Major General Pikalov deciding to go with the dosimeter himself instead of one of his soldiers wasn't just a noble act. It was also strategical due to the nature of the USSR bureaucracy. He knew that HE had to be the one to do it because if a lower ranking soldier went no one would have believed them.
He embodies the other side of this story: it’s about cowards that doom millions trying to save themselves, but also about heroes, who give everything to save others
Pikalov fought in WWII, including the battles of Kursk, Stalingrad and Moscow. He was wounded more than once in combat. He survived the Chernobyl incident and lived until 2003.
With what he achieved in WW2 he had much more clout and wouldn’t be discredited so easily by the bureaucracy and he was a commander who led from the front.
This show is not about the evil that was done. It's about the people who knew the consequences and chose to face it. My respects to all the heros involved.
@@stumblepuppy606 Yes, exactly that. My favourite quote from the show iis "Every lie we tell incurrs a debt to the truth, sooner or later that debt is paid".
Also have to give General Vladimir Pikalov credit. When the high range dosimeter arrived, even when the risks were explained, rather than send a subordinate to do it, he did it himself. A true leader.
@@Fio583 Haha yeah, Vasily's like "right, I didn't want to mention lava earlier because we just really needed that 5000 tons of sand and boron and I didn't want to freak anyone out too soon."
I love how the meeting at 27:22 starts off with Gorbachev asking "dont you know whats at stake here?" Meaning the reputation of the USSR. And then they tell him what is actually at stake here.
The USSR is on shaky ground at this time. The Soviet-Afghan War is embarrassing the USSR as a military power. The economy is starting to heavily stagnate and the Politburo is struggling to resuscitate the economy. The totalitarian system is showing signs of fracturing. For a country so self-conscious about their political image on the world stage, any hint that the Soviet Union is not the superpower they believe themselves to be can have drastic political ramifications both internally and externally.
13 วันที่ผ่านมา
As far as I know the numbers and implications they said in that scene were not true - no magaton explosions. This I found annoying about the show. It was unnecessarily making some things sound worse than they were.
If humanity looked into researching better ways to clean up radioactive materials and areas that have been hit with it, perhaps one day those families could finally return, but humanity is so stupid and always bickering and fighting that the chances of such things are insanely low, only time will tell.
"We are dealing with something that has never occurred on this planet before." That sentence send shivers down my spine, plonder on that, Earth has seem earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, volcanic explosions, asteroids hitting Earth and extinguishing all forms of life, but this...was never seem before. That's probably the most powerful sentence in the whole show for me.
I was one of those German children Boris mentioned, who was not allowed to play outside when this happened. I was of course too young to fully grasp the gravity of the situation back then, but even to little nine years old me it was very obvious that this was *bad*, simply from the scope of how this topic completely dominated all the news.
Dutchmen here with the same experience. The day before we were allowed to play outside again, the municipality cut all the grass fields. And I remember that, unlike all other times, they took the grass away. Even as kid, that struck me as significant.
22:51 It wasn't shown very clearly, but the radiation didn't make that helicopter fall out of the sky. Its rotor blades hit the construction crane's cable.
@@funnylilgalreacts The real accident happened months after the reactor explosion, during the cleanup operations. The visibility was bad because of sun glare, and some of the cables not being marked properly. The show's writers wanted to include this accident for dramatic purposes, and in the shot made the smoke from the fire be the cause for bad visibility.
This show instills anger, anxiety, dread and despair like no show I have ever watched. And it is brilliant in that respect. This makes it perhaps the greatest reaction series ever. Everybody needs to watch this if for no other reason than to really appreciate the sacrifices a few very normal people made to protect the rest of world. This is a real life super hero movie.
I think Boris' speech to the workers to go into the water is so powerful. He is not downplaying the danger or situation that the men will go into, but clearly stating why it needs to be done and why it has to be them. I also shows how he is starting really understand the danger and gravity of the situation.
Since FLG mentioned _The Expanse_ in episode 1 of this series, I feel obligated to compare the Boris speech to the "save 52" scene from season 2 of that series, one of the top 5 scenes of the show IMO. "So let's be tough, and do what needs to be done." Both fantastic speeches, and I appreciated them equally well coming from the known phenomenal actor Stellan Skarsgard in a lead role as a Soviet bureaucrat with surprising depth, or the out of nowhere one-shot performance of Gugan Deep Singh as a random civilian who abruptly found himself in a position to be a shining light to his peers.
"This is what has always set our people apart. A thousand years of sacrifice in our veins. And every generation must know its own suffering." The Second World War, The Russian Revolution, the serfdom under the Russian Tsars, the Napoleonic Wars, the Great Northern War. The Mongols. The list goes on and yet the Russians as a people keep enduring.
The officer who drove the truck with the dosimeter himself was General Pikalov .. he indeed drove the vehicle himself to the core rumble (tought it wasnt a truck but a special variant of the BRDM for chemical/nuclear warfare) and he had to run down the gate of the central to not damage the dosimeter in the front.. he survived the thing and died at 78 of old age.. he had fought in WW2 allready and had a long career.
There's two good reasons why he drove it himself; first there's the Father To His Men reason, a good leader not being willing to send his men into danger that he's not willing to face. The second was the risk of denial of whatever number a subordinate reported. *No-one* there was going to tell a general that he must have read the wrong number, so they'd be forced to deal with the reality of it.
@@klemminguk In real life he wasnt even in front of Shcherbina or Legazov.. he just went to his men told them the mission and said "and im gonna do it myself"
The Soviet Union was filled with 2 types of people. Those that try to scam the system, passing blame, not accepting responsibility - those are the people that allowed this disaster to happen. The other types are true believers, will do anything the state asks, even if it means their life. The General was one of the latter people. And communism (if you don't care about freedom) isn't a bad system, but is doomed to fail if you have too many of the former and not enough of the latter types of people. And that's why the USSR failed. Back in the 60s when most were true believers, the USSR was neck to neck with the USA on most levels.
I too found it funny they had him drive a "truck" instead of an NBC BRDM, which the Soviet Army had plenty of. They shot the Pripyat scenes in one of the Baltic States, which has the same Soviet-era architecture. Surely they had some old Soviet Army vehicles in storage somewhere.
@@klemminguk And on top of all that General Pikalov was a legendary soldier. Accounts from the soldiers who served under him are incredible, and they almost worshiped him. Plus he fought, survived the battles of Stalingrad, Kursk and Berlin, three of the bloodiest battles in history
While true, there were subdivisions within each ministry that behaved in a vaguely company-like manner for administration purposes. Order did come from the top, but those orders weren't necessarily always carried out to the letter. The late Soviet Union had a real problem with corruption too.
@@Renozable This is just straight up wrong, Russia in 2024 is not even close to being a socialist state. They are solidly capitalist, controlled by private interests of the very large companies and banks, an oligarchy. The USSR had no privately owned companies with the exception of a small number of special exceptions, they are the ones that transformed into the current day oligarchs of Russia, because the complete disaster of the US "Shock Doctrine" they helped implement in the aftermath of the Collapse of the USSR. y
Yeah, I can't really tell how much Angela understands about how the USSR used to work. Secret police, absolute government control, et al, and that priorities were always power/control over safety/welfare. But that might just be me not being able to read the reactor well enough.
The first time I watched this series, I was alone in a dark bedroom after midnight. When the episode finished on the black screen with sudden silence, I was left in a dark room completely shaken. I watched videos of kittens that night before i went to bed. And I'm a man in his 40s. You're doing well Angela!
not hilarious, but actually dreadful. "I am in charge" in communist terms means not "I make decision" but " I take the blame for other's decisions". The "shifting blame" is present multiple times in the episode. "Dyatlov was in charge" is the exact same meaning to keep distance , but Scherbina do not take the standard party procedures, while knowing he is under the party procedures - now somebody who actually was in charge with dealing with the disaster aftermath immediately takes the fall, not his underling. It is present everywhere on Earth, yes, and in 80s USSR there were no firing squads as with Stalin, but still...multiple hard options how to be responsible for things that allegelletly "your" decision to make, but dare to make other than pre-approved decision.
21:42 "What a painful lie that was for him." Spot on. I recall hearing (on the official podcast or an interview) that in Harris' mind, this was the moment when Legasov knew he was damned, or words to that effect. Definitely, irrefutably complicit.
It's the dilemma of the entire show, encapsulated in a moment: if Legasov tells the truth in that moment, maybe he saves a few lives, but once word gets around that he's a loose cannon not toeing the party line, he's probably removed from the Committee (or worse) and then he no longer has the ability to help anyone at all.
I have a bottle of iodine tablets stored away just in case... It's cheap and easy to get now, but I remember like right after Fukushima it was harder to get and prices spiked, and it actually stores well for extended time (retains efficacy).
@@captainz9That's because all it does is ensure your thyroid is fully saturated with non-radjoactive iodine so radioactive iodine doesn't get taken up by the gland where it would almost 100% guarantee thyroid cancer and severe metabolic disruption. Direct acute radiation from outside your body is rarely a threat (except when it is as intense as standing next to an open burning core). The ongoing lingering threat is breathing/eating/drinking radioactive elements where all types of decay are occuring directly around and in your own cells. Alpha decay is the energetic emission of helium nuclei and is stopped by a sheet of paper or the outer (dead) layers of your skin, but if the source is dissolved in the water, it sits right next to all of your living cells where it wreaks terrible havoc. Iodine is by no means a magic bullet that stops the hazards of exposure to radiation. It prevents one particularly dangerous consequence of exposure.
They did not take precautions standard in every other nation that used nuclear power - containment buildings, positive void coefficient, modern water-moderated reactors. They didn't even have protocols for dealing with a radiation leak: protective clothing, respirators, dosimeter badges, iodine pills
It's overly simplistic to say that experts should be believed; the show is much subtler. Dyatlov was an "expert" with 25 years experience in nuclear plants, but his experience blinded him because he was sure that RBMK reactors couldn't explode. Even Legasov had no answer at first when asked to explain how reactor cores could explode.
@@charlize1253 The problem was the Soviet Union's arrogance. The same outcome happens with many of our history's conquerors who've believed that they are indestructible. It must be the same that the Soviet Union thought it was indestructible. But at some point all these examples in our human history end up with encountering something that inevitably reveals the flaws not just in the design of something like a nuclear reactor, but the design in the system that the entire country runs on. Just as the nuclear reactor sustained the power of an entire city and more, the whole of the Soviet Union thought that sheer deception could sustain it. Eventually, that all gets proven wrong and objective improvement needs to be done if another collapse can be prevented.
@@charlize1253 His arrogance blinded him. He failed at one of the core tennants in science. When you see evidence that debunks a theory, you question the theory, you don't dismiss the evidence. But the USSR did not exactly encourage the type of mindset that would encourage one to question the established. I think Chernobyl works to show just how dangerous the world gets when you're taught not to ask questions.
Real life accounts of Dyatlov describe a man who was nothing like the way he was portrayed in the show. The writers wanted human villains and didn't care who they slandered in the process. He made some mistakes but he was nothing like the absurd caricature in the show. Bryukhanov is the only one of the three "villains" who bore any major personal culpability in the scale of the disaster due to his role overseeing construction of the facility.
"My _god,_ Boris is awful!" "Why doesn't anyone listen to experts?" It all comes down to following the Party Line. What the Party says, goes -- say anything to the contrary and you run serious risks. "Our power comes from the perception of our power" indeed -- optics were _everything_ to the USSR.
@@Ostermond Stuck in the past while forgetting it at the same time. They were surprised by the low defenses while invading *through* the exclusion zone and when told to dig trenches in the oddly autumnal forest (it was the beginning of spring) they didn't bat an eye as many didn't know why there were deathly warnings around and barely anyone defending it. They dug trenches in ground that was deliberately upturned to bury irradiated soil deeper and limit contamination. Within days soldiers fell ill of "unspecified illnesses". Many didn't know how cursed the ground was.
@@QuayNemSorr And for countless corporations. Tesla was at one point worth more than Ford despite selling 1% as many cars and losing money, simply because of what they promised.
It's overly simplistic to say that experts should be believed; the show is much subtler. Dyatlov was an "expert" with 25 years experience in nuclear plants, but his experience blinded him because he was sure that RBMK reactors couldn't explode. Even Legasov had no answer at first when asked to explain how reactor cores could explode.
Boris is probably my favourite character in the whole show. While neither I nor the writers can speak to the character of the man in real life, the way they chose to characterise him in the show is very well done. It would've been so easy to make him a direct antagonist to Legasov, but they didn't, they made him human. In that scene where the three plant workers stand up and take on the task of draining the water, Boris is the other person in that scene who stands up out of his chair. He starts the scene seated, but gets up to back up Legasov, not two scenes after being told the radiation will kill him, just from being here. That is the moment he too decides I will do it, because it must be done.
Consumption of wild berries and mushrooms in large quantities was discouraged immediately after and until late 90's in many parts of Finland that received considerable fallout of cesium-137. It was still somewhat of a concern in 2010's. Particularly certain mushrooms were found to be significantly more radioactive than they were before Chernobyl, even in 2013.
@CaptNondescript - yes. i believe also in the lochs of Scotland cesium can still be measured within the silt to this day. the further north on these isles, the more of the cloud came over and affected the ground below it. we didn't get the "full belt" fortunately, but it was a case that the north was where the cloud crossed over us.
@@perx3561 same here in Bavaria. Whenever someone tells me how safe nuclear power is I ask them why they think then that I couldn't play outside and eat wildberries when I was 12.
Same here in Ireland. The Republic's government of the day reacted by sending precisely one iodine tablet to every household in the country, as farcical as it was oblivious to the scale of the crisis.
The controls that were put in place in the UK on the movement of livestock were finally released in Wales in 2012 as the last part of the UK still under those controls. Until then, meat had to be regularly tested for radiation levels before being allowed for sale.
This series is incredibly rough and also incredibly important. Thank you for reacting. Really. Thank you. I dont know how far along you are on patreon so I wont way more than it may feel rough now, it get worse before it gets better. Big hug from Sweden.
The guy who at first wanted no information out is Donald Sumpter. He played the part of Maester Lewin in "Game of Thrones." He was the Maester at Winterfell.
the helicopter flew into wires, this actually happened. even recordings of it. i agree, these 2 are top actors. Been following Jared since Fringe, one of my most favourite series
Roughly 6 months later in October, 1986 while the cleanup was being done. Part of the reason it flew into the cable supporting the crane was the smoke was still thick enough that it limited pilot visibility. So they were using radio communications between the ground and the helo pilots to guide them. But the radiation was still strong and interfering with communications to and from the ground and the pilot didn't get the warning that he was too close to the cable.
Don't worry, it's a great series to react to. It doesn't matter if it's not funny or you don't speak all the time, we see how you react to the things shown anyway (and I dare say it mirrors all our reactions when we first watched this). I came home from work tired and with a headache but as soon as I logged on and saw you had posted this I immediately felt excitement. Yes it's a heavy series to watch but I am looking forward to seeing the rest of your reactions to it. Such a well-made show and the acting is fantastic.
My favorite moment in this episode is when Legasov explodes at Scherbina that they will die in five years. That silent moment when the reality hits Boris and he shuts down for a moment... And then he switches gears and tries his best despite still being shell shocked. Even during the meeting later he is not fine, but he keeps working.
Yup, that is one of my many favorite moments in this series. The man has just been handed a death sentence so he needs time to process it, but then after like 30 seconds he just pulls himself together and picks up the phone.
Rewatching Con O'Neill as Brukhanov (curly grey hair) in this, after imprinting on him as Izzy in Our Flag Means Death, is always a trip. Great actor. (everyone in this is excellent!)
Oh Angie, this series is gonna wreck you. Please make sure to watch it when you're emotionally able to, on a good day, or with enough time for a pick me up. The reactions can wait.
If you can, after the series is over, look up the Elephant's Foot and the documentary about the building and design of the Sarcophagus made to contain the radiation from the exploded core. This is one of the saddest and upsetting shows ever for all the reasons you pointed out. Don't let it get to you too much, Ang. ❤
There is an interesting film of the May Day parade held in Kiev (less than 100km away) four days after the disaster. People had yet to be told that anything had happened, so they were out celebrating. But it was shot on actual film stock and has the distinction of having *lots* of white flashes appearing in it. This was the direct result of the energised particles from the fallout exposing the film in the canister before it was developed.
4:12 I'm from Italy, and a lot of children from the contaminated zone were sent to my country to stay far from that place and closer to the sea, because of the iodium. many of them had been saved with this initiative. 9:16 all the clothes, masks and equipment of the emergency personnel sent to Chernobyl is still in Pripyat Hospital's basement, that place has still an high radioactivity because of that stuff.
Just my opinion, but I think the way you're experiencing 'Chernobyl' is by far the most meaningful, for yourself, and also for so many of us who remember watching the original news broadcasts in 1986. Your fearless reactions and emotions are beautifully appropriate to the tragic nature of this story, and I appreciate you for it.
An anecdote: I was 10 yo when this happen, and I remember, after it was public knowledge, my old folks telling me one day in the evening to take the Tupwerware with steaks they bought earlier that day below the stairs, where it was dark, to see if they glowed. Mind you, we live in Venezuela, thousands of miles away, but cold war paranoia was strong those days
Boris was a party creature, but when the expert stood up to him in the helicopter, he got a hint of how actually serious the situation was. That and his encounter with the local party men caused him change his mind.
Thank you for your emotional reaction, i can't help but cry everytime i watch this series..😢 Lot's of love from Ukraine, sending good vibes to everyone ✌️💙
I’m German and was 6 when this happened. I very clearly remember all the playgrounds being closed and my parents buying a second freezer. We ate frozen and canned vegetables for months.
18:59 interesting things about Major General Pikolov is that he is not only a WWII veteran, he fought in almost every major battle in the USSR. From Moscow to Stalingrad to Berlin. He did many dangerous things rather than order those to do it for him. He lived to 2003
"What happened to those guys who were down there opening the valves?" We saw the control operator, Akimov ("we did everything right") sitting in the hospital hallway when Ignatenko's wife was there looking for him. He was one of them.
I was playing in the sandbox in the age of 6, about 70 km north of the Forsmark nuclear power plant in Sweden that first got alarm bells in western Europe then. One interesting fact is, that the two areas in Sweden that got the most rain had a spike in suicides years after. The Swedish government still conducts regular tests on Boars. I was so sad when mum told me not to pick berries and mushrooms.
Atleast the civilians in the volunteering scene were offered cash and promotions. All the way through the military are right beside the civilians and doing it for nothing. Alot of them died, some killed themselves for what they had to do. Later on you will see. It's great acting from all the leads, I think they made this program as good as it is
Jared Harris is great in everything! Interesting how Angela has been watching his career backwards. Expanse -> Chernobyl -> (redacted). Foundation next?
One of the reasons Gorbachev says 'our power comes from the perception of our power' is that it was the only thing keeping the USSR together at that point, and his duty was to keep the USSR going. With failures in Afghanistan and now this, there was a drop in trust that the USSR. This led to reforms, which led to the coup that ended the USSR. Chernobyl alone didn't do that, but it was certainly a factor in undermining confidence in the state. If you want to feel really bad, you should know that post-USSR, a lot of foreign aid was contingent on dropping welfare programs for the Chernobyl liquidators and victims.
It's more universal than that; perception is how power works. The US has never had to launch its nuclear arsenal (at least not since Hiroshima and Nagasaki) and won't ever need to, as long as our enemies believe that we someday could.
@@charlize1253 Similar but opposite. The American military operates by people knowing it is even stronger than it seems. The Russian military operates by seeming stronger than it really is. Neither wants to display their full capabilities, the Americans for their true strength, and the Russians for their lack thereof. Unfortunately for Russia…
I just watched your Ep. 1 watch and cried right along with you all over again. I guess we're in this ride together, tears and all. It's so well done. Jared Harris and Stellan really shine in this, and that's saying a lot.
The ending scene of that episode is one of the finest examples of induced terror. We need nothing more than failing light inducing isolation and the relentless increasing clickrate of the dosimeter. Watching that scene i feel the anxiety gets almost overwhelming even knowing the outcome of those 3 men from history.
An important thing to note about General Pikalov choosing to take the reading himself. Yes it was noble to not risk one of his men's lives but more importantly it meant the readings would not be questioned. In the USSR your rank carried a lot weight and had to be respected. If a normal person had been sent to take the reading it could have been dismissed as done incorrectly by someone incompetent. I believe Pikalov knowing this must have played a large part in his decision. Another sidenote is the Geiger counter clicks were added completely for dramatic effect and are not at all accurate to situations they appear in. At these levels of radiation there would be so many clicks that it would not even be audible to the human ear. The divers would not have even been sent in with detectors because levels were already assumed to be lethal and the equipment would have just slowed them down.
Back in 1986 the knowledge about the possible steam explosion wasn't widely spread. When I watched the series some years ago and saw that part, I thought that Western Europe didn't worry enough about the risks during the entire event. If that explosion had happened, the fallout would have been so much worse. Chernobyl to Frankfurt is 1508 km (937 miles) as the crow flies.
I lived through this and it was incredibly scary. Just 50 miles away, in Wales, we were told that if it rained at a certain time and place, the radioactive dust would fall on the Welsh farmland and Welsh lamb would be affected. It felt like you could be wiped out if you consumed radioactive lamb and the farming industry could be over for, more or less, ever. My son was born the January before.
Regarding the helicopter crash at 22:50, note that the rotors hit the crane, which is why it crashes. It's not radiation related, but rather it was blinded by the smoke from the reactor.
I wrote this on episode 1 already, but an important thing to understand about the Soviet Union’s approach to everything: Mind over matter. The economy, all of society, was explicitly considered a question of willpower. The initial idea was that human beings are advanced and rational enough to set aside selfish self-interest for the common good, but that sadly gives humans too much credit. So in the Soviet Union it quickly became a matter of forcing it. And if they could make society work a certain way through sheer force of will, why couldn’t physical reality fit the decided-upon narrative too? Mind over matter, even radioactive matter. But the Soviet Union is far from alone in this. Religions do this too, trying to force piety when people can’t be trusted to be pious enough on their own. Any corporate branding exercise or dishonest study is an attempt at forcing a reality into existence. See tobacco and oil for that. Heck, any woo’y influencer talking about “manifesting” or affirmations is doing it too, just solo. The weird thing is that these days it’s flipped around to some people being so intensely individualistic that they deny reality as a reflex. The Earth is flat _because_ “the experts” say it’s not; climate change isn’t real, because _I_ don’t like it. That hurricane won’t kill me because it’s all fake news. The Soviet Union tried to create one common truth, these days it’s about “your personal truth” - neither necessarily aligns with reality.
25:11 - I was 9 when this happened, living in the Netherlands; we were told not to play outside in fields either. Many farmers growing spinach had to destroy it (it seems to have this weird affinity for picking up irradiated particles), milk was thrown out for the same reason because cows ate contaminated grass which made the milk slightly radioactive it seems. As kids we had no idea. We had no idea why our parents were a little scared. Took a fair few years to come to the realization this could've ended very different.
The dosimeters going nuts at the end is pure anxiety. Also, the helicopter falling over the reactor might have been an artistic license, as I understand
I remember after Fujishima, retirees volunteered to go on the frontlines. They figured that didn’t have that many years, and would rather risk themselves rather than send in people with many more years ahead of them.
I have been to the contaminated zone when it was still possible before the war..it is the single most scary experience of my life..because of the eery quiet...it is REALLY scary
You will get a very detailed explanation of what happened that night. I know your hunches are usually quite good but be patient with this one. You'll get the answers. 😊
Thing is, as it is also now, that information was under tight control. For example there were marches on May 1st, for Labour Day, and they were mandatory. Local people started spreading the info about this incident, and people were starting to get scared. Still the marches did proceed. In Poland, central government was running official cover for the soviets. Later after catastrophe was revealed, it was local authorities and MDs that were investigating and trying to get anti-radiation supplies to the people, but not central government, they were engaging in heavy propaganda.
I was a kid In Poland at the time and my parents heard very little of what happened and it was not really discussed at the time. We only found how much danger there was after most of it had already passed. Most my parents discussed it in front of me was to joke that my father's hair started to grow back due to the radiation.
Actually, in Poland we learned about it very fast - not just due to the info from the west, but also due to some of our stations picking up on radioactivity. The Government, surprisingly enough, did not try to cover the situation either. The iodinization action that happened in schools was also carried out as a result of decision made by them merely day after they themselves learned about the situation, and the News were quite clear about why the action was being done. It was only later that the government went back to quietly covering for the Russians and trying to downplay the situation.
Remember that in the 80s nuclear medicine was still in its infancy, and there wasn't yet many case studies of what happens for massive radiation exposure over such a short time like this. In fact most of our current knowledge about radiation sickness and the symptoms come from this very accident. I like the scene where the old doctor is trying to treat the patients with milk as if it was a regular burn, and the newer doctor asks about iodine pills and knows about the contaminated clothes probably because she was actually educated about it - i think the earlier studies on radiation sickness came from the radium paint that was used in watches to make the hands glow in the dark before they knew about radiation, as well as Hiroshima and the aftermath obviously.
Boris' line about how "a thousand years of sacrifice in our veins" has always set their people apart reminds me of a PBS documentary about an American astronaut who worked aboard the Russian Mir space station as part of an exchange program between the United States and the Soviet Union. The astronaut said that, at first, whenever an alarm went off (and hey were gong off all the time - Mir was in constant need of repair), the cosmonauts would put him into the Soyuz escape capsule where he'd be safe while they went and dealt with the emergency. He said that they felt like they had to shelter him because Soviets believed that their culture taught their people to accept hardship and sacrifice and that "decadent" capitalist cultures (especially American) did not. He had to assert himself as a fully trained and qualified astronaut to get them to include him fully in the running of the space station - including emergencies.
31:26 I don't know if it applies here but this kind of reminds me of a quote from "Art" to "Debbie" in "Invincible" S2: "Nolan (here stands for "indestructible" superheroes in movies) has superpowers, he's indestructible, that's not strength, that's having it easy. You (in this case the normal people being real heroes), you have strength..."
Don't sell yourself short Angela, your reaction is priceless, not despite but because you have that intimate and emotional connection to what you're watching and experiencing. We were all in absolute disbelief, in shock as we watched it for the first time. This show tears your soul apart.
I didn't see the crane the first time I watched this episode, so I thought it was the radiation that destroyed the helicopter, but I learned later that it hit the crane you see in the scene. And that did indeed happen irl.
Jerad Harris was outstanding. His explanation in the meetings were powerful. I remember being devastated as he shared the info. And when the old badass general comes back and says “It’s not 3.6 roentgen. It’s 15,000.” Holy smokes I gasped. 😮
As a russian I of course have heard a lot about the Chernobyl tragedy, mostly in school,and it's truly devastating,this show is also very sad and I just think that it captured the situation in the most truthful way,just the pain and the apathy of people who already know that they're so screwed(sorry if my rambling is a bit chaotic). The only thing I don't get is what that is with the accent? We really don't talk like that. Anyway,looking forward for your new reactions and thank you for being so considerate. I think it's the best reaction to Chernobyl I've seen so far.
@@renslayerlipa The director and producers said that they chose to use mainly British accents for the characters because even though Russian and Eastern European accents would have been more accurate, they also sound very campy to American ears, and they felt that it would have distracted from the story they were trying to tell.
@terripring5114 yep,makes sense,thank you. it's just that in other shows people are trying so hard to mimic that "russian" accent and fail miserably,but here I can see it from their point of view.
The post rock band "We lost the sea" after losing their vocalist due to a tragic accident, release an album called "departure songs" Each song is an instrumental piece about loss, heroism, tragedy They dedicated one about this 3 plant workers and called the song "bogatyri",which means Heroes in Russian beautiful album and song it always gives me chills to remind their heroism and what it meant to the world
Don't forget, Boris is constantly surrounded by a bunch of liars, cowards, sycophants, and opportunists. The show starts with him assuming Lagosov is just like all the rest of them. It's only through the growing list of times Lagosov actually endangers himself by contradicting the party line to "do the right thing" that Boris begins to trust him.
This series is the embodiment of why it sometimes necessary to watch difficult subjects , And not like some who would say yeah we know bad stuff happens why watch it, it's not fun? Those people who "think" they know are perhaps just as much in need of a wake up call as the know nothings of the world..
Dont know how much you have watched but Jared Harris gives the performance of a lifetime on this show and Boris's character ark ( than mans character ark) will make you cry. Congrats to lil gal on getting engaged btw x
I was stationed in Germany when this happened. Many years later I developed Leukemia. No idea if it's related but guess it's possible. Modern medicine saved me though. 6 years free.
Your mouth hanging open is exactly how we all reacted when we first watched this. The anger, sorrow and rage will be correct as well. Keep going with this, it's a commentary on the wrongs of the human condition.
Dear FLG: This show accurately depicts the utter failure of the Soviet system! you shouldn't feel bad about despising some of these gov't characters--they were awful people who made many people lives miserable, or even caused their deaths!! On the other hand, the show breaks you heart by showing the unimaginable bravery of ordinary Russian firemen, soldiers, and scientists, many of whom gave their lives to stop this disaster
The flaw of the Soviet system was that a small number of people had power and were removed from consequences. There are many ways to get there. They all have similar results.
Too bad show throw most blame on one real character - Dyatlov, he was guilty, but not like he was portraited. He kinda represent all soviet system in show, but thats never mentioned, like Homyuk represent all scientist who help.
@@ch3f8 And that's probably the thing I disslike the most about the show. How they turn a real person, into a villain, just to fit the story of the show.
The men who went into the water to open the valves actually survived and lived full lives. Being chest deep in water while wearing neoprene diving suits protected them.
Someone, I think Vanity Fair, had a scientist who assisted with the aftermath of Chernobyl watch the series and comment on what was realistic and what seemed dramatized. She said that a lot of the medical stuff was made to be more dramatic in the series. Things that take weeks in reality are instantaneous in the show. Which is more awful if you think about it, weeks of agony in a hospital bed is unthinkable. She also said that the political stuff was dead on.
same as for ep 1, keep in mind this is durign the cold war, US vs UDSSR, somehting like that happening to a "country" that thinks of themselves as superior in politics, technology, and society. its the "because what must not be cannot be" attitude through and through, not showing any weakness was always more important than people and that cost so many lives. the accident, everything that happens esp in the UDSSR was the representation of either success or failure in the battle of the systems, democracy vs communism
18:59 That's Colonel General Vladimir Pikalov. He was a highly decorated veteran of the Second World War. He fought at Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk and all the way to Berlin. He was wounded three times in combat. He went through some of the most hellish, brutal battlefields in history. Even a literally ruptured reactor core didn't scare him. The man was a total badass. And his massive brass balls shielded him so much he managed to survive the radiation and lived to 78 years of age.
I love how early you discuss the feeling of the anger rising. This show has SO MUCH sadness, despair, and grief, but overwhelmingly every episode, I left feeling anger. I want to write more, but I think you haven't finished on patreon yet, so I will make my comments at the end of the season
The nurses at the hospital removing the firefighters' clothes and moving them to the basement - there are photos of those clothes, still there in that basement to this day.
@@thedragon133 I mean it's pretty radioactive but people can and do (or could and did when it wasn't a warzone) go down there and look at it first hand for 'funsies' so it's not exactly gonna kill anyone who steps in the room. I would bet at least a few nuclear tourists have messed with some of that gear.
And someone stole one of the firefighters' helmets there a few years ago.. (probably a tourist; helmet's location is unknown) So they filled in the entire basement with concrete.
Shock and awe *are* the correct reaction to this disaster. Don't doubt your reaction here. It's the honest horror, that confirms and solidifies my own reaction to the series, that I find most valuable.
20:36 - A chilling line because, as far as we know, it's true: There was an ancient nuclear "reactor" that had just the right conditions to facilitate fission in a uranium deposit billions of years ago in Africa. However, the more fission took place, the hotter the water allowing the atoms to collide would get. Eventually the water would boil away, the reaction would slow down until it stopped altogether, water would come back, and the process would start all over again. This pattern repeated likely for tens of thousands of years until the Uranium deposit simply decayed away to the point where fission was no longer possible. 23:15 - You can see the rotors clipping a crane and that's what actually causes it to plummet. It's based on actual footage from a helicopter crash that actually happened while trying to contain the reactor fire. They couldn't see through the smoke and I believe they were also flying toward the sun. It's why Boris tells them to "approach from the West" because the smoke and/or sun wouldn't obstruct their vision as much.
Major General Pikalov deciding to go with the dosimeter himself instead of one of his soldiers wasn't just a noble act. It was also strategical due to the nature of the USSR bureaucracy. He knew that HE had to be the one to do it because if a lower ranking soldier went no one would have believed them.
Even more noble then, knowing he was offering himself as a sacrifice so that the unnecessary death would be his own rather than someone else.
He embodies the other side of this story: it’s about cowards that doom millions trying to save themselves, but also about heroes, who give everything to save others
@@PK19899 he used NBC prepared APC, not simple truck, so risk wasn't that high
Pikalov fought in WWII, including the battles of Kursk, Stalingrad and Moscow. He was wounded more than once in combat. He survived the Chernobyl incident and lived until 2003.
With what he achieved in WW2 he had much more clout and wouldn’t be discredited so easily by the bureaucracy and he was a commander who led from the front.
This show is not about the evil that was done. It's about the people who knew the consequences and chose to face it. My respects to all the heros involved.
the names of those 3 plantworkers will stay with me the rest of my live.
I thought the meaning of the series was stated in its first words, "What is the cost of lies?"
@@stumblepuppy606 Yes, exactly that. My favourite quote from the show iis "Every lie we tell incurrs a debt to the truth, sooner or later that debt is paid".
This is about the evils of communism.
Also have to give General Vladimir Pikalov credit. When the high range dosimeter arrived, even when the risks were explained, rather than send a subordinate to do it, he did it himself. A true leader.
It didn't make the edit, but the actor playing Gorbachev, their delivery of "you have made lava?" Absolutely kills me every time
The "I anticipated this" that follows from Jared Harris is literally me when shit's going sideways and I'm in my monthly meeting with my supervisor 🤣
@@Fio583 Haha yeah, Vasily's like "right, I didn't want to mention lava earlier because we just really needed that 5000 tons of sand and boron and I didn't want to freak anyone out too soon."
I love how the meeting at 27:22 starts off with Gorbachev asking "dont you know whats at stake here?" Meaning the reputation of the USSR. And then they tell him what is actually at stake here.
The USSR is on shaky ground at this time. The Soviet-Afghan War is embarrassing the USSR as a military power. The economy is starting to heavily stagnate and the Politburo is struggling to resuscitate the economy. The totalitarian system is showing signs of fracturing.
For a country so self-conscious about their political image on the world stage, any hint that the Soviet Union is not the superpower they believe themselves to be can have drastic political ramifications both internally and externally.
As far as I know the numbers and implications they said in that scene were not true - no magaton explosions.
This I found annoying about the show. It was unnecessarily making some things sound worse than they were.
"You are dealing with something that has never occurred on this PLANET before." This is the line that always gets me.
I still don't know which is worse. Being the person who has to say that or being the person who has to hear that.
@@chaospoet definitely the one that hears that, since they're the one that has to deal with it
reminds me of the time i lost my virginity
They were so calm evacuating because they were told it would only be for 3 days, and then they could return. No one knew it would be forever.
If humanity looked into researching better ways to clean up radioactive materials and areas that have been hit with it, perhaps one day those families could finally return, but humanity is so stupid and always bickering and fighting that the chances of such things are insanely low, only time will tell.
"We are dealing with something that has never occurred on this planet before."
That sentence send shivers down my spine, plonder on that, Earth has seem earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, volcanic explosions, asteroids hitting Earth and extinguishing all forms of life, but this...was never seem before.
That's probably the most powerful sentence in the whole show for me.
I was one of those German children Boris mentioned, who was not allowed to play outside when this happened. I was of course too young to fully grasp the gravity of the situation back then, but even to little nine years old me it was very obvious that this was *bad*, simply from the scope of how this topic completely dominated all the news.
I was 7 and was told not to play on playgrounds in the sand and stay inside after school, in Düsseldorf.
Dutchmen here with the same experience.
The day before we were allowed to play outside again, the municipality cut all the grass fields. And I remember that, unlike all other times, they took the grass away.
Even as kid, that struck me as significant.
For as many villains as there were in this tragedy, there were even more, unnamed, super heroes.
Isn't that always the way.
22:51 It wasn't shown very clearly, but the radiation didn't make that helicopter fall out of the sky. Its rotor blades hit the construction crane's cable.
I did notice that but I assumed the helicopter hit the crane because the pilot was being radiated by the core.
@@funnylilgalreacts The real accident happened months after the reactor explosion, during the cleanup operations. The visibility was bad because of sun glare, and some of the cables not being marked properly. The show's writers wanted to include this accident for dramatic purposes, and in the shot made the smoke from the fire be the cause for bad visibility.
There is footage of the helicopter hovering above the roof and no cables present... and another looking directly at the core....
@@Dmitriy.0 Here`s a helicopter hovering where the Liquidators are ` Chernobyl 3828 `
@@funnylilgalreacts Chernobyl 3828
This show instills anger, anxiety, dread and despair like no show I have ever watched. And it is brilliant in that respect. This makes it perhaps the greatest reaction series ever. Everybody needs to watch this if for no other reason than to really appreciate the sacrifices a few very normal people made to protect the rest of world. This is a real life super hero movie.
I think Boris' speech to the workers to go into the water is so powerful. He is not downplaying the danger or situation that the men will go into, but clearly stating why it needs to be done and why it has to be them. I also shows how he is starting really understand the danger and gravity of the situation.
"The needs of the many, outweigh the needs of the few."
@@paulwatson9486 "Or the one."
When men become men and volunteer to do what is right.
Since FLG mentioned _The Expanse_ in episode 1 of this series, I feel obligated to compare the Boris speech to the "save 52" scene from season 2 of that series, one of the top 5 scenes of the show IMO. "So let's be tough, and do what needs to be done." Both fantastic speeches, and I appreciated them equally well coming from the known phenomenal actor Stellan Skarsgard in a lead role as a Soviet bureaucrat with surprising depth, or the out of nowhere one-shot performance of Gugan Deep Singh as a random civilian who abruptly found himself in a position to be a shining light to his peers.
"This is what has always set our people apart. A thousand years of sacrifice in our veins. And every generation must know its own suffering."
The Second World War, The Russian Revolution, the serfdom under the Russian Tsars, the Napoleonic Wars, the Great Northern War. The Mongols. The list goes on and yet the Russians as a people keep enduring.
The officer who drove the truck with the dosimeter himself was General Pikalov .. he indeed drove the vehicle himself to the core rumble (tought it wasnt a truck but a special variant of the BRDM for chemical/nuclear warfare) and he had to run down the gate of the central to not damage the dosimeter in the front.. he survived the thing and died at 78 of old age.. he had fought in WW2 allready and had a long career.
There's two good reasons why he drove it himself; first there's the Father To His Men reason, a good leader not being willing to send his men into danger that he's not willing to face. The second was the risk of denial of whatever number a subordinate reported. *No-one* there was going to tell a general that he must have read the wrong number, so they'd be forced to deal with the reality of it.
@@klemminguk In real life he wasnt even in front of Shcherbina or Legazov.. he just went to his men told them the mission and said "and im gonna do it myself"
The Soviet Union was filled with 2 types of people. Those that try to scam the system, passing blame, not accepting responsibility - those are the people that allowed this disaster to happen. The other types are true believers, will do anything the state asks, even if it means their life. The General was one of the latter people. And communism (if you don't care about freedom) isn't a bad system, but is doomed to fail if you have too many of the former and not enough of the latter types of people. And that's why the USSR failed. Back in the 60s when most were true believers, the USSR was neck to neck with the USA on most levels.
I too found it funny they had him drive a "truck" instead of an NBC BRDM, which the Soviet Army had plenty of. They shot the Pripyat scenes in one of the Baltic States, which has the same Soviet-era architecture. Surely they had some old Soviet Army vehicles in storage somewhere.
@@klemminguk And on top of all that General Pikalov was a legendary soldier. Accounts from the soldiers who served under him are incredible, and they almost worshiped him. Plus he fought, survived the battles of Stalingrad, Kursk and Berlin, three of the bloodiest battles in history
Remember this was the USSR. Everything was owned and administered by the state. There was no "company" involved.
While true, there were subdivisions within each ministry that behaved in a vaguely company-like manner for administration purposes. Order did come from the top, but those orders weren't necessarily always carried out to the letter. The late Soviet Union had a real problem with corruption too.
Current Russia is almost at the same state. It’s really scary.
@@Renozable This is just straight up wrong, Russia in 2024 is not even close to being a socialist state. They are solidly capitalist, controlled by private interests of the very large companies and banks, an oligarchy.
The USSR had no privately owned companies with the exception of a small number of special exceptions, they are the ones that transformed into the current day oligarchs of Russia, because the complete disaster of the US "Shock Doctrine" they helped implement in the aftermath of the Collapse of the USSR.
y
One single power structure/overall heirarchy, which reduces the scope for one institution to moderate another as in more heterogeneous structures.
Yeah, I can't really tell how much Angela understands about how the USSR used to work. Secret police, absolute government control, et al, and that priorities were always power/control over safety/welfare. But that might just be me not being able to read the reactor well enough.
“Always look for the helpers.” - Mr. Fred Rogers (from his mother, Nancy). “Because if you look for the helpers, you’ll know that there’s hope.”
The first time I watched this series, I was alone in a dark bedroom after midnight. When the episode finished on the black screen with sudden silence, I was left in a dark room completely shaken. I watched videos of kittens that night before i went to bed. And I'm a man in his 40s. You're doing well Angela!
"Why doesn't anyone listen to experts?"
I wish that were a problem limited to the Soviet Union.
I was thinking the same thing. 🤔
covid, did we listen to the expert?
@@laer6919 Some of us did.
“That’s my decision to make”
“Then make it”
“I’ve been told not to.”
That is frustrating and hilarious at the same time.
not hilarious, but actually dreadful. "I am in charge" in communist terms means not "I make decision" but " I take the blame for other's decisions". The "shifting blame" is present multiple times in the episode. "Dyatlov was in charge" is the exact same meaning to keep distance , but Scherbina do not take the standard party procedures, while knowing he is under the party procedures - now somebody who actually was in charge with dealing with the disaster aftermath immediately takes the fall, not his underling. It is present everywhere on Earth, yes, and in 80s USSR there were no firing squads as with Stalin, but still...multiple hard options how to be responsible for things that allegelletly "your" decision to make, but dare to make other than pre-approved decision.
21:42 "What a painful lie that was for him."
Spot on. I recall hearing (on the official podcast or an interview) that in Harris' mind, this was the moment when Legasov knew he was damned, or words to that effect. Definitely, irrefutably complicit.
It's the dilemma of the entire show, encapsulated in a moment: if Legasov tells the truth in that moment, maybe he saves a few lives, but once word gets around that he's a loose cannon not toeing the party line, he's probably removed from the Committee (or worse) and then he no longer has the ability to help anyone at all.
I was 12 when this happened. When the radiation reached finland, they started handing sugar cubes laced with iodine to all school children
I have a bottle of iodine tablets stored away just in case... It's cheap and easy to get now, but I remember like right after Fukushima it was harder to get and prices spiked, and it actually stores well for extended time (retains efficacy).
@@captainz9That's because all it does is ensure your thyroid is fully saturated with non-radjoactive iodine so radioactive iodine doesn't get taken up by the gland where it would almost 100% guarantee thyroid cancer and severe metabolic disruption.
Direct acute radiation from outside your body is rarely a threat (except when it is as intense as standing next to an open burning core). The ongoing lingering threat is breathing/eating/drinking radioactive elements where all types of decay are occuring directly around and in your own cells. Alpha decay is the energetic emission of helium nuclei and is stopped by a sheet of paper or the outer (dead) layers of your skin, but if the source is dissolved in the water, it sits right next to all of your living cells where it wreaks terrible havoc.
Iodine is by no means a magic bullet that stops the hazards of exposure to radiation. It prevents one particularly dangerous consequence of exposure.
As for experts... initially, not even the understood how that reactor could explode. It took many experts to fully figure out what actually happened.
They did not take precautions standard in every other nation that used nuclear power - containment buildings, positive void coefficient, modern water-moderated reactors. They didn't even have protocols for dealing with a radiation leak: protective clothing, respirators, dosimeter badges, iodine pills
It's overly simplistic to say that experts should be believed; the show is much subtler. Dyatlov was an "expert" with 25 years experience in nuclear plants, but his experience blinded him because he was sure that RBMK reactors couldn't explode. Even Legasov had no answer at first when asked to explain how reactor cores could explode.
@@charlize1253 The problem was the Soviet Union's arrogance. The same outcome happens with many of our history's conquerors who've believed that they are indestructible. It must be the same that the Soviet Union thought it was indestructible. But at some point all these examples in our human history end up with encountering something that inevitably reveals the flaws not just in the design of something like a nuclear reactor, but the design in the system that the entire country runs on. Just as the nuclear reactor sustained the power of an entire city and more, the whole of the Soviet Union thought that sheer deception could sustain it. Eventually, that all gets proven wrong and objective improvement needs to be done if another collapse can be prevented.
@@charlize1253 His arrogance blinded him. He failed at one of the core tennants in science. When you see evidence that debunks a theory, you question the theory, you don't dismiss the evidence.
But the USSR did not exactly encourage the type of mindset that would encourage one to question the established.
I think Chernobyl works to show just how dangerous the world gets when you're taught not to ask questions.
Real life accounts of Dyatlov describe a man who was nothing like the way he was portrayed in the show. The writers wanted human villains and didn't care who they slandered in the process. He made some mistakes but he was nothing like the absurd caricature in the show. Bryukhanov is the only one of the three "villains" who bore any major personal culpability in the scale of the disaster due to his role overseeing construction of the facility.
"My _god,_ Boris is awful!"
"Why doesn't anyone listen to experts?"
It all comes down to following the Party Line. What the Party says, goes -- say anything to the contrary and you run serious risks. "Our power comes from the perception of our power" indeed -- optics were _everything_ to the USSR.
The last part is still true for Russia today. Giving the impression of power
@@QuayNemSorr Terminally stuck in the past. Chasing the idea of "the glorious old days".
@@Ostermond Stuck in the past while forgetting it at the same time. They were surprised by the low defenses while invading *through* the exclusion zone and when told to dig trenches in the oddly autumnal forest (it was the beginning of spring) they didn't bat an eye as many didn't know why there were deathly warnings around and barely anyone defending it.
They dug trenches in ground that was deliberately upturned to bury irradiated soil deeper and limit contamination. Within days soldiers fell ill of "unspecified illnesses". Many didn't know how cursed the ground was.
@@QuayNemSorr And for countless corporations. Tesla was at one point worth more than Ford despite selling 1% as many cars and losing money, simply because of what they promised.
It's overly simplistic to say that experts should be believed; the show is much subtler. Dyatlov was an "expert" with 25 years experience in nuclear plants, but his experience blinded him because he was sure that RBMK reactors couldn't explode. Even Legasov had no answer at first when asked to explain how reactor cores could explode.
Boris is probably my favourite character in the whole show. While neither I nor the writers can speak to the character of the man in real life, the way they chose to characterise him in the show is very well done. It would've been so easy to make him a direct antagonist to Legasov, but they didn't, they made him human. In that scene where the three plant workers stand up and take on the task of draining the water, Boris is the other person in that scene who stands up out of his chair. He starts the scene seated, but gets up to back up Legasov, not two scenes after being told the radiation will kill him, just from being here. That is the moment he too decides I will do it, because it must be done.
Even in England, the radiation from Chernobyl affected the farm animals and certain meat products were banned temporarily
Consumption of wild berries and mushrooms in large quantities was discouraged immediately after and until late 90's in many parts of Finland that received considerable fallout of cesium-137. It was still somewhat of a concern in 2010's. Particularly certain mushrooms were found to be significantly more radioactive than they were before Chernobyl, even in 2013.
@CaptNondescript - yes. i believe also in the lochs of Scotland cesium can still be measured within the silt to this day. the further north on these isles, the more of the cloud came over and affected the ground below it. we didn't get the "full belt" fortunately, but it was a case that the north was where the cloud crossed over us.
@@perx3561 same here in Bavaria. Whenever someone tells me how safe nuclear power is I ask them why they think then that I couldn't play outside and eat wildberries when I was 12.
Same here in Ireland. The Republic's government of the day reacted by sending precisely one iodine tablet to every household in the country, as farcical as it was oblivious to the scale of the crisis.
The controls that were put in place in the UK on the movement of livestock were finally released in Wales in 2012 as the last part of the UK still under those controls. Until then, meat had to be regularly tested for radiation levels before being allowed for sale.
This series is incredibly rough and also incredibly important. Thank you for reacting. Really. Thank you.
I dont know how far along you are on patreon so I wont way more than it may feel rough now, it get worse before it gets better. Big hug from Sweden.
Those clothes from the fire men are still in the basement of that hospital. They are still highly radioactive
The guy who at first wanted no information out is Donald Sumpter. He played the part of Maester Lewin in "Game of Thrones." He was the Maester at Winterfell.
I will never forget that the most horrifying sound on earth is a disseminator screaming at you
the helicopter flew into wires, this actually happened. even recordings of it.
i agree, these 2 are top actors. Been following Jared since Fringe, one of my most favourite series
Yes, they flew into the crane's cable that was hanging very near the reactor.
Roughly 6 months later in October, 1986 while the cleanup was being done. Part of the reason it flew into the cable supporting the crane was the smoke was still thick enough that it limited pilot visibility. So they were using radio communications between the ground and the helo pilots to guide them. But the radiation was still strong and interfering with communications to and from the ground and the pilot didn't get the warning that he was too close to the cable.
Fringe is a show everyone sleeps on
@@selardohr7697 sleeps on?
@@CyberBeep_kenshi it means they don't pay attention to it
Don't worry, it's a great series to react to. It doesn't matter if it's not funny or you don't speak all the time, we see how you react to the things shown anyway (and I dare say it mirrors all our reactions when we first watched this). I came home from work tired and with a headache but as soon as I logged on and saw you had posted this I immediately felt excitement. Yes it's a heavy series to watch but I am looking forward to seeing the rest of your reactions to it. Such a well-made show and the acting is fantastic.
My favorite moment in this episode is when Legasov explodes at Scherbina that they will die in five years. That silent moment when the reality hits Boris and he shuts down for a moment... And then he switches gears and tries his best despite still being shell shocked. Even during the meeting later he is not fine, but he keeps working.
Yup, that is one of my many favorite moments in this series. The man has just been handed a death sentence so he needs time to process it, but then after like 30 seconds he just pulls himself together and picks up the phone.
Rewatching Con O'Neill as Brukhanov (curly grey hair) in this, after imprinting on him as Izzy in Our Flag Means Death, is always a trip. Great actor.
(everyone in this is excellent!)
Oh Angie, this series is gonna wreck you. Please make sure to watch it when you're emotionally able to, on a good day, or with enough time for a pick me up. The reactions can wait.
Agree 100% Your Flintstone, but this is a test for anyone. Be prepared. You can do this, but there is no rush.
❤
If you can, after the series is over, look up the Elephant's Foot and the documentary about the building and design of the Sarcophagus made to contain the radiation from the exploded core. This is one of the saddest and upsetting shows ever for all the reasons you pointed out. Don't let it get to you too much, Ang. ❤
There is an interesting film of the May Day parade held in Kiev (less than 100km away) four days after the disaster. People had yet to be told that anything had happened, so they were out celebrating. But it was shot on actual film stock and has the distinction of having *lots* of white flashes appearing in it. This was the direct result of the energised particles from the fallout exposing the film in the canister before it was developed.
34:22 your shock and awe is exactly what makes this a good reaction. We all felt this way watching it for the first time.
4:12 I'm from Italy, and a lot of children from the contaminated zone were sent to my country to stay far from that place and closer to the sea, because of the iodium. many of them had been saved with this initiative.
9:16 all the clothes, masks and equipment of the emergency personnel sent to Chernobyl is still in Pripyat Hospital's basement, that place has still an high radioactivity because of that stuff.
Jared Harris is an amazing actor. So was his father Richard Harris who you might know as the 1st Dumbledore.
The better Dumbledore
As legendary as Richard Harris is as an actor, Jared may yet surpass him in terms of reputation.
Just my opinion, but I think the way you're experiencing 'Chernobyl' is by far the most meaningful, for yourself, and also for so many of us who remember watching the original news broadcasts in 1986. Your fearless reactions and emotions are beautifully appropriate to the tragic nature of this story, and I appreciate you for it.
An anecdote: I was 10 yo when this happen, and I remember, after it was public knowledge, my old folks telling me one day in the evening to take the Tupwerware with steaks they bought earlier that day below the stairs, where it was dark, to see if they glowed. Mind you, we live in Venezuela, thousands of miles away, but cold war paranoia was strong those days
Ahh the good old radiation detector 'Eyeball mk1'
@@TimoRutanen The innocence of that era, I guess
@@Lagartofero Yeah.. at least it was quite harmless to check! I wonder what would have happened if they found a glowing one..
I remember being stressed out when episode 2 ended like that. This mini series is so well done.
Boris was a party creature, but when the expert stood up to him in the helicopter, he got a hint of how actually serious the situation was. That and his encounter with the local party men caused him change his mind.
They were local party men. Boris is a career party man.
Boris character arc is amazing. As soon as he knows what’s going on he’s setting almost everything in motion.
You see the turn start from the moment he asks: "Why did I see graphite on the roof?"
@@rudewalrus5636someone tried to BS him.
We love your pure reactions, and yes this show is a phenomenal one for you to react to.
Thank you for your emotional reaction, i can't help but cry everytime i watch this series..😢
Lot's of love from Ukraine, sending good vibes to everyone ✌️💙
I’m German and was 6 when this happened.
I very clearly remember all the playgrounds being closed and my parents buying a second freezer. We ate frozen and canned vegetables for months.
@@UloPe I remember, my parents didn‘t let me play outside this time. I was a child, but I noticed this was something big and frightening.
Jared Harris is one of the best actors in the business. I could watch him read a phone book.
18:59 interesting things about Major General Pikolov is that he is not only a WWII veteran, he fought in almost every major battle in the USSR. From Moscow to Stalingrad to Berlin. He did many dangerous things rather than order those to do it for him. He lived to 2003
"What happened to those guys who were down there opening the valves?" We saw the control operator, Akimov ("we did everything right") sitting in the hospital hallway when Ignatenko's wife was there looking for him. He was one of them.
Poor guy ended up losing his face with the radiation poisoning, with parts.lf his skull.exposed.
There were heroes and there were villains. The accuracy of this show was very high with few exceptions and dramatizations. Boris was a hero.
I was playing in the sandbox in the age of 6, about 70 km north of the Forsmark nuclear power plant in Sweden that first got alarm bells in western Europe then.
One interesting fact is, that the two areas in Sweden that got the most rain had a spike in suicides years after.
The Swedish government still conducts regular tests on Boars.
I was so sad when mum told me not to pick berries and mushrooms.
Atleast the civilians in the volunteering scene were offered cash and promotions. All the way through the military are right beside the civilians and doing it for nothing. Alot of them died, some killed themselves for what they had to do. Later on you will see.
It's great acting from all the leads, I think they made this program as good as it is
Jared Harris is great in everything! Interesting how Angela has been watching his career backwards. Expanse -> Chernobyl -> (redacted). Foundation next?
@@Dmitriy.0 Plleeeeease Foundation next, it was so good!
One of the reasons Gorbachev says 'our power comes from the perception of our power' is that it was the only thing keeping the USSR together at that point, and his duty was to keep the USSR going. With failures in Afghanistan and now this, there was a drop in trust that the USSR. This led to reforms, which led to the coup that ended the USSR. Chernobyl alone didn't do that, but it was certainly a factor in undermining confidence in the state.
If you want to feel really bad, you should know that post-USSR, a lot of foreign aid was contingent on dropping welfare programs for the Chernobyl liquidators and victims.
It's more universal than that; perception is how power works. The US has never had to launch its nuclear arsenal (at least not since Hiroshima and Nagasaki) and won't ever need to, as long as our enemies believe that we someday could.
@@charlize1253 Similar but opposite. The American military operates by people knowing it is even stronger than it seems. The Russian military operates by seeming stronger than it really is. Neither wants to display their full capabilities, the Americans for their true strength, and the Russians for their lack thereof. Unfortunately for Russia…
I just watched your Ep. 1 watch and cried right along with you all over again. I guess we're in this ride together, tears and all. It's so well done. Jared Harris and Stellan really shine in this, and that's saying a lot.
Update: I started watching this Episode at work. All my coworkers about to watch me bawl
The ending scene of that episode is one of the finest examples of induced terror. We need nothing more than failing light inducing isolation and the relentless increasing clickrate of the dosimeter. Watching that scene i feel the anxiety gets almost overwhelming even knowing the outcome of those 3 men from history.
An important thing to note about General Pikalov choosing to take the reading himself. Yes it was noble to not risk one of his men's lives but more importantly it meant the readings would not be questioned. In the USSR your rank carried a lot weight and had to be respected. If a normal person had been sent to take the reading it could have been dismissed as done incorrectly by someone incompetent. I believe Pikalov knowing this must have played a large part in his decision.
Another sidenote is the Geiger counter clicks were added completely for dramatic effect and are not at all accurate to situations they appear in. At these levels of radiation there would be so many clicks that it would not even be audible to the human ear. The divers would not have even been sent in with detectors because levels were already assumed to be lethal and the equipment would have just slowed them down.
Back in 1986 the knowledge about the possible steam explosion wasn't widely spread. When I watched the series some years ago and saw that part, I thought that Western Europe didn't worry enough about the risks during the entire event. If that explosion had happened, the fallout would have been so much worse.
Chernobyl to Frankfurt is 1508 km (937 miles) as the crow flies.
I lived through this and it was incredibly scary.
Just 50 miles away, in Wales, we were told that if it rained at a certain time and place, the radioactive dust would fall on the Welsh farmland and Welsh lamb would be affected.
It felt like you could be wiped out if you consumed radioactive lamb and the farming industry could be over for, more or less, ever.
My son was born the January before.
Regarding the helicopter crash at 22:50, note that the rotors hit the crane, which is why it crashes. It's not radiation related, but rather it was blinded by the smoke from the reactor.
I wrote this on episode 1 already, but an important thing to understand about the Soviet Union’s approach to everything: Mind over matter. The economy, all of society, was explicitly considered a question of willpower. The initial idea was that human beings are advanced and rational enough to set aside selfish self-interest for the common good, but that sadly gives humans too much credit. So in the Soviet Union it quickly became a matter of forcing it. And if they could make society work a certain way through sheer force of will, why couldn’t physical reality fit the decided-upon narrative too? Mind over matter, even radioactive matter.
But the Soviet Union is far from alone in this. Religions do this too, trying to force piety when people can’t be trusted to be pious enough on their own. Any corporate branding exercise or dishonest study is an attempt at forcing a reality into existence. See tobacco and oil for that. Heck, any woo’y influencer talking about “manifesting” or affirmations is doing it too, just solo.
The weird thing is that these days it’s flipped around to some people being so intensely individualistic that they deny reality as a reflex. The Earth is flat _because_ “the experts” say it’s not; climate change isn’t real, because _I_ don’t like it. That hurricane won’t kill me because it’s all fake news. The Soviet Union tried to create one common truth, these days it’s about “your personal truth” - neither necessarily aligns with reality.
Well said.
25:11 - I was 9 when this happened, living in the Netherlands; we were told not to play outside in fields either. Many farmers growing spinach had to destroy it (it seems to have this weird affinity for picking up irradiated particles), milk was thrown out for the same reason because cows ate contaminated grass which made the milk slightly radioactive it seems. As kids we had no idea. We had no idea why our parents were a little scared. Took a fair few years to come to the realization this could've ended very different.
I went to high school with a friend from Poland that moved away just after this happened and she would talk about how you couldn't get milk
The dosimeters going nuts at the end is pure anxiety. Also, the helicopter falling over the reactor might have been an artistic license, as I understand
The accident did happen. It hit a cable from the crane, not from the radiation.
@@corpusD And actually occurred later on in irl timeline
I remember after Fujishima, retirees volunteered to go on the frontlines. They figured that didn’t have that many years, and would rather risk themselves rather than send in people with many more years ahead of them.
I have been to the contaminated zone when it was still possible before the war..it is the single most scary experience of my life..because of the eery quiet...it is REALLY scary
You will get a very detailed explanation of what happened that night. I know your hunches are usually quite good but be patient with this one. You'll get the answers. 😊
Thing is, as it is also now, that information was under tight control. For example there were marches on May 1st, for Labour Day, and they were mandatory. Local people started spreading the info about this incident, and people were starting to get scared. Still the marches did proceed.
In Poland, central government was running official cover for the soviets. Later after catastrophe was revealed, it was local authorities and MDs that were investigating and trying to get anti-radiation supplies to the people, but not central government, they were engaging in heavy propaganda.
I was a kid In Poland at the time and my parents heard very little of what happened and it was not really discussed at the time. We only found how much danger there was after most of it had already passed. Most my parents discussed it in front of me was to joke that my father's hair started to grow back due to the radiation.
Actually, in Poland we learned about it very fast - not just due to the info from the west, but also due to some of our stations picking up on radioactivity. The Government, surprisingly enough, did not try to cover the situation either. The iodinization action that happened in schools was also carried out as a result of decision made by them merely day after they themselves learned about the situation, and the News were quite clear about why the action was being done. It was only later that the government went back to quietly covering for the Russians and trying to downplay the situation.
@dahak2358 I'm talking here about central government vs local. Locally, there was exchange of information. While at central level there was silence.
Remember that in the 80s nuclear medicine was still in its infancy, and there wasn't yet many case studies of what happens for massive radiation exposure over such a short time like this. In fact most of our current knowledge about radiation sickness and the symptoms come from this very accident. I like the scene where the old doctor is trying to treat the patients with milk as if it was a regular burn, and the newer doctor asks about iodine pills and knows about the contaminated clothes probably because she was actually educated about it - i think the earlier studies on radiation sickness came from the radium paint that was used in watches to make the hands glow in the dark before they knew about radiation, as well as Hiroshima and the aftermath obviously.
Honestly the relationship between the two leads is so strong throughout this whole show, probably what kept me hooked.
Boris' line about how "a thousand years of sacrifice in our veins" has always set their people apart reminds me of a PBS documentary about an American astronaut who worked aboard the Russian Mir space station as part of an exchange program between the United States and the Soviet Union. The astronaut said that, at first, whenever an alarm went off (and hey were gong off all the time - Mir was in constant need of repair), the cosmonauts would put him into the Soyuz escape capsule where he'd be safe while they went and dealt with the emergency. He said that they felt like they had to shelter him because Soviets believed that their culture taught their people to accept hardship and sacrifice and that "decadent" capitalist cultures (especially American) did not. He had to assert himself as a fully trained and qualified astronaut to get them to include him fully in the running of the space station - including emergencies.
31:26 I don't know if it applies here but this kind of reminds me of a quote from "Art" to "Debbie" in "Invincible" S2: "Nolan (here stands for "indestructible" superheroes in movies) has superpowers, he's indestructible, that's not strength, that's having it easy. You (in this case the normal people being real heroes), you have strength..."
Don't sell yourself short Angela, your reaction is priceless, not despite but because you have that intimate and emotional connection to what you're watching and experiencing. We were all in absolute disbelief, in shock as we watched it for the first time. This show tears your soul apart.
I was 16 at the time and even though I lived about 1700 kilometers away from Chernobyl, we were very scared as long as the "atomic crisis" lasted
I didn't see the crane the first time I watched this episode, so I thought it was the radiation that destroyed the helicopter, but I learned later that it hit the crane you see in the scene. And that did indeed happen irl.
Jerad Harris was outstanding. His explanation in the meetings were powerful. I remember being devastated as he shared the info. And when the old badass general comes back and says “It’s not 3.6 roentgen. It’s 15,000.” Holy smokes I gasped. 😮
Your reaction is genuine. I can only speak for myself, but that's what I look for.
31:09 I do not judge any of those men who did not stand. Most of us wouldn’t
As a russian I of course have heard a lot about the Chernobyl tragedy, mostly in school,and it's truly devastating,this show is also very sad and I just think that it captured the situation in the most truthful way,just the pain and the apathy of people who already know that they're so screwed(sorry if my rambling is a bit chaotic). The only thing I don't get is what that is with the accent? We really don't talk like that. Anyway,looking forward for your new reactions and thank you for being so considerate. I think it's the best reaction to Chernobyl I've seen so far.
@@renslayerlipa The director and producers said that they chose to use mainly British accents for the characters because even though Russian and Eastern European accents would have been more accurate, they also sound very campy to American ears, and they felt that it would have distracted from the story they were trying to tell.
@terripring5114 yep,makes sense,thank you. it's just that in other shows people are trying so hard to mimic that "russian" accent and fail miserably,but here I can see it from their point of view.
The post rock band "We lost the sea" after losing their vocalist due to a tragic accident, release an album called "departure songs"
Each song is an instrumental piece about loss, heroism, tragedy
They dedicated one about this 3 plant workers and called the song "bogatyri",which means Heroes in Russian beautiful album and song it always gives me chills to remind their heroism and what it meant to the world
Don't forget, Boris is constantly surrounded by a bunch of liars, cowards, sycophants, and opportunists. The show starts with him assuming Lagosov is just like all the rest of them. It's only through the growing list of times Lagosov actually endangers himself by contradicting the party line to "do the right thing" that Boris begins to trust him.
This series is the embodiment of why it sometimes necessary to watch difficult subjects , And not like some who would say yeah we know bad stuff happens why watch it, it's not fun? Those people who "think" they know are perhaps just as much in need of a wake up call as the know nothings of the world..
Dont know how much you have watched but Jared Harris gives the performance of a lifetime on this show and Boris's character ark ( than mans character ark) will make you cry.
Congrats to lil gal on getting engaged btw x
*arc
I was stationed in Germany when this happened. Many years later I developed Leukemia. No idea if it's related but guess it's possible. Modern medicine saved me though. 6 years free.
Your mouth hanging open is exactly how we all reacted when we first watched this. The anger, sorrow and rage will be correct as well. Keep going with this, it's a commentary on the wrongs of the human condition.
Dear FLG: This show accurately depicts the utter failure of the Soviet system! you shouldn't feel bad about despising some of these gov't characters--they were awful people who made many people lives miserable, or even caused their deaths!! On the other hand, the show breaks you heart by showing the unimaginable bravery of ordinary Russian firemen, soldiers, and scientists, many of whom gave their lives to stop this disaster
The flaw of the Soviet system was that a small number of people had power and were removed from consequences. There are many ways to get there. They all have similar results.
Too bad show throw most blame on one real character - Dyatlov, he was guilty, but not like he was portraited. He kinda represent all soviet system in show, but thats never mentioned, like Homyuk represent all scientist who help.
Soviet. SOVIET firemen, soldiers, and scientists. Many of whom were from Ukraine, which Russia is massacring right now.
@@ch3f8 And that's probably the thing I disslike the most about the show. How they turn a real person, into a villain, just to fit the story of the show.
"Courage isn't about not being afraid. It's about being afraid, but doing what you have to do anyway."
~ Jon Pertwee
Don't worry, this is a very good reaction series. I had the exact same reaction when watching it.
The men who went into the water to open the valves actually survived and lived full lives. Being chest deep in water while wearing neoprene diving suits protected them.
26:33
The dogs of chernobyl documentary by Kyle Hill is amazing
Open mouthed with shock and awe is entirely appropriate for this show. I am already terrified for you for the upcoming episodes.
Someone, I think Vanity Fair, had a scientist who assisted with the aftermath of Chernobyl watch the series and comment on what was realistic and what seemed dramatized. She said that a lot of the medical stuff was made to be more dramatic in the series. Things that take weeks in reality are instantaneous in the show. Which is more awful if you think about it, weeks of agony in a hospital bed is unthinkable. She also said that the political stuff was dead on.
same as for ep 1, keep in mind this is durign the cold war, US vs UDSSR, somehting like that happening to a "country" that thinks of themselves as superior in politics, technology, and society. its the "because what must not be cannot be" attitude through and through, not showing any weakness was always more important than people and that cost so many lives. the accident, everything that happens esp in the UDSSR was the representation of either success or failure in the battle of the systems, democracy vs communism
21:33 these aren't random tourist btw, they are kgb overseers. so this goes kind of like "are you willing to talk?" - "... no"
The "divers" lived. When they made the show they found them. Nothing short of incredible.
18:59 That's Colonel General Vladimir Pikalov. He was a highly decorated veteran of the Second World War. He fought at Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk and all the way to Berlin. He was wounded three times in combat.
He went through some of the most hellish, brutal battlefields in history. Even a literally ruptured reactor core didn't scare him. The man was a total badass. And his massive brass balls shielded him so much he managed to survive the radiation and lived to 78 years of age.
I love how early you discuss the feeling of the anger rising. This show has SO MUCH sadness, despair, and grief, but overwhelmingly every episode, I left feeling anger.
I want to write more, but I think you haven't finished on patreon yet, so I will make my comments at the end of the season
The nurses at the hospital removing the firefighters' clothes and moving them to the basement - there are photos of those clothes, still there in that basement to this day.
And still very radioactive.
@@thedragon133 I mean it's pretty radioactive but people can and do (or could and did when it wasn't a warzone) go down there and look at it first hand for 'funsies' so it's not exactly gonna kill anyone who steps in the room. I would bet at least a few nuclear tourists have messed with some of that gear.
And someone stole one of the firefighters' helmets there a few years ago.. (probably a tourist; helmet's location is unknown) So they filled in the entire basement with concrete.
Why? Why do you keep spoiling stuff. If you have nothing to say just shut up. These are not extra Infos. She will see all of this in the end.
@@scottwatrous That basement was sealed off some time ago.
Shock and awe *are* the correct reaction to this disaster. Don't doubt your reaction here. It's the honest horror, that confirms and solidifies my own reaction to the series, that I find most valuable.
20:36 - A chilling line because, as far as we know, it's true:
There was an ancient nuclear "reactor" that had just the right conditions to facilitate fission in a uranium deposit billions of years ago in Africa. However, the more fission took place, the hotter the water allowing the atoms to collide would get. Eventually the water would boil away, the reaction would slow down until it stopped altogether, water would come back, and the process would start all over again. This pattern repeated likely for tens of thousands of years until the Uranium deposit simply decayed away to the point where fission was no longer possible.
23:15 - You can see the rotors clipping a crane and that's what actually causes it to plummet. It's based on actual footage from a helicopter crash that actually happened while trying to contain the reactor fire. They couldn't see through the smoke and I believe they were also flying toward the sun. It's why Boris tells them to "approach from the West" because the smoke and/or sun wouldn't obstruct their vision as much.
Love you pumpkin. Thanks for powering through. What a great series.
Your reaction, so full of empathy and sympathy is exactly what makes this journey with you so meaningful.
In reality, the 3 power plant employees did not go into the pump cellar voluntarily.
They had the misfortune of working the shift when the order came.