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HBO's Chernobyl |OT| Do you taste something metallic?
- Thread starter Wrexis
- Start date
Oh wow, I figured they had taken some creative liberties but didn't think they would do something that drastic. Thanks for the info.
I think the peace I've made with this is the alternative would probably be various scenes of Legasov talking on a phone. Which I can understand not being an appealing approach for telling the story.
I do think they should have brought her assistant along just to get the idea across they represent many voices rather than channeling it all through a single person. Maybe she will phone him once or twice, which will be good enough for me.
Barely halfway through the 2nd episode and I feel like traveling back in time to give the real versions of these gross bureaucrats a good throttling. Fucking slugs watched multiple men turn as red as boiled lobsters before fainting and vomiting in alternating order and still try so desperately to treat this shit with all the seriousness and urgency of accidentally spilling table salt. I knew this fucking show was gonna rile me up but didn't expect my blood to boil this much. More than likely because this show is strikingly poignant in a time where men and women who've devoted their entire lives to making sure they can tell the difference between a minor and severe environmental crisis are met with an overwhelming number of US politicians and citizens scoffing at and ridiculing their decades and decades of research and data.
Correct, she isn't a real person but instead is meant to be an amalgamation of several scientific minds that assisted in the cleanup.
edit: Boris was real per the info below. Thanks for the info!
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https://www.nytimes.com/1984/01/15/world/soviet-pipeline-official-made-deputy-premier.html
Definitely a real person. Not entirely sure but details around him may have come from the declassified KGB documents in the 90s but they are a little hard to read first hand, lol.
I do wish the podcast had gotten more into him and what they sourced. Maybe next episode.
Boris is real and did indeed die in 1990.
Although he was about 70 years old at the time anyway, so I dunno how much you can attribute that to the incident.
You can watch it on NowTV, It's only £8 a month and has a free 7 day trial.
I was watching online through amazon prime and they have little bits right after the credits where the actors and creators talk for a little bit about the events and the actress explains why they invented this singular character to represent the larger numbers of scientists that could not be fit into a TV show. Hopefully they do the same thing on the live TV broadcast because it seems necessary for info like this given how realistic the show is elsewhere.
Details around Shcherbina also likely comes from Legasov's tapes, which were real. Again, language barrier is difficult for first hand info here but some details about the tapes.
https://www.spiegel.de/internationa...litburo-skepticism-of-chernobyl-a-752696.html
https://www.spiegel.de/internationa...litburo-skepticism-of-chernobyl-a-752696.html
He's totally real, he even has own Wikipedia article (google translated from Russian).
English-language sources on the subject seems to be very scarce, tho.
HBO has that as well but I never bother to watch them. Time for that to change lol
If you're this riled up, wait until they finally get back to showing how the reactor actually exploded, in detail.
Stop fretting. This technology is plenty safe. *proceeds to deliberately ignore no less than a half-dozen explicit safety guidelines and warnings on a nuclear reactor that is already poorly documented*
After reading this thread, I felt compelled to go watch the first episode. Holy shit, this is some of the most unsettling television I've ever seen. It's so compelling. I know not all the details are real, and I'll need to listen to the podcast for more, but I'm loving it.
Moneyball did something similar, his character doesn't exist, instead he's an amalgam of a bunch of people where it was easier narratively to condense them into one person.
My spoiler policy has been if it hasn't happened in the show yet but seems almost certain to be in a future episode I try to be considerate and use the spoiler tag so people can make their own decision. I imagine most people have heard of Chernobyl and may have a vague sense of what happened but may not know specifics so very possible this is new and fresh material.
Same. We need more focused tight shows. These bloated multi-million dollar, multi-season epics aren't necessary for entertainment to still be compelling.
Ugh all that false bravado of Soviet propaganda seems to seep everywhere making many people overconfident to the point of negligence.
I'm being distracted from the show by how much I love the font of the title cards, as well as the subtle chromatic effect it has.
Can I get this font somewhere?
Edit: I mean, it looks like Futura but I really want that color it's going for.
Can I get this font somewhere?
Edit: I mean, it looks like Futura but I really want that color it's going for.
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This is a terrific show. Have to wonder how many people this show prompted to turn to looking up info on the Internet and spending hours looking into Chernobyl and other events.
For me personally, I got to reading more about Hanford out in Eastern Washington. I'm about 240 miles away and from what I read, WOW. I didn't know some specifics, around how they need to stir the mixture "periodically" that is kept there to keep it from exploding?!
Some fun reading:
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/welcome-most-toxic-place-america-n689141
https://thebulletin.org/2017/05/a-predictable-nuclear-accident-at-hanford/
For me personally, I got to reading more about Hanford out in Eastern Washington. I'm about 240 miles away and from what I read, WOW. I didn't know some specifics, around how they need to stir the mixture "periodically" that is kept there to keep it from exploding?!
Some fun reading:
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/welcome-most-toxic-place-america-n689141
https://thebulletin.org/2017/05/a-predictable-nuclear-accident-at-hanford/
The grim and understated heroism of Colonel-General Pikalov volunteering to take the close-up reading from the truck, the calm voice of the Lead One pilot before things go wrong and the engineers stepping up to drain the tanks from under the reactor... all these things could have been schmaltzy, underlined moments but they're perfectly pitched and depicted. Very Russian too.
I like how they use actual spoken Ukrainian here and there.
Series continues to chill to the bone.
I like how they use actual spoken Ukrainian here and there.
Series continues to chill to the bone.
This show does an incredible job of making it terrifying. When all those people were just watching the plant burn on the bridge while the fallout was snowing down on them. *chills*
You know the radiation is intense when your own flashlight nopes out.
Maybe.
The clean up robots have to be replaced by "bio-robots" later on, after all.
They had to photograph the "Elephant's Foot" from around a corner with a mirror because the radiation would ruin cameras that got too close
The creative license they took with the Khomyuk character makes a lot of sense, it's just better to do it this way than show some disorganized mess of scientists.
That's called chromatic aberration:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromatic_aberration
It's an effect used a ton on the far sides of the left and right of most first-person shooter games today and a few others not in that genre. I lost count, honestly lol It's also used (shoddily, gaudily, and annoyingly) in many movies today.
The effect rarely looks good because it's over done and over used – but I am pleased to say this is how it should be used. Styllistically, it works perfectly considering the circumstances with radiation.
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Its surreal every time someone learning about the radiation asks if it is the Americans. Today it seems ludicrous for the United States to stealth nuke someone that it hasn't declared war against, and even then we would hesitate to use it until it is a last resort, but it was the cold war.
Those 2 physicists and those 3 guys, if based on actual events are some of the biggest heroes in human history.
Those 2 physicists and those 3 guys, if based on actual events are some of the biggest heroes in human history.
The female physicist is a composite character representing the hundreds of scientists in the USSR who rallied to help manage the Chernobyl disaster.
It's not mentioned on screen, but Craig Mazin (the writer/showrunner) mentioned in the podcast Legasov didn't know that much about the design of the reactor. He dealt more with theory than engineering. So other experts were needed to keep him in the know.
That zoom out shot of Legasov/Shcherbina on the roof of the evacuated Pripyat buildings was *chef kiss*.
How bad would it have been if the reactors blew up? I know that they said that the Ukraine and Belarus would be uninhabitable for a century but what else would've happened? Would the Soviet Union ended shortly thereafter instead of in '91? Would there have been a refugee crisis in Europe that is ten times worse than what is going on today? How would America be affected?
Yeah megaton seems to be orders of magnitude off, as that is a lot more powerful explosion than Hiroshima bomb. It would still have destroyed all the reactors, though, rendering massive parts of Belorus and Ukraine uninhabitable.
On the new Scriptnotes podcast Mazin speaks to Christopher McQuarrie; McQuarrie was really angling to be the director for this during early talks.
Hard to really say. That large of an explosion and fallout would collapse the USSR, wipeout the food supply of Western Europe, and displace untold amount of people.
It would probably lead to a worldwide economic collapse with it. We, today, would still be recovering from it.
2nd episode was great as well, it's crazy how Chernobyl is still dangerous today and will be for a long time. With the new sarcophagus in place, at least the possible danger in the next time is under control. It's crazy how huge that thing is and what had to be done to move it in place, as they could not build it directly over the old one (radiation still too high)
The show made me remember my childhood in Germany, when we were told to not play outside, the local playgrounds were closed (sand was removed/replaced) and mushrooms were not to be eaten/collected in the woods.
The show made me remember my childhood in Germany, when we were told to not play outside, the local playgrounds were closed (sand was removed/replaced) and mushrooms were not to be eaten/collected in the woods.
