WATCHED - Chernobyl

On the 26th April 1986 the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine experienced a catastrophic explosion in one of its four reactors.  It was the world's worst nuclear accident, and over 31 people died from the immediate explosion. Yet modern estimates of those who died subsequently as a result of being exposed to the radiation from it, vary from 4,000 to over 60,000+ across Europe. These figures may be serious underestimations.

This five part mini series by HBO, painstakingly recreates the disaster and its calamitous aftermath. It is done with great realism, that you almost feel the radiated dust coming towards you as you watch. The out of control nuclear reactor burns with an intense glow as firefighters battle it.. You see the process by which someone who has been exposed to such huge levels of radiation, what horrific and painful things that does to the human body.   

What makes this tragedy still more horrific is how the people in charge of running Chernobyl try to downplay the severity of what's happened. They have radiation scanners many of which are faulty, though they can't read beyond a certain level anyway, but they blithely promulgate a lower manageable figure that they know to be incorrect. The true radiation level at Chernobyl was hundred's and hundred's of times more. The male Soviet hierarchy seemed to be all about pretending to be competent in order to gain further career advancement. People below a certain level of responsibility who had crticisms, were either ignored, ridiculed or told they didn't know what they were talking about. All of which meant the initial response to the disaster, was to deny that it was an explosion in the core at all, to treat it as a fire on a roof that could easily be controlled.

As an expert in atomic energy Valery Legasov (Jared Harris) is brought in by the government to advise them what to do. Initially he too has to fight against a level of leaden bureaucracy that really doesn't want to hear what he has to say. They don't want the world to know the Soviet Union has nuclear facilities that are incompetently managed and dangerous. He is sent to Chernobyl with Boris Cherbina ( Stellan Skarsgard ) to assess and make recommendations. Ulana Khomyuk ( Emily Watson ) a nuclear physicist from the Minsk, tells Valery that the reactor is at a critical stage and could well generate a thermo-nuclear explosion of massive proportions and millions of deaths across Europe. 

Just one of many crises they have to overcome, but each time they are overcome at the sacrificial cost of human lives. Men who heroically take the risk of going into the plant to open water gates or miners who spend days and days digging a critical tunnel under the reactor. The weight of this moral burden weighs heavy on all those responsible who are taking those decisions. Once the reactor is stablised, then they have to create an exclusion zone, including lots of critical clinical care and mopping up operations. The horror never seems to stop.

As it reaches the penultimate and final episodes, still more human lives are ruined. In preparing the reactor to be housed in a secure facility,  robotic removal of radioactive matter from the roofs around the reactor fails, so in the end humans have to do it. Women exposed to radiation through their fireman husbands, give birth to babies that cannot survive more than a few hours of life. Legasov is sent to tell the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna what happened, and is compelled by the government to lie by omission, to not tell them about the role structural flaws played in disaster. But later at the trial of the three engineers in charge on the night of the explosion, Legasov does expose the real truth. He loses his job and two years later kills himself, an act which itself ensured the world would now know what really happened on the 26th April 1986. His words 'Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth' resonating strongly with the shallow zeitgeist of our present time.

This series was compelling to watch, but I found it deeply deeply disturbing. My sleep was affected considerably as I tossed and turned restlessly through out the nights afterwards. There are a number of things which make it dangerous to see this as a completely verbatim account of what happened. Some of it draws on a collection of accounts Voices From Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich, which she has been accused of inserting her own views and analysis into. The script created the fictional character of Ulana Kmoyuk as a conduit for the work of numerous scientists who worked to support Lagasov. most of whom were male and are unsung by this production. However, the effect of the drama upon the empathy of one's soul remains undiluted. The graphic truth with which they have tried to portray what happened, makes this worthy of being lauded with the highest praise indeed.

CARROT REVIEW - 7/8