BY ISABELLA SUMMITT

Let me preface this review by saying that the disaster at Chernobyl is something I’d never even heard of before. I heard it mentioned in a random YouTube video reviewing makeup that depicts radiation burns. I had a passing interest in radiation because of the many hours I have played Fallout 4. But Chernobyl was completely outside my field of reference. Once I discovered clips of the actual show on YouTube, I knew I needed to watch the whole thing, and I’m glad I did. It is perhaps one of the best miniseries I have seen.

This review is in three parts.  

  1. Viewpoint
  2. Metaphor
  3. Warnings

1. Viewpoint

Much of this series is told through a limited viewpoint, which pulls you in regardless of your knowledge about this event in history. If you are aware of the historical event you can recognize what is going on. If, like me, you knew nothing about it, the characters pull you into it. What is happening is terrible, and yet the show is so good you want to see more. The first scene of the first episode depicts the main character hanging himself two years later. A lot of the story is told in retrospect like this; we do not see the events leading up to the accident or the boring lives of the workers’ families of Pripyat, as you would in a typical disaster movie. This way the show doesn’t waste any time and starts you right at the event itself. We do not even get an explanation of how the accident happened until the last episode. 

The accident is first seen by a pregnant woman waking up in the middle of the night to throw up. She sees a flash of light from the power plant off in the distance and a few seconds later the whole house shakes. The viewpoint switches between multiple protagonists. The audience, like the characters, has no idea what is going on. The show doesn’t bother trying to follow a documentary timeline with a narrator who just throws facts and exposition at you or cuts away to the previous day, but restricts the information given to the audience by focusing on the perspectives of a few characters in the middle of the disaster. This makes the audience much more grounded in the characters’ experience and makes them relate to what is happening. This is helpful because the events are so extreme and crazy that you need to bring the audience back down to reality and to remind them that this all really happened. In this case, reality is scarier than a horror movie.

The response to the disaster took many twists as the cleanup effort dealt with new potential disasters. This means that the episodes always have new situations. They help illustrate how insidious and pervasive radiation is. Legasov has to consult his colleague, a female scientist who is a composite of multiple real people, and they keep finding new ways the disaster could get even worse. They have to protect the other four reactors and prevent a second explosion from the steam so they have to get a trio of plant workers to wade into radioactive water to drain the cooling tanks. Then they don’t want it melting into the ground water so they have to hire a team of miners to dig under the foundation of the plant. Then they have to deal with the fallout and destroy and bury everything contaminated, including pets. 

2. Metaphor

Throughout the show, the whole reactor explosion is used as a metaphor for the ripping apart of the blanket of lies that the Soviet Union used to manipulate its citizens. Two of the most prominent protagonists in the show are Pr. Legasov and Boris Shcherbina, who start from opposite sides. Legasov is a scientist and Shcherbina is a politician. At the beginning they need to learn to work together as they both discover how bad the situation really is. I love the give and take between these two characters. It’s rare for a movie or tv show to show a good character arc where a character completely changes his mind about something, but they do it really well here. Shcherbina goes from brushing off the radiation levels as no worse than a chest x-ray, to ranting on the phone about the committee lying about the radiation levels which fry the circuitry of one of the cleanup robots on loan from Germany. As measures are taken to try to contain the situation, they teach each other about their expertise; Shcherbina learns about the scientific dangers of radioactivity and the gravity of the situation and Legasov has to learn to be discreet and play along with the politicians in the USSR if he wants to get anything done. His discovery of the infrestructure of lies is what leads to his suicide at the beginning.

3. Warnings

The whole show has a depressing feel to it as it shows how the Soviets lived in complete denial, and they didn’t care how many died so long as they didn’t appear weak. This attitude conflicts constantly with the main characters’ attempts to deal with the catastrophe. The disaster was the culmination and result of decades worth of lies. The show doesn’t blame any one person for the meltdown, though it points out certain individuals who didn’t help. The blame is put on the system of lies that allowed this to happen through a chain of unfortunate events. All of the characters are constantly being shadowed by agents of the KGB. Any character who steps out of line is grabbed and sent to jail. I do think that the show deliberately takes away sympathy from certain characters who were more complex in real life, to give sympathy to other characters. I’ve seen videos or real life survivors or their relatives complaining about that.

The series relies a lot on horrifying understated visuals to get the full emotional impact. One scene encapsulates the whole situation in Chernobyl and Pripyat: The citizens of the town stand on a bridge and watch with idle curiosity the column of blue light coming from the power plant. A breeze blows ash onto them from the fire and the children play in it like snow, not knowing it’s radioactive fallout. 

Parental Notes> There is a lot of throwing up in this show, but I understand why. That is what radiation poisoning does to the body. There is a lot of swearing and one scene of nudity, but it is not sexual. It is only because the miners who have to dig a trench under the foundation of the plant had to work in super hot conditions, so they worked naked. 

One of the episodes focuses on a young volunteer who is assigned to help two hardened Red army sharpshooters to hunt down and shoot all pets and domestic animals in Pripyat. There are a lot of shocking and heart-wrenching scenes of the three men shooting dogs and puppies, to tug at the heartstrings of people more moved by animal than human suffering. 

They avoid being too gruesome and over dramatic but they do depict the horrifying effects of radiation sickness on the body with terribly accurate makeup. It was this makeup that drew me to it in the first place, but overall it is a great series and you need to watch it. 

 “Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth; sooner or later that debt is paid.” ~Valery Legasov