s 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 Dar\u00edn), ventures out in search of answers \u2014 and his teenage daughter \u2014 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 \u2014 not least by Argentina\u2019s erstwhile far-right regime, who \u201cdisappeared\u201d Oesterheld and thousands of other dissidents in the 1970s.\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2606\u2606On Netflix now<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Watching coverage of the Iberian peninsula\u2019s blackout earlier this week, the thought briefly occurred to me that Netflix\u2019s marketing campaign for its new sci-fi drama, The<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":298305,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-298304","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298304","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=298304"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298304\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":298306,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298304\/revisions\/298306"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/298305"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=298304"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=298304"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=298304"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}