As a Fridge subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.
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Fridge Brilliance
- Perhaps an unintentional joke, but Zharkov's comment about this event "being their moment to shine" doubles as Black Comedy; "shine" is a term of jargon used in the nuclear power industry for radiation being emitted from a nuclear power plant.
- Fittingly, when Zharkov gives his speech about leaving matters of the State to the State - thus massively endangering all of Pripyat - the lighting and shadows on his face make it resemble a skull.
- Bryukhanov's comment about being sent shit equipment and Moscow wonders why things go wrong is a mouth of babes moments when you consider the design flaws in the RMBK reactor were a large part of why it exploded, making his statement about the dosimeters apply to the reactor as well.
- Legasov's estimation that both Shcherbina and him would be dead in five years can also apply to the Soviet Union: The disaster happened in the 26th of April, 1986 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union happened in the 26th of December, 1991, five years and eight months after Chernobyl.
- In real life, Shcherbina was born to the family of a railroad worker. A slab track is a piece of rail fastened to a concrete foundation, and concrete itself is used in constructing tunnels and stations. So of course he would be familiar with what concrete looks like, burned or not. Chances are he himself worked on several construction sites for the rail company, or pretty regularly visited them with his parents. As an adult, he was also involved with constructing a number of hydroelectric power plants, which also use concrete.
- At the end of Episode 4, a pair of liquidators rush up to the top of the cooling tower and plant the Soviet flag. What is the most famous occasion of planting a Soviet flag? Raising it on the Reichstag at the end of the Battle of Berlin.
◊ This symbolizes the Soviet "victory" over the disaster and regaining control over the plant. In Real Life, it was plain red cloth on a pole, not a Soviet flag, but the symbolism was still there. - When Pikalov drives the truck into the plant to record the radiation, he does it not only to spare one of his men from a terrible fate, but because no one would dispute a general. The plant managers already disbelieved one of their own guys who saw the open core with his own eyes. Having a general report a high radiation reading would ensure they can get to work on containment.
- Taking it a step further, Colonel-General Vladimir Pikalov was a veteran of WWII who earned a degree in chemical engineering after the war, and by the time of the Chernobyl disaster had been commanding the Soviet Army's Chemical Troops detachment for almost 20 years. His status as a war hero with a proven track record of cleaning up disasters like this one meant bureaucrats like Fomin and Bryukhanov would have zero chance of sidelining him or threatening him into repeating their BS 3.6 roentgen radiation reading, like they did to Sitnikov and Legasov. When a man like Pikalov says the dosimeter shows 15,000 roentgen, it's 15,000, and no amount of cajoling or gaslighting by the plant managers would change that.
- Same reason Shcherbina asks "Why did I see graphite?", instead of "Why did Legasov see graphite?", even though it was Legasov who saw it and indentified it. Shcherbina knows that if he asks the latter, Bryukhanov and Fomin will just continue discrediting Legasov instead of giving an explanation. While Shcherbina asked for a very rudimentary rundown of how a nuclear power plant works, the main takeaway was that "graphite is only in the core, you should not see any graphite under any circumstance outside that or a pencil", which makes it very easy to spot bullshitting by Fomin.
- One from the script, but not the show as the scene was cut: When Shcherbina tells Legasov about Fomin's suicide attempt, he speculates that he may have tried to send a message instead of just avoiding punishment. You can almost see Legasov deciding to seize the idea for himself.
- From the final episode's ending, we get the info that Boris Shcherbina died on August 22, 1990, four years and four months after Chernobyl. Just like Legasov had told him - they were both dead within five years.
- The soldier shooting the old woman's cow in the opening to Episode 4 might seem like gratuitous cruelty, but it really isn't. The animals in the area (plus their produces) are already classified as radiation hazards - hence why the same soldier went on to dump its milk. It also foreshadows the animal control storyline later in the episode.
- Legasov's cutting final remark to Charkov, "Oh, that's perfect. They should put that on our money", is an even deeper condemnation that it appears at first glance. The Soviet Union was founded as a Communist system the lower classes would finally be respected and treated fairly, unlike the evil capitalistic west that only values money. Yet that same state needlessly sacrificed dozens, if not hundreds, of workers' lives by building cheap nuclear reactors with few safety measures. Not only does Charkov, a leader of that state, not even care, he actively tries to suppress anyone that tries to make things better (evidenced by his arrest of Legasov). Why not advertise the fact that their workers' paradise cares less about safety than saving money by printing that fact on the currency they supposedly don't value?
Fridge Horror
- Dyatlov didn't give a crap about the test's veracity. He ran it under invalid conditions, figuring the results made no difference whatsoever as long as he'd completed it gotten into Fomin's good graces.
- The trio of Bryukhanov, Fomin, and Dyatlov eventually deciding to do the test anyway after they get the order that if they do it they have to wait 10 hours. As Legasov put it, the sensible option when hearing they have to produce energy would have been to raise the output back up to normal which would have burned away the surplus xenon with no issuenote .
- Being in Akimov's shoes: he's knowledgeable enough to know the potential danger, but also all too-aware, as this is 1980s Soviet Union, he absolutely positively must do as ordered by a superior. Being fired and drummed out of the nuclear profession (as Dyatlov threatens) is actually the more lenient outcome for this kind of defiance, the other outcome being imprisonment, which was all too common.
- Imprisonment was extremely unlikely. Akimov is afraid of being drummed out of the nuclear profession by a vindictive boss and upset Party Secretary as that means he could get reassigned to a much less nice profession and place in the Soviet Union. Plus, even if he is not reassigned to a different part of the country, the nuclear profession carried with it access to special shops and nicer, more modern apartments. What he is being threatened with is perpetual poverty. That is enough to make almost anyone, even in free societies do as they are told. Which makes it even more horrifying when you think about it.
- The series has been described as feeling like a horror movie, but that's not quite right. It deals with an invisible force that fundamentally alters the basic universal conditions that we take for granted, which, among other things, leads to the human body breaking down in incomprehensible and macabre ways. All of this clearly follows some sort of demented set of rules of its own, but they are not rules that anything in our entire experience as a species has prepared us for, since even after the event has clearly happened, many people break while still seeking to act on delusions of normality rather than coming to terms with the brutal new reality that they are experiencing, even as it either quickly or slowly kills them by sheer proximity and forever alters their very society by just existing. This force can not be fought or defeated, only maybe sealed away at a tremendous human cost. Yeah, that's not just a horror story, that's a cosmic horror story! And it actually happened!
- As the series speculates, the true number of deaths could have been in the tens of thousands. And probably a few hundred of them died of ARS, like Vasily: a hideous, agonizing, protracted death.
- If Legasov had toed the party line and kept the RMBK Reactor Flaw secret, this sort of accident may have happened again in the years to come. And this time, the results may have been far worse.
- Whatever happened to Khodemchuk. Anything is possible from being vaporized in either of the two explosions to being crushed by debris, trapped and burned or poisoned by high radiation. He is presumed entombed in the sarcophagus but no remains were ever found. Sadly, there's no possibility to confirm any way; the reactor hall is so immensely radioactive and damaged by the explosion, it'd be next to impossible to find any sign of Khodemchuk.
- At first, the scene of Legasov and the tourist couple in the hotel is a reversal of the one with Khomyuk and Garanin's secretary. Once it's revealed they are actually KGB, you realize that the exchange was actually a Secret Test of Character and that Legasov would have been in deep trouble even if he had just told them to leave quietly.
- The bird that drops dead at the end of Episode 1 is the same bird that Yuvchenko saw in the exploded pump room. Its feathers are potentially as contaminated as the firemen's uniforms. And there are children and pets walking around it, unsupervised.
- At the trial, it's stated that around 200 control rods were removed from the reactor, leaving only about 16 still in place. When the AZ-5 button is pressed, all of the control rods are reinserted. It's very important to understand what this means: when they say "removed", they simply mean that the rod was pulled back all the way out of the reactor, they were still in their housings; by "not removed", it means the rod was left in the reactor pile. When the AZ-5 button was pressed, it wasn't 16 graphite-tipped control rods being reinserted into the reactor(and then getting stuck because steam damaged their housing), it was OVER 200 RODS being reinserted all at the same time.
- The part of the roof that Sitnikov is sent to check out is later revealed in the fourth episode to be the one where the radiation is at its worst. Meaning that not only do Bryukhanov's and Fomin's stupid orders end up getting Sitnikov killed, there's a very good chance they also lead to the death of the guard who was sent to escort him up to the roof.
- The horrific puppy-shooting scene is actually even worse than it looks at first glance. There are only five dogs (a mother and four puppies) seen in the room that Bacho decides to clean out himself, but at least nine shots are heard, and he presumably shot the mother first to avoid her retaliation and spare her Outliving One's Offspring anguish. That means that either there were even more puppies out of sight, or it took four extra shots to kill them, either because they were running and hiding or some of them were only wounded first and didn't die instantly.
Meta
- Chernobyl will not be safe for twenty thousand years. To put this in perspective: if you were to be born in the time of the Egyptian Pharaohs, and still were alive today, you'd still have to wait three times your current lifetime to make it to 20,000 years. Or, if you were willing to go further back, Damascus, according to scholars, is one of the oldest cities on Earth (by our definition of 'city') and it was founded in the year 10,000 BC. In other words, the entire history of humanity from 10,000 BC to the series' airing date of 2019...doubled.
- On a similar note, it's mentioned in the epilogue that the New Safe Confinement building is designed to last for a hundred years. While far more structurally sound than the comparatively more haphazard "sarcophagus" that preceded it, this still means that, unless there are some major advances in the field of structural engineering and/or hazardous material disposal, the NSC will still potentially be have to be replaced dozens of times at the bare minimum, and potentially well over a hundred times.
- That firefighter gear is still in the Pripyat Hospital basement today. If you were to grab a jacket and put it on right now note — over thirty years later — you would get a fatal dose of radiation in under a minute. That pile of clothing is the second most radioactive object in the entire world after the "Elephant's Foot."
