I am three episodes in and really enjoying it: after the initial chaos of the disaster, it becomes a story about people trying to make the best decisions they can while caught between physics and bureaucracy; it is full of hot equations and it is never without compassion. I came into it with less detailed knowledge of the Chernobyl disaster than I did something like the K-19 nuclear accident, I think because I was alive at the time and a small child and did not assimilate the information the same way, but everything I can evaluate seems well-handled and while at least one of the protagonists is a composite, I thought one of the others was invented and she turned out to be famous. It is terrifyingly good about the numinous, supernatural aspects of radiation, the way it can kill you and you can walk around for five years (or five days) first, its invisible persistence, the way it can be transferred like a curse. It is also doing, from my perspective, a brilliant job of being an almost constantly technical narrative that never buckles under its own infodumps, primarily because it doesn't really have them (it has exchanges of information, but so do real human conversations). I sort of tripped and fell into Jared Harris last year and he's excellent as the deputy director of the USSR's leading atomic research institute who gets fast-tracked to Chernobyl to make a problem go away that best-case strictly speaking won't go away for hundreds of years; he has a conscience and not enough political acumen and he's both appalled by the human cost of Chernobyl and his share in it and transfixed by the science of it, both the problem-solving to save as many lives as possible and the locked-room mystery of what makes an RBMK reactor explode. Stellan Skarsgård, Emily Watson, and Jessie Buckley seem to have emerged as the other protagonists, with consistent support from a wide range of character actors. If it holds up, I'll write about the series when I'm done. I have to wait for each episode to air because there is no way I am paying my Roku for HBO. The Criteron Channel and TCM cost money; that's it.
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Thank you!
How's Chernobyl?
I am three episodes in and really enjoying it: after the initial chaos of the disaster, it becomes a story about people trying to make the best decisions they can while caught between physics and bureaucracy; it is full of hot equations and it is never without compassion. I came into it with less detailed knowledge of the Chernobyl disaster than I did something like the K-19 nuclear accident, I think because I was alive at the time and a small child and did not assimilate the information the same way, but everything I can evaluate seems well-handled and while at least one of the protagonists is a composite, I thought one of the others was invented and she turned out to be famous. It is terrifyingly good about the numinous, supernatural aspects of radiation, the way it can kill you and you can walk around for five years (or five days) first, its invisible persistence, the way it can be transferred like a curse. It is also doing, from my perspective, a brilliant job of being an almost constantly technical narrative that never buckles under its own infodumps, primarily because it doesn't really have them (it has exchanges of information, but so do real human conversations). I sort of tripped and fell into Jared Harris last year and he's excellent as the deputy director of the USSR's leading atomic research institute who gets fast-tracked to Chernobyl to make a problem go away that best-case strictly speaking won't go away for hundreds of years; he has a conscience and not enough political acumen and he's both appalled by the human cost of Chernobyl and his share in it and transfixed by the science of it, both the problem-solving to save as many lives as possible and the locked-room mystery of what makes an RBMK reactor explode. Stellan Skarsgård, Emily Watson, and Jessie Buckley seem to have emerged as the other protagonists, with consistent support from a wide range of character actors. If it holds up, I'll write about the series when I'm done. I have to wait for each episode to air because there is no way I am paying my Roku for HBO. The Criteron Channel and TCM cost money; that's it.