The first version of Héctor Germán Osterheld’s El eternauta (illustrated by Francisco Solano López) appeared, serially, in the magazine Hora Cero Semanal between 1957 and 1959. Season one of the Netflix series El eternauta, created and directed by Bruno Stagnaro, was released on April 30, 2025.

These two time periods tug at each other within the parallel present of Stagnaro’s cinematic reimagination. The technology that marks the present moment—the cell phones, computers, cars, and (most of all) the newly algorithmic internet offering its peculiar amalgam of connection and isolation via social media advertising and online marketplace fiefdoms—collapses into the 1950s almost immediately.

This collapse arrives with an incongruous snow (familiar to the original readers of Osterheld) that covers Buenos Aires in the summertime. We see four older men playing truco in a basement when, suddenly, their electronic devices stop working. There are loud crashes outside and they are shocked at the suddenly frigid temperatures, at the snow falling outside their window. While there is an initial sense of chaos as they realize that the snow is poisonous, that it is killing anyone outside who comes in contact with it, this soon gives way to a profound silence. Every electronic device—every telephone, every computer, every screen in Buenos Aires—has simultaneously gone quiet.

And while this causes innumerable deaths in the reality of the characters, it is, for us, a catastrophe of tremendous relief. It is a relief for the audience in that it allows everyone to participate in the fantasy of a world that unfurls in the present without the internet and its digital, psychologically ensnaring tendrils. The ever-encroaching garbage of AI is suddenly no more. This (wonderful) quieting of the world is compounded by the toxicity of the snow. Death simplifies the chaos of a churning Buenos Aires in which everything seems intractable, non-negotiable, inevitable, cruel, and normalized. (Several of the main characters in Stagnaro’s series, before the snowfall, make wry comments in their car as they are stuck in front of yet another a protest of desperate people; we sense that this is business as usual and that there is no real hope of anything ever changing.)

In the 2025 El eternauta, the protagonists soon discover that only the most modern technology has been rendered inert. Their old electronics—record players, lightbulbs, old cars—all work if they are powered independently from the grid. Favalli, understanding that the answer to the contemporary crisis is a return to the 1950s, utters a sentence that has now become associated with the show through social media memes: “Lo viejo funciona, Juan.”

This is a line that does not appear in the original comic but reaches back to it with a charged nostalgia. It suggests that the current technology does not function, particularly when it comes to the organization of a just and healthy society. And while the most obvious temporal frame, the late fifties, corresponds to the origin of El eternauta, the soundtrack also transports us, musically, to the sixties, seventies, and eighties. Not in a way that idealizes these time periods but rather gives cultural and emotional texture to the period before the incessant virality of our current era.

The force of all this conjured nostalgia suggests that the primary enemy is, perhaps, not an alien civilization hoping to colonize the planet—it is a different monster that appears only briefly, before the snow, that the audience already knows quite well: the embeddedness of for-profit technology in the psyches of Buenos Aires’ residents. One senses, before the catastrophe, that this monster is influencing them, distracting them, manipulating their minds through a network of invisible, digital filaments that render them puppets: marionets dancing to conspiracy theories, consumption fantasies, and regularly updated bits of repeatable, meme-able, like-able content. Shots of telephone users and protesters demanding electricity amidst extended outages suggest that something is amiss, even if the audience is so inured to the problem that it is hard to imagine anything short of an alien invasion that might shift its course.

This monster is difficult to kill and despite the initial relief we experience as the snow falls on the city, it reemerges in the final scene of the first season: the audience learns that the alien invasion seems to be directed by a being who has the capacity to influence humans, manipulating their minds through a network of invisible filaments that it plays like a harp with many-fingered hands. Juan realizes, at the close, that his daughter has been turned into a puppet, a marionet who is being influenced by someone who does not have her best interests at heart. This fear will not be an unfamiliar one to many viewers.

Who are the influencers of 2025? Who or what might be behind them? Do the old ways still work? Where? And in what contexts? Which of the many catastrophes around us might lead to a change in direction? A series from a digital streaming service that uses AI in its special effects might not provide the answers, but it does seem tuned in to the questions, or at least to the anxieties that feed them and, perhaps, a few of the many monsters of our time.