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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Here's a better version of the Discovery Channel show. It goes into the history of the critical people in charge at the reactor and how their minute-by-minute decisions, poor communication between the reactor controllers and the feed water people, led to catastrophe.
I like it because even tho its not fictionalized, I felt dread and horror knowing what was about to happen.

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Originally posted by JAYNEZTOWN:

I watched 2 eps and I think its the best show on tv at the moment and the best series for a long while

the show is fantastic

The history is hard, morbid and brutal science stuff is fine because they break it down like a Discovery Nat geo show where they try expalin stuff like you expalin to a child, if you throw technical stuff at people watching they might not get it but you see it from the view of different cast / characters who slowly see what is energy power, they learn what is fission and radioactive decay, what kind of damage can be done to an animal or the human body, what is radiation, you learn all these things as the people on the ground might have been suddenly forced to learn about the disaster around them.

While it is bleak it could also make you think....Are we going to evolve or are we doomed. Why when we listen with our radio telescope why is there nothing out there in the stars, no alien life in the universe? Or is there a higher life but it no longer will talk to us as an 'intelligent' civilistaion? Is it the nature intelligence to be corrupted is it a destiny of civilistaions to invent things that eventually destory themselves, are we always going to lie and cover up? They who do this science say we can also collect almost limitless 'free energy' from the Sun and the Winds. So Why the Nuclear push and Is Nuclear power the answer to an 'Energy Crisis' is mankind ever going to make Nuclear 'Safe'?


I think this show is top level, its respecful, dramatic and truthful although it does have moments of hollywood tv drama it is also real and historical, it shows the idiocy, the corrupt nature of people and of Russian communist bureaucracy. The acting is top, the writing very well done, to score weird creepy soundtrack and the music and camera work complements the entire story. More scary than most horror because this story is based on reality the creeping dread atmosphere unfolding.


There is a real genuine feel to the series despite its drama, people might see Left or Trump or whatever in it but I don't really see any left vs right stage show politics. I see a government corrupt during a massive crisis that would wreck the town, the cities, destory lives of people and change the lands, although on the idea of left and right I do agree the socialist leftist USSR system was a terrible political system. Some talk about accidents and disasters like Three Mile Island, the Oil Spills, Fukushima but this historical Chernobyl still ranks as the world's worst man-made catastrophes, maybe its a lesson about cover ups the corrupt secrecy surrounding the disaster, great actors, great writing, great film work.

a great show

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What HBO’s “Chernobyl” Got Right, and What It Got Terribly Wrong

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Chernobyl: Truth is more horrible than fiction

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Svetlana Alexievich, the Russian-language Belarusian writer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 2015, for her work with oral history, has said that the book she found easiest to report was her book about Chernobyl. (Its English title, depending on the translation, is “Voices from Chernobyl” or “Chernobyl Prayer.”) The reason, she said, was that none of her interlocutors—people who lived in the area affected by the disaster—knew how they were supposed to talk about it. For her other books, Alexievich interviewed people about their experience of the Second World War, the Soviet war in Afghanistan, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. For all of these other events and periods in Russian history, there were widely adopted narratives, habits of speaking that, Alexievich found, had a way of overshadowing actual personal experience and private memory. But when she asked survivors about Chernobyl they accessed their own stories more easily, because the story hadn’t been told. The Soviet media disseminated very little information about the disaster. There were no books or movies or songs. There was a vacuum.

Alexievich’s book about Chernobyl was published in Russian in 1997, more than ten years after one of the reactors at the Chernobyl power plant exploded, in what was probably the worst nuclear accident in history. One of the most remarkable facts about Chernobyl is that the narrative vacuum had persisted for that long, and, in fact, it has persisted since: Alexievich’s book came to prominence, both in Russia and in the West, only following her Nobel Prize win. There have been stories in the media in Russia and abroad, many of them on the odd tourist industry that has sprung up in the disaster zone; there has been a BBC documentary and a bizarre American-Ukrainian documentary. But in the past year two books, one by a historian and the other by a journalist, have attempted to tell the definitive documentary story of the disaster. Finally, the HBO series “Chernobyl,” the fifth and final episode of which aired Monday, tells a fictionalized version. It being television, and very well-received television at that, it is the series, rather than the books, that will probably finally fill the vacuum where the story of Chernobyl should be. This is not a good thing.

Before I get to what the series got so terribly wrong, I should acknowledge what it got right. In “Chernobyl,” which was created and written by Craig Mazin and directed by Johan Renck, the material culture of the Soviet Union is reproduced with an accuracy that has never before been seen in Western television or film—or, for that matter, in Russian television or film. Clothes, objects, and light itself seem to come straight out of nineteen-eighties Ukraine, Belarus, and Moscow. (There are tiny errors, like a holiday uniform worn by schoolchildren on a non-holiday, or teen-agers carrying little kids’ school bags, but this is truly splitting hairs.) Soviet-born Americans—and, indeed, Soviet-born Russians—have been tweeting and blogging in awe at the uncanny precision with which the physical surroundings of Soviet people have been reproduced. The one noticeable mistake in this respect concerns the series makers’ apparent ignorance of the vast divisions between different socioeconomic classes in the Soviet Union: in the series, Valery Legasov (Jared Harris), a member of the Academy of Sciences, lives in nearly the same kind of squalor as a fireman in the Ukrainian town of Pripyat. In fact, Legasov would have lived in an entirely different kind of squalor than the fireman did.

Herein lies one of the series’ biggest flaws: its failure to accurately portray Soviet relationships of power. There are exceptions, flashes of brilliance that shed light on the bizarre workings of Soviet hierarchies. In the first episode, for example, during an emergency meeting of the Pripyat ispolkom, the town’s governing council, an elder statesman, Zharkov (Donald Sumpter), delivers a chilling, and chillingly accurate, speech, urging his compatriots to “have faith.” “We seal off the city,” Zharkov says. “No one leaves. And cut the phone lines. Contain the spread of misinformation. That is how we keep the people from undermining the fruits of their own labor.” This statement has everything: the bureaucratic indirectness of Soviet speech, the privileging of “fruits of labor” over the people who created them, and, of course, the utter disregard for human life.

The final episode of “Chernobyl” also contains a scene that encapsulates the Soviet system perfectly. During the trial of three men who have been deemed responsible for the disaster, a member of the Central Committee overrules the judge, who then looks to the prosecutor for direction—and the prosecutor gives that direction with a nod. This is exactly how Soviet courts worked: they did the bidding of the Central Committee, and the prosecutor wielded more power than the judge.

Unfortunately, apart from these striking moments, the series often veers between caricature and folly. In Episode 2, for example, the Central Committee member Boris Shcherbina (Stellan Skarsgård) threatens to have Legasov shot if he doesn’t tell him how a nuclear reactor works. There are a lot of people throughout the series who appear to act out of fear of being shot. This is inaccurate: summary executions, or even delayed executions on orders of a single apparatchik, were not a feature of Soviet life after the nineteen-thirties. By and large, Soviet people did what they were told without being threatened with guns or any punishment.

Similarly repetitive and ridiculous are the many scenes of heroic scientists confronting intransigent bureaucrats by explicitly criticizing the Soviet system of decision-making. In Episode 3, for example, Legasov asks, rhetorically, “Forgive me—maybe I’ve just spent too much time in my lab, or maybe I’m just stupid. Is this really the way it all works? An uninformed, arbitrary decision that will cost who knows how many lives that is made by some apparatchik, some career Party man?” Yes, of course this is the way it works, and, no, he hasn’t been in his lab so long that he didn’t realize that this is how it works. The fact of the matter is, if he didn’t know how it worked, he would never have had a lab.

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.

The Harvard historian Serhii Plokhy’s 2018 book on Chernobyl reconstructs the sequence of events and assigns blame. In effect, Plokhy argues, it was the Soviet system that created Chernobyl and made the explosion inevitable. Glimmers of this understanding appear in the HBO series, too. In the final episode, Legasov, testifying as a witness, tells a Soviet court that the disaster happened because the tips of the control rods were made of graphite, which sped up the reaction, when the control rod was supposed to slow it down. When asked, by the prosecutor, why the reactor was designed this way, Legasov cites the same reason that other safety precautions are ignored and other corners are cut: “It’s cheaper.” He seems to be damning the whole system.

More often, however, we are given to believe that the three men who were put on trial—and especially one of them, a particularly unattractive villain by the name of Anatoly Dyatlov (Paul Ritter)—are to blame. We see him strong-arming younger, better men into actions that will ultimately lead to catastrophe. All because, it seems, he wants a promotion. In fact, it wasn’t the carrot of a single promotion, or even several promotions, and it wasn’t one nasty and abusive boss. It was the system, made up primarily of pliant men and women, that cut its own corners, ignored its own precautions, and ultimately blew up its own nuclear reactor for no good reason except that this was how things were done. The viewer is invited to fantasize that, if not for Dyatlov, the better men would have done the right thing and the fatal flaw in the reactor, and the system itself, might have remained latent. This is a lie.

It would be harder to show a system digging its own grave instead of an ambitious, evil man causing the disaster. In the same way, it’s harder to see dozens of scientists looking for clues when you can just create a single fantasy character who will have all the good disaster-fighting traits. This is the great-men (and one woman) narrative of history, where it’s a few steps, a few decisions, made by a few men that matter, rather than the mess that humans make and from which they suffer.

It was the stories of those who suffered that most interested Alexievich. The series actually makes use of one of the stories in her book: the story of Lyudmilla Ignatenko (Jessie Buckley), who broke the rules by staying with her firefighter husband in the hospital until he died, even though she was pregnant. (She lied about it.) Her baby lived for four hours after birth; she had apparently absorbed the radiation, saving her mother’s life. Ignatenko’s monologue in Alexievich’s book is some of the most memorable reading I have ever done. (I once asked Alexievich if people actually talk like that; she agreed that the quality of Ignatenko’s speech was “Shakespearean.”) In the series, though, Ignatenko’s story is partly shown and partly told by Khomyuk. In the great-men version of history, only the powerful have speaking parts. Even the house pets left in the “exclusion zone” after people are evacuated are shown through the eyes of men who are sent there to execute them. We never see these pets through the eyes of their owners. We hardly see any of the evacuees at all, and we are given only one indication that some people resisted and refused to leave: an old woman who, at the beginning of Episode 4, obstinately continues milking her cow after she is repeatedly ordered to move.

Testifying in court during the final episode, Legasov says, “Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid. That is how an RBMK reactor core explodes. Lies.” One would think that a vacuum created by lies could be filled by truth. Instead, it is filled by an entirely fictional, fantastical trial at which a large group of people—scientists, we are told—are given an accurate assessment of events in an accessible, brilliant speech, the likes of which Soviet courts didn’t feature.

Legasov gets the last word. He speaks of “the gift of Chernobyl: where I once would fear the cost of truth, I only ask”—the screen fades to black—“what is the cost of lies?” One might say that the cost of lies is more lies. One might say that these are fantasies, embellishments, shortcuts, and even translations. Whatever they are, they are not the truth.

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Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
And AOC believes we can create tubes under the ocean for trains to travel internationally.

Good luck with the earthquakes, water pressure... Cthulhu.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Originally posted by reaverfan:

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Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
And AOC believes we can create tubes under the ocean for trains to travel internationally.

Good luck with the earthquakes, water pressure... Cthulhu.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Who told you that? One of your Nazi buddies on 8 chan?

Dumb, dumb, dumb dumb...

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Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:
I have heard that this HBO show is about Trump travelling back in time to Chernobyl, so that the story is really about Trump.

Sounds like more SJW Science Fiction to me.

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Ukrainian historians of the Chernobyl disaster blame the communist state machine, whose mismanagement led to the biggest catastrophe in the history of the “peaceful atom.”

The Kremlin **** reportedly **** is pushing its own film about the event, blaming the CIA, which is only to be expected.

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:

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Ukrainian historians of the Chernobyl disaster blame the communist state machine, whose mismanagement led to the biggest catastrophe in the history of the “peaceful atom.”

The Kremlin **** reportedly **** is pushing its own film about the event, blaming the CIA, which is only to be expected.

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Oh look, SECOND has stooped to just making shit up! This is called "vaporware" ... otherwise known as farts!

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The Hollywood Report says it ...

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:

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The Hollywood Report says it ...

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Yep. The Hollywood Reporter. I think that says it all.

Maybe this belongs in the "predictions" thread so we don't lose track of what the Hollywood Reporter predicted. Let me know when it comes out.

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:

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The Hollywood Report says it ...

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Yep. The Hollywood Reporter. I think that says it all.

Maybe this belongs in the "predictions" thread so we don't lose track of what the Hollywood Reporter predicted. Let me know when it comes out.

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Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:

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The Hollywood Report says it ...

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Yep. The Hollywood Reporter. I think that says it all.

Maybe this belongs in the "predictions" thread so we don't lose track of what the Hollywood Reporter predicted. Let me know when it comes out.

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He even lies about the Hollywood Reporter, or just can't keep his lies straight.
He lies claiming a film is being made, without any handy linkies. Then when his lie is exposed, he provides a link to The Hollywood Reporter story about a TV Series, not a film.

Maybe these Russian Trolls don't know any difference between Films and TV Series?

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Originally posted by second:
JewelStaiteFan, you are so fucking stupid it is no surprise you support Trump. This is why I fire Republicans from my business: you guys are more trouble than you are worth because you barely understand what your job is, much like the semi-incompetent people designing, building, maintaining, and operating the nuclear power plants at Chernobyl.

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The Hollywood Report says it ... SECONDHAND

Yep. The Hollywood Reporter. I think that says it all.
Maybe this belongs in the "predictions" thread so we don't lose track of what the Hollywood Reporter predicted. Let me know when it comes out. SIGNYM

Signym, isn't The Reporter a tiny bit different than me making up the story, as you accused?- SECONDHAND

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JewelStaiteFan, you are so fucking stupid it is no surprise you support Trump. This is why I fire Republicans from my business: you guys are more trouble than you are worth because you barely understand what your job is, much like the semi-incompetent people designing, building, maintaining, and operating the nuclear power plants at Chernobyl.-SECONDRATE

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:

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JewelStaiteFan, you are so fucking stupid it is no surprise you support Trump. This is why I fire Republicans from my business: you guys are more trouble than you are worth because you barely understand what your job is, much like the semi-incompetent people designing, building, maintaining, and operating the nuclear power plants at Chernobyl.-SECONDRATE

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Not only do you post politically-motivated death threats and death wishes, and claim that you hate many Americans, you also fire people for political reasons.

Wow, it's a good thing you haven't been doxxed. A lot of investigators might be interested in you.

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Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Unfortunately, it seems that he's already off the hook for firing people based off of their political beliefs. At least in 2019, there doesn't appear to be any grounds for legal recourse.

There are, however, some fairly high profile cases making their way up the courts regarding this as we speak.

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Originally posted by second:
Please cite even one of those cases, 6ix.

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Federal laws don’t prohibit political discrimination. Neither do Texas laws, comrade.

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Originally posted by second:
You know when you can't hear your speakers, and you keep turning various volume controls up higher and higher in confusion, and then someone hits the mute button and there's a deafening blast of sound? That's basically what happened at Chernobyl.

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Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

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Originally posted by second:
Please cite even one of those cases, 6ix.

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You've got Google. Use it.

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Federal laws don’t prohibit political discrimination. Neither do Texas laws, comrade.

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Yup. That's what I JUST SAID.

Laws change, however. Every day.


Your gross confessions here are the very reason why they do.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Originally posted by second:
After watching the HBO miniseries, I knew there was more to the science of this. I've also heard a lot of stuff from both credible and non-credible sources that just doesn't hold up to scrutiny.
What /Actually/ Happened at Chernobyl
Why Chernobyl Exploded - The Real Physics Behind The Reactor

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Originally posted by captaincrunch:

Not sure if you have seen AMC's The Terror. A mini series starring the same actor that portrayed Legasov, Jared Harris. He's pretty good in that series as well - such an unlikely actor, which is cool. It's a Ridley Scott produced show and is quite good imho.

Bonus, season 2, The Terror: Infamy, premieres on August 12th on AMC. It shifts the setting to World War II and the focus to Japanese internment camps.

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Originally posted by second:

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Originally posted by captaincrunch:

Not sure if you have seen AMC's The Terror. A mini series starring the same actor that portrayed Legasov, Jared Harris. He's pretty good in that series as well - such an unlikely actor, which is cool. It's a Ridley Scott produced show and is quite good imho.

Bonus, season 2, The Terror: Infamy, premieres on August 12th on AMC. It shifts the setting to World War II and the focus to Japanese internment camps.

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I saw The Terror. I won't see The Terror:Infamy. Those tales don't entertain me about supernatural monsters with human-like intent to terrorize, possibly because of the book "Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion". I can see what mental button those tales are pressing, hammering on the human control panel. www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-19-506901-3

The book shows that most people will systematically anthropomorphize -- they attribute human characteristics to nonhuman things and events. People find a wide range of humanlike beings plausible: Gods, spirits, abominable snowmen. The Terror had a snowman and The Terror:Infamy will have spirits but both shows will be pushing the same button on the audience: fear the supernatural.

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Originally posted by captaincrunch:
Truly amazing mini series. 5 episodes. The production design is remarkable, music brilliant, acting... etc etc etc.
The story of the ultimate price of state sponsored lies.

Highly recommend.

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Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Fight lies with lies, huh?

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Originally posted by second:

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Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Fight lies with lies, huh?

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Next you're gonna complain that astronomy has not discovered 5 Suns orbiting each other like in Firefly's 'Verse and closer than 35 lightyears to Terra.

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The HBO series "Chernobyl" gets plenty of things right about the nuclear power plant disaster that most likely exposed hundreds of thousands of people to radiation. But to adapt the story for television, the "Chernobyl" writer and producer Craig Mazin invented a character and adjusted the chronology of a few events.

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