That scene where they have to clean all of that debris off the roof, is one long tracking shot, an ingenious way to get you into the mind of the soldier on the roof. The sound design with the meter being the score of the scene gives you chills. And at the end. COMRADE SOLIDER.... YOU're DONE.
Lyrics to the Cossack folk song. Played when the animals are being dumped in the pit. "BLACK RAVEN" Why do you circle over me? You won't have your prey, Black Raven, I'm not yours! You won't have your prey, Black Raven, I'm not yours!
I read the story of one that had been on the roof. His wife said that after a few months he started to have trouble staying up for long periods. Then he started having issues getting out of bed, and finally stopped all together. After a few days they sent for a doctor to take a look at him. When they lifted him up he left a large part of his back stuck to the bed sheets exposing his spine. He died a few days after. I've also read that while those few minutes on the roof were supposed to be your one and only, that multiple people of the older age range volunteered multiple times over to spare the lives of the younger men. With all that gear on no one could really identify anyone so they went up multiple times
I'm pretty sure that, while the 90 seconds of exposure would certainly increase their chances of developing cancer quite significantly, the people who only recieved the normal types of exposure (ie not falling into puddles, looking over the side, or volunteering multiple times) shouldn't have had enough of a dose to experience what you describe. Not that I'm saying people didn't, I'm sure they did. Many of the bus drivers who evacuated Pripyat developed cancer in the years following the disaster, I'm sure most of the roof clearers did as well.
@@StarkRG Which is Ironic that the 3 initial men who volunteered to go into the flooded basement to drain the tanks where the highest doses of radiation survived with no major issues,well 1 passed away in 2005,the other two are still around,though big difference is,they had the right protective equipment.
The film makers had to sanitize the animal control segment. When the soldiers ran short of ammunition they were forced to bury many of the animals alive. The studio was concerned that that might have been too much for the audience to stomach.
The 90 seconds is per person and once only. Radiation damage is cumulative. 90 seconds was a compromise between enough time to get something done and "low" enough radiation exposure to not be immediately deadly. Many of the liquidators sent to the roof died. Some of them died in the months to follow some in the years to follow. While the rules limited each draftee to one trip only there are reports that some did multiple trips to keep others off the roofs. Those that did almost certainly died and died sooner.
The show also turned down the horror of the animal section. People reported animals were walking around with body parts melted together from radioactive disintegration. To the point where workers could not recognize cats as cats and dogs as dogs. Some cats looked like lizards. Some dogs looked like frogs. Just imagine seeing something like that and it almost looked alien-like.
I learned after watching Chernobyl that many of the men that cleared the roof kept taking the place of other new soldiers in the rotation. Their thinking was they were already exposed and better to put their own lives at risk than others when they were already compromised.
"Tips" is a little misleading. The rods have two sections, the lower section of Graphite is an "accelerator" the upper section of Boron is the "break", so the rods do two jobs. However when in the up position where the "break" is out and the accelerator is in, there's a big gap below the accelerator that is full of water. This water is a "break" and helps distribute heat more evenly. So to shut down you lower the rods. But before the Boron "break" comes in, the Graphite "accelerator" pushes the water out. So at that moment you still have full "accelerator", but now, the water "break" is gone! Normally you only move small groups of rods but they pushed the entire reactor to the absolute limit. Almost all the rods were acting as "accelerators". The Zenon was burning away, and then the very last shred of "break", the water, was entirely pushed out of the core! I believe Western reactors use heavy water as the accelerator. This means if things start getting too hot, the accelerator turns to steam and that automatically slows the reactor down, so it's self limiting.
@@jwmiller2430 It _was_ just a spike, but it was a huge spike, enough cause the flash boiling of all the water and spontaneous ignition of accumulated hydrogen when it met oxygen (I think that's the order things went in). If you were to somehow skip that inevitable explosion, the rods would have been lowered enough that the reaction would be suppressed. It wasn't exactly a design flaw, but the operators didn't know or understand enough to make good decisions and they were pressured to make bad decisions by people who knew even less. Yes, the reactor could have been designed differently and this wouldn't have happened, but something else might have. It was a failure of culture more than a failure of design. Many RBMK reactors are still in use today, they've been modified to be safer, but also the people running them have more of an idea of how to run them.
The veteran soldier is one of my favorite characters. He’s obviously seen combat in Afghanistan, and maybe other places and killed men before. Despite that, he still has some humanity and doesn’t want the animals to suffer.
Yeah, he's really good, and his monologue about getting past killing is great. That kind of life experience both desensitise one to suffering, yet at the same time makes you feel for it more. Also, 3 men there are at different stages of PTSD, which was shown brilliantly. Even the silent armenian Garo, who also obviously were to Afghanistan. Especially with fresh and evolving PTSD of the young one, who never experienced anything like that.
There is good short book about Chernobyl from Svetlana Alexejevich, you have the story of fireman and Ludmila there and also real stories of people who were cleaning up that mess.
This episode is one of the best pieces of filmmaking I've ever seen. Shocking and difficult to watch. The rooftop scene is true to real life, the video is on TH-cam.
The scene with the old lady detailing her family history in Ukraine is one of the most powerful of the show, nobody seems to really react to it, and often times cut it short. It's utterly heartbreaking what the Ukrainian people have had to endure.
@@zammmerjammer and she wouldn't on her own accord, so that was also a cliffhanger. There are people who illegally live in the zone to this day, even returning to their homes, she meant to represent them. And majority of them are old, and probably women.
3:21 & 13:51 She was not that lucky... 5:40 I like the set of that room. 6:03 They did a great with him. Everyone dislikes him. :) 9:17 "high command" sound like something from a scifi show. 13:42 Another sad and powerful ending with the beautiful music.
The rovers didn't fail on the moon, its just that after the US got there first, the USSR decided there was no point anymore and just didn't bother sending them up.
I live in California, and we are currently experiencing a forest fire near some communities close by, and evacuation orders are in effect. Many of the residents refuse to leave. A lifetime of memories and all your belongings are tied to your home. It must have been so much tougher for the people of Chernobyl, for while a fire tangibly destroys, and in effect gives you a sense of finality, the radiation creates a break from your cognitive understanding of whats going on. "My stuff is still there, my home...I can see it" are thoughts the residents must have encountered. What would you do, and if anyone has experienced a disaster, how did it effect you?
Good one, but please don't use "the" before Ukraine. It's just Ukraine, no article, as it's the country now, not a dependant territory or state within Soviet U.
In answer to your question...it was 90 seconds total for each man...after 90 seconds on that roof, a normal sized man would absorb the maximum "safe" dosage of radiation for essentially their entire lifetime. 🖖✌
Good morning Shan !!! Glad I don't have to write DANCES WITH WOLVES anymore. Thanks for reacting to it. Here's a couple of gems you might want to react to APOCALYPTO or MAVERICK. Both Mel Gibson movies 1 he stars in and 1 he directs but both great movies. Have a great Sunday Shan and everybody.
The baby didn't absorb radiation for the mother. The fetus simply absorbed radiation and was far more susceptible to it, because of the high rate of cellular division and growth in a fetus . I was surprised that the baby was full term. I was expecting a miscarriage
Was saddened to hear that you can't read these comments due to people posting spoilers...folks should know better. This is such a great series, but it makes mistakes and leaves things out...so it would be so much better if you could see comments about that stuff. I hope you are able to go back and read some of these so that you will know the things they got wrong. 🖖✌
There are stories from the culling of the animals, apparently not every animal was dead before being buried in concrete. They even filmed a scene for this with that, but cut it because watching a dog drown in concrete is.. you know awful
The biorobots had two options: 90 seconds on that roof, or two years of active duty in the Afghan war. The fact that so many still chose Afghanistan lets you know how terrifying the experience was.
Finished the series yesterday. It was excellent but horrible to watch. I did some research after watching, and apparently 2 out of the 3 divers are still alive to this day, which is incredible
5:27 -- "Democracy is not perfect by any means, but it's way better than oppression and communism" ...ehhhhnnnn... maybe not in a deadly global crisis... not when collective action is needed and needed fairly quickly... then maybe not.
@@catherinelw9365 Climate change? Capitalism did that one. Or were you not talking about the deadly global crisis that is presently threatening to destroy the entire biosphere, not just an exclusion zone in Ukraine/Belarus?
@@zammmerjammer Oh just stop with that nonsense. They had to start calling it climate change instead of global warming because it is becoming increasingly clear there is no global warming, and climates change naturally all the time. Even if you accept the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis, the proposed "solutions" are worse than the supposed problem. Pollution is far worse under communist and other totalitarian regimes than with democracy and capitalism. When you spout woke nonsense you just make yourself sound like an idiot.
@@zammmerjammer While it existed, the Soviet Union was among the largest emitters of carbon, and the Communist bloc countries were among the most polluted in all of Europe. Carbon emissions are not a function of capitalism, they are a byproduct of an industrializing economy. After all, what country wouldn't want to achieve better living standards? Soviet-style communism favored heavy industry even more than capitalist countries except with even fewer checks on the negative consquences. To the extent that capitalist economies may emit more carbon, it's because those countries are generally richer, not because it's something inherent in capitalism. The argument over whether centrally planned are really superior at collective action is a complicated one, but as the Chernobyl incident clearly demonstrates, they are hardly immune from the human foibles of passing blame and trying to hide inconvenient information. If anything, the Soviet Union was far worse at admitting facts that depicted the party in anything less than a flattering light. Based on precedent and history, I have a feeling they would handle the current climate crisis far worse than we are now.
That scene where they have to clean all of that debris off the roof, is one long tracking shot, an ingenious way to get you into the mind of the soldier on the roof. The sound design with the meter being the score of the scene gives you chills.
And at the end. COMRADE SOLIDER.... YOU're DONE.
Lyrics to the Cossack folk song. Played when the animals are being dumped in the pit.
"BLACK RAVEN"
Why do you circle over me?
You won't have your prey,
Black Raven, I'm not yours!
You won't have your prey,
Black Raven, I'm not yours!
You've gotten through the hardest episodes. Looking forward to the stellar finale!
I read the story of one that had been on the roof. His wife said that after a few months he started to have trouble staying up for long periods. Then he started having issues getting out of bed, and finally stopped all together. After a few days they sent for a doctor to take a look at him. When they lifted him up he left a large part of his back stuck to the bed sheets exposing his spine. He died a few days after.
I've also read that while those few minutes on the roof were supposed to be your one and only, that multiple people of the older age range volunteered multiple times over to spare the lives of the younger men. With all that gear on no one could really identify anyone so they went up multiple times
I'm pretty sure that, while the 90 seconds of exposure would certainly increase their chances of developing cancer quite significantly, the people who only recieved the normal types of exposure (ie not falling into puddles, looking over the side, or volunteering multiple times) shouldn't have had enough of a dose to experience what you describe. Not that I'm saying people didn't, I'm sure they did. Many of the bus drivers who evacuated Pripyat developed cancer in the years following the disaster, I'm sure most of the roof clearers did as well.
@@StarkRG Which is Ironic that the 3 initial men who volunteered to go into the flooded basement to drain the tanks where the highest doses of radiation survived with no major issues,well 1 passed away in 2005,the other two are still around,though big difference is,they had the right protective equipment.
The sign of a brilliant film or TV series is that it prompts intelligent watchers, such as Shan, to probe further into the real life events.
The film makers had to sanitize the animal control segment. When the soldiers ran short of ammunition they were forced to bury many of the animals alive. The studio was concerned that that might have been too much for the audience to stomach.
The 90 seconds is per person and once only. Radiation damage is cumulative. 90 seconds was a compromise between enough time to get something done and "low" enough radiation exposure to not be immediately deadly. Many of the liquidators sent to the roof died. Some of them died in the months to follow some in the years to follow. While the rules limited each draftee to one trip only there are reports that some did multiple trips to keep others off the roofs. Those that did almost certainly died and died sooner.
The end scene "so powerful" "I have no words". Yes, that's exactly put.
"Good thing he's smoking, that'll kill him faster." Literal LOL from me.
The show also turned down the horror of the animal section. People reported animals were walking around with body parts melted together from radioactive disintegration. To the point where workers could not recognize cats as cats and dogs as dogs. Some cats looked like lizards. Some dogs looked like frogs. Just imagine seeing something like that and it almost looked alien-like.
You would love the thriller "Shoot to Kill" with Sidney Poitier, Tom
Berenger, Kirstie Alley, bears, elks and phantastic Rocky Mountains
scenes.
Don't forget Clancy Brown, Kurgan from Highlander.
@@warlockEd73 , no spoilers please!
"Listen, Comrades. These are the most important 90 seconds of your life."
Yes Boss, NO PRESSURE.
10:40 Radiation poisoning is accumulative. Once the damage is done, it is done.
So sad the guy smoking in the hospital, the manager in the plant that night (Paul Ritter) died recently in real life of a brain tumor.
I think what they're spaying on the ground with, is some sort of sticky compound, so that wind doesn't carry radioactive dust.
I learned after watching Chernobyl that many of the men that cleared the roof kept taking the place of other new soldiers in the rotation. Their thinking was they were already exposed and better to put their own lives at risk than others when they were already compromised.
The roof codenames were based on General Tarakanov's nieces. I think it's safe to assume Masha was a...problematic child.
"Tips" is a little misleading.
The rods have two sections, the lower section of Graphite is an "accelerator" the upper section of Boron is the "break", so the rods do two jobs.
However when in the up position where the "break" is out and the accelerator is in, there's a big gap below the accelerator that is full of water. This water is a "break" and helps distribute heat more evenly.
So to shut down you lower the rods.
But before the Boron "break" comes in, the Graphite "accelerator" pushes the water out.
So at that moment you still have full "accelerator", but now, the water "break" is gone!
Normally you only move small groups of rods but they pushed the entire reactor to the absolute limit. Almost all the rods were acting as "accelerators". The Zenon was burning away, and then the very last shred of "break", the water, was entirely pushed out of the core!
I believe Western reactors use heavy water as the accelerator. This means if things start getting too hot, the accelerator turns to steam and that automatically slows the reactor down, so it's self limiting.
Thanks for that explanation. It bothered me that the lowering 'tips' caused the out of control reaction instead of just a spike.
@@jwmiller2430 It _was_ just a spike, but it was a huge spike, enough cause the flash boiling of all the water and spontaneous ignition of accumulated hydrogen when it met oxygen (I think that's the order things went in). If you were to somehow skip that inevitable explosion, the rods would have been lowered enough that the reaction would be suppressed.
It wasn't exactly a design flaw, but the operators didn't know or understand enough to make good decisions and they were pressured to make bad decisions by people who knew even less. Yes, the reactor could have been designed differently and this wouldn't have happened, but something else might have. It was a failure of culture more than a failure of design. Many RBMK reactors are still in use today, they've been modified to be safer, but also the people running them have more of an idea of how to run them.
In a western reactor we use water once you cut the water off the reaction stops
The veteran soldier is played by Fares Fares, brother of Josef Fares that gamers might recognize; Brothers, A Way Out and It Takes Two.
The veteran soldier is one of my favorite characters. He’s obviously seen combat in Afghanistan, and maybe other places and killed men before. Despite that, he still has some humanity and doesn’t want the animals to suffer.
Yeah, he's really good, and his monologue about getting past killing is great. That kind of life experience both desensitise one to suffering, yet at the same time makes you feel for it more. Also, 3 men there are at different stages of PTSD, which was shown brilliantly. Even the silent armenian Garo, who also obviously were to Afghanistan. Especially with fresh and evolving PTSD of the young one, who never experienced anything like that.
Subscribed - interesting to see the series again through another's eyes. Such a good series.
There is good short book about Chernobyl from Svetlana Alexejevich, you have the story of fireman and Ludmila there and also real stories of people who were cleaning up that mess.
Thumbs up just for taking this on.
Shan: "I'm ready..."
Narrator: "But Shan was not ready."
This episode is one of the best pieces of filmmaking I've ever seen. Shocking and difficult to watch. The rooftop scene is true to real life, the video is on TH-cam.
Forgot Barry Keoghan was the young soldier in this
The scene with the old lady detailing her family history in Ukraine is one of the most powerful of the show, nobody seems to really react to it, and often times cut it short. It's utterly heartbreaking what the Ukrainian people have had to endure.
thanks, as Ukrainian
And she never actually leaves, notice. She never gets up to leave.
@@zammmerjammer and she wouldn't on her own accord, so that was also a cliffhanger. There are people who illegally live in the zone to this day, even returning to their homes, she meant to represent them. And majority of them are old, and probably women.
@@PUARockstar Peace for Ukraine from Canada
3:21 & 13:51 She was not that lucky... 5:40 I like the set of that room.
6:03 They did a great with him. Everyone dislikes him. :)
9:17 "high command" sound like something from a scifi show.
13:42 Another sad and powerful ending with the beautiful music.
The rovers didn't fail on the moon, its just that after the US got there first, the USSR decided there was no point anymore and just didn't bother sending them up.
I live in California, and we are currently experiencing a forest fire near some communities close by, and evacuation orders are in effect. Many of the residents refuse to leave. A lifetime of memories and all your belongings are tied to your home. It must have been so much tougher for the people of Chernobyl, for while a fire tangibly destroys, and in effect gives you a sense of finality, the radiation creates a break from your cognitive understanding of whats going on. "My stuff is still there, my home...I can see it" are thoughts the residents must have encountered.
What would you do, and if anyone has experienced a disaster, how did it effect you?
I think you would enjoy GOGOL. It's a Russian mini series based on the stories of Nikolai Gogol. He was a 19th century novelist from the Ukraine
That's interesting!
@@Veronica-yn2zu Full episodes are available on TH-cam. It's in Russian but there are subtitles. Started watching on a whim and became obsessed.
Good one, but please don't use "the" before Ukraine. It's just Ukraine, no article, as it's the country now, not a dependant territory or state within Soviet U.
@@PUARockstar My apologies. Don't know why I've always put "the" before Ukraine. I meant no disrespect
This show is like a 5 hour punch to the gut, and I absolutely love it.
In answer to your question...it was 90 seconds total for each man...after 90 seconds on that roof, a normal sized man would absorb the maximum "safe" dosage of radiation for essentially their entire lifetime. 🖖✌
And several of them volunteered to return to the roof to save others from it.
They were also given a choice of two minutes on the roof or two years in Afghanistan
Good morning Shan !!! Glad I don't have to write DANCES WITH WOLVES anymore. Thanks for reacting to it. Here's a couple of gems you might want to react to APOCALYPTO or MAVERICK. Both Mel Gibson movies 1 he stars in and 1 he directs but both great movies. Have a great Sunday Shan and everybody.
Apocalypto is awesome, don't let the PC criticisms of it deter you.
The men on the roof only make one trip. In 90 seconds, they'll have absorbed a lifetime's worth of radiation. They're only asked to do it once.
The baby didn't absorb radiation for the mother. The fetus simply absorbed radiation and was far more susceptible to it, because of the high rate of cellular division and growth in a fetus . I was surprised that the baby was full term. I was expecting a miscarriage
As a son of a liquidator, my parents were persuaded by doctors to get abortion.
This one was the hardest for me, because of the animals.
They only get 90 seconds each, because your radiation level drop very slowly and most of it would already done damage before dropping.
It's 90 seconds per lifetime. The scene is also shot in real time, it is 90 seconds.
This is the most depressing one
Was saddened to hear that you can't read these comments due to people posting spoilers...folks should know better. This is such a great series, but it makes mistakes and leaves things out...so it would be so much better if you could see comments about that stuff. I hope you are able to go back and read some of these so that you will know the things they got wrong. 🖖✌
Beautiful :)
btw asking to americans was useful, no one had something that could clean Masha, I don't even know if we have something now that could do it
Fun fack: the russian were the first to sent a rover on the moon, the man who designed the rover was a tank designer.
soviets*, not russians.
🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
After this series it would be poignant to check out Tchaikovsky's film Stalker
So good but so hard to watch
There are stories from the culling of the animals, apparently not every animal was dead before being buried in concrete. They even filmed a scene for this with that, but cut it because watching a dog drown in concrete is.. you know awful
The biorobots had two options: 90 seconds on that roof, or two years of active duty in the Afghan war. The fact that so many still chose Afghanistan lets you know how terrifying the experience was.
Ha, shaaaahaaan!
Finished the series yesterday. It was excellent but horrible to watch. I did some research after watching, and apparently 2 out of the 3 divers are still alive to this day, which is incredible
Can you please react to the movie Candyman
The new one is out
in Capitalism it´s the same
Chernobyl Episode 4 “Pup Snuffers.”
You should watch the TH-cam channel Bald and Bankrupt. He has visited Pripyat and the people still living there many times.
Had to skip the dog part, can't watch that stuff
5:27 -- "Democracy is not perfect by any means, but it's way better than oppression and communism"
...ehhhhnnnn... maybe not in a deadly global crisis... not when collective action is needed and needed fairly quickly... then maybe not.
And what system enabled the deadly global crisis?
@@catherinelw9365 Climate change? Capitalism did that one. Or were you not talking about the deadly global crisis that is presently threatening to destroy the entire biosphere, not just an exclusion zone in Ukraine/Belarus?
@@zammmerjammer Oh just stop with that nonsense. They had to start calling it climate change instead of global warming because it is becoming increasingly clear there is no global warming, and climates change naturally all the time.
Even if you accept the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis, the proposed "solutions" are worse than the supposed problem.
Pollution is far worse under communist and other totalitarian regimes than with democracy and capitalism.
When you spout woke nonsense you just make yourself sound like an idiot.
@@zammmerjammer While it existed, the Soviet Union was among the largest emitters of carbon, and the Communist bloc countries were among the most polluted in all of Europe. Carbon emissions are not a function of capitalism, they are a byproduct of an industrializing economy. After all, what country wouldn't want to achieve better living standards? Soviet-style communism favored heavy industry even more than capitalist countries except with even fewer checks on the negative consquences. To the extent that capitalist economies may emit more carbon, it's because those countries are generally richer, not because it's something inherent in capitalism. The argument over whether centrally planned are really superior at collective action is a complicated one, but as the Chernobyl incident clearly demonstrates, they are hardly immune from the human foibles of passing blame and trying to hide inconvenient information. If anything, the Soviet Union was far worse at admitting facts that depicted the party in anything less than a flattering light. Based on precedent and history, I have a feeling they would handle the current climate crisis far worse than we are now.
I would like to give a sincere thank you to the people who post Spoilers in the comments. You guys are the best.