Watched the show and it's most likely one of the best shows ever made in TV history. It's a very interesting historical event and the way how it's portrayed is (a few shortcomings notwithstanding) a very accurate and relatable tale about human suffering and struggle after hubris ends up creating one of the most significant catastrophies in human history.
I really like watching original cuts from live television about historic events. Stuff like the Howard Stern show from the day of the 9/11 attacks. The way how these events pan out, with people not knowing what even happened and trying to come to terms with it is really fascinating and makes you understand historic events much better.
This show, though a dramatisation, does that and it does so well.
Dyatlov shouting about the core not having exploded, people trying to cling to lies of the accident not being that terrible, the whole "It's not 3 Roentgen, it's 15.000 Roentgen" thing... it's insane.
And the show manages to encapsulate the sheer terror of what it means to be exposed to radiation. People have no clue what dangers they are in, or if they do, they have no choice. The last scene of episode 3 where the dosimetres go crazy and the radiation becomes to bad, the flashlights die, that's nightmare fuel. The scene with the liquidator on that rooftop is also pretty impactful.
Just imagine, you have thousands of people come from all over the place to work less than 2 minutes to shovel a few pieces of debris. That's how dangerous that job was.
Very emotional, I just wonder, is there a public source about radiation sickness and radioactive burns on the skin, cause I would like to know how realistic that depiction was. In terms of -say- Akimov and that Firefighter Wassili (the one who irradiates his wife), I assume it was pretty spot on, but the other firefighter that lifts a piece of graphite at the beginning might be a bit exaggerated. Then again, he was touching a piece of graphite just a few minutes after it was thrown out of the reactor, so god knows how many short-lived isotopes you'd still have on that, emitting insane levels of radiation.
It most certainly doesn't have anything to do with current events. Just the usual, dude trying to gain woke points on Twitter. The problem is we're boiling all of our interactions down to this. You have to look at how this guy wrote it. The way he tells the story. The narrative is compelling because of how he tells it, and how Legoslav is a Shakespearean figure. The whole thing plays out like a Shakespeare play. A tragedy about madness. Its got a fuckton of Shakespearean influences.
Its got far more in common with Hamlet or Othello than it does with Donald fucking Trump and climate change. This fucking shit makes me nauseous. How this guy accepts his interwoven, complex narrative, with breathtaking cinematography (fuck me, STALKER and Fallout, beautiful), the droning soundtrack, to this one note "HURR ORANGE MAN BAD" & "YASSS QKWEEN" to mongoloids on Twitter I will never fucking understand.
In a post-credit scene in Episode 4, the makers of the show actually refer to Khomyuk as a shakespearian representation of Legasov's conciousness, so you're 100% on your money.
Also, your other, long comment is a really well-written piece that highlights why Khomyuk is a great character. I was conflicted about her being an amalgam character, but I came to the same conclusion that it's very handy to condense down a shitton of people into one representation and they did give her a few very neat scenes and blended her in very well.
Oh ffs It's a show set in the Soviet Union. Why would you expect the people there to be diverse (and yes I'm aware of the Soviet Union's Central Asian component). That would be like these people complaining that the Godfather part I wasn't diverse enough...It's the fucking mafia. They're not supposed to be diverse.
The same people complain about Jared Leto being a Yakuza - y'know, one of the few criminal organizations where it makes a shitton of sense that you'd have a foreigner in their ranks, since they are pretty much outsiders to japanese society anyway.
There were many more lies, lies about how fucking safe it was and contained, lies about the number of people affected. You can't have sad in Soviet paradise. There were orders to exclude radiation exposure from diagnoses. A lot of livestock in nearby areas were slaughtered and ... did not go to waste. That's probably another 10 episodes of less drama that no one would care to watch.
In Germany, farmers and corporations didn't know what to do with their crops that had been declared unsafe for consumption. Many farmers just plowed them over, which is one of the most stupid things to do tbh, since it put all these dangerous elements back into the ground, so generations of crops will be contaminated. On the other hand, you'd have people buy these contaminated crops, contaminated milk and milk powder and just sell it to companies Eastern Germany.
I'm too young to remember much of this time myself, I do, however remember the hassle of cleaning clothes and boots after taking a walk. Only vague recolletions of my father grabbing my rainboots and making sure that we didn't track anything into the apartment, stuff like that.
And just to highlight the scope of this issue:
I live in Germany, more than 1200km away from Pripyat, however to this day, it's dangerous to eat too many mushrooms from the forest or boar and deer meat, since it's contaminated to this day. You'de have to eat a lot of this stuff to get into trouble, but it's still something to be aware of, more than 30 years after the fact.
But at least we get awesome memes now:
