touring the Chernobyl area on a motorbike

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

I thought young ugly-mug actor whose name I can't recall was very good as sensitive ingenue called up into pet liquidation squad in last ep.

Just started this. We've seen two episodes so far, this series is incredible. It's like an updated "Day After." Truly scary and unsettling. The score, by Hildur Guðnadóttir, is excellent. She's a cellist, but it sounds like scraping metal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTw1-nw5S4A

we just watched ep 1 last night

no matter how prepared you are from reading about it, it’s still a lot to take in when you watch it unfold even as a dramatization

the locals hanging around on the bridge taking in the view of the fire as the ash starts falling, or the firefighters inncuously rolling up with hoses, it’s all just continuous & varying degrees of D:

hooked, obv

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

...with at least one notable exception.

Resignation was the defining condition of Soviet life. But resignation is a depressing and untelegenic spectacle. So the creators of “Chernobyl” imagine confrontation where confrontation was unthinkable—and, in doing so, they cross the line from conjuring a fiction to creating a lie. The Belarusian scientist Ulyana Khomyuk (Emily Watson) is even more confrontational than Legasov. “I am a nuclear physicist,” she tells an apparatchik, in Episode 2. “Before you were Deputy Secretary, you worked in a shoe factory.” First, she’d never say this. Second, the apparatchik might have worked at a shoe factory, but, if he was an apparatchik, he was no cobbler; he has come up the Party ladder, which might indeed have begun at the factory—but in an office, not on the factory floor. The apparatchik—or, more accurately, the caricature of the apparatchik—pours himself a glass of vodka from a carafe that sits on his desk and responds, “Yes, I worked in a shoe factory. And now I’m in charge.” He toasts, in what appears to be the middle of the day: “To the workers of the world.” No. No carafe, no vodka in the workplace in front of a hostile stranger, and no boasting “I’m in charge.”

The biggest fiction in this scene, though, is Khomyuk herself. Unlike other characters, she is made up—according to the closing titles, she represents dozens of scientists who helped Legasov investigate the cause of the disaster. Khomyuk appears to embody every possible Hollywood fantasy. She is a truth-knower: the first time we see her, she is already figuring out that something has gone terribly wrong, and she is grasping it terribly fast, unlike the dense men at the actual scene of the disaster, who seem to need hours to take it in. She is also a truth-seeker: she interviews dozens of people (some of them as they are dying of radiation exposure), digs up a scientific paper that has been censored, and figures out exactly what happened, minute by minute. She also gets herself arrested and then immediately seated at a meeting on the disaster, led by Gorbachev. None of this is possible, and all of it is hackneyed. The problem is not just that Khomyuk is a fiction; it’s that the kind of expert knowledge she represents is a fiction. The Soviet system of propaganda and censorship existed not so much for the purpose of spreading a particular message as for the purpose of making learning impossible, replacing facts with mush, and handing the faceless state a monopoly on defining an ever-shifting reality.

In the absence of a Chernobyl narrative, the makers of the series have used the outlines of a disaster movie. There are a few terrible men who bring the disaster about, and a few brave and all-knowing ones, who ultimately save Europe from becoming uninhabitable and who tell the world the truth. It is true that Europe survived; it is not true that anyone got to the truth, or told it.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/what-hbos-chernobyl-got-right-and-what-it-got-terribly-wrong

*funny* how life works out sometimes: just about everyone stood on that bridge perished soon afterwards... two of the suicide mission divers are still alive apparently.

it might have been better to include bigger groups of scientists and portray the group-think that really went on and the trouble some of them got into for being outspoken. And lots of other niggles. But I'm just glad to see some decent drama for once!

I knew that was Masha Gessen before I clicked the link.

I mean, same.

especially since she consulted on and handled the Russian dialogue in The Americans

I'm usually a little cranky about the addition of dramatic elements or taking poetic license when it comes to the actions of characters based on real life or composite figures so I understand the impulse to complain, but some of those gripes are in the realm of not understanding how creative nonfiction works versus documentaries

Now, the real complaint would be how the characters act as if they're in an American/British drama as opposed to a Russian one, right

If only Jared had employed that fucked up accent he used in the expanse, I might have believed that scene where he said: Just hoy a bit o' fucking sand an' barium on it lad :p

boron even.

Now, the real complaint would be how the characters act as if they're in an American/British drama as opposed to a Russian one, right

Yeah, it's minor and I get it, but it does irk me a little (esp. when one actor used "bloody" as a profanity). I joked with my wife that when Jared reads the report in Russian in the second episode he should have looked up and said in English "I don't understand a word of this!"

I don't think it would have been improved by actors employing uniform daft commie accents throughout, although some tried to at times. It might have been improved if everyone spoke in Russian/Ukrainian, but I thought some of the strongest performances where from actors speaking in their normal accents.