touring the Chernobyl area on a motorbike

2nd ep of Chernobyl builds on the good work of the first. I think that claustrophobic radiation horror at the end of the ep will give me nightmares tonight. Emily Watson/Stellan Skarsgard/Jared Harris all bringing it. There is brilliant scene with Skarsgard bluffing the lower level apparatchiks with his new-found knowledge (5mins ago in the chopper) of the make-up of RBMK reactors. Best series these useless fuckers have done in years imo.

yeah i love this show after two episodes. the horror is realised very vividly.

"a yearly stipend of 400 roubles" for whichever fool walks into the jaws of death. Nightmare day at work today!

"come on lads this is for russia"

"fuck it so, i could use a few extra roubles, where do i sign?"

"For the rest of my life, you say?..."

first episode was great, this last one was brilliant

my only problem is that i keep forgetting the names of the characters and it's difficult to refer to them by description (the apparatchik who doesn't actually know what's going on? er...
the scientist guy with glasses? er...), but that's on me

it was quite amusing when apparatchik with fey croaky voice tries to bullshit Skarsgard character that it's the concrete that is burning. But yeah, fuck knows the names of any of this lot!

I've started the Serhii Plokhii Chernobyl book, it's much better than that Higginbotham travesty and he grew up in the Soviet Union + has a better feel for how the dysfunctional + belligerent interactions between different departments (+ add idiot bosses/unrealistic quotas/budgetary pressures to the mix) conspired towards the 2nd rateness of the reactors (bad design without safety containment to start with) and absolute inevitability of a catastrophe at some point.

Yeah I only know the characters by how they look, I guess a lot has happened in two episodes, but it seems masterfully written and acted so far. The dynamic between Harris and the minister type bloke was instantly great, like the way he seems actually quite effective within the confines of what's possible in such a system.

It's interesting seeing Gorbachev portrayed at the centre of such a system, I guess I feel all I remember about him was this heroic treatment of him in western media and even when I was at primary school, which I suppose was some bizarre lionising bullshit due to the fall of communism.

Also the whole thing looks incredible.

yeah the design is so very impressive and convincing on every scale, from the reactor to the civilian scenes, everything is so real looking. I can't still can't get that image out of my head when the worker looks right into the burning core of the reactor in ep 1, incredible scene.

I'm just getting to the bit in the book that deals with the firemen attempting to extinguish the fire on the huge shared turbine hall roof. It is actually even more horrific and chaotic than the version presented in the series. Some of the firemen are kicking lumps of radioactive graphite out of the way, not realising these little glowing lumps have already condemned lots of them to a very painful death within hours/days. Molten bitumen is practically gluing some of them to the spot. One of them describing it as worse than anything the pen of Dante could have imagined. They don't even understand the implications of the reactor core blowing open and are only trained in dealing ordinary fires, and are more concerned with the broken oil pump threatening to release 200 tonnes of machine oil onto the floor turning it into a total inferno. It is a hellish clusterfuck even before you factor in the off the scale radiation bombardment and the threat of half of Europe getting sterilised.

Just started this series, and fucking hell

I mean, having read Svetlana Alexievich's book I'm not sure why I'm doing this to myself, but here we are

Now looking at the writewr/creator's IMDB credits, and having some serious cognitive dissonance.

The Huntsman: Winter's War (written by)
2013 The Hangover Part III (written by)
2013 Identity Thief (screenplay) / (story)
2011 The Hangover Part II (written by)
2008 Superhero Movie (written by)
2006 Scary Movie 4 (screenplay) / (story)
2003 Scary Movie 3 (written by)
1998 Senseless (written by)
1997 RocketMan (screenplay) / (story)

This is like finding out Threads was a Benny Hill project

That Darn Cat 2 next?

“We were doing our research, we came across this description of coal miners in the Soviet Union as being a particularly irascible, difficult group that operated outside of the normal fear bubble that everybody was in because they knew that they were necessary. In fact, they’d gone on strike a few times and Gorbachev said that he was more scared of the coal miners than anyone else,”

even though the miners were played for straight grim-faced lols, it's interesting what the writer said about them.

lol I've just realised the miners spokesman is ex-Eastenders Scottish character, who was so dull and unmemorable I can't even remember his name.

Very grim lols, but believable, too, I thought.

Watching this, am simultaneously appalled at a political system that could basically force so many people to sacrifice themselves so horribly, and astonishingly grateful that they did.

some grim lols needed after so much radiation horror, but it was cut with much sadness as well. I mean most of the grim lols were the overt machismo of these lads, but it's quite touching at the end - even though lol naked miners.

Another good touch was him (J Harris character) realising (or maybe he knew at the time) that the couple at the bar asking him innocuously nosy questions were KGB agents, making sure he wasn't spreading fear and blabbing to people.

Is that what that was? I didn't pick up on that. In that same scene, why did he ask for the other glass?

in the next ep they are being tailed by them. My take was that he was aware that the even some distance from the reactor the radiation levels were something like at least 4 times the amount legally allowed for nuclear workers, let alone civilians and much worse in some places. So an upright cup catches irradiated dust particles?

a quite chilling witness account from Pripyat from one bloke was he was blithely going about his business, supping a few beers on the roof and sunbathing. But he could sense something different in the atmosphere, and feel his skin burning much faster than it usually does on a sunny day.

Yeah, I assumed he wanted a cup that had been rim-down so the innards were clean.

Jared Harris really is a gem.

Yeah, he's a fine actor and then some.

He has so much integrity in every character I've seen him play. I hope he continues to get more work. He was brilliant in The Terror as well which didn't seem to get any traction in the UK but was very enjoyable.

All of this feels so well studied and just so real, albeit with scenes like the one with the chief of the KGB that are sort of classic spy fiction but absolutely note perfect.

The casting seems fairly meticulous, I noticed even the hospital receptionist is the Irish actress Caolfhinn Dunne, I don't even know if she will appear again but I found that interesting given how most of the roles seem perfectly cast.

Horrific scenes with the victims in the hospital.

he will definitely get plenty of work, he seems to be the go-to fellow to bring integrity and quality to all sorts of rubbish - but he is always a massive pleasure to watch.

Must have been a hard slog in relative obscurity until the last few years when you're Richard Harris's son.

I mean as far as sense of self goes rather than it being as hard as broke and unemployed actors.

i totally forgot he plays Andy Warhol in a pretty forgettable 90's movie, maybe he is one of those actors that was solid but dull in his youth, but has matured into a top notch performer?

lol, I'd also forgotten he was in Fringe, he was excellent in that deranged but very watchable nonsense as well.

I think he had some solid parts over the years but his recurring role on Fringe and, more importantly, Mad Men, bumped his profile up a bit

He's played more than one nice but doomed men who end up hanging themself.

I wish I could watch this, but I don't have HBO, so I'll wait for the video. The documentaries on YouTube are disturbing enough, and the touring by bike site and those videos creeped me out for a long time. But for me, the saddest part was when people in Sweden noted heightened radioactivity in the air, and determined that the source was somewhere in the Soviet Union...it was not reported in any news until days later.

On a related note, I found this calendar amusing (Flickr is down for maintenance so I can't link to it right now). I have a perverse sense of humor, I hope it doesn't offend.

https://www.pinterest.co.uk/mihalshozda/chernobyl-exclusion-zone-nude-calendar-2019/

I’m glad people who lived in the Soviet Union at the time are as impressed with this show as I am

I have just finished watching Episode 1 of Chernobyl on @HBO. My perspective is that of someone born and raised in the Soviet Union who has vivid memories of 1986, the catastrophe itself and how it was handled by the Soviet politicians and the state media...

— Slava Malamud (@SlavaMalamud) May 24, 2019

Yeah it is a very good book, which shows rather than sensationalised horror - the series is quite restrained and sparing the viewer a lot of it.

And also you learned there wasnt really a clever and decisive jh character making wise decisions about containing the disaster it was much more chaotic.

Probably two bad posts but am on my phone a nd walking and slightly fresh.

Watching this, am simultaneously appalled at a political system that could basically force so many people to sacrifice themselves so horribly, and astonishingly grateful that they did.

I don't know if it's dramatic license or not, but the show does a good job of suggesting that their sacrifice is more voluntary than that. The guys who agree to go and turn off the water don't do it because of the four hundred roubles, or because they've been forced. They do it because they know what will happen if they don't do it. It needs to be done, as Stellan Skarsgard says. And I definitely got the same impression from the miners. This is work that needs to be done, and they're the only people who can do it.

Yeah - it’s noted in that book that some miners were reluctant but others absolutely did it out civic duty and were insulted by cash. Some compared it to the duty that makes you enlist for war

The Soviet miners weren't broken like their UK counterparts and had quite high self-esteem in relation to their importance in the Soviet system, and were probably fed on macho Stakhanovite myths (like most miners were tbf) which don't exactly encourage health and safety awareness to say the least. It probably would be fair to say the numbers of people willing to sacrifice themselves might be much lower these days. And we'd all die, lol.

The guys who agree to go and turn off the water don't do it because of the four hundred roubles, or because they've been forced. They do it because they know what will happen if they don't do it. It needs to be done

I'm also glad this part was handled factually - the old stories that used to do the rounds was those 3 went in, did their fix, and either fell down dead on the spot or died the next day. Neither of which turned out to be true (one of ems still alive and one was alive til 2005)

Another thread from yer man

I have finished watching the 3rd episode of @HBO's #Chernobyl. The second ended on a cliffhanger, so I kept on through midnight, which, in retrospect, was a bold decision... Well, "every generation must have its sacrifice." I will review it in the thread below...

— Slava Malamud (@SlavaMalamud) May 26, 2019

excellent thread. next time I see an old friend who has been on the NHS waiting list for a sinus operation for 2 years, I'll tell him he needs to try bringing some chocolate and cognac "vzyatkas" to his next appointment.

Thats a great thread!

is it true that britishes pronounce the element with atomic no. 53 as eye-oh-deen

a bit like you lot with aloo-minum

fraid so, and we do it with chlorine, bromine, fluorine too