The Eternaut: Only The Collective Can Survive
By Nancy Nuñez and Emiliano Rodriguez Nuesch
What if the apocalypse came quietly, as snow?
The Eternaut, Netflix’s new adaptation of the iconic 1957 Argentine graphic novel, opens with a silent snowfall over Buenos Aires — beautiful, toxic, and deadly. As people collapse in the streets, it becomes clear: this isn’t just weather. It’s an invasion. But the real battle isn’t only against a foreign force. It’s against isolation.
Premiering in 2025 and adapted for the screen for the first time, The Eternaut, captured global attention, debuting at #1 on Netflix’s Global Top 10 for non-English language series.
This is not your typical sci-fi. There are no superheroes. No lone saviors. Just ordinary people — neighbors, friends, families — trying to survive the unimaginable. Together.
At the heart of The Eternaut is a radical idea: only the collective can survive. And that idea resonates far beyond fiction.
At its center lies the idea of the “collective hero,” connecting it to core concepts like compassion as a shared act, narrative empathy, and emotional engagement in the face of mass suffering.
These ideas mirror the focus of the Arithmetic of Compassion: understanding why people often feel emotionally disengaged from large-scale crises, and how stories can help us reconnect and re-engage our empathy.
From the creation of the “collective hero” to the emotional force of empathy in the face of mass suffering, the story dismantles the myth of the lone savior and puts solidarity at the center. What follows is an exploration of how The Eternaut redefines heroism, embodies the psychology of compassion, and reveals empathy not as sentiment, but as strategy — a way to face the invisible threats of our time.
The Collective Hero vs. the Isolated Individual
The Eternaut was written by Héctor Germán Oesterheld and illustrated by Francisco Solano López. It was published between 1957 and 1959 as a newspaper serial in Hora Cero magazine.
Oesterheld coined the term “eternauta”: a combination of "eternal" and "naut" (navigator), inspired by Robinson Crusoe, a book he read as a child. But instead of a lone survivor, he imagined a man surrounded by his family and friends, navigating not the sea but death.
The Netflix adaptation preserves this core idea and updates it: Salvo is reimagined as a divorced Malvinas war veteran. New characters — survivors of Argentina’s economic crises — add political and social layers that resonate with contemporary audiences.
The original story featured common people who collectively stare down a totalitarian threat. The main character becomes a hero with few resources who has no superpowers. Juan Salvo is a symbol of the survivor who resists, forged in everyday courage.
This makes The Eternaut a striking embodiment of the collective hero, which stands in direct contrast to the dominant cultural myth of the lone savior. In today’s world of social fragmentation, this idea has renewed urgency.
Fighting Invisible Enemies
The central threat in The Eternaut is a mysterious snowfall that kills on contact — silent, and deadly. It marks the first wave of an alien invasion. The horror lies not in spectacle, but in the slow, creeping realization that the world is no longer safe — and that the danger cannot be seen or understood in simple terms.
Today’s threats may not come from outer space, but from climate change, mass displacement, pandemics, and disinformation. These are similarly slow-moving, abstract, and emotionally hard to process. Yet, the challenge is the same: we can only face them collectively.
Human empathy struggles when confronted with abstraction or scale. This is why storytelling is so powerful. It makes the incomprehensible personal. The Eternaut does not ask us to imagine some distant future — it places the apocalypse on a neighborhood sidewalk, in a shared living room, among friends.
As the story says, “Everything that seemed impossible happened.”
Resistance as Empathy
What gives The Eternaut its emotional force is not just its political message but its ability to make us feel with the characters — to engage in what Suzanne Keen calls narrative empathy: “the shared feeling and perspective-taking induced by reading, viewing, hearing, or imagining narratives of another’s situation and condition.”
The story invites audiences into the emotional lives of ordinary people facing extraordinary threats and making choices. This is where the story connects most strongly with the idea of compassion as action. Resistance in The Eternaut means staying close to others and refusing to retreat into individualism.
This aligns with the idea of how empathy is fragile, and how stories can restore it. Research shows people are more likely to act for one identifiable victim than for statistics about many.
In his article “Bright Words”, Scott Slovic reflects on how we are often moved by a single story more than by large numbers. The Eternaut builds on this insight — not by isolating one character, but by helping us care about a group. It transforms collective danger into collective emotional engagement.
The Eternaut poster recreating its iconic cover
Images from the Netflix series The Eternaut
Rewriting the Hero Myth
While popular narratives glorify superheroes and lone warriors, The Eternaut quietly proposes something far more radical: What if survival is only possible together?
The story dismantles the myth of the exceptional individual and elevates the value of community — of people helping each other, not because they are strong or powerful, but because they have no other choice.
This redefinition of heroism matters. In a world where individualism is often glorified and isolation is increasingly normalized, The Eternaut shows that the true hero is the one who stays, who joins others, who resists fear with presence.
For Oesterheld, the true hero of The Eternaut is a collective hero, a human group. It reflects his deepest conviction: “the only valid hero is the one who acts with others, never the lone hero.”
The iconic cover of The Eternaut
A Story That Transcends Time
Although the narrative includes monsters, spaceships, and toxic snow, it never stops being an allegory. The invasion represents power, subjugation, and colonization. Its story shows us that survival comes from cooperation, not conquest. That solidarity is a weapon. That compassion is a collective force.
Over time, The Eternaut has transcended its pages and became a cultural symbol - not just in Argentina, but globally.
In a time when many threats still feel vast, abstract, or invisible, stories like The Eternaut help us reconnect emotionally. They show that empathy isn’t just a personal feeling — it is a social tool, a political act, and a source of strength.
The story’s central message—only the collective can survive—echoes through the series, captured in its logline: No one will survive on their own.