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Chernobyl (miniseries)


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11 hours ago, Ramsay B. said:

From a quick search it is said that a person who is internally contaminated, like the husband, can spread the radioactive material through his blood, sweat or urine. So hugging and touching him was in fact somewhat dangerous. 

Wow that’s pretty bad!, I’m guessing it wouldn’t be as severe as the people who were exposed to the original material though because the concentration would be far less?.

Either way I agree with the other poster who thought there might be mercy killings of the afflicted, think I’d rather an AK47 to the head than radiation sickness!.

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Good god this show is tense! Which is incredible because I know roughly whats going to happen. Yet I'm still on the edge of my seat shouting at people for being so stupid. 

Yep, definitely one of the best things I've seen this year. Have to say Jared Harris is brilliant. I always think back to his character in the Expanse because its SO far away from most of the characters he tends to play. I could watch him in anything. 

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Been watching the show this weekend. 

It's absolutely brilliant. There's an almost cosmic, Lovecraftian dread about the whole affair; the insidious, invisible horror killing people off and poisoning the land whilst bureaucrats bumble around not really understanding what nightmare they are living through.
The fact it was a real event (in fact it still IS a real event and will be for thousands of years) makes it even more terrifying I think than any horror nonsense spewed out of Hollywood these days.

I've read quite a lot about the accident and cleanup and my father works in the industry so i've grown up with nuclear power just being "normal" i guess you could say. It's quite a badly understood science really and a lot of the general public just look at something like Chernobyl and assume that this was standard in the industry.
I hope to god that this series at least shows some people that the accident and all the mess around it was far, far from normal and absolutely not the sort of thing that would happen in many other countries. Shoddy construction & maintenance, poor safety practices, unwillingness to question the party lies, unwillingness to admit to any wrong doing, lack of concern for human life.....it all wove a nightmare that could really only happen in the USSR.

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17 hours ago, dooog said:

Brilliant show, easily the best television of the year. Quite grim though, as I was watching E1 I couldn't stop myself thinking how every single one of these people must be dead now.

They're not, though. Good example is that the three guys who went into the power station at the end of Episode 2 to close the sluice gates are all still alive.

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10 minutes ago, Werthead said:

They're not, though. Good example is that the three guys who went into the power station at the end of Episode 2 to close the sluice gates are all still alive.

Two of them are, although one of them died back in 2005 (but not from anything radiation-related - it was heart disease). 

I've watched the first two episodes at least three times each - they're incredibly re-watchable. I'm trying to work myself up to watch the third episode again, but it's so incredibly sad to see what happened with the firefighters. Jared Harris is excellent unsurprisingly - only thing I can think of where he was underwhelming was as Moriarty in Sherlock Holmes 2, and that's because they didn't give him much to work with. 

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8 minutes ago, Spring Bass said:

Two of them are, although one of them died back in 2005 (but not from anything radiation-related - it was heart disease). 

I've watched the first two episodes at least three times each - they're incredibly re-watchable. I'm trying to work myself up to watch the third episode again, but it's so incredibly sad to see what happened with the firefighters. Jared Harris is excellent unsurprisingly - only thing I can think of where he was underwhelming was as Moriarty in Sherlock Holmes 2, and that's because they didn't give him much to work with. 

Episode 3 is genuinely traumatic.

The podcast is very interesting as well. Apparently when Emily Watson's real-life counterpart tried to interview the third witness, they were hampered by the fact that "he no longer had a face."

The first draft of the script apparently tried to recreate that and HBO - HBO! - came back with notes and said, "We really, really do not need to see that under any circumstances." And the writer agreed so they just had the reaction shot.

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Everyone is raving about this, but it just sounds so depressing and heavy that I don't think I can face it. 

Sky are currently selling it as 'best TV show ever' based on the IMDB score, is this hyperbole or should it be in the conversation?

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30 minutes ago, BigFatCoward said:

Everyone is raving about this, but it just sounds so depressing and heavy that I don't think I can face it. 

Sky are currently selling it as 'best TV show ever' based on the IMDB score, is this hyperbole or should it be in the conversation?

I assumed it would be simply too depressing to even contemplate watching but I gripped me almost immediately. 

Its not something to watch before bed though, it stays with you.

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I’d be interested to see the viewing figures for this. I feel like there should be a massive spike in viewership between episodes 1 and 2 (or maybe 2 and 3). Maybe its just anecdotal but after the first episode there seemed very little talk or publicity and then it suddenly seemed to explode. Wonder if the ratings reflect this

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13 hours ago, Triskele said:

ETA:  There was something I couldn't quite follow in this episode when Skaarsgard blows up on the phone when the were observing the roof, but I didn't really catch what it was about.  Something related to what they were hearing the party was going to say publicly about the whole situation?  

The Soviets had asked the West Germans for a robot to try and collect the graphite on the worst of the 3 roofs. However, the Soviets lied about the level of the radiation so the robot was always doomed to fail. That's what he was so pissed about, after everything that has happened, the Central Committee is STILL toeing the "This doesn't happen in the Soviet Union" line.

This might have been the grimmest episode yet. The job the 3 soldiers had was brutal. 

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The...I don't know that you call it music...the sound effects?  Throughout so many scenes.  It's hisses and static like.  It's like that odd musical instument who's name I forget, a thurma-something maybe?  It's the sound effects from a video game as you walk around, I'm of a mind of Wolfenstein game or the original Halo...

I don't know of that makes any sense, but it all just adds to the atmosphere of the show...

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Quote

 

Sky are currently selling it as 'best TV show ever' based on the IMDB score, is this hyperbole or should it be in the conversation?

 

 

Based on what's happened so far, absolutely. This is up there with Threads and Edge of Darkness as an examination of human morality and life versus the power of science, except that Chernobyl gains a lot more from being a true story.

1 hour ago, Jaxom 1974 said:

The...I don't know that you call it music...the sound effects?  Throughout so many scenes.  It's hisses and static like.  It's like that odd musical instument who's name I forget, a thurma-something maybe?  It's the sound effects from a video game as you walk around, I'm of a mind of Wolfenstein game or the original Halo...

I don't know of that makes any sense, but it all just adds to the atmosphere of the show...

The TV show has the same sense of desolate, alien strangeness as the STALKER video games, which are set in and around the Chernobyl exclusion zone, with a similar nod to the Geiger counter as background noise (something that the Fallout games also use).

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9 hours ago, BigFatCoward said:

Everyone is raving about this, but it just sounds so depressing and heavy that I don't think I can face it. 

Sky are currently selling it as 'best TV show ever' based on the IMDB score, is this hyperbole or should it be in the conversation?

I won’t lie to you, yes it’s depressing, yes it’s bleak as fuck and we all know it doesn’t end well at all but at the same time it’s fantastic tv, the dialogue and scenes between some of the actors, the tension and some of it being really eerie.

 

Also to everyone else here I had an article in the news feed on my phone the other day about the author of a book called Mignight in Chernobyl watching the tv show and comparing it to the actual events, some was very accurate and some was dramatised for television according to them.

Has anyone here read the book?, I’m curious about reading it after I’ve finished what I’m currently reading.

My Russian partner finds it very interesting to watch too, she was born about 18 months after Chernobyl in the dying days of the Soviet Union so that era of history is pretty interesting to her, she finds the accents hilarious though.

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I've been on holiday but this show was top of my catch-up list. Episode 3 thoughts. This show is really doing the "HBO of" on the disaster genre in the way they have with cop (the wire), westerns (deadwood) fantasy (GOT) genres. It is at it's heart a disaster show with all the tropes of sacrifice, stupidity, science and horror but in such a gripping and startlingly "mature" ("intelligent and dramatic") way.

Case in point with the wife. Utterly idiotic and frustrating to have her recklessly ignore very good advice but the way it is handled/acted upon is such that you understand the wife a) doesn't understand the dangers (most of the staff probably don't) and b) she loves her husband and can't watch him die alone.

The acting is top notch. Harris is great as frustrated scientist/underling. I loved his sassy "has a half life of 24,000 years do i think it's safe to say the problem will last more than a Lifetime". It justs makes episode 1's opening scene that more painful knowing what ultimately happens. I also liked the "you are naive enough to not be a threat" from skarsgard.

While they portray the politicians and military leaders as a bit useless the depiction of the working class has been great and a reminder there were aspects of communism that were noble. The miners were brilliant and I loved what they did to the coal minister.

On 5/23/2019 at 9:26 AM, Ramsay B. said:

Yes, a horrifying but excellent episode. Learning that the effects of radiation sickness recedes for a day or two then basically goes into overdrive(at least in severe cases) was particularly hellish. 

Amazing how close this was to being a much bigger disaster too. The perfect storm of incompetence, government denial, chaos, etc. Pretty fucking scary. 

I knew the actress playing the wife, Jessie Buckley, looked familiar. She was a standout in Taboo, and I need to watch Beast now.

Yeah, the radiation pretty much stops all of your cells from dividing meaning when they die there aren't any replacements. So the symptoms progress as the various life cycles of certsin types of cell come to the end of their life cycle (skin, blood, muscle, liver etc all have very different lifespans). 

Beast is a very good film although i personally wished it had ended 10 minutes earlier as I'd have preferred that ending. Others love the actual ending though.

On 5/24/2019 at 12:01 AM, Ramsay B. said:

From a quick search it is said that a person who is internally contaminated, like the husband, can spread the radioactive material through his blood, sweat or urine. So hugging and touching him was in fact somewhat dangerous. 

There's a reason they had lead coffins and a cement burial. Again it feels like sci-fi horror but this actually happened.

 

On 5/23/2019 at 2:27 PM, Trebla said:

What made the body horrors even more terrifying was the reveal that they couldn't even give the worst victims pain medicine because of the breakdown of cell structure.The agony they must have felt is the thing of nightmares. 

Honestly a bullet to the head would be the humane thing in those cases. I'm wondering if anyone will take that option if there are others who are exposed that badly. I wasn't sure whether the 3 volunteers from epidode 2 were amongst the dead in episode 3?

What is surprising is the relatively low body count from the disaster. I guess long term deaths are ongoing, hard to prove and may be hidden/lowered for political reasons. It's still terrifying to think the explosion they averted from episode 2 could have occurred.  

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Watched ep3 last night and just thinking about what those guys went through has truly stuck with me. That one shot of the black nose and his rotting body is going to take me a while to forget. 

The thought that the explosion mentioned in episode 2 might have ever happened is absolutely terrifying, the sheer damage it would have caused is immense. We are very lucky in fact that it didn't happen. 

The one big takeaway from the show however is how the show deals with peoples perceptions of the truth. From that first episode there is an effort by everyone to install their own version of truth on events, even if they are obviously wrong. It becomes apparent that most people are more concerned with protecting themselves from liability than they are of doing the right thing or even worrying about what is happening. While we can all stand back and think this is a symptom of a communist system, I have seen these parallels many times in my working life in numerous companies. 

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48 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

Watched ep3 last night and just thinking about what those guys went through has truly stuck with me. That one shot of the black nose and his rotting body is going to take me a while to forget. 

The thought that the explosion mentioned in episode 2 might have ever happened is absolutely terrifying, the sheer damage it would have caused is immense. We are very lucky in fact that it didn't happen. 

The one big takeaway from the show however is how the show deals with peoples perceptions of the truth. From that first episode there is an effort by everyone to install their own version of truth on events, even if they are obviously wrong. It becomes apparent that most people are more concerned with protecting themselves from liability than they are of doing the right thing or even worrying about what is happening. While we can all stand back and think this is a symptom of a communist system, I have seen these parallels many times in my working life in numerous companies. 

Totally agree and i think the human element is perhaps the most dangerous. The scene where both the scientists were saying the math didn't add up for why the meltdown happened and one of them said the only way to the truth was in talking to those involved - not on a piece of paper. I don't think the dying scientists were to blame beyond their faith the red button would work. I'm curious if the cause turns out to be corner cutting on the "red button" akin to the geiger counters that only measured to a certain level despite it being clear protocols were designed to respond to much higher counts.

Also wonder whether we knew such disasters were possible before it happened or if this was just in hindsight.

HBO/sky Atlantic definitely need to sign up the writers/directors for follow up shows. Maybe they could do other disasters (given the sane level of research) or I'd trudt them with something completely different based on the talent on show here

Edit: wow, i just looked up writers previous work and just shows you can't judge too much on previous output. The guy did comedies like scary movie and hangover. Clearly he was working in wrong genre. Makes me think the so-called unknowns in lord of the rings may be better than their cv suggests

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i was really taken by the self sacrifice displayed on the show by so many people.  My guess is that such a socialist society is built on the idea of self sacrifice and the good of the many over the self.

I would guess that a similar incident in the west wouldn’t result in the same level of selflessness, with our focus on the self. Instead the government would be bankrupted from being constantly sued.

Both systems have their flaws and strengths I guess 

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54 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

i was really taken by the self sacrifice displayed on the show by so many people.  My guess is that such a socialist society is built on the idea of self sacrifice and the good of the many over the self.

I would guess that a similar incident in the west wouldn’t result in the same level of selflessness, with our focus on the self. Instead the government would be bankrupted from being constantly sued.

Both systems have their flaws and strengths I guess 

They'd probably have to offer huge cash incentives and/or force armed/rescue Services to do it. They certainly couldn't get away with lying about it in the long term.

I hadn't thought about litigation but i imagine you are correct that if it had happened it would bankrupt a country. I guess they'd try and worm out by saying anyone who moved within the affected area after the plant was built knew of potential risks. That or they'd simply have to refuse to pay out. It will be interesting to see what happened in Chernobyl and Fukushima in this regard.

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