Sam strike chernobyl12/11/2023 ![]() ![]() And the managers refuse to accept that there is graphite scattered around the site, making the sight of Misha (Sam Strike) having his hand almost burned off by a piece he has picked up extremely hard to take.Īt the episode’s end, Jared Harris’s Valery Legasov gets a call demanding his presence at a committee to handle the disaster. When Dyatlov falls ill, Bryukhanov orders Sitnikov (Jamie Ives), who has consistently defied the party line to insist on the gravity of the situation, to go to the roof to inspect the damage himself, resulting in him sustaining heavy radiation burns. Bryukhanov is, it seems, the real villain of the piece, calling together the local governing council to explain that the situation is not at all serious, and allowing Donald Sumpter’s elderly Zharkov to give a rousing pro-party speech telling the assembled men not to distrust the party, and that they will be celebrated for the decisions they make that night – which include shutting off the town and letting no-one out to avoid the spread of disinformation. ![]() There are moments of quiet beauty, such as when coolant starts to fall on two men, but the twisted metal and constant billow of smoke (blowing into alarmingly high winds) are constant reminders of the ugliness of what is to come.īut this is clearly less a series about nuclear horror than it is about human horror. The dirtiness of hospitals, the utilitarian corridors of the plant, the perfectly laid out squares of the local town – this looks like documentary footage shot in the 80s, and the mundanity of the plant in particular only exacerbates the horror as workers find distorted walls, men with red burns on their faces and hands, and at the place where the core should be, a swirling vortex of dust. The fear of the men at contradicting him is only gradually countered by the realisation that the truth is too horrific to be ignored, and Dyatlov’s double-think is complete – it is never made clear whether he really believes what he is saying, or is able to completely divorce belief from the party line when he finally collapses with radiation sickness, vomiting over Chernobyl manager Bryukhanov’s (Con O’Neill) conference table, the first thing he does is apologise.įrom the clean control room, the camera follows several workers through the bowels of the power station, stunningly captured in Luke Hull’s period design. He simply repeats the orders to get coolant into the core, and refuses to countenance any other action, dismissing the increasingly graphic reports of the disaster as delusional. But when a worker arrives to tell the men that the nuclear core has gone, Dyatlov’s breathtaking denial kicks in. ![]() At first he seems eerily competent, telling everyone not to panic and giving clear, systematic orders that get people moving. ![]() The assistant chief engineer of the plant is on duty, and we see him first in a control room surrounded by confused people. This is no Deepwater Horizon action film, but an eerie horror, made awful by Paul Ritter’s Anatoly Dyatlov. From the start, it is made clear that the threat is just as much to the surrounding area as it is to the building. The episode darts back and forth between the close-up of the aftermath of the explosion, following several white-clothed workers at the flat, and the threatening image of the distant plant as seen from the town of Pripyat. Jessie Buckley’s Lyudmilla walks around her flat at night, and the camera can see a glowing white light at a distant building suddenly, the flat shakes. The flat-out denial of Anatoly Dyatlov (Paul Ritter) is like watching a slow-motion car crash.įollowing a brief prologue (of which more later), the episode jumps straight in at the point of the explosion. ![]()
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