As big a fan as I am of the STALKER games, there was no way I wasn’t going to watch this. I’m rather surprised that a miniseries about the Chernobyl disaster was funded and made at all and even shocked that it’s so well made and high profile. It’s not perfect by any means especially as it tries too hard to neatly categorize characters as either heroes or villains but it’s much better than I’d hoped. It would be fantastic if more shows of such quality were made to dramatize important real events.
The series proper starts immediately after the explosion of reactor no. 1 at Chernobyl. The engineers working in the control room are unsure what happened however and the supervisor on duty Anatoly Dyatlov insists that an explosion is impossible. Outside, firefighters scramble to put out the fire including Vasily Ignatenko. In Moscow, nuclear scientist Valery Legasov is informed of the accident and is sent together with Boris Shcherbina, a senior bureaucrat to handle it. Another scientist Ulana Khomyuk independently deduces that the core has exploded and travels to Chernobyl to offer her help. After Ignatenko falls sick from radiation exposure, his wife Lyudmilla insists on staying close to him despite the danger and the fact that she is pregnant. This covers all of the main characters with most of the excitement being centered around Legasov and Shcherbina struggling to put out the fire and contain the radiation.
The production values are of course impeccable with the Russians themselves commenting on how the show perfectly replicated the look and feel of the era. The series was filmed in Lithuania and not actually in Pripyat, Ukraine but it looks so close to the real thing as to make no difference. Even details like school uniforms and school bags are apparently correct. One interesting choice is that most of the cast members are British and there are deliberately no American actors. They also gave up trying to have the actors use fake Eastern European accents so they still sound recognizably English. It’s somewhat distracting for a while and this is an English-language show so it’s probably the best possible compromise. I was somewhat upset at first when they appeared not to show the events leading up the explosion but then they ended up doing that for the final episode. The only thing I really miss is that they don’t cover the construction of the sarcophagus around the destroyed reactor. I suspect that this would have been far too expensive to film as the structure is huge and there was no way to cheaply create a replica of it around the decommissioned Lithuanian nuclear power plant they actually used.
As a dramatization of a historical event, there is no doubt that Chernobyl succeeds brilliantly. As my wife notes, the early episodes play out like a horror movie with the cracked reactor core being a looming monster that none can stand against directly. It has no difficulty evoking our empathy for the victims, fear of the invisible threat and indignation at those most responsible for the disaster. I was also surprised by the depth of the technical detail provided in the series. Still, it does try a little too hard to heighten the drama. While it’s reasonable to create the fictional character of Khomyuk to stand in for the many other scientists who assisted Legasov, it’s less reasonable that she is portrayed as the perfect heroine who knows exactly what to do at all times. At the other end of the pendulum, it also tries so hard to paint people like Dyatlov as the villains that they become almost unbelievable caricatures. It also seems to be inaccurate. While Dyatlov did insist on carrying out the tests in the face of protests from his staff, in real life he seems to have quickly realized that the core did explode. Also simplistic is how it portrays unhelpful Soviet bureaucrats as being essentially uneducated oafs promoted beyond their ability.
The show even sacrifices scientific accuracy if it would lead to escalating the stakes and the sense of danger. For example, the deaths attributed to the so-called Bridge of Death seems to be an urban legend while Legasov’s briefing to the Central Committee that the reactor was in danger of blowing up like a nuclear bomb that would render large parts of Ukraine and Belarus uninhabitable was a far-fetched exaggeration. Another obvious howler is the claim that Lyudmilla’s fetus absorbed the radiation. In fact, even the victims aren’t considered radioactive. They did have plastic sheeting to separate them from guests but the purpose is to protect the patients from infection, not to protect the visitors. Even the dramatic helicopter crash is misleading. There was a crash but it involved a helicopter colliding with cranes during construction of the sarcophagus, not due to radiation.
Still so long as one keeps in mind that this is indeed a dramatization and does not take it as the unvarnished truth, this is a fantastic show and probably brings more information about Chernobyl to the general public than they would otherwise come across. I consider myself to be fairly well informed on the topic and it still inspired me to read up more on it. That’s really all we can ask for and it would certainly be great if we could have more of this type of show.