Alternate Character Interpretation: When Legasov says early on that Dyatlov doesn't deserve prison, he instead deserves death, is he saying that Dyatlov doesn't deserve to live after being in some way responsible for the deaths of so many people? Or is he saying that Dyatlov doesn't deserve to live suffering from ARS and deserves instead to be put out of his misery?
Some people complained about the plausibility of a female scientist being as involved as Ulana Khomyuk. In reality, though Khomyuk is a Composite Character and the Soviet Union was systematically sexist in many ways, the sciences were fairly egalitarian and there were indeed plenty of female scientists involved in the Damage Control.
Creator/writer Craig Mazin had been unaware that "Comrade" was really used so extensively as a style of address.
Americans Hate Tingle: As was to be expected, the series was far more controversial in Russia than in the rest of the world. In particular, its use of artistic license had attracted criticism even from the "liberal opposition-aligned" commentators with firsthand knowledge of the situation, while both the pro-state media, and many older generations in the wider society of The New Russia who tend to be Soviet-nostalgic, (unlike Ukraine and Belarus) had seized on the inaccuracies to dismiss the entire show as a lie and a work of propaganda. On the other hand, the more Western-oriented and "liberal" youth had often praised it in line with the Western opinion, thus intensifying the split. The entire controversy had even resulted in the creation of CHERNOBYL: The Untold Story, an indie video game that parodies the claims in the series by taking them Up To Eleven. The 2021 film Chernobyl: Abyss, which shifts focus away from the many mistakes and failures of the Soviet system involved to the firefighters and liquidators, was praised in Russia meanwhile (although its director and producer have acknowledged the quality and impact of the 2019 mini-series).
Angst Aversion: Brilliant as the series may be, it's also an unrelentingly grim and intense portrayal of utterly catastrophic damage that indirectly resulted in the deaths of thousands of people, the most gruesome extent of which is shown in unflinching detail, as a direct result of easily avoidable bureaucratic incompetence. Understandably, this makes it a rather difficult watch for casual audiences and even some critics. It's not for nothing that many people have described the series as a "historically accurate horror movie."
Dyatlov's character can be seen as the representation of the quagmire that was the Soviet system: proud, intolerant of dissidence, unrepentant, unwilling to take fault and ultimately more concerned with reputation than of taking responsibility for his actions. Fittingly, the only time he looks humbled is when the fatal flaw of the RMBK reactor, which the Soviet state concealed, is revealed to the public.
It didn't take long for Chinese netizens to start pointing out certain similarities in the way the CCP was (mis)handling information concerning and its general response to the coronavirus outbreak, and how the Soviet Union dealt with the disaster as depicted in the series. Cue a Banned in China crackdown on any such discussion and a suspension on new sales. Thus emphasizing the point, really.
Craig Mazin has noted how the lessons of Chernobyl are more than applicable to climate crisis of today, with a clear and obvious disaster that directly threatens the lives of millions being obfuscated and covered up by corrupt, complacent, and incompetent authorities who actively hinder any attempts to mitigate it.
Its applicability to the COVID-19 Pandemic became more and more relevant in the US, with many individuals and media providers advocating any number of false narratives/potential treatments related to the virus, alongside denial of science (particularly vaccination reluctance in the wake of the Delta variant in mid-2021 and resistance to masking). "The price of lies" indeed...
Ass Pull: The Ignatenko and Legasov plots remain unconnected until Episode 3, and near the end of Episode 4, Khomyuk tells Legasov and Shcherbina that she has been checking up on Lyudmila, all of which happened completely offscreen after first encountering her in the hospital.
While the show did end up winning three Emmys, including Outstanding Limited Series, Jared Harris lost to Jharrel Jerome. Fan favorite Stellan Skarsgard also lost to Ben Whishaw, who had been sweeping the awards circuit for A Very English Scandal. Both snubs are understandable given how acclaimed the winners were, but many people still wish Harris and Skarsgard could've won alongside the show. They did wind up taking the Bafta and Globe respectively though.
At the Creative Emmys, the show lost awards for both non-prosthetic and prosthetic makeup to Fosse/Verdon and Star Trek: Discovery respectively, a sore spot among those impressed by the horrifically realistic portrayal of dying from radiation poisoning.
If you're into haunting drone-based ambience soundtracks, the way Hildur Guðnadóttir's compositions for the series conveys the horror of the nuclear catastrophe and radiations (using a number of sounds from the nuclear power plant where the series was filmed) is particularly chilling, especially with "Evacuation". The "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue also owes much of its emotional impact to the Ominous Slavic Chanting of "Vichnaya Pamyat"note "Vichnaya Pamyat" means "Memory Eternal," an Eastern Orthodox funeral prayer for the deceased.
The soundscape produced for the series certainly builds on the minimalistic electronica kicked off by both Alien and Blade Runner, but uses a more game-like aesthetic that is highly reminiscent of the heights of the dynamic interplay between background and foreground ambience found in Survival Horror environmental sound design. Think Silent Hill and other greats.
Glukhov's gotten a lot of love for his Brutal Honesty and mercilessly snide sense of humor, making him one of the few sources of genuine comedy in this extremely dour series. Being A Father to His Men and one of the few characters willing to call the government bureaucrats on their bullshit doesn't hurt either.
Bacho is also this for being a hardass Sergeant Rock who proves to be surprisingly compassionate in carrying out his duties. It helps that he's also a Deadpan Snarker with some genuinely hilarious lines, and he gets one of the best monologues in the show as well.
The three liquidators note Alexei Ananenko, senior engineer Valeri Bespalov and shift supervisor Boris Baranov have (quite justifiably) been hailed as the highlight of the entire series for their utterly astoundingact of bravery and badassery in venturing deep into the belly of the beast, preventing an explosion that would have had caused a far more serious nuclear disaster than the one that already happened. Oh, and despite basically everyone (in Real Life and the series) thinking of it as certain death (Legasov asks Gorbachev for his permission "to kill three men"), they all survived. One died of a heart attack in 2005, and the other two still live in Kyiv.
Colonel General Pikalov has gained quite a few fans for personally volunteering to drive into Chernobyl in order to gain an accurate reading of the radiation levels at the destroyed core, and being one of the few Soviet higher ups managing the disaster that isn’t hopelessly incompetent or more concerned with saving face.
Fountain of Memes: Dyatlov, mainly for his increasingly absurd downplaying of the disaster and denial being ripe for Black Comedy.
Friendly Fandoms: Fans of this show seem to get along with (and sometimes also be) fans of The Terror, due to the shows sharing two actors and being somewhat similar in tone.
"Open wide, O Earth" is part of a prayer in the Russian Orthodox service of burial.note The whole prayer is, "Open wide, O earth, and receive him (her) that was fashioned from thee by the hand of God aforetime, and who returneth again unto Thee that gave him (her) birth. That which was made according to his image the Creator hath received unto himself; do thou receive back that which is thine own."
"The Happiness of All Mankind" uses an untranslated Cossack song as a leitmotif. It is about a man talking to a crow circling above him, which represents death.
The leaden "egg basket" obtained by Bacho for Pavel to protect him from going infertile is a pun in Russian - "eggs" is slang for testicles.
"Vichnaya Pamyat", the title of Episode 5 and sung in the end credits, is Ukrainian for "Memory Eternal" and is a traditional Eastern Orthodox proclamation at funerals.note Technically, it's in liturgical Ukrainian, as a modern Ukrainian person would say "vichna" instead of "vichnaya". "Vichnaya" might be something said by a speaker of the Russian-Ukrainian "surzhyk" patois.
Gorbachev's taking the time to actually listen to Legasov in the initial meeting, even after calling him out for speaking out of turn, is an even stronger indication of his status as a Reasonable Authority Figure if you know anything about the previous leaders of the Soviet Union and how they would have likely reacted in a similar situation.note (Josef Stalin would at best have had Legasov thrown in jail overnight for his impertinence, and at worst would have purged him; Nikita Khrushchev would probably have ignored Legasov; Leonid Brezhnev would have spent so much time going back and forth between all the various parties involved that the disaster would have grown much worse in the interim; and Konstantin Chernenko spent his brief leadership of the Soviet Union in such poor health that he probably wouldn't even have been at the meeting to begin with, and wouldn't have been much use if he was there. Georgy Malenkov would likely have been the only prior leader to properly hear out Legasov, as Malenkov himself had an engineering background and always placed a high value on the opinions of qualified experts; Yuri Andropov would probably also have listened to him, though likely would have been more concerned with making an example of the plant managers than actually dealing with the disaster)
Charkov was loosely based on the part-Jewish Yuri Andropov. He calls Legasov out for betraying his Jewish colleagues, with the implication that if the situation the pair is in were reversed, a younger Legasov wouldn't have hesitated to get rid of him.
Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The series has been very well received in Ukraine, Belarus and parts of the Russian population that don't fit in Americans Hate Tingle above for its portrayal of the disaster and humanizing it, and it renewed interest in the disaster where former Soviet authorities once downplayed the disaster or tried to have it quickly be forgotten.
The finale aired on June 3, 2019, almost exactly one month before a fire aboard a deep-sea Russian nuclear submarine killed fourteen crewmen, who according to a high-ranking Russian naval official had averted a "planetary catastrophe." Fans of the miniseries were quick to compare the fire to the Chernobyl disaster, and many of them initially thought that the presumed nuclear accident was worse than what the Russians were officially letting on.
The August after the above event happened, another major explosion occurred in a Russian arms depot in Siberia, potentially spreading dangerous chemicals to the populace. And another similar incident involving a nuclear missile test happened a few days after that.
Many of the parallels with Global Warming are also applicable to the COVID-19 Pandemic, and the images of evacuated Pripyat resemble the lock downs enforced in many countries. The way the leaders in the USSR react by being more worried about their reputations, deflecting blame, and ignoring scientists also has parallels to various world leaders (most notably in the U.S., Brazil, and Sweden) who did the same while the outbreak spiraled.
Dyatlov being doomed to die of radiation poisoning is quite uncomfortable after Paul Ritter was killed by a brain tumor just two years after making the series (in fact, the real Dyatlov lived seven more years after the disaster than Ritter did the series).
After detecting radiation in the air, Khomyuk thinks of Ignalina power plant in Lithuania as a possible source. It is a perfectly reasonable guess in-universe because Ignalina is the closest nuclear plant to Minsk... but it also happens to be the place where the Chernobyl scenes in the show were shot.
Michael Colgan, who plays the Minister of Coal, played Toptunov in a BBC docudrama about the same events.
In the French dub, Dyatlov is voiced by Philippe Peythieu, aka Homer Simpson, who also works in a nuclear power plant, does stupid/dangerous things there and lives in blissful denial of many things.
After the series aired, some Russian reviewers accused it of being American propaganda made to make Russia look bad, and one Russian network promised that they would create their own television series showing the "true" events of the disaster (claiming it was engineered by the CIA), essentially inadvertently proving the entire point of the series.
Before the show's airing, many people thought the three Liquidators who went under the reactor to drain the water had died, in particular the post-rock band We Lost the Sea believed when they composed the song "Bogatyri" only for the show to prove that no, they did in fact survive. The best part is We Lost the Sea acknowledged their mistake too.
The finale aired on 3.6.2019. Not great, not terrible.
The German robot sent to remove the graphite is named Joker. A year later, the series composer won an Oscar for a film of that name. Then, in 2022, Barry Keoghan played Joker in anything but name in The Batman.
The music in the series is composed entirely from samples of ambient sound; many commented that it sounded like the soundtrack to the original Fallout.
Ho Yay: Boris and Valery get quite close during their time working together at Chernobyl, and they have their share of shippers. Notable details include Boris calling him "Valera" (an affectionate diminutive of his name like the ones the token couple use for each other) and his reaction to seeing him smile.
Love to Hate: Dyatlov. Not since Joffrey Baratheon has an HBO character been so universally loathed by the audience, but Paul Ritter's excellent performance and his numerous memetic lines have endeared him to fans.
Dyatlov's insistence that there is no graphite and that RBMK reactor cores don't explode has spawned a number of memes, particularly involving Homer Simpson.
"You're confused. RBMK reactor cores do not explode."
"You didn't see graphite. YOU DIDN'T, because it's NOT. THERE."
"3.6 roentgen. Not great, not terrible."
"He's delusional. Take him to the infirmary."
Fomin and Bryukhanov aren't far behind...
"Tell me how an RBMK reactor core explodes."
"It's disgraceful. Really. To spread disinformation at a time like this?"
Bryukhanov applauding by tapping on the table has been memed specifically due to how sycophantic and weird it is (seriously, who applauds like that?).
Referring to graphite as "spicy concrete" after Fomin tries to pass the graphite on the ground as burnt concrete.
Photoshopping hats and a red face (from radiation burn) onto random characters intersecting with the show.
"I serve the Soviet Union."
"Thank you."
"I serve the Soviet Union"
"Thank you."
"if I was [in some situation] I would [seemingly simple solution]. rip to [someone] but im different" explanation After a Twitter exchange in which a user jokingly claimed they would have stopped Chernobyl if present. The format is used for both actually-simple solutions and nigh-impossible tasks that only sound simple because they're phrased in one or two words.
"They gave them the propaganda number."
Shitposting groups about the series on Facebook make jokes about how Vasily's finalstate makes him look like a pizza or a lasagna, and how some characters actually confuse him with such and eat him.
There's been reactions by several right-wing pundits about how the series is a damning indictment of all leftist thinking, mostly (if not exclusively) due to the fact that the setting is the Soviet Union, leading to Mazin defending the series as an argument againstany short-sighted bureaucracy unwilling to listen to experts about ongoing Real Life catastrophes.
Mazin: Chernobyl was a failure of humans whose loyalty to (or fear of) a broken governing party overruled their sense of decency and rationality. You're the old man with the cane. You just worship a different man's portrait.
Tankies (usually pro-Stalinist extremists) on social media who use the miniseries to compare the USSR's response to Chernobyl favorably to how the U.S. government has handled disasters like Hurricane Katrina, the Flint water crisis, or the COVID-19 Pandemic, going so far as to claim the miniseries vindicates Soviet-style communism. This despite the miniseries clearly depicting the Soviet government as corrupt and incompetent — prioritizing its ideology over facts — which contributed to the disaster and bungled the response at several points afterward.
Some believed that the series would preach against nuclear power, and show the dangers that exist with it. Surprisingly, the series shies away from it and instead makes a point of showing that if any number of things had been different, the disaster would have either had minimal damage or never even happened in the first place. In effect, the series shows that when built and operated correctly, nuclear power is actually safe; it just so happens that the particular reactor that exploded could never have been built correctly because it was poorly designed, and a corrupt, incompetent idiot was ordering people to operate it incorrectly under threat of being fired, neither of which are problems when authoritarian politics aren't taking precedence over competence. It's also surprising some think the show would preach against nuclear power...despite the fact Legasov is a nuclear scientist who never once makes negative comments about nuclear energy but in Episode 5 even praises it when discussing how nuclear energy works, calling it "beautiful".
Though perhaps charm isn’t the right word. In episodes 2 and 3 we follow Ananenko, Baranov and Bezpalov as they swim down to open the gate valves. Due to their extremely limiting protective equipment, they can only communicate to each other in ape-like grunts. It should be ridiculous, but thanks to brilliant direction, excellent lighting, great acting and the high stakes of their mission, it is sheer, pants-shitting terror.
Also counts as Nightmare Fuel, but the state of Vasily Ignatenko by the end of episode 3. He looks like a corpse that has been decomposing for days but he's still alive and lucid.
Donald Sumpter as Comrade Zharkov. He gets approximately two minutes of screentime but delivers one of the most chilling speeches in the whole series.
In the podcast, Peter Sagel expressed regret that Michael McElhatton had so few lines in Episode 5, just from the way he opens the trial.
Portmanteau Couple Name: People who ship Valery and Boris refer to the pairing as "Valoris," which doubles as a convenient homonym for "valorous."
Realism-Induced Horror: This series runs on this. The knowledge that almost everything depicted in this series actually happened makes it absolutely terrifying to watch.
Retroactive Recognition: This isn't the first TV show about Chernobyl that Michael Colgan (who plays Mikhail Shchadov, the Minister for Coal Industry) has been featured in; he previously starred in the Chernobyl episode of the BBC series Surviving Disaster as Leonid Toptunov.
Rewatch Bonus: The structure of the series, which begins with the disaster in the first episode and finishes with the trial explaining what happened in the fifth episode, makes rewatching the first episode a popular move.
For example, in the first watch, it is easy to overlook that Dyatlov sees graphite lying on the floor with his own eyes in Episode 1, before he starts to berate his subordinates for thinking that the core indeed exploded and that graphite was scattered on the ground. As if there were not enough reasons to hate Dyatlov, this scene in retrospective shows how willing is he to reject the reality and knowingly endanger the lives of his workers only to shift the blame from himself.
The show has a surprising few, such as the two workers looking into the exposed core, Ignatenko's state after the disaster, a liquidator shown in hazmat gear hosing down the streets of Pripyat, and of course, the disaster itself.
Poor Sitnikov being forced to look into the roof and mouth of the core as he returns a look of pure hopelessness.
Please Remain Calm:
The liquidators' exploration into the loins of the power plant.
The exposition about the worst possible scenario.
Pikalov driving a truck to the exposed reactor to take accurate radiation readings.
Open Wide, O Earth: Vasily's radiation mutilated body.
The Happiness of all Mankind: The 90-second Real Time scene of the young liquidator hurling graphite off the roof and tearing a hole in his boot, leaving him to an uncertain fate.
Vichnaya Pamyat: The recreation of the last seconds before the explosion including the mind-bending shot of the melted borderline Eldritch control rods around the reactor core as well as the trial in general.
Shares setting, themes, and some character tropes (e.g. the Ignored Expert, the Reasonable Authority Figure, the Obstructive Bureaucrat, the backup scientist latecomer) with Citizen X, an earlier HBO movie about a Soviet criminal investigator trying to catch a Serial Killer while the government insists that such thing doesn't exist in the country. Mazin also mentioned this film as an inspiration in deciding to not use Fake Russian accents, which Citizen X did, to mixed effect.
It can also be considered an interesting follow-up to The Terror, which also starred Jared Harris and Adam Nagaitis and also was inspired by a famous historical disaster (though The Terror was an adaptation of a novel, not a docudrama, and had a few supernatural flourishes, which Chernobyl does not).
Several viewers have also stated that the bleak atmosphere, '80s setting, docudrama format and brutal depiction of the horrors of nuclear disaster remind them of Threads.
Another comparison has been made to the miniseries and Shin Godzilla, which also dealt with politics behind the response to major disaster along with red tapes in delaying solutions against the crisis. Of course, that film was partially inspired by the Fukushima nuclear disaster, which was the worst event of its kind since Chernobyl.
When it skews as close to humor as the subject matter lets it, it channels the pure, unadulterated, Black Comedy of Slavic media and jokes of the past 300 years, with a cut of Joseph Heller and Kafka for good measure. When drama/horror... Slavic works, again, with a nod or six towards Kafka, Orwell, and Lovecraft.
To some extent, of Half-Life, which also takes place in an industrial facility, involves a test Gone Horribly Wrong, creating a large-scale problem never dealt with before on Earth, and the government trying to cover it up. Fittingly enough, the plot of the original Half-Life was greatly inspired by the Chernobyl disaster.
Visual Effects of Awesome: The series has been praised for its horrific makeup effects and for its realistic reenactment of the disaster, especially in Episode 5 where they finally revealhow the reactor exploded.
The Woobie: So many innocent people, major and minor characters alike, pay the price for the Soviet government's lies.
All of the people on the Bridge of Death thought they were just going to watch a fire from a safe distance away, even bringing their children along so they can play in the snow. The one we see the next day is already suffering major radiation burns alongside their poor baby who won't stop crying, to the point that he begs Lyudmilla to take the baby away from him. The epilogue confirms everyone on the bridge that night died (though luckily, in real life terms, the events of the so-called Bridge of Death have never been confirmed one way or the other).
Vasily Ignatenko is called to respond to what he believes is an ordinary fire, completely unconcerned for the danger to his own life and focusing on trying to save anyone caught inside. As a result of this selflessness, he's condemned to death by Acute Radiation Syndrome, one of the most horrifying ways to die mankind has ever engineered, as his cells die off one-by-one until he's essentially left as a walking corpse with no possible way to lessen or numb the incredible pain.
Lyudmilla Ignatenko only wants to make sure her husband doesn't die alone after his ARS starts getting bad, and not only does she end up not being at his side when he dies, but the radiation she absorbed from his body ends up giving her a miscarriage, meaning she loses both her husband and his baby in rapid succession. Luckily for her, contrary to what the doctors predicted, she did manage to eventually have another baby.
Akimov and Toptunov do everything in their power to prevent Dyatlov from causing a catastrophic failure, but once he threatens to blacklist them from ever working in a reactor again, they have no choice but to go along with his orders, which eventually cause the explosion. In part out of guilt, they spend hours trying to cool a reactor that doesn't exist anymore while standing in waist-high radioactive water, condemning themselves to ARS and not even accomplishing anything while doing so. Not only do they die slow and horrible deaths just like Vasily, but they go to the grave thinking the explosion was their fault and swearing that they "did everything right".
Sitnikov, the leader of the day shift, gets (in order and in rapid succession) denied the chance at a promotion so Dyatlov can run the safety test, dismissed in his concerns by Dyatlov himself, essentially gaslighted by Fomin, and then ordered by Fomin and Bryukhanov to examine a reactor that Sitnikov already knows will kill him with an armed guard just for good measure. He takes one look at the reactor and within seconds has received a clearly lethal dose of radiation straight to the face, after which Bryukhanov and Fomin proceed to lecture and yell at him while he's basically catatonic. He's essentially murdered by his superiors for information they were never going to trust or use anyway so they can cover their own asses, all while he should've been sleeping at home with his wife.
. The "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue also owes much of its emotional impact to the Ominous Slavic Chanting of "Vichnaya Pamyat"