Warning! This article contains spoilers for The Eternaut.
In The Eternaut season 1’s six-episode runtime, the main character, Juan, gets several mysterious visions. Although The Eternaut intentionally avoids explaining the meaning of these visions and their significance in the overarching narrative, it leaves enough room for viewers to speculate and theorize about what they indicate. Since the Netflix post-apocalyptic show has been renewed for season 2, its next installment will likely explore what Juan’s visions mean. Till then, audiences can piece together little details from the show’s story and notice how they tie together.
Juan Salvo seems to get close to seven of these visions, where some are unique, while others are redundant. While his first vision shows up in episode 2, the final ones are introduced in the finale. His early visions suggest that he is merely recounting all the traumas he experienced during his time in the military. However, before The Eternaut season 1’s ending credits start rolling, it becomes evident that there is a lot more to Juan’s vision than meets the eye.
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Juan Sees Another Version Of Himself
The Eternaut Season 1, Episode 2
Juan’s visions begin in the show’s opening arc when he wears a protective layer of clothes, dons a safety mask, and heads out of his home to seek help. A few moments into his journey, he hears a distant whistle. The whistle is familiar and suddenly makes him feel uncomfortable, seemingly reminding him of his time in war. Moments later, a man, who eerily looks like him, emerges at a distance. Juan realizes that something is not right and starts running in the opposite direction.
His alternate self seemingly paid him a visit to either warn him about an imminent event or to steer him away from a catastrophic choice.
This early sequence in the series establishes that even though Juan is not fully aware of it, he is traveling through space and time. The man he saw at a distance was either a version of him from the future or the past. His alternate self seemingly paid him a visit to either warn him about an imminent event or to steer him away from a catastrophic choice.
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Juan Gets A Glimpse Of The Future
The Eternaut Season 1, Episode 2
After rescuing his wife from her apartment, Juan finds himself facing off against many men from the housing complex. All of them seem to be determined to get their hands on his breathing mask. Juan, however, cleverly neutralizes the threat by smashing a window open and letting the snow in. While the men run away to protect themselves, Juan wraps a plastic bag over his face to be able to protect himself from the toxic snow. Unfortunately, he soon starts suffocating and falls to the ground. This is when he gets another series of visions.
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While unconscious, Juan seems to experience everything from his past to his future in a few fleeting moments. He first finds himself in an excavation in a war zone, revealing how he was once a veteran. Soon, he gets visions of red balls of light falling from the sky, which eventually become a future scene in the series. Before the sequence ends, Juan also seems to see the full scale of the alien invasion. This vision, too, highlights how he is seemingly experiencing the past, the present, and the future simultaneously.
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Juan Gets Another Peek At His Timeline
The Eternaut Season 1, Episode 3
In episode 3, Juan goes around looking for a car before he finds a security guard’s booth. Moments after he grabs the keys from the booth, another vision kicks in again, which walks him through all the crucial events he is about to experience. Juan zones out and finds himself sitting in the abandoned car the next moment. Yet again, Juan struggles to make sense of his visions, but they suggest that he has either lived through the future before or has found a way to look beyond the boundaries of space and time.
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Juan’s Past & Present Merge
The Eternaut Season 1, Episode 5
One of Juan’s most intriguing visions comes in the opening moments of episode 5. The episode begins with a sequence where a man fights enemy forces from an excavation in a war zone. However, suddenly a bomb goes off in front of him, and he loses consciousness. When he awakens, he sees Juan standing at a distance. It soon becomes evident that the young man in the war zone is Juan himself, and he is seeing a version of his future self.
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The Eternaut Key Facts |
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Created By |
Bruno Stagnaro |
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Based On |
The Eternaut by Héctor Germán Oesterheld & Francisco Solano López |
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Rotten Tomatoes Critics’ Score |
92% |
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Rotten Tomatoes Audience Score |
92% |
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Streaming On |
Netflix |
This scene again highlights how Juan’s perception of time is unlike anyone else’s. He has found a way to diminish the boundaries of space and time, seemingly allowing him to experience multiple timelines at once. This sequence can also be interpreted as an effective allegory for PTSD from war, where Juan keeps reliving his past war trauma.
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Juan Interacts With A Woman He Killed
The Eternaut Season 1, Episode 6
When the mind-controlled humans execute a brutal shoot-down on the survivors, Juan puts his military skills on full display and kills many of them. He also ends up killing a woman and notices that she has a golden necklace that seemingly represents her family. The finale then begins with another vision in which Juan finds himself in a shopping complex where he meets the same woman he killed. The woman tells him that she is “in there” somewhere, seemingly highlighting how, even though the aliens are mind-controlling her, she has not lost full control over herself.
This turns out to be one of the strangest visions in the series, hinting at how Juan might have met the woman in an alternate reality despite killing her in the one he exists in. Sequences like these in The Eternaut season 1 make it hard not to anticipate the Netflix sci-fi show‘s season 2 because future story beats might finally connect all the dots and explain what is happening to Juan.
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Juan Feels A Sense Of Déjà Vu
The Eternaut Season 1, Episode 6
An overwhelming feeling of déjà vu dawns upon Juan in The Eternaut season 1’s ending arc, where he cannot help but wonder why he feels like he has lived through the present before. However, in this scene, it becomes evident that Juan’s previous visions in the series were allowing him to look into the future. His present feels familiar to him in the closing scene because he has lived through it once or maybe several times in “the past.”
In The Eternaut season 2, which has been confirmed by Netflix, the character will likely realize that his visions allow him to see the future. This will give him the opportunity to foresee several disastrous events and prevent them from happening. Juan’s visions establish that even though the aliens are far ahead of humans, he might eventually be able to save humanity from them with his ability to look beyond the fabric of space and time.
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Juan Sees His Daughter Training With The Military
The Eternaut Season 1, Episode 6
Juan’s final vision in the series shows him how his daughter, too, will eventually join forces with the aliens by becoming one of the many humans mind-controlled by them. The Eternaut establishes that Juan’s daughter, Clara, too, was abducted by the aliens at some point, and they implanted the mind-controlled device in her brain. This explains why she has a bump on her head like most mind-controlled humans. However, Clara somehow manages to escape the aliens and even resists their mind-control techniques.
Written by Héctor Germán Oesterheld, the original The Eternaut comic was first published between 1957 and 1959.
Based on Juan’s vision in The Eternaut‘s finale, she might eventually fall for the aliens’ influence. However, if Juan understands the true meaning of his visions, he might be able to race against time and save her before it is too late.
This story originally appeared on Screenrant
