The Eternaut Ending Explained: Who is Controlling the Bugs and the Humans?

Netflix’s ‘Eternaut’ is a Spanish sci-fi show, steeped in mystery, where the apocalypse forces a community of regular citizens to fight for survival. It revolves around a Buenos Aires town that becomes overrun by a deadly snowfall that kills everything it touches. Fatefully, Juan Salvo and his friends, who are playing cards in electrical engineer Alfredo Favalli’s house, are sheltered from this lethal turn in the weather. Nonetheless, the same cannot be said for the world around them. Soon, society devolves into a chaotic battleground, infested by killer snow, gigantic spiders, and something even more menacing unfolding behind the curtains. Nonetheless, Juan only has one priority in mind: finding his lost daughter, Clara. Inevitably, as the father takes on increasingly more reckless risks, he begins to inadvertently unravel the peculiarities that are trying to take over humanity. SPOILERS AHEAD!

The Eternaut Recap

On a nondescript Friday night, things take a turn for the worse. Out-of-season snowfall takes over Buenos Aires, taking people out with only one unwitting touch. While hundreds die on the streets, Juan Salvo and his friends obliviously enjoy a game of cards, safe in their well-sealed home. However, soon enough, they realize something strange is happening outside. Even after they establish that the white substance falling from the sky must be killing people, one of them, Russo, impulsively rushes out to check on his family and falls to his death before he can even leave the front yard. Shortly afterward, a newcomer joins the group—Inga, the delivery driver who had been in Favalli’s closed-off garage when the snowfall came. Meanwhile, Juan begins to go stir-crazy, unable to know whether his daughter is safe or not. Consequently, the group decides to help him by making a safety suit from waterproof materials and a gas mask.

By the morning after, Juan is ready to gamble on his life with the suit. Luckily for him, it holds out under the deadly snowfall. However, his trek into the abruptly apocalyptic world also exposes him to the horrors that the night has left behind. Meanwhile, Favalli and others, despite their tense environment, make some progress—including finding a way to drive care. Simultaneously, Juan arrives at his ex-wife, Elena’s, apartment, only to find that his daughter isn’t there. Unbeknownst to the parents, Clara had actually taken a sailboat out to the sea with her friends when the snow had arrived. The divorced couple’s escape from the apartment is difficult, mostly because of Juan’s coveted mask. Nonetheless, they manage to make it out alive, thanks to Favalli, who rescues them in the nick of time.

Once back at Favalli’s safe house, Juan immediately makes plans to look for Clara by tracking down her friends. Nonetheless, all this endeavor gets them is the addition of one newly orphaned kid, Pablo, into their group. Eventually, this search takes him and Favalli to the downtown area, where they discover a horde of alien beetle-like beasts that are terrorizing the survivor community. Furthermore, they also make some discoveries about their newfound reality, including the fact that threatening red-streaked meteors have been invading the atmosphere. Likewise, Favalli theorizes that the deadly snow is actually radioactive particles released due to a shift in Earth’s magnetic poles.

Upon their return from this downtown trip, a surprise awaits the duo: Clara. The young woman somehow managed to find her way home on her own. Her return compels the group to think about a long-term plan. Consequently, Favalli trades his house for an RV so that the group can drive out to his house on the Tigre island. Yet, their trip is cut short when they come across a group of people who have formed a community in the expansive supermarket. Although everything seems initially peaceful, all hell breaks loose the next morning. The snow has stopped falling, making the outdoors safe again. Nonetheless, danger arrives on the supermarket’s doorstep in the form of armed men and women. Worse yet, on the heels of this attack, one of Juan’s friends, Lucas, happens to run into the local military. As a result, all the survivors travel to Campo de Mayo. Still, unknown to them, not every military man can be trusted, such as Moro, a soldier who seems to be in cahoots with the alien bugs.

The Eternaut Ending: Why are the Humans Working With the Beasts? Who is Controlling Them?

The story plants the seeds of doubt regarding the allegiance of some humans from early on. One instance in particular finds Moro, a military soldier, walking into the bug aliens’ lair, almost as if the part of their group. For the same reason, suspicions regarding the military and their intentions remain firm. This is only exacerbated once the survivors are all corralled to the Campo de Mayo base, where young people are eagerly recruited and dangerous plans are devised against their enemy. The head of the base sanctions a dangerous mission to send out a radio signal from downtown, to send out a message of hope and refuge to the city. Despite their reluctance to participate, Juan and Favalli inevitably end up on the train to downtown alongside Lucas, Omar, Igna, and Pablo.

Even though their mission is successful, virtually everything else goes wrong. Pablo and Inga are separated from the group, while Lucas commits suicide after behaving erratically. Soon afterward, the revelation arrives that most of the military soldiers, as well as the surviving townsfolk, have banded together with the alien beasts. This urges Juan to turn tail and return to the downtown even after he and the others barely escape with their lives. Thus, the end finds Juan and the train engineer traveling to the stadium, which is weirdly lit up in blue lights. Furthermore, it had been the destination of a fighter plane that had crashed earlier in the day, which ignited even more suspicions about the area.

Ultimately, a horrible truth is revealed to them once Juan and the engineer secure a safe vantage point to observe the situation. Favalli had pitched the theory that an alien species had invaded the planet, which had jump-started all these events. As such, the idea remains that the beetle-beasts are simply the henchmen to a more intelligent—and thereby, more dangerous—enemy. The stadium confirms this truth when Juan catches a glimpse of a being with hundreds of fingers on their unearthly hands. It’s very clear that whoever this being is has been mind-controlling the beetles as well as the humans to do its bidding. As a result, even through the narrative’s ambiguity, a story begins to form.

The leader of the alien invasion, likely the being with the Hand, arrived on Earth in order to take control of the human species. For the same reason, the invasion’s attack began in small but lethal doses. The toxic snowfall isolated the population and instilled an inherent fear and distrust within them. From there, the introduction of the beetle beasts compelled the people to mobilize and seek out power, leading to infighting, which made them infinitely easier to control and exploit. In the end, once the pieces had been set in place, the Hand Being took control of the masses en masse, building a dangerous and efficient army for themselves. Still, while the motivations of this enemy remain transparent, their final endgame regarding the Earth’s invasion is yet to be explored. Are they simply seeking to erase humanity and snatch their planets from there, or is there something even worse afoot?

How Does Juan Know the Train Engineer?

Amidst these overarching invasive plans of Hand and their beetle minion, an even more intriguing mystery builds around Juan. Ever since his first foray into the deadly snow, the man keeps flashing back to his traumatic past as a soldier who fought in the Falklands. However, as the plot progresses, it becomes evident that these flashes of memories aren’t simply from the past. Instead, a part of these memories is actually from the future yet to come. We see some of these events unfold in the season—such as the final moments of the Beetle/human mobilization and Clara’s return home.

Still, many other remain a mystery for now, hinting at things that may come to pass in potential future seasons. In the same vein as these flashbacks, Juan’s eerie insistence that he knows the Train Engineer, despite no prior introduction between the two, also casts a suspicious shadow on his past. Therefore, it comes as a shock when the man reveals the reason the engineer feels so familiar to him: Juan has already lived through this entire thing.

Multiple things throughout the show rang the warning bells for the protagonist. The seemingly random way in which the snowfall begins and stops. The way Clara somehow returns home, but without any of her memories of the sailboat. Numerous instances make Juan suspect that everything that is happening to him is staged and orchestrated by someone who wants to control his emotions and reactions. However, the final revelation that the man has already lived through all these instances implies something else.

The implications remain that Juan is actually stuck in a time loop. This would explain why the memories of his future accompany his flashbacks, because for him, these things have indeed already happened, even if he retains no memory of them. He’s constantly experiencing bouts of deja vu because he’s stuck in an endless cycle, forced to relive the same experiences over and over again. Even though this comes as a climactic explanation meant to tie the narrative together, it only adds more questions to Juan’s story. Is Juan the only one stuck in this Sisyphean nightmare, or are the others experiencing the same thing? Is it a side-effect of Hand’s mind control, or is Juan one of the only ones who isn’t a victim of it? Unfortunately, these questions remain to be pondered over for now.

Why Does Clara Join the Military?

While these world-warping revelations are arriving, a crucial piece of information is revealed that might seem small in the grand scheme of things. Clara, who is back in Campo de Mayo with her mother and the other survivors, has joined the military, becoming one of their foot soldiers. This is a stark contrast to the last we see of the character. Even though she has a yearning to join the fight like the other teenagers, she also heeds her father’s advice to take some time to deal with her past before jumping into anything overly violent. Clara has somehow made her way back home all on her own from a sailboat to Favalli’s house. Yet, she has almost no tangible memory of it, including her time on the sailboat, during which she saw her friends die.

It very evidently has a negative effect on Clara, as proven by the random bouts of migraines she has become prone to experiencing. If anything, all these things only make her final appearance, as a dead-faced soldier being taught to shoot, become all the more intriguing. It’s very likely that this is not an intentional choice on the teenager’s part but rather another result of Hand’s mind control. Clara’s stance and her lack of emotions are evocative of the numerous other brainwashed humans who are fighting for Hand and the other aliens. As such, it’s highly probable that even with all the distance between downtown and the military base, Hand has managed to sink his mind-controlling fingers into the survivors’ brains.

Why Does Lucas Jump off the Building? Was He Being Mind-Controlled?

Once the mind-control angle is introduced into the narrative, one can’t help but engage in it to explain the various other eccentricities of the finale. Soon after Juan and the others leave Favalli’s home for a road trip to safety, Lucas begins acting strangely. This becomes most prominent when he expresses his disturbing relief at Russo’s death and later gets blackout drunk, only to end up in the military troops’ way. More often than not, he ends up conveniently bringing things to Juan and Favalli’s lives that are furthering the military’s agenda. In fact, it’s he who pitches the idea of including the other two men in the downtown mission.

Therefore, Lucas’ predicament remains intriguing for some time before it comes to a head during a game of cards. After getting frustrated with the rounds, the man ends up stabbing Omar and running out to the rooftop to dangle his life by the ledge. As he gears up for the leap, he gives one last speech during which he talks of some ominous Foundation, its enemies, and their brutal fates. Ultimately, Juan and Favalli are equally unable to save their friends as he dives to his death. In retrospect, it seems evident that Lucas was indeed being mind-controlled by Hand.

However, his brand of brainwashing seems a bit different, almost as if the man still has some autonomy, unlike the other brainless bots. Once his actions are examined under the light of mind control, it can be inferred that the Foundation he was speaking of is actually related to the Hand and the other aliens. Consequently, it is likely that Lucas had been recruited by Hand to lure the survivors out to the downtown. Their free survival as a unit, growing in numbers, would be seen as a threat to the invasive species, compelling them to take measures to eradicate them. Nonetheless, once Lucas brings his friends downtown, he has already served his purpose. Whether or not his final demise was a choice of the hive brain forced upon him or his own guilty conviction remains a mystery.

Was the Downtown Mission a Trap? Why Do the Aliens Let Them Broadcast Their Message?

Once the nature of the downtown and the Aliens’ control over its people becomes obvious, one can’t help but wonder if Juan’s arrival in the area was also intentional. There are various signs that point toward this possibility, including the stark lack of beetle-beasts that interfere in the group’s mission. Therefore, there’s almost a feeling that the Aliens want Juan and his friends to accomplish their mission, i.e., establish the radio signals. For the same reason, the next question naturally arises about their motives regarding this. Why would Hand and the others want to broadcast a message to the masses?

It’s possible that the answer to this is revealed in the season’s ending shot, where Clara’s fate as another mind-controlled individual is revealed. The story hasn’t yet revealed how the mind-control aspect of Hand works. Yet, we know that distance and accessibility to the person most probably play some role in the brainwashing process. Therefore, a theory emerges about the potential uses the Aliens might have had with the broadcast. They want to spread their mind-controlling messages to the entire city so that they can exert control over even more people. As such, it’s likely that they lured Juan and his friends to set up the radio downtown, to be later used for their own nefarious, brainwashing purposes.