The Power of the Beginning of the End

Welcome to the latest edition of Remote Feeds, a weekly newsletter covering the best new and recent international TV.

“Let’s toast to all the beautiful things waiting for us.”

There’s a kind of cruelty in watching characters anticipate a future we know they’ll never see. That could apply on a small scale: Someone unknowingly marked for death gives one last phone call to a loved one. Historical tales, from war stories to the recent spate of corporation hagiographies, are littered with groups of people huddled around a room the night before The Big Day, unaware that their fates have already been sealed for decades, if not centuries. 

Apocalypse stories magnify that dread precisely because the people involved usually have no inkling that they’re on the verge of unprecedented times. Watch enough of their fates unfold and it becomes a reminder of your own impermanence. So while it may feel a little absurd to say that one of the keenest depictions of modern existence is a show where the main enemy is killer snow, “The Eternaut” is effective for all the tiny observations it makes before the people inside it realize what kind of story they’re actually in. 

Outside of recaps, the TV media ecosystem rarely takes (or has) the chance to look at a premiere episode in isolation. Opening seasons get viewed as whole. If a review focuses on a single episode, it’s just as likely to be later in the season, ensuring that anyone watching sticks it out long enough to make the journey worth it. “The Eternaut,” which premiered last year on Netflix, feels like a perfect candidate for a pilot-only look, and not only because it’s a very solid table-setter for the series to come. It’s one of the sharpest examples of an in-process apocalypse that I can remember. 

Reading “Station Eleven” in 2016 (a decade and an eon ago), the part that stood out most was the section at the airport. The chronicle of the Before Times had its intrigue and yes, there’s something to be said for tracking troubadours through the ruins of organized society. But I wanted everything the book could give me about what happened at that airport. The idea of watching society shift and recombine in real time had the most dramatic power of anything else in the story. Thankfully, the TV adaptation obliged in its own way, fulfilling that promise even as we were living through acute examples of our own to judge it against. (Related: We’ve done a decent job in the last year giving David Wilmot the chance to be a pesky newsroom boss and Papa Shakespeare, but there is plenty more work to be done. Casting directors of the world, do your stuff.)

“The Eternaut” drops us right into that same kind of environment, only with a person and not a place as our guide. Juan Salvo (Ricardo Darín) just wants to help an old buddy out by inviting him to a standing card game night. There are some complications. A local protest blocks access to the streets near his destination. Some of the other poker friends (they’re actually playing a trick-taking game that I desperately want to learn for myself) are less than cooperative when Juan arrives with a hanger-on in tow. But for a few moments, we see an otherwise normal night play out. A few drinks, a few verbal jabs mixed in among the bids. And then the lights go out. 

Some disaster stories make it really easy for every character to get on the same page quickly. A kaiju bites off the head of the Statue of Liberty. Tripod aliens start vaporizing New Englanders. A nuke detonates somewhere just beyond the horizon. Faced with the impossible, people snap into action. But in this first episode of “The Eternaut,” the proof isn’t quite as clear. Bodies start dropping in the street, and a chill starts tearing through the air around the house where everyone is protected inside. Even though the lightbulbs all go dark at once, you still get to watch the metaphorical light leave the eyes of these assembled characters one by one as reality arrives for each of them in separate waves. 

It becomes clear which of these characters are motivated by sensing something is off and which ones need to see physical, immutable proof. Without the benefit of too much preamble, “The Eternaut” can still make it clear when a particular sound (or lack thereof) tips off these folks as overly strange. Once cars started veering off their path, drivers slumped over in the front seat, panic starts to set in. It’s not long before some of the game night friends insist on venturing outside for a closer look, against the advice of everyone else gathered. Through the unfortunate passersby who drop while passing by, Juan and his pals realize that the escalating problem has something to do with the falling, glowing snow staring to cover the ground. 

“The Eternaut” also manages to fit in a key component of the Evolving Crisis Storyline without drawing too much attention to itself. Pretty quickly, Juan faces the existential question that’s a daily choice for so many watching the fictional version play out: Is it best to try to keep everyone calm or be brutally honest? Juan discovers that it’s possible for these two options to go hand in hand. As people realize the danger of the moment at different times, there are different waves of actions trying to pull the group in one direction or another. Juan becomes a steady hand through his deliberate decisions, but also in ways that go beyond the character. 

Darín is a pillar of the Argentinian film community and has become something of an ambassador for the country on the world cinema stage. He’s a recognizable face in “The Secret in Their Eyes,” one of the biggest international awards breakouts of the 2000s. This show is his return to TV, his first starring role in a series since achieving such widespread notoriety. 

So even though Darín is playing something of an everyman in this show, the metanarrative of “The Eternaut” is that there is some comfort to be found in realizing that the one guy with the answer to all the problems is someone who we’ve already put time and faith into believing. We all want to trust that the people with that access to resources and public goodwill can be a counterbalance to the malevolent forces at work on a broad scale, that we won’t be forced to be our own saviors because there’s no alternative. The trick becomes whether or not the aspirational competency of something like “A House of Dynamite” exists too much in contrast to the current landscape we know exists. It’s a lot easier to believe that an Argentinian Clooney would be most capable of helping us outlive a supernatural weather event. 

Whether or not he’s played by a superstar, Juan is the sturdiest kind of presence for a story with an ever-changing status quo. He’s is the first character to realize that a point of no return has been passed. The digital art being made upstairs from the card table will soon be obsolete. Those card game nights are irrevocably changed. Just going outside to walk a pet through the neighborhood is an act that’s as impossible as it is simple. 

Grounding this whole global-altering event in one person makes it a lot easier to not get lost in the how and why of a supernatural weather event. It’s the same recipe that guided the Belgian stay-out-of-the-sun-to-stay-alive plane thriller “Into the Night” and its Turkish submarine offshoot “Yakamoz S-245.” Absurd and simple can coexist if there’s a steady hand leading the survival efforts. By the end of the first episode of “The Eternaut,” everyone is forced to accept that things have changed. All that’s left is to figure out how to exist in a new reality. It’s what keeps our eyes fixed on the bridge between Before and After.  

“The Eternaut” is available to stream on Netflix. The series has been renewed for a Season 2.