Month: June 2019

What you need to know about Chernobyl, HBO's 5-episode miniseries from Craig Mazin, is that you cannot understand how deeply it will destroy the very fabric of your being until you see it. Which is, strangely, analogous to the fallout from the meltdown of Chernobyl reactor #4. As it was happening, and in its immediate aftermath, no one understood what it meant. "You are dealing with something that has never happened on this planet before!" says scientist Valery Legasov (Jared Harris) when attempting to impress upon the Kremlin the unknowable scope of the event, which took place in April of 1986. But for us in 2019, we do know. At least, we know that simple, almost mundane scenes of children playing in the radioactive ash and men at the power plant letting irradiated water splash all over them equals death. But as a first responder picks up a rock and looks at it curiously, his hand melts away, and others start to know things too.

As a viewer you know the history; you know the monster is on the other side of the door and you find yourself screaming, "Don't go in there! You're going to DIE!

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"Chernobyl" is not an easy show to watch.

Nor should it be. The 1986 explosion at Chernobyl in present-day Ukraine was the worst nuclear accident to date, which killed hundreds of thousands and still affects millions more. But HBO's five-part miniseries is hard to watch for reasons beyond those harrowing facts and graphic images of the immediate effect of radiation on the Chernobyl plant workers and first responders, the omnipresent column of black smoke belching from the reactor's core, or even eerie footage of the residents of the nearby factory town of Pripyat, gathered convivially to watch the fire burn while their children chase radioactive ash like snowflakes.

"Chernobyl" is so hard to watch because of the all too human themes creator Craig Mazin has woven into his masterful script. Mazin and his team have done their homework, immersing themselves into the history, science, and even the tick-tock of Chernobyl, as well as first-hand accounts in Nobel prize laureate Svetlana Alexievich's "Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster." Watching the show is a crash course in nuclear physics, but more importantly, it is a thought-provoking exploration of the importance of truth and the nature of self-sacrifice.

"The truth doesn't care"

"We live in a time where people seem to be re-embracing the corrosive notion that what we want to be true is more important than what is true," Craig Mazin says of the series. "It's as if truth has become a joke. One of the most important lessons of "Chernobyl" is that the truth does not care about us. The Soviet system was soaking in this cult of narrative, and then one day the truth erupts. This is why this story is more relevant than ever."

Truth—and the lack of it—is front and center in Episode One. The series' protagonist, Valery Legasov (Jared Harris) sits alone in his Moscow flat with a small cassette player, attempting to grapple with the truth of Chernobyl two years after the incident. Minutes later, we are plunged into chaos and confusion in the Chernobyl control room just seconds after the explosion. Anatoly Dyatlov (Paul Ritter), the plant's senior engineer, systematically ignores the increasingly alarming information his subordinates bring him that the reactor's core has exploded. Again, and again, Dyatlov insists that an explosion is impossible, and continues to issue orders that will consign his already doomed men to more immediate and agonizing deaths from radiation.

Fear is pervasive in the control room, but the cause is not just the alarming reads on the radiation meters (the more sophisticated and accurate meter is locked in the safe and no one has the key— a marvelously Soviet moment). No, the more pressing issue, we learn through snatches of conversation, is that the accident may have been the result of a safety test performed hours before. This is the real specter that haunts Dyatlov and the men in the control room: that they may be blamed for the damage caused by the accident. Their immediate concern is not the reactor as much as containing the damage to their reputations and job security.

If we find this ludicrous, the incredulity of all the characters suggests that worrying about their jobs is an easier problem to get their heads around than a seemingly impossible explosion in a nuclear reactor, something, as Legasov later states, "has never happened before on this planet."

But Dyatlov doggedly continues to insist that everything is fine, the damage is minimal, as are the radiation levels, and he passes this doctored information and, with it, his damage control agenda up the chain of command.

Truth is again relegated to the sidelines as the plant's apparatchiks, Director Bryukhanov and Chief Engineer Fomin meet with Pripyat party officials in a bunker below the reactor's executive office. The precaution of evacuating the city is dismissed by a veteran of the Russian Revolution, who tells the assembled officials: "It is my experience that when the people ask questions that are not in their best interests, they should simply be told to keep their minds on their labors."

Read the rest here.