Series / Chernobyl

"Vnimanie, vnimanie..."^Translation"Attention, attention..."

"What does matter is that, to them, justice was served. Because, you see, to them, a just world is a sane world. There was nothing sane about Chernobyl."

— Valery Legasov, "1:23:45"

Chernobyl is a 2019 historical disaster miniseries chronicling the infamous nuclear power plant accident and its aftermath. It is the first co-production between HBO and Sky, created and written by Craig Mazin and directed by Johan Renck. Hildur Guðnadóttir composed the soundtrack.

At 01:23:45 on April 26, 1986 in the Ukrainian SSR, the city of Pripyat is shaken by a massive explosion from Reactor #4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station. It soon becomes clear to personnel on the ground that a catastrophic failure of the reactor vessel has blown up the whole building it's in, and the open reactor is now spewing a cloud of radiation and contaminated materials all over Eastern Europe. Soviet authorities race to contain the disaster — or at least some of them do, while others are more concerned with denial and cover-ups.

Jared Harris stars as Valery Legasov, a nuclear physicist called in to give advice on the unfolding disaster. Stellan Skarsgård is Boris Shcherbina, a Soviet apparatchik who works with Legasov. Emily Watson is Ulana Khomyuk, another physicist who is the first person to see just how dire the situation is. David Dencik portrays Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

Many details in the series, particularly the subplot following fireman Vasily Ignatenko and his wife Lyudmilla, were based on accounts in the oral history Voices from Chernobyl. Compare Chernobyl: Abyss, a Russian feature film focusing on a heroic firefighter turned liquidator.

The official trailer can be watched here.

---

Individual character tropes go on the character sheets, and tropes applying to specific episodes can be found on the Recap pages.

---

This miniseries provides examples of:

A-G

• Abandoned Area: The town of Pripyat, nearby to the reactor, becomes this. A montage near the end of Episode 2 shows the spooky abandoned town hours after all the citizens have been put on buses and evacuated. One of the shots features the interior of a restaurant with half-eaten food and drinks still on the tables. (It is of course still abandoned, and is the most infamous Real Life abandoned area in the world.)
• Abandoned Hospital: Pripyat Hospital after the evacuation. It's arguably an improvement as the hospital was overwhelmed with horrific casualties that it didn't have the resources to cope with.
• Adaptation Explanation Extrication:
  • In the show, when Dyatlov says that he's "seen worse" after the reactor explosion, it's treated as a sign of how disconnected from reality he is to dismiss the explosion. The original script indicated that Dyatlov genuinely meant that he had seen worse before; in real life, he had been part of another nuclear accident twenty years before that seemed, at least at first, to be worse than the Chernobyl explosion, hence his calm reaction. By removing the backstory but keeping the reference, Dyatlov's delusional attempts to deny the explosion even happened are emphasized even further^note In real life, Dyatlov's previous nuclear incident led to his son's death, which has prompted speculation that Dyatlov's actions on the night of the explosion were designed to "conquer the atom" and get some closure. Mazin thought that this would be too much armchair psychology and simply omitted the whole thing.
  • When Shcherbina arrives at the disaster, he puts the reactor crew on the back foot by correctly identifying graphite on the roof; when they try to pass it off as burnt concrete, he immediately calls out their lie by saying that he knows a lot about concrete, and what he saw wasn't concrete. Though the Awesomeness by Analysis effect is left intact, in real life, the reason why he knew a lot about concrete was that he and his father had long careers in construction before he went into politics, which the show doesn't have enough time to get into.
• Adaptational Relationship Overhaul: In the show, Shcherbina and Legasov's relationship gets off to a very rough start, with Shcherbina in particular acting like an Obstructive Bureaucrat who condescendingly asks Legasov for explanations and then claims he's no longer needed. While their relationship does get better over time, in real life, both of them were very well-respected and connected in their particular professions and, according to Legasov's real tapes, they were cordial to each other from the get-go.
• Adapted Out: Legasov's wife and two children were kept out of the series to streamline the story, as it's only five episodes and the creator wanted to keep the focus on the disaster itself.
• All for Nothing:
  • Akimov and Toptunov are instructed to manually fill the core with water by hand-turning the cranks, while standing nearly chest high in irradiated water. By this point, both are aware that the core has exploded, meaning they're killing themselves for nothing. As if to add insult to injury, the camera pans over to the water pointlessly spilling out over the exposed core.
  • A relatively minor one when weighed against the total human cost of the disaster, but Sitnikov's death certainly qualifies. When he reports the presence of the graphite debris he is attacked and scolded for suggesting the obvious. When Dyatlov falls sick after volunteering to inspect the reactor from the roof, Fomin volunteers Sitnikov, who tries to refuse but ultimately can't. He's essentially sent to his death. Afterward, during the silent montage at the end of the episode, Bryukhanov and Fomin are seen still grilling and berating a shell-shocked Sitnikov, his skin beet-red from radiation. The information he has been forced to give his life to obtain has fallen on the ears of the willfully deaf. Sitnikov's defeated thousand-yard stare says everything.
  • All attempts to cover up the disaster and save face, habits left over from Stalin's rule, fail to do anything except make more people suffer and embarrass the nation even further. Hiding things from Legasov and Scherbina just made Bryukhanov and Fomin look stupid, hiding things from Gorbachev was completely unnecessary because he's a Reasonable Authority Figure, and hiding things from the Western nations didn't work because the cloud of radiation moved over Western Europe and was detected by scientists who didn't have to fear censure, and Western authorities were savvy enough about Soviet ass-covering to realize that the mere fact that the Soviets were admitting Chernobyl was a problem (instead of denying everything) meant that they were hiding something really serious.
  • At the Soviet government's request, the German government provides a robot that will safely allow the clearance of the radioactive graphite off the roof. The robot shorts out less than a minute after being deployed. After a (very angry) telephone conversation with the Kremlin, Shcherbina emerges from his mobile trailer, dangling the destroyed remains of the phone, and calmly explains that the Germans' robot was not designed to withstand the radiation levels inside the plant, since the Kremlin insisted on low-balling the number when they asked the Germans for help. Not only is the scheme a flop, but they have wasted months waiting to receive and deploy the robot, while the disaster is only getting worse.
  • Legasov admits to Khomyuk that there is a less than 50% chance that the reactor fuel will in fact melt through the concrete pad; in the event, it didn't, and the heat exchanger the miners installed, at significant risk to their health, never ended up being used.
    • Subverted in that the surviving miners are still proud of their work, because if the fuel had reached the ground with nothing to diffuse the heat, it would have poisoned the water from Kiev to the Black Sea. So it's better safe than really sorry.
  • Averted hard in the final conversation between Shcherbina and Legasov. Boris says that, in the end he was just another Obstructive Bureaucrat, and scientists like Legasov made the real difference. Legasov says he couldn't be more wrong: a dozen scientists would have seen and reported the same things as him, but without Shcherbina's willingness to listen to them, and his superpower of getting the vast Soviet bureaucracy to actually do things, it would have ended up like all the rest of the reports- ignored and covered up, while the problem kept getting worse.
    Legasov: They heard me, but they listened to you. Of all the ministers, all the deputies, the entire congregation of obedient fools... they mistakenly sent the one good man. For God's sakes, Boris... you were the one who mattered most.
• An Aesop: Lies and narratives can dangerously obscure the truth. When leaders feel the need to lie and deflect blame when a disaster happens, the disaster only compounds.
  Legasov: When the truth offends, we lie and lie, until we can no longer remember it is ever there. But it is still there. Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid.
• Anyone Can Die: Nobody is safe from the radiation and certainly not the children and pregnant women. The show references this often without being exploitative.
• Apocalyptic Gag Order: The Soviet Union tries to keep the disaster secret until radiation reaches neighboring countries and they are forced to admit it. And even when they are working with West Germany they downplay just how bad the radiation is.
• Arc Words:
  • "We did everything right." ...But because the engineers had been lied to about what the Big Red Button did, their pushing it like they had been instructed to do accidentally took the situation in the reactor From Bad to Worse.
  • "How can an RBMK reactor expode?" and variants thereof. At first the phrase is used by Dyatlov at the other high-ranking plant officials to shut down witnesses who point out that the reactor has been destroyed, by saying that such an event is impossible. It then ends up being asked by Legasov and Khomyuk who, even after finally getting party officials to accept that the reactor did explode of its own accord, have to admit they have no idea how or why it happened, leading to them investigating in order to prevent a similar accident.
• Artifact of Death: Eventually, any object within the exclusion zone is considered this and abandoned. Special mention goes to the fire brigade's uniforms in Pripyat's hospital, which still emit 600 roentgen per hour (enough to significantly increase cancer risk) over three decades after the disaster.
• Artistic License – History: Has its own page.
• Artistic Licence – Physics: As you may expect from a series heavily featuring the dangers of radiation poisoning. Whilst the depiction is overall fairly accurate, the speed and severity of reaction, as well as the physical horror itself, is exaggerated. Notably:
  • The famous 'Red Forest', full of trees which eventually died as a result of radiation exposure, are shown as having red leaves within days after the disaster. This would in fact take several months to manifest.
  • The firefighters, who received astonishingly high doses of radiation, most certainly died in severe pain. However, the effects of acute radiation poisoning are shown to basically turn them into living zombies for their last few days, which is not accurate.
  • The graphite from the reactor core is treated as the most dangerous single material to come out of it. One of the firefighters who picks up a piece of the core graphite out of curiosity is shown in severe pain with large burns and broken skin on his hand several minutes later, and there are several shots of chunks of shattered graphite smoking ominously. In reality, the graphite itself was not significantly radioactive, but the presence of it outside the reactor is the 'smoking gun' that proved indisputably that the reactor had indeed exploded.
  • The firefighters are also treated as though they are dangerously radioactive themselves, and this is the cause of Lyudmilla's miscarriage, the baby having absorbed all of the radiation Lyudmilla exposed herself to by repeatedly seeing Vasily against medical advice. In reality, whilst the dust on their clothing and skin was (and still is) extremely dangerous, the firefighters presented no risk to others once changed and showered down, and the idea that a baby could absorb the bulk of radiation a mother is exposed to is also very medically dubious.
• As You Know: Charkov has two instances in Episode 5:
  • During his conversation with Legasov in the beginning, he produces a certificate for the Hero of the Soviet Union award, which Legasov is in line for. Charkov describes it as "our highest honor," something Legasov would almost certainly know already.
  • Later, during Legasov's post-trial interrogation, Charkov notes that Legasov was in Komsomol. He then helpfully clarifies that Komsomol is the communist youth organization.
• A Year and a Day: After Legasov's suicide in the opening, the series flashes back "Two Years and One Minute Earlier" to the events of the disaster.
• Bad Boss: All three senior leaders of the power plant are motivated purely by the prospect of career advancement and force the safety test through. Anatoly Dyatlov definitely takes the cake, though, true to his real-life counterpart (who was infamous for being a horrible person who was extremely mean and disrespectful to everyone below him). He angrily defies repeated pleas by his staff to halt the test, threatening to destroy their careers and lives unless they obey his extremely dangerous orders. He then repeatedly rejects the warnings and testimony of his subordinates reporting to him (and everyone else) that the core has exploded and that their actions are meaningless (or worse). Put another way: while the fatal flaws in the Soviet RBMK reactor design (and the lies and secrecy that deliberately hid those flaws from the people who operated and ran those reactors) caused the explosion, it was Dyatlov's colossal recklessness, threatening his subordinates, giving false reassurances that he knew what he was doing and that it was safe, and unwillingness to accept anything that he didn't want to hear that put the reactor in a disastrous state where the emergency shutdown was even needed.
• Bambification: A shot used prominently in the trailers shows a dead roe deer in the Red Forest.
• Based on a True Story: The show attempts to portray the disaster and its aftermath as faithfully as possible.
• Being Watched: The KGB is observing the situation almost as soon as it happens. When Shcherbina takes Legasov for a walk, Legasov spots a couple that he recognizes as the couple he talked to at the bar observing them. Shcherbina points out that if they're observing them openly, it's because they want them to know. According to Charkov, those people watching over Legasov and Shcherbina also have people watching them.
  • When the West German robot fails because the Soviets inaccurately reported how much radiation it would be exposed to, Scherbina calls his superiors and rails at them, calling them idiots and incompetents. This is a sign of just how far he's been pushed, since when the person he's talking to reminds him that the KGB will be listening to the call, he explodes.
  Scherbina: OF COURSE I know they're listening! I want them to hear, I want them to hear it all! Do you know what we're doing here? Tell those idiots what they have done!
• Beyond the Impossible: Everyone treats an RBMK reactor exploding as this. For those who don't know about the critical, fatal design flaw of the Soviet RBMK nuclear reactors, this is an understandable reaction, as it would be physically impossible without such a flaw. Even so, the sheer, pig-headed denial that this has even occurred at all amongst the powerplant management is astounding, as for all they knew, someone sabotaged the reactor or planted a bomb, and numerous people qualified to make the call were all reporting that the core had either exploded or been hit by a powerful explosion.
• Big Bad: Anatoly Dyatlov, the Deputy Chief Engineer at the plant, is treated by most people (In-Universe and out) as most directly responsible for the explosion and his attempts to deny the explosion cause several more innocent deaths along the way. All that said, the series does not blame him for the design flaw that truly caused the explosion, and it's made clear that the Chernobyl disaster can't truly be blamed on a single man.
• Big Damn Heroes: There were a lot of heroes at Chernobyl, but some of them (like the firefighters) went in because they didn't understand the danger, and others went in because they believed bullshitters like Dyatlov and Fomin. Special mention has to be given to the three liquidators—Boris Baranov, Alexei Ananenko, and Valeri Bezpalov—at the end of Episode 2, who volunteer and go into the depths of the plant to drain the water, knowing that it likely means their doom, with radiation so bad that their dosimeters emit a continuous hiss and their flashlights go out.
• Big Disaster Plot: The entire mini-series is about how the Chernobyl disaster was handled (and mishandled).
• Bittersweet Ending: The disaster is contained, but at great cost in human life. The surrounding area is an irradiated no-man's land, though life is slowly creeping back into the area. Steps are taken to prevent another such disaster from happening again, but Legasov is forced into social isolation for speaking out and dies by suicide two years after the disaster, and Shcherbina dies within five years of the disaster, just as predicted. According to the epilogue, The people of Pripyat and the surrounding evacuated areas were able to move on and start new lives, and Lyudmilla even had a son despite being deemed infertile, while Gorbachev believed that the disaster led to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
• Blame Game: A major theme of the series. Everyone from the plant supervisors to the Soviet state itself is desperate to find anyone else to blame for the disaster, when in reality (as Legasov observes in his memoirs) it was the fault of the whole incompetent system.
• Blatant Lies: One of the series's premises: the Soviet Union relies on the principle that whatever the state says is true—no matter how ludicrous.
• Blind Obedience: Deconstructed. the Soviet's nurturing of this mindset is depicted not only as one of the background reasons for why the disaster happened in the first place but also as the reason the disaster was mismanaged in its early hours and the following days.
• Body Horror: Death by radiation poisoning for those who were directly exposed to the core of the destroyed reactor, which is basically your body dying and rotting from within while you're still alive, if you even make it that far. There is a time where the victims appear to be in a state vaguely resembling almost healthy, but this is a Hope Spot that quickly gives way to the final stages, where they look more like zombies than living people. At the absolute end, the victim's blood vessels have the structural integrity of a wet paper bag, causing them to bleed to death and rendering attempts at pain relief completely pointless. The plant workers and first responders are shown in the late stages of this process, and it isn't pretty. Once dead they have to be put in plastic bags, then lead-lined coffins, then steel coffins, then buried in concrete due to the radiations.
• Bookends:
  • The show starts with Legasov recording his tapes, but begins in the middle of his recording with him asking "What is the cost of lies?" The end of the last episode has a voiceover from Legasov that ends with the same line, catching us up to where he was in his tapes at the beginning.
  • The first episode introduces the Driving Question "How does an RBMK reactor explode?" In the final episode, Legasov answers it.
• Canned Orders over Loudspeaker: The infamous "Vnimanie, vnimanie..." announcement blared over loudspeakers mounted on military vehicles during the evacuation of Pripyat in the second episode. The audio used is the same from the real-life evacuation and was featured prominently in the series's trailers.
• Cassette Craze: Legasov records his thoughts and the story behind what happened in Chernobyl on audiotapes, which he hides in a crevice by the ash bin (presumably for a cohort to pick up and disseminate) before dying by suicide.
• Central Theme: Science and truth versus politics and lies.
• Children Are Innocent: The first episode ends with children heading to school, oblivious of what is happening around them. After arriving at Pripyat, Shcherbina comments that children in Germany have been forced to stay indoors because of the contamination, yet Soviet children literally in the disaster's backyard aren't being afforded the same consideration.
• Colour Wash: Not every indoor scene is underlit with a green tint, and not every outdoor daylight scene is overcast, but it's the way to bet.
• Commie Land: A depressing look at the Soviet Union in 1986 as it struggles to recover from a major man-made disaster that, at its core, was precipitated by flaws inherent in a system that keeps generating several kinds of obstructive problems after the catastrophe has happened.
• The Commies Made Me Do It: A literal example—Shcherbina comments that anyone who tries to stand up to the Soviet government will not just be threatening themselves, but encouraging the government to go after their friends and family.
• Company Town: The town of Pripyat is an "atom city" built to supply the workers and community of the power plant. As the behind the scenes videos point out, it's actually a model city, closely living up to the promise of the Soviet ideal (which isn't true for most of the rest of the country). The shelves in all the stores are well-stocked, the streets are clean, and it's actually a pleasant place to live and raise a family - until you run up against the truth that they cut corners on safety measures everywhere.
• Composite Character: While most characters are specific Real Life people, the sheer number of people involved in the real disaster forced the writer to omit some and give their actions to others. The most notable example is Ulana Khomyuk, who is a fictional representation of various scientists that discovered the crisis on their own and were raising the alarm bell in the days immediately after the disaster.
• Contamination Situation: Unsurprisingly, many of the characters who stand around the exploded reactor in the immediate aftermath, like plant workers and firefighters, as well as any person who comes in contact with them before decontamination, becomes seriously ill from radiation poisoning. Everyone takes a level in cynicism following their exposure.
• Cop and Scientist: Though Shcherbina isn't a cop, he has this dynamic with Legasov, with Legasov making plans with his scientific knowledge and Shcherbina dealing with the political and human side of things.
• Cosmic Horror Story: The series could've swung dry, just going with the science of radiation but it instead goes just enough into an unknown and unfathomable Chernobyl to join the house that S.T.A.L.K.E.R. built.
  • The nuclear side of the disaster reeks of this. Mankind harnesses a power they don't fully understand, which grows beyond their control and takes a form none of them can comprehend, killing everything around it indiscriminately. The power that is unleashed is so horrific that even getting close enough to look straight at it means very likely death. All anyone can think of are costly, half-baked solutions to seal away the menace where it will keep existing for thousands of years to come.
    Legasov: The atom is a humbling thing.
  • This idea appears to be deliberately invoked in Episode 5, where we are shown a slow-motion shot of the core exploding. The tangled mass of graphite rods emerging from the ground (nicknamed "Elena") looks like some sort of tentacled Eldritch Abomination emerging from the depths.
  • The exposed reactor is framed throughout the story as if it were almost an Eldritch Abomination; it is constantly obscured and almost imperceptible, seen only in glimpses of smoke and unnatural light, yet is somehow angry and malevolent, warping the world around it in ways that can barely be perceived and poisoning people who make the mistake of looking at it for a single second too long or standing just a bit too close...
• Covert Emergency Call: Khomyuk has a phone call with another scientist near Chernobyl where they talk about the hot weather and Khomyuk offers to visit the scientist's nephews and is told they don't want visitors. Through the seemingly mundane conversation, Khomyuk learns that the nuclear disaster is severe (the temperature being hot), that boron and sand are being dropped on the reactor (through the names of the "nephews"), and that her presence is not welcomed and she should not go to the site.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: Legasov tells Shcherbina about how death from Acute Radiation Syndrome is one of the most horrible ways a person can die, and the series backs this up visually, in graphic detail.
• Cutting Corners:
  • As Legasov reveals at the trial, the fatal flaw in RBMK reactors was the result of this.
    Legasov: These [control] rods are made of boron—which reduces reactivity—but not their tips. The tips are made of graphite, which accelerates reactivity.
    Judge: Why?
    Legasov: Why? For the same reason our reactors do not have containment buildings around them, like those in the West. For the same reason we don't use properly enriched fuel in our cores. For the same reason we are the only nation that builds water-cooled, graphite-moderated reactors with a positive void coefficient.[beat] It's cheaper.
  • Shcherbina also states that the plant was completed at the end of a fiscal year, so that the manager could get a bonus. Naturally, not all procedures were completed.
• Damage Control: The second through fourth episodes are all mostly focused on trying to evacuate people and control the radiation in the area. Episode 2 features the evacuation of Pripyat and an attempt to block the immediate spread of radiation Gone Horribly Wrong, Episode 3 features miners joining in an attempt to stop radioactive material from leaking into a major river, and Episode 4 has further evacuation, trying to deal with the animals who could leave the area and contaminate it, and clearing the very radioactive roofs.
• Dead Man Writing: Legasov makes several tapes going over the truth behind what happens in Chernobyl before killing himself.
• Deadpan Snarker: All over the place. Many characters engage in flat sarcasm, both to highlight how serious the situation really is, and to downplay it. Shcherbina's reaction to one of Tarakanov's clean-up ideas is particularly acerbic:
  Shcherbina: You want to shoot exploding bullets at an exposed nuclear reactor?
  Tarakanov: Well...
  Shcherbina: No, no. Let's go light that roof back on fire, it was so easy to put out the first time!
• Death Glare: Shcherbina has a very effective one. When General Pikalov announces that the radiation levels are five thousand times greater than what they were initially led to believe, Bryukhanov begins, "Comrade Shcherbina...", who just looks at him, and he shuts up immediately.
• Death World:
  • The immediate surroundings of Reactor #4 mean certain and painful death to anyone who spends even a few seconds there, and spreads radioactive dust and debris for miles around. And it can't be truly dealt with, only sealed away.
  • The different roof levels, covered in radioactive graphite, in Episode 4. They're all given harmless-sounding girls' names, but one of them in particular - Masha - is specifically referred to as the most dangerous place on Earth; so dangerous, in fact, that it kills robots specifically hardened against radiation exposure. They have to clear it using humans because at least those wouldn't die immediately.
• Didn't Think This Through:
  • It's mostly mentioned in passing, but the international incident Gorbachev has to deal with is made much worse by Soviet officials' refusal to admit that anything happened until Sweden detected the radiation and reported it. This had two main effects: one, being exposed to heavy radiation and not warned pissed other nations right off, and two, they were unable to control how the Western world learned of the disaster... and the West learning of a desperate cover-up that was exposed by natural weather patterns told them that whatever happened, it was incredibly embarrassing for the Soviet Union.
  • Lying to the West German government about radiation levels on the roofs. The cat was already out of the bag at this point and the Soviet Union really couldn't get much more humiliated, but officials still tried to save face by insisting the radiation levels were lower than they really were. The West Germans were legitimately trying to help, but the lower figure they were given meant that they sent a robot that couldn't handle the most radioactive roof. The sheer stupidity of the lie causes Shcherbina to explode with rage and indirectly curse out the KGB for making his job so much harder.
  • At his show trial, Dyatlov has the gall to interrupt everyone and blatantly lie that he wasn't even in the control room when the control rods were removed from the core, despite numerous witnesses all saying that he was, that he gave the order, and that he threatened Akimov when he initially refused. Given that this was a show trial, and the only way to avoid severe punishment (or execution) is to basically express sincere guilt, shame, and humility, it was an incredibly dumb thing to do — so much so that the prosecutor, Legasov, and the judge are baffled that Dyatlov even tried it.
• Disaster Dominoes: Several factors had to align in order for the Chernobyl disaster to occur, as listed on the Useful Notes page. Episode 5 serves as a recount of all of those factors: human, scientific and political.^note The short version: RBMK reactors are designed with a positive feedback loop ("positive void co-efficient") which is dangerous, but produces a lot of electricity cheaply. The gas Xenon-135 is a byproduct of the nuclear reaction, which in large quantities will slow the reaction – but at normal reaction levels, the neutron emissions being produced by the reaction outpace the rate at which Xenon is produced, "burning" it off (once an atom of Xe135 has absorbed one neutron, it will absorb no more, becoming effectively transparent to neutron radiation). The danger is that keeping the reactor in low power mode for too long will lead to a Xenon buildup - the "Xenon Pit" mentioned by Toptunov - that "stalls" the reactor. Due to a series of scheduling screwups for political reasons, this is exactly what happened, when the reactor administration left it in low-power mode for too long as part of a safety test, combined with making the less well-trained night shift perform the test, without even being told in advance or given time to prepare for it. When a reactor stalls, you're supposed to gradually build it back up to normal reaction levels, which takes 24 hours. Instead, the reactor chief ordered the engineers to just yank out all the control rods at once. The reaction indeed restarted, but due to the feedback loop nature of RBMK reactors, it started increasing too fast. In a last desperate attempt to regain control, the crew hit the emergency shutdown button (AZ-5) which automatically shoves all the control rods back into the reactor to shut it down. Unfortunately, the control rods were built to be half-boron, a neutron absorber, and half graphite, a neutron accelerator, so that they could balance the rate of reaction more precisely than just controlling how much it was impeded. In an emergency, however, this meant that the accelerating effects would continue to be felt until the control rods were fully in place, giving the reactor time to continue to go super-critical. The heat evaporated all the water in the core into steam, which ruptured the fuel rod channels and jammed the rods in place with the graphite still in the reactor; with nowhere else to go, the graphite continually accelerated the reaction until, five seconds later, the pressure got too high and the lid exploded. Now exposed to the air, the elements inside the reactor combined with oxygen, causing a second, much worse explosion, this time destroying the building and sending the radiation into the air.
• Disaster Movie: The series has been described by some reviewers as a more cerebral, somber and dramatic disaster movie of sorts. While it avoids sensationalizing the catastrophe, it certainly doesn't shy away from giving the people the tension and detailed disaster sequences they want to see.
• The Dreaded: The KGB are treated like this, true to form. They are a pervasive, sinister state entity that is so overly-paranoid they are actively spying on themselves in addition to every other person of interest in the Soviet Union.
• Driving Question:
  • The first and last line of the series, "What is the cost of lies?", which also serves as the show's tagline.
  • "How does an RBMK reactor explode?" "Lies."
• Drone of Dread:
  • The majority of the soundtrack, much of which was created using samples from real nuclear power plants in Lithuania.
  • Also the regularly audible dosimeters, which click faster and faster until they are whirring. This sound is used during the divers' mission in Episode 2 and the rooftop scene in Episode 4, as well as during the credits of every episode.
• Eldritch Abomination:
  • In Episode 1, the gouts of smoke billowing out of Reactor 4 look like a living thing, and when the wind carries the smoke toward Pripyat, the forest beneath the cloud immediately starts dying.
  • In Episode 5, the audience gets a brief glimpse of the damaged control rods attached to the dislodged upper biological shield, which appears as the twisted and bent branches of a demonic tree lit by the exposed core below, which starts glowing brighter and brighter with an unearthly light as if coming alive just before it explodes and consumes everything in flames. If you want to see what it actually looks like, the official site of the power plant has pictures of the real thing.
• End of an Era: The disaster happens in the final years of the Soviet Union and, according to the former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev himself, it was a "turning point" that "opened the possibility of much greater freedom of expression, to the point that the system as we knew it could no longer continue."
• Epic Fail: Naturally, the RBMK reactor safety test on April 26, 1986, counts as one. It was actually the fourth time they'd attempted the test over three years. No one suspected such a simple test could cause such a massive disaster—and it wouldn't have, if everything else hadn't already gone wrong. Shcherbina delivers an epic condemnation of the power plant's management in the trial in Episode 5:
  Shcherbina: The first time they tried it, they failed. The second time they tried it, they failed. The THIRD time they tried it, they failed. The fourth time they tried it . . . was April 26, 1986.
• Epilogue Letter: The series ends with a passage of Legasov's tape recordings which he left before dying by suicide, followed by a Real-Person Epilogue.
• Everybody Smokes: Most of the cast are puffing away like chimneys; given the stress they're under it's not surprising. This is Truth in Television, as smoking was much more prevalent in the Soviet Union than in the West, even in the 1980s. Makes it a little ironic considering they are trying to stave off a source of radiation and cancer while consuming another one (though considering just how much radiation some of them have absorbed, a few cigarettes really is just the proverbial drop in the ocean at this point).
• Everything Is an Instrument: Hildur Guðnadóttir's score was composed using recordings from the real power plant where some of the series was shot.
• Failsafe Failure:
  • A tragic Truth in Television example. The RBMK reactors in Chernobyl had a serious design flaw where the graphite tipped control rods that would be used for an emergency shutdown actually increased the chances of a reactor breach, which is exactly what directly caused the reactor explosion.
    Legasov: No one in the room that night knew that the shutdown button could be used as a detonator.
  • During the trial, Shcherbina explains that the reactor has three diesel-fuel backup generators to provide power to the pumps in the event that the power to the plant itself is disrupted. However, they take one minute to be brought up to speed, which would never have been enough for a nuclear disaster. Such a serious design flaw was what necessitated the safety test in the first place.
• Fan Disservice: Full-body shots of nearly naked men? Hot. Said nearly naked men being in the final stages of Acute Radiation Syndrome later on? Not.
• Fatal Flaw: The Soviet state as a whole has its obsession with PR and denial of responsibility. Half the reason that the disaster occurred was an obvious flaw in the RMBK system that could have been easily fixed, but was covered up just to avoid the minor embarrassment of having an inferior reactor design. The problem is also allowed to get much worse because the authorities are desperate to let no one know that a disaster has occurred, despite how obvious it was becoming.
• A Father to His Men: When Legasov warns General Pikalov that, even with lead shielding, whoever drives the dosimeter truck close to the fire may not survive the radiation, Pikalov replies, "Then I'll do it myself."
• Fire-Forged Friends: Boris and Valery graduate to this, even using the diminutive with one another by the end of the series.
• First-Name Basis: At the outset of the disaster, Professor Valery Legasov and Energy Minister Boris Shcherbina are forced to work together by direct order from General Secretary Gorbachev. When Legasov first addresses the Minister as "Boris", as his colleagues on the Council are allowed to do, Shcherbina angrily rebukes him. Later on, as they become Fireforged Friends, Shcherbina starts addressing the Professor as "Valery". By the end, he is using "Valera", the dimunative and even more familiar version (Boris's would be "Borya").
• Flashback: After a How We Got Here prologue, the series starts one minute before the moment of the explosion. In Episode 5 a series of flashbacks shows the events that led up to the explosion—Bryukhanov and Fomin's desperation to get the test done, Dyatlov's recklessness as he plowed ahead with it in violation of all protocols, Akimov frantically pressing the AZ-5 button as reactor power spiked, and the explosion, leading back to the same Dutch Angle shot of Dyatlov that started the story in Episode 1.
• Forbidden Zone: A thousand-square-mile "exclusion zone" is eventually established around the plant, delineating the area that is simply too contaminated for habitation.
• Foregone Conclusion: Most people are at least passingly familiar with the amount of horror the Chernobyl disaster brought and its ultimate consequences (i.e the exclusion zone). We also know from the opening scene that Legasov kills himself, and Dyatlov ends up in prison.
• Freakier Than Fiction: So much of what goes on after the explosion is utterly incredible, and difficult to believe for a modern Western audience. While there's a fair amount of dramatic license, a lot of what happens in this series also went down in real life. And bear in mind that Craig Mazin, when researching and writing the plot, always chose to go for the least dramatic narratives. In fact, 3/4 or more of the accompanying podcast is Mazin saying "yes, this actually happened. Except it was even more unbelievable in reality."
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: It's more than a frame but it's easy to miss, but the helicopter didn't crash because it flew over the core and was overcome with radiation — it hit the crane hoist (you can see its hook fall with the helicopter).
• From Bad to Worse: In the immediate aftermath of the explosion, Dyatlov incorrectly assumes the radiation levels to be 3.6 roentgen — in his words, "not great, not terrible", and as Fomin points out, it's a level that won't cause any problem so long as shifts are limited to a few hours at a time. Then Sitnikov manages to get a reading with a mid-range dosimeter (the only thing he had to hand that wasn't either limited to 3.6 roentgen, destroyed by the explosion, or instantly fried by the radiation levels) and finds that the level is actually at least 200 roentgen, which would make someone severely ill after a couple of hours, and be lethal a couple of hours after that. Finally, General Pikalov manages to get a reading with a high-range dosimeter and discovers that the actual level near the reactor is 15,000 roentgen — a level that would prove lethal after less than a minute of exposure.
• Futureshadowing: We see the explosion from afar and the worker's reaction to it in the first episode. It's not until the last that we get to see the buildup and the explosion up close.
• Gallows Humor: True to the setting, this is how most of the characters cope with the situation. Glukhov's Establishing Character Moment provides a great example.
  Glukhov: What's as big as a house, takes 20 liters of fuel every hour, puts out a shitload of smoke and noise, and cuts apples into three pieces? [beat] A Soviet machine made to cut apples INTO FOUR PIECES!
• Genre Mashup: Many viewers and critics alike have noted that at times, the series feels more like a (five-part) horror movie than a traditional historical drama or a Disaster Movie —it just happens to be a horror movie that's thoroughly well-researched and accurate to real events, which makes it all the more terrifying. It evolves into a Courtroom Drama with elements of How We Got Here in Episode 5 when Legasov and Khomyuk testify at the trial of Dyatlov, Bryukhanov, and Fomin and explain how the disaster happened.
• Genre Deconstruction: One founded in real life. This show explores just what kind of system would foster the kind of over-the-top Head-in-the-Sand Management commonly seen in a Disaster Movie.
• The Ghost: Legasov on several occasions mentions a nuclear engineer named Volkov who discovered the design flaw in the Soviet atomic plants that ultimately caused Chernobyl to happen, but was ignored and punished by the Soviet government a decade before the disaster occurred.
• Ghost Town: By the end of Episode 2, Pripyat has been cleared of its entire civilian population.
• Glasses Pull: After being told that when the lava reaches the water tanks below the reactor, it will create an even bigger explosion that will kill untold numbers of people and make the entirety of Ukraine and Belorussia uninhabitable for at least a century, Gorbachev pulls off his glasses and sits back in his chair. Perhaps (understandably) he doesn't see the point of reading his briefing folder any further.
• Gone Horribly Wrong: The entire disaster began because of a safety test, with countless lies, mismanagements, political stunts, and a complete disregard for actual safety causing the reactor to explode.
• Got Volunteered: Many of the people who work to fix Chernobyl had this happen to them.
  • Gorbachev sends Legasov to assist Shcherbina on the ground after he reveals how dire the situation at Chernobyl really is.
  • Subverted. The miners are approached by the Minister of Coal and ordered to get on the buses to Chernobyl, though he can't tell them why, but they point out that there's nothing the soldiers can really do to force them and demand a better explanation. After realizing the gravity of the situation, however, they all volunteer willingly.
  • At the end of Episode 3, soldiers go from door-to-door to deliver draft notices, conscripting people into becoming Liquidators.
• The Greatest Story Never Told:
  • Some of the series' promotional materials called it an "untold true story."
  • Charkov tells Legasov that his efforts will be hidden from the public and the credit given to other people. While the exact circumstance that leads up to this is fictional, he was indeed largely erased from the story until his death, as a combination of backlash for speaking out against the Soviet government and criticism from other scientists who thought him a Know-Nothing Know-It-All whose decisions like dumping sand and boron on the open reactor just made things worse.

H-R

• Harmful to Touch: Anything exposed to high enough levels of radiation from the core becomes this (including people). The graphite from the broken fuel channels is especially dangerous—a fireman who picks one chunk up finds the flesh of his hand being virtually eaten away a minute later. Because of this, the dead bodies of the plant workers and firefighters who died of Accute Radiations Syndrome are put in plastic bags, then in nailed lead-lined coffins, then sealed in zinc coffins then buried in concrete.
• Hazmat Suit:
  • The absence of these in the power plant has devastating effects on the engineers when the disaster happens.
  • General Pikalov puts a rubber NBC suit on to go measure the radiactivity of the exposed core, though it's really more the lead-lining put on the truck that protects him the most from the extreme radiations in this mission.
  • The liquidators who individually have 90 seconds to clean the graphite off the roof of Reactor #4 have NBC suits made of rubber with what looks like a x-ray protective gear for the torso, protective goggles and a gas mask. That's not enough to withstand much radiations but that's all they have, hence the 90 seconds.
  • The decontamination cleaners seen later in Prypiat (and on the series' poster) seem to be better equipped.
• Head-in-the-Sand Management: Given how "nothing bad ever happens in the Soviet Union", the Soviet hierarchy initially refuses to believe the seriousness of the disaster.
  • Averted as you go higher in the Soviet hierarchy, though. In particular, Gorbachev objects to Legasov's unprofessional outburst, but allows him to voice his concerns more calmly and takes them seriously when he does; similarly, Shcherbina initially varies from apathetic to outright hostile to Legasov, but he asks honest questions to try to understand the situation and he uses the answers Legasov gives him immediately on arrival to test Bryukhanov and Fomin. Essentially, at the very top, the management don't have their heads in the sand so much as they hadn't yet realized that Soviet bureaucratic culture has trained their subordinates to withhold information in this kind of emergency out of fear of punishment.
• Hell Is That Noise:
  • The creepy music, composed using recordings from an actual power plant and supplemented by Geiger counters, helicopters, and static, fuses seamlessly with the noises of the reactor, both while it is working and as it basically withers and dies after the accident. This creates a background ambiance that greatly enhances the creepy atmosphere. The culmination of this is certainly "Evacuation", which sounds even creepier when divorced from the evacuation scene proper.
  • When intense radiation is shown on screen, an otherworldly chorus ressembling screaming can be heard.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Even beyond more direct cases like the divers, anyone who went near the plant at all to help contain the damage counts. As Legasov blurts to Shcherbina, both of them will be dead within five years just from the radiation they've already been exposed to, when neither of them has even gotten particularly close to the exposed reactor site. Anyone willing to go within even the general area of the plant to help is shortening their own lives by years at the very least, if not giving themselves mere weeks or even days to live.
• Hope Spot: Lyudmilla rushes to the hospital to see Vasily, and he and the other surviving firefighters seem completely fine — their burns, though extensive, have been bandaged and treated and they seem in good spirits (the radiation poisoning will not claim them until later).
• Hourglass Plot: When they are first introduced, Shcherbina is Too Dumb to Live and completely oblivious of and dismissive of the danger of the reactor, and Legasov has to explain it to him to stop him from getting them both killed. Later in the series when the two are dealing with the political disaster, it's Shcherbina who is saving Legasov from unknowingly making Too Dumb to Live mistakes.
• How We Got Here: After Legasov's suicide exactly two years after the disaster, the series jumps back to the moment the reactor blew up and continues from there. The events leading up to the explosion are shown in Episode 5.
• Ignored Expert: Precious days are lost before people finally start to believe what several of the nuclear workers and scientists have been (correctly) saying: the nuclear core has exploded. Before that point, that statement was handily ignored by all authorities at the power plant. Even allowing for the fact that they, with good, if flawed, reason, did not believe it was physically possible for the core to explode, they should at least have tried to determine why so many people were saying it had.
• Implausible Deniability: First, the official line is that there was no explosion. Then, the story is that there was an explosion, but the reactor can recover and everything is fine. Then the line is that the nearby town needs to be evacuated, but the radiation numbers are far lower than they actually are, even when the Soviets are genuinely trying to ask for help from their allies. A running theme for the show is that the government is so focused on covering their own ass that they can't even come up with a plausible lie, which only humiliates them further and causes more suffering.
  Bryukhanov: My wife is here. Do you think I would keep her in Pripyat if it wasn't safe?
  Petrov: Bryukhanov, the air is glowing.
• In Defence Of Storytelling: Inverted. Legasov's opening monologue explicitly casts "stories" as a poor secondary substitute for "truth," and the concept of narratives—what they mean, who controls them, how they can be dangerous—is woven into the fabric of the show as a cautionary tale.
• Inherent in the System: The series shows the entire event to be one of many symptoms of corruption, inefficiency, and politicking existed within Soviet bureaucracy, as Chernobyl's reactor saw many cheaper alterations and protocol skips that eventually resulted in the meltdown. Even during the cleanup, many lives and resources are needlessly lost thanks to false information and bureaucratic irresponsibility.
  Legasov: 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.
• Instant Mystery, Just Delete Scene: The actual explosion and events leading up to it are not shown in the first episode. This allows for the show to explore the mystery of what happened up until the very end.
• Irony: Of the cruelest possible kind.
  • Various characters note the that the disaster occurred during - indeed, as a result of - a safety test.
  • In episode 4, Legasov admits to Khomyuk that he and others knew about this flaw in the RBMK reactor, but didn't think it would be a problem because the failsafe would only act as a detonator if someone was dumb enough to bypass all the other safety measures and take a reactor to the brink of disaster, which is precisely what Dyatlov did.
  • During the trial in episode 5, Legasov explains that Dyatlev "broke every rule we have" in conducting the test, because he believed that, if the worst should happen (which, of course, it wouldn't) then he could simply press the Big Red Button and shut down the reactor, not knowing that, in the circumstances he created, the button acted as a detonator rather than a shutdown.
• Ironic Echo: Dyatlov and the other bureaucrats running the nuclear reactor keep repeating that a radiation reading of 3.6 roentgen is "not great, not terrible" - even though the technician who gave the reading to Dyatlov explicitly protested that 3.6 is the highest reading that their low-level meter goes, so that actual radiation count is officially off the charts, but he is ignored. At the meeting of the reactor leadership, Dyatlov and the bureaucrats keep parroting the line "3.6 is not great, but not terrible" back and forth at each other, as if to reassure themselves. The true climax of this comes when their report is read out to the Soviet politburo in Moscow, which assures them that 3.6 roentgen is merely equivalent to a single chest x-ray. Legasov, the actual nuclear scientist, then interrupts that this is a blatant lie: 3.6 roentgen is truly equivalent to 400 chest x-rays, and is in fact quite "terrible". Even ignoring that Legasov goes on to point out that 3.6 is just how high their meters go, that there's reports of reactor chamber graphite on the ground, etc. this is a farce. The way this line gets echoed back and forth is essentially a microcosm of the Soviets' "perfect system" based on ass-kissing and denial: if everyone repeats the same lie back and forth to each other enough times (that "3.6 roentgen isn't terrible" when it measurably is), it will become accepted as truth.
• Jerkass: The nurse at the hospital who extorts a bribe from Ludmilya so she can see her husband. Given the calm and casual way Ludmilya goes about this it’s apparent that this is just business as usual in the USSR. Fortunately it’s subverted a few minutes later when another nurse ignores Ludmilya going for cash and instead is very helpful. Her concerns were simply for her safety.
• Just Following Orders: Legasov says that many people were following orders, himself included, of the Central Committee and the KGB to hide the flaw in the RBMK design.
• Kafka Komedy: Frankly, the series often goes the full-Kafka: comedy, drama and horror sharing the same bleak(ly) (hopeful?) scene. That's what makes the funny stand out when we get it: it's inherent in the system, Comrade.
• Kangaroo Court: Played with; Dyatlov, Bryukhanov, and Fomin actually are guilty of everything they're being accused of, with the only mitigating factor being that they had no way of knowing how disastrously flawed the RBMK design was. However, the main purpose of the trial is to actually divert attention away from that fact, and sell the narrative that the disaster was purely the result of the trio's incompetence.
• Karma Houdini: As Legasov says in the opening, Dyatlov's sentence of ten years in a prison camp for "criminal mismanagement" is a double-injustice. There were far greater criminals in the Soviet government that are able to turn Dyatlov into a scapegoat just because he doesn't have powerful friends, which diverts the attention away from them, but on top of that, Dyatlov deserved to die for his actions, not just go to prison.
• Knight in Sour Armor:
  • Discussed in the podcast as a major theme of the show; Mazin tried to depict a grim aesthetic with little in the way of beauty, and show characters who, despite their cynicism, would sacrifice their lives for it anyway. Legasov doesn't want to investigate further and blames himself for the disaster but believes he has to go on, and Shcherbina is horrified by how he will die just from being near the reactor and thinks his role in the response and his life is fairly meaningless anyway but continues to devote himself to his job.
  • The poem at the beginning of Episode 2 is supposed to symbolize this idea. It discusses the Russian ethos of serving one's "bitter" country despite its many flaws.
• Light Is Not Good: The reactor core post-meltdown is depicted as a hellish light so radioactive that anyone who gets a glimpse of it is doomed to die of ARS. The blue light above the exposed core is radiation smoke ionizing the air, showing just how dangerous the situation really is.
• The Man Is Keeping Us Down: The main characters often find their efforts at Damage Control and exposing the truth stymied by the corrupt and oppressive government they have to work within.
• May It Never Happen Again: This is the focus of the later parts of the show, with the main characters figuring out what exactly caused the accident and trying to tell everyone about it to prevent it from happening again, though they are reluctant to do this due to personal consequences of defying the official government line.
• Meaningful Background Event: As a nauseated Ludmilya walks around her apartment in the middle of the night you see the explosion in the distance behind her. She doesn’t notice it until several seconds later when the sound and blast wave rattle the apartment.
• Mission Creep: The main characters start by being sent to Chernobyl to assess the damage, but Legasov realizes that they have to immediately do something to stem the contamination, and from there it turns out they are going to have to spend months cleaning everything up. And then on top of it all, they get caught up in investigating just why the catastrophe happened.
• Multinational Team: Unlike other works, this miniseries includes people of many ethnicities and backgrounds, showing how diverse the Soviet Union was rather than merely being Russia.
• Nature Is Not a Toy: Nuclear energy is actually quite safe and one of the most ecologically friendly sources of energy if handled properly. However, between the inherently flawed design of Reactor 4, the inexperienced operators, and the arrogance of the plant's higher-ups in the face of an increasingly obvious and dangerous life-threatening event, practically ensured the disaster to occur sooner or later. And in the process, doom thousands to horrific fates.
• The Needs of the Many: A mixed bag.
  • Averted with the government officials who, believing that Utopia Justifies the Means, are willing to let millions suffer in order to avoid damage to the national reputation.
  • Played straight with the common people like the three divers and the group of miners who are willing to sacrifice their lives for the sake of the many.
  • Legasov tells Gorbachev that to prevent a steam explosion that will irradiate all of Belarus and Ukraine and kill millions, three operators are going to have to go into the plant and drain the water. But those three men will die from radiation exposure after they do it, which is why Legasov says, "We're asking your permission to kill three men." After taking a Beat to digest this, Gorbachev says, "Comrade Legasov, all victories inevitably come at a cost," which is all he says to give the go-ahead.
• Never My Fault:
  • As was typical in the Soviet Union, multiple characters attempt to shift the blame to someone else. The best example would be during the meeting between Bryukhanov, Fomin, and Dyatlov shortly after the accident. Dyatlov begins to summarize what he thinks happened, pointing out that they were working exactly as Fomin prescribed. Fomin then replies that Dyatlov was directly supervising when the accident occurred. The script even points out that both men immediately recognize what the other is doing.
  • When the radiation level is reported at the jaw-dropping level of 15,000 roentgen, Scherbina orders Bryukhanov and Fomin "escorted" to the local Party headquarters (i.e., arrested). As they are dragged away, Fomin shouts, "Dyatlov was in charge! It was Dyatlov!"
  • At the State trial, Dyatlov (looking very much the worse for wear after his poisoning) lies through his teeth and says it wasn't he who gave the order to raise the power, in fact he wasn't even in the control room.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
  • Legasov's idea to smother the fire with sand and to slow the reaction with boron results in the sand being liquefied into radioactive "lava" and pouring towards water pooled underground, threatening to cause an even greater disaster if they interact. The only way to avert this is to send three men into the dark and highly irradiated underground to pump the water out; even if they succeed, it is a Suicide Mission, and he needs clearance from Gorbachev himself to order it. In his defense, Legasov was aware that dumping the boron/sand mixture would "create problems of its own" (and much of the sand that the lava was made of was already in situ around the reactor where it was intended to act as a safety blanket), but putting out the fire had to take priority because it was spewing radioactive smoke, and he wasn't aware of the pooled water until Khomyuk alerted him to it; in addition, unlike basically everyone else who fucked up to any extent regarding the disaster, he owns his mistake and sets to work trying to prevent its potential consequences, and a stroke of luck ensures that the mistake ends up having no casualties, even of the divers who by all rights should have died.
  • Toptunov, Akimov, and the firefighters poured tons of water onto the reactor fire in hopes of putting it out, but the water vaporized upon contact because the fire was so hot.^note And the now irradiated water vapour floated into the atmosphere, contaminating everything downwind The water that hadn't boiled away pools under the reactor, where it must be drained away lest the core melts its way down and touches the water which would trigger another steam explosion.
• Nightmarish Nursery: One episode shows some volunteers in radiation suits conducting dosimeter sweeps of Pripyat to determine how much of the town is salvageable. One woman is sweeping a children's park while her dosimeter clicks in the middling range, until she approaches a little girl's bicycle. The bike's frame is steel, which absorbs radiation like a sponge, then releases it over time, making the dosimeter max out. The woman backs away from the bike, recognizing that it's too dangerous for anyone to be near, protection or no. The whole park will have to be buried under layers of concrete.
• Non-Malicious Monster: The exploded RBMK reactor isn't even alive, much less capable of realizing the massive harm it's doing. It's simply a large mass of highly radioactive material that's been spread over a wide area. Nonetheless, that very same lack of sentience also makes it even more horrifying, as the radioactive fallout isn't even aware that it exists, nor does it care that its presence causes other creatures that are sentient to cease existing.
• No One Should Survive That!: Some rooted in reality:
  • Alexander "Sasha" Yuvchenko — the man who says "I don't think there is a core" – survived. He spent nearly a year in the hospital afterwards, and needed burn treatments, but was able to live with his wife and son afterward in Moscow. He was even interviewed in the documentary seen here. A Russian newspaper article about his son Kirill says he died in 2008 at the age of 47.
  • Anatoly Dyatlov received a huge dose of radiation (around 4 Sv), yet he survived and he died in 1995 of heart failure. It wasn't the first time he was hospitalized due to radiation sickness – in the sixties Dyatlov worked in a nuclear submarine shipyard in Komsomolsk and he was irradiated, also nearly fatally, in an accident.
  • Colonel-General Pikalov, who volunteered to climb the rubble towards the exposed core and take a reading because he was unwilling to risk the lives of any of his men, also didn't die. He survived and died of a heart attack in 2003 at the age of 78.
  • All three of the "Chernobyl Divers" survived their mission to drain the basement.
    • Alexei Ananenko and Valeri Bezpalov were alive as of 2018 when they were awarded the Order For Courage in the Third Degree by the Ukranian president in a ceremony held at the nuclear plant. Ananenko was able to accept in person, while Bezpalov was absent due reportedly due to health issues.
    • Boris Baranov died of a heart attack in 2005 and was given the Order posthumously, which his grandson accepted on his behalf.
  • In general, the effects of radiation largely come down to luck and probability, especially when talking about long-term effects where it's impossible to determine who will get cancer from the radiation and whether someone's cancer was actually caused by it or not, only that some large amount of people will die. And in acute cases, many of the victims survived because of having the best medical care possible in Moscow.
• No OSHA Compliance:
  • The RBMK reactor design itself. It wasn't adequately contained (unlike Western reactors, RBMKs had containment walls, but no containment roof, so if an explosion happened, it would be channeled upwards and the roof wouldn't contain it) and it had control rods (meant to decrease the speed of nuclear reactions) tipped with graphite, which accelerates nuclear reactions. This meant the control rods did literally the opposite of their job when they were inserted. This led to a runaway reaction Going Critical (technically prompt-critical) and resulted in the roof being blown off the building and radioactive debris being scattered around.
  • As Scherbina explains at the trial, the reason for the safety test that led to the disaster is because RBMK reactors didn't have a reliable backup power system in the first place, and everyone blatantly knew this. The reactor requires power to run the water pumps that cool the core: if power is lost due to blackout, foreign attack/terrorism, or just plain mechanical failure, the coolant will stop flowing and the reactor will go into meltdown. They did build backup diesel generators—but it would take 60 seconds for them to come online in the event of a sudden power failure, which was simply too late to stop a meltdown. They might as well have not had the diesel backups. The safety test was an ad hoc fix to see if they could use some of the reactor's own power, while the turbines were gradually winding down, to bridge the gap—a promising idea, but one that never worked. So RBMK reactors were built throughout the Soviet Union knowing that they had no reliable backup power system, and a blackout for any reason would lead to a meltdown.
• Not Even Bothering with the Accent: Most of the actors don't; Jessie Buckley and Emily Watson do, but Stellan Skarsgård sticks with his native Swedish accent and Jared Harris speaks with his English, Irish-inflected accent. In the podcast, the writer reveals that they tried having the actors do accents but found that it distracted from their performances and could easily descend into narm.invoked However, the primarily US audience would be immediately taken out of the disbelief that the series was in the USSR if actors had American accents. As a result, the majority of Soviet Ukraine apparently has English accents, and even those who put on Eastern European drawls are non-American actors.
• Nothing Is Scarier:
  • Several scenes are sold entirely on silence and atmosphere. This is particularly evident because radiations often kill without making any visual cues other than their effects on the human body.
  • No trace of plant worker Valery Khodemchuk was ever found; as he was working down at the pumps near the reactor, it's presumed that he was vaporised when the reactor exploded. If not, his body is still down there and can never be recovered.
• Not Quite the Right Thing: Legasov decides to go through with an admittedly risky and imperfect plan of dumping sand and boron on the reactor, believing it is worth it for containing the radiation, and that they have a month to fix the negative consequences. However, he was not aware that there is still water in the tanks, and if the melted, superheated "lava" reaches those tanks, it will immediately change the water to steam and cause a disastrous second explosion within only two days.
• Obstructive Bureaucrat:
  • Deconstructed and examined. The politicians of the Soviet Union are more concerned with finding someone to blame for the unfolding catastrophe than they are with solving it, or even understanding its seriousness. This is because the governmental system of the USSR pretty much encourages everyone to just pass the buck, and the man left without a chair when the music stops is either Reassigned to Antarctica or executed. No one who knows the truth of the magnitude of the nuclear accident can admit it because it is political suicide at best, and literal suicide at worst.
  • Deconstructed with Shcherbina, who certainly starts off that way and nearly gets himself and everyone killed by arrogantly believing they can fly right over the plant. However over the course of the series he begins to realize just how dire the situation is and eventually uses his political power to break through a lot of the bureaucracy and actually be effective.
• Oh, Crap!: Anyone being told to report to Chernobyl has this reaction. Specifically Glukhov, who moments earlier was threatening to actually kill Minister of Coal Mikhail Shchadov drops his Smug Snake attitude the second he hears why he is being told to move out.
• One-Steve Limit: Both averted, because it's Based on a True Story where many of the people involved happened to share names, and played straight, because everyone refers to everyone else by their last names all the time. You'd never know just from the show, for instance, that Dyatlov and Sitnikov both happened to be called "Anatoly".
• Outside-Context Problem: Legasov states the nature of the Chernobyl disaster as this to Scherbina early on in the emergency. They essentially have to invent their own solutions to the problem as they go along.
  Legasov: You are dealing with something that has never occurred on the planet before.
• The Place: The title of the show. As Mazin notes in the podcast, people living at the time didn't have the association of Chernobyl with nuclear disaster—to them, it was just a place.
• Perilous Power Source: The reactor itself proves to be this, due to its design flaws and the hubris of its operators.
  Legasov: The atom is a humbling thing.
• Phlebotinum-Proof Robot: Following the incident, the main characters use robots to clear the roof of the facility of irradiated debris. For two of three roofs, they are successful with robotic lunar rovers. For the third, they have to negotiate for a high-durability West German robot to be able to operate in the extreme radiation. Unfortunately, the robot breaks down because the negotiations didn't give them an accurate number on how bad the radiation was to get a capable unit, as doing so would force them to admit how bad it really was, so the robot ends up failing only seconds in, and they're forced to use people instead.
• Poisonous Person: Once someone has been exposed to high doses of radiation, they are portrayed as being perpetually radioactive and dangerous for others to touch. It is implied that touching Vasily is when Lyudmilla receives the deadly dose of radiation that kills her baby.
• Poor Communication Kills: One of the morals of the series: when governments prioritize keeping secrets over actually solving problems, the cost becomes astronomical.
• Power Trio: Legasov, Shcherbina, and Khomyuk are the three main characters working to stop the disaster from getting worse. They have their foil in Dyatlov, Bryukhanov, and Fomin, who . . . are not.
• Pragmatic Adaptation: Because of the sheer amount of people and events involved in the Chernobyl incident, some things had to be condensed or switched around to make them into a narrative story.
  • Legasov didn't leave behind tapes when he died; he left behind written notes, which were then recorded on tapes after they were found. It starts the show off with a historical deviation, but by having Legasov record them as tapes, it gives the show an excuse to start with a voiceover from the main character.
  • Legasov was married with children, but adding them into the story would have detracted from the narrative's main focus and added far more layers to his suicide than they could unpack, so they're Adapted Out. Shcherbina indirectly mentions them in episode four by saying that the KGB will go after his family, but they never appear nor are they mentioned in the epilogue.
  • The amount of firefighters, liquidators, scientists, miners, and politicians involved in clearing out the incident easily numbers over 10,000 people, which is simply impossible for the show to juggle. As a result, the series relies on Allegorical Characters to represent the different groups; Khomyuk is a fictional Composite Character to represent all of the scientists who aided in the relief efforts (which the show acknowledges in the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue), Pavel and Bacho represent the newly conscripted and veteran soldiers, etc. While it leaves large numbers of people Adapted Out, it accomplishes the goal of representing the thousands of people involved without overdosing the show with characters.
  • Several characters are shown having to act on bad orders via literal or metaphorical gunpoint, such as Sitnikov needing an armed guard to take him to view the exposed reactor. In reality, Soviet culture and propaganda was so focused on following orders to aid communism that none of them would have needed any kind of threat - either the inherent threat of reprisals were present in every order, or the culture was so effective that no one would've questioned the benefits of the order in the first place. However, because this does not tend to be true in Western cultures, the only ways to make this clear was to either derail the script with exposition or just have actual threats to force the issue, and the latter is far less disruptive.
  • The divers didn't have any backup lights in real life - once their one light went out, they accomplished their mission in complete darkness by following the pipes in and out. Of course, there's no way to have a scene in actual complete darkness and still have any idea whatsoever of what's happening, so the divers here have backup windup lights to use once their main lights go out.
  • Legasov and Shcherbina were not actually present at Dyatlov, Fomin, and Bryukhanov's trial (in particular, Legasov's involvement with the incident ended in Vienna). However, as a narrative, the trial serves as the climax, meaning that the options were to either have the real scientists (that we had not yet seen) speak at the trial, or use some artistic license to make it a strong climax for the narrative and the characters involved. The show slightly mixes the idea - the podcast does acknowledge the artistic license taken with the trial, but the show itself implies that Legasov and Shcherbina actually were at the trial but were erased from the event by the government in retaliation for Legasov's speech.
  • The complexity of Russian naming conventions is flattened down to a simple "Comrade Lastname" for everyone. This avoids both the problem of the viewer figuring out, for example, who this "Dyatlov" guy could be after five minutes of dialogue addressed to Anatoly Stepanovich, and also the One-Steve Limit problems when Anatoly Andreyevich (Sitnikov) shows up.
• Previously on…: Episodes 2 to 5 open with a recap of the events from earlier episodes.
• Pride Before a Fall: As noted in End of an Era, the Chernobyl disaster would be the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union.
  • On one hand, there was the RBMK Reactor, held to be a state of the art accomplishment in Soviet engineering. The disaster and subsequent reveal of its fatal design flaw lead to the decline of the nuclear industry in the Soviet Union, its most prestigious arm now seen with suspicion by the people. Although the Reactor's flaws would be corrected, of the twenty-six reactors that once existed, only three were in operation by the time the series aired.
  • On the other, the Soviet Union itself: its wanton attitude both towards safety and the consequences of the disaster in an effort to preserve its reputation would lead to the glasnost and perestroika initiative of Gorbachev to gain traction and, ultimately, end in the dissolution of the Soviet state.
• Pulling the Thread: Numerous workers and scientists make repeated remarks on various bits of evidence that the disaster must be much worse than they're being told, but are repeatedly ignored by the more powerful bureaucrats. It's only when the most powerful bureaucrat involved, armed with an Info Dump from Legasov, calls out some technical details that the true nature of the disaster starts to become accepted.
  Shcherbina: Why did I see graphite on the roof? Graphite is only found in the core where it's used as a... neutron flux moderator. Correct?
  Bryukhanov: [horrified realization] Fomin, why did the Deputy Chairman see graphite on the roof?
  Fomin: Well, that can't be. Comrade Shcherbina, my apologies, but graphite... that's not possible. Perhaps you saw burnt concrete?
  Shcherbina: Now there you made a mistake, because I may not know much about nuclear reactors, but I know a lot about concrete.
• Pyrrhic Victory: Although it's the only victory possible under the circumstances (the whole of Ukraine doesn't collapse from radiation poisoning), this is invoked numerous times, with characters being sent to awful and inevitable deaths simply because it's the only way to prevent a huge collapse that might lead the whole world into The End of the World as We Know It. In the end, the knowledge that the disaster was eventually contained (for a given definition of "contained", since Pripyat still has to be abandoned) is only a token consolation for the hundreds of thousands of lives ended or ruined by the disaster.
• The Queen's Latin: Only a few actors attempt an accent. Most speak English with a British accent instead.
• Rage Breaking Point:
  • Legasov has an understated one in Episode 3. By that time, he's already dealt with more than his share of Obstructive Bureaucrats, Know Nothing Know It Alls, and politicians who want him to change the laws of science to fit their production schedules. He finally reaches his limit when Gorbachev snaps at him to demand "when all this will be over!" Legasov doesn't raise his voice, he simply deadpans that, since Plutonium-238's radioactive half-life is 24,000 years, "perhaps we should just say, not within our lifetimes." He gives no outward sign of anger, but he no longer gives a damn about ruffling anyone's feathers.
  • Shcherbina's comes when the "Joker" robot shipped from West Germany fails within seconds of being deployed on the radioactive roof of the plant. He calls the Kremlin, who admit that they underreported the radiation levels to the West because of their stubborn adherence to the party line that "a global nuclear disaster of this scale is not possible in the Soviet Union". Shcherbina proceeds to rip the entire Soviet leadership, up to and including Gorbachev, and right down to the KGB agents wiretapping his phone, a whole new anatomy for being such fucking idiots, then exits his trailer dangling the smashed remains of the phone and calmly explains the situation to Legasov and General Tarakanov.
• Rage Within the Machine: Legasov and Shcherbina both have prominent positions in the Soviet Union and start out as loyal to the party and willing to allow injustices to happen to get by. Their Character Development throughout what they go through starts to change that. By the end (and to a good extent from the beginning for Legasov, given he knows exactly how badly everyone is messing up), they are both furious at the system.
• Readings Blew Up the Scale:
  • In the immediate aftermath of the explosion at Chernobyl it's mentioned that most of the Geiger counters being used to measure radiation are breaking after being having their measurements maxed out. The Central Committee makes the mistake of trusting the reported "3.6 roentgen" number until Legasov points out that that's the maximum reading for such low-level equipment, and given that he fears that the equivalent of a nuclear bomb just went off, the real number is probably much higher. It takes General Pikalov driving a truck in himself with their most capable dosimeter tied to the front to confirm that actual readings are around 15,000 roentgen for anyone to take this correction seriously.
  • This is pointed out when Legasov testifies about the final power reading at the Chernobyl reactor, saying that while the final reading was 33,000 megawatts (which is already more than ten times the amount the reactor was designed to operate at), this was only the highest that the display could actually show - in reality, it was certainly much higher, but there's no way at the time to calculate how high the power went (modern estimates have placed it in the millions).
• Real Is Brown: Many scenes are washed out and tinged gray or dingy green to illustrate the gritty realism the production designers wanted.
• Real Footage Re-creation: The series recreates the Chernobyl Mi-8 helicopter crash through the use of CGI (and from different camera angles), albeit setting the crash at a point of time several months before it occurred in Real Life.
• Reality Has No Subtitles: Every piece of text, even single-word buttons, is in Russian with Cyrillic script. The only way to know what they say is either by being Russian literate or by the characters' reaction to it.
• Real-Person Epilogue: The end of the last episode has this, showing pictures of the real people and places involved while explaining what happened to them.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: In a social and political system that encourages selfish preservation and emboldens Obstructive Bureaucrat mentality, reason is a liability. But some still manage to use their power for good.
  • Boris Shcherbina is Legasov's primary ally in the government, and while he initially seems like an Obstructive Bureaucrat, he very quickly realizes the reality of the situation and uses his pull within the government to aid Legasov's plans any way he can. He very quickly gets fed up with the Soviet system and even indirectly assists Legasov with revealing the truth to the world by ensuring he has time to speak at the trial.
  • Gorbachev contrasts all of his predecessors by taking the disaster seriously from the get-go and focusing most on containing the disaster rather than saving face. Though he does get tired of Legasov's attitude and condemns him for speaking out of turn, he still lets Legasov speak and trusts everything he has to say due to his expertise, even when it comes from the smallest pieces of evidence he has.
  • General Pikalov, the first leader Legasov and Shcherbina encounter on the ground, proves he can be trusted by immediately understanding they need a proper roentgen measurement rather than going along with Bryukhanov and Fomin's lies. Once Legasov explains the dangers, Pikalov volunteers to do it himself, knowing he's subjecting himself to a probably lethal amount of radiation but trusting that the information he gains will be useful to the cleanup efforts (and likely knowing that his word will be inherently more trustworthy than a random soldier's, meaning that the lies will come to an end).
• Reports of My Death Were Greatly Exaggerated: As discussed in the ending text, the three divers were rumored and believed by the west to have died as a result of their actions, but they in fact all survived.
• Right on the Tick: Legasov kills himself exactly at the time of the disaster, two years later, at 1:23:45. This same time shows up in Episode 5 as Legasov's Lecture as Exposition is alternated with showing the second-by-second procession of the catastrophe.

S-Y

• Sadistic Choice: Everyone is forced to make one, either to contain the disaster or because of the Soviet government's intolerance of disobedience.
  • The night shift for Reactor 4 can either obey Dyatlov's boneheaded orders to put the reactor into meltdown or get themselves banned from ever working again. They choose the former only because they are unaware of how bad things could get.
  • Fomin and Bryukhanov order Sitnikov to get up on the reactor rooftop and look into the core to report its status, under threat of getting shot in the face. Shcherbina later gives his helicopter pilot the same choice, but the pilot is smart enough to listen when Legasov says a bullet is a much more merciful death than Acute Radiation Sickness.
  • Legasov and Shcherbina can expose many men to dangerous amounts of radiation to clean up and contain the situation or let the reactor continue poisoning the world.
  • Legasov can either expose the truth of the RBMK reactor's design flaws and incur the wrath of the Kremlin for humiliating the Soviet Union, or he can toe the party line and let the possibility of a second Chernobyl happen.
• Scenery Gorn: The devastated and unsettling scenery is overwhelming, particularly the mutilated reactor building itself.
• Scenery Porn: Contrasting the gorn are the shots in the first episode of the nuclear plant's halo directly after the explosion, as well as the cinematography of life continuing as normal in the closing minutes.
• Science Foils: Legasov and Khomyuk are both scientists and part of the show's Power Trio, with Khomyuk's idealism about speaking the truth contrasting with Legasov, who only gets there after a lot of Character Development.
• Science Is Good: The disaster is largely caused by people who try to ignore the science behind nuclear reactors in favor of their own political motivations and is contained by those who do have the scientific knowledge and morality to act.
• Scientist vs. Soldier: Scientists vs. soldiers and politicians. The scientist characters try to call the political party men in charge out for how they are ignoring the threat or choosing horrible solutions to it for political reasons. However, the scientists themselves are not innocent of covering up the truth, and among the ranks of the soldier and political characters are Reasonable Authority Figures and people who are willing to make a Heroic Sacrifice if necessary to help contain the radiation.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: The radioactive fission within the remains of the power plant cannot be stopped. It will keep happening until what remains of the fuel runs out in 50,000 years. The only thing that can be done is to shelter the rest of the world from the radiation by burying the reactor in sand, boron, and (eventually) concrete and steel.
• Seen It All: One old woman who stubbornly refuses to evacuate gives this as her reason: she's survived revolution, civil war, famine, and world war. None of those things ever got her to leave her home, so she won't leave because of radiation, something she can't even see.
• Sensor Suspense: Given that you can't see the radiation, some scenes like the divers scene and the scene with the liquidators clearing the roof have to be sold completely on the "soundtrack" of Geiger counters ticking furiously—to great effect.
• Setting as a Character: The reactor itself is as prominent a presence as any of the human characters, serving as an antagonist of sorts. This impression is strengthened when the liquidators nickname the building's three roof levels "Masha," "Katya," and "Nina." The tangle of rods in the core itself is affectionately known as "Elena."
• Shaky Cam: The camera often drifts around a bit when one might expect it to be still. It isn't following a moving subject or switching between characters, it's just wobbly.
• Shame If Something Happened: Dyatlov forces Akimov to calling in the day shift (to maintain the now-destroyed reactor) by telling him that he may not be able to save Akimov's career, but he can certainly make it worse. Episode 5 reveals Dyatlov tried to pull this before the explosion too: he told Akimov and Toptunov that if they didn't raise the power back up from 30 immediately (against all safety precautions), he would see to it that they never found work in the nuclear industry again.
• Shell-Shock Silence: After the explosion, we get this from Dyatlov's perspective while Akimov shouts his name. This is shown in both the first and last episodes.
• Shoot the Dog: A pretty overt example in Episode 4, when two soldiers and one conscripted civilian are charged with "destroying" all the animals (most of which are pets) in Pripyat to prevent them from spreading the radiation. The leader of the unit, although a pretty tough and often mean guy, combines this with Pet the Dog in his violent insistence that none of them be allowed to suffer (he also sends the civilian outside and does the job himself when a mother dog along with her pups has to be shot).
• Shown Their Work: Some Artistic License aside, the show manages to not only be one of the most accurate portrayals of the Chernobyl incident in fiction but one of the most accurate portrayals of living in the 1980s Soviet Union. Some viewers who lived in the Soviet Union during the events portrayed have remarked that the show can be hard to watch, simply because of how Close to Home it can get for them. The first example of many is how Legasov leaves some extra food for his cat before dying by suicide; initially written as him leaving pet food for his cat, the show's advisors pointed out that there was no pet food in the Soviet Union. Another is that all married characters wear their wedding rings on their right 4th fingers, instead of the left as is common in the west.
• Slave to PR: The Soviet government's biggest concern even in the midst of a nuclear crisis is looking competent in front of everyone else, which leads to more problems than can be counted.
  • Fomin and Bryukhanov are more interested in passing the blame than investigating the accident, wasting valuable time while the exposed reactor is belching out radioactive smoke every second. The citizens of Pripyat are not alerted of the danger or evacuated away from the power plant until several days have passed, while the Kremlin initially believes the accident is nothing to worry about because of their underselling.
  • The Kremlin negotiates with West Germany for a robot that can handle the astronomical radioactivity on the plant's rooftop but undersells just how radioactive it really is. Several months are wasted for a robot that breaks down in seconds.
  • The RBMK reactors had serious design flaws that were classified, most notably that the AZ-5 shutdown button acted less like an off switch and more like a lit fuse to dynamite. Dyatlov was unaware of this, and he removed every other safety feature only because he thought he had AZ-5 as a backup. Legasov exposes this design flaw and is punished for exposing the Kremlin's incompetence.
    Shcherbina: What you're proposing is that Legasov humiliate a nation that is obsessed with not being humiliated.
• Someone Has to Die: Just getting close enough to the reactor to contain it means massively increased cancer risk for all the workers, but if they don't do anything, the entirety of Europe will be poisoned by the radiation.
• Starts with a Suicide: The story begins with a heartbroken and traumatized Legasov recording his thoughts about Chernobyl a few years after the event and then dying by suicide, implicitly over the guilt of the events of Chernobyl. We then flash back to the actual disaster and see how things got this bad.
• State Sec: The KGB is a recurring obstacle for the protagonists, most notably to Khomyuk who is investigating the cause of the reactor's explosion. The agents are everywhere disguised as the most innocuous people, stalk the protagonists, and even arrest Khomyuk when she threatens a doctor that "people are going to hear about this". However, they are also presented in a more nuanced light. Charkov, one of the highest-ranking people in the KGB, is himself is watched over by agents and he explains that the organization may be oppressive but is also a "circle of accountability". Shcherbina notes they even have power over how the nuclear reactors are built and managed, and that the RBMK reactors will never be fixed without their approval.
• Stupid Evil: The disaster gets exponentially worse than it could've been because so many people are so focused on saving face that they lose all common sense.
  • The entire Soviet government does everything it can to pretend to the world that the disaster didn't happen, to the point that they delay the evacuation of their own citizens. It somehow never occurs to them that other countries could eventually discover what happened until Sweden detects the radiation due to natural weather; the result is that the entire world realizes that if other countries are detecting a problem that the Soviets aren't reporting, they must have royally fucked up, causing worldwide embarrassment for them. Even when they're dealing with countries that genuinely want to help like West Germany, they still lowball the danger, which does absolutely nothing but waste time, ensure more deaths, embarrass them even further, and ensure that no country is willing to give them aid again.
  • The leaders in the plant are so determined to cover up the explosion that they send several innocent people to die pointless deaths and they try to lie about graphite to Shcherbina, which makes him immediately realize that something must be incredibly wrong if they're trying to lie to his face.
  • Dyatlov tries to throw his workers under the bus for the disaster, claiming that he wasn't even in the control room when the disaster occurred. By this point, several witnesses had already testified to his role in the disaster and included specifics, such as how he threatened his subordinates to force the test to go through after they had already warned him that something was wrong. The worst part is that this was in a show trial, where all he had to do was just show some sincere guilt - instead, he's so dedicated to screwing over his workers that he tries a bold-faced lie that doesn't even make sense and that everyone in the room, including the judge, immediately sees through.
• Superficial Solution: So, so many, in part due to incompetence and also because of the nature of radiation itself.
  • The drops of boron and silica—a main component of sand—into the core serve to put out the nuclear fire and reduce the spread of the radiation cloud; however, it does not end the problem as there's still radioactive corium (a name given to the melted components of a reactor) within the facility that still gives lethal radiation, which leads to the next phase . . .
  • The construction of the sarcophagus. Though it worked to contain the spread of radiation, the area of Pripyat is still lethally contaminated and will be so for years, additionally, the concrete sarcophagus itself had a set life of 50 years and had to be replaced in 2016.
  • As Shcherbina points out in the final episode, the implementation of the diesel back-up generators in case of a blackout to prevent a core meltdown would not have worked since it took approximately a minute for the generators to pick up the load of the pumps. The safety test being carried out that night was supposed to evaluate a possible solution to this, and it instead revealed that the most dangerous part of the reactor was the failsafe.
• Tagline: "What is the cost of lies?"
• Take That!: The series contains many of these directed at the Soviet leadership for being more concerned about covering up the situation instead of fixing it, making everything worse.
• Tempting Fate: This is the Soviet Union's unofficial motto. The disaster happens because the reactor was shoddily designed and built, with Dyatlov pushing it into meltdown mode because all of them thought nothing could go wrong. This attitude of always pretending things are perfectly fine and nothing bad will happen is a natural extension of the Soviet's obsession with public image, which always leads to disaster. Charkov and Legasov sum it up perfectly in the last episode:
  Charkov: Why worry about something that isn't going to happen?
  Legasov: "Something that isn't going to happen"? [laughs] Oh, that's perfect! We should put that on our money.
• Tentative Light: Three structural engineers in radiation suits venture into the lower levels of reactor 4 to assess the damage to the cooling pumps. All three are issued flashlights powered by 12-volt carbon-zinc batteries. All three lights fail within the first minute, due to the massive radiation making the air conductive. The engineers must feel their way around the pipes and debris in total darkness and hip-deep in heavy water.
• Thanatos Gambit: Legasov's suicide can be considered this, as it was his death combined with the tapes he disseminated that finally drew public attention to the design flaws of the RBMK reactors. Afterwards, the Soviet government has no choice but to publicly admit the flaws and fix them.
• This Cannot Be!: Several people, especially Fomin, disregard the news of the explosion on the grounds that reactor cores "don't/can't explode". Even when investigating the explosion, Legasov and Khomyuk initially think it isn't possible until they learn about several reactor design flaws in conjunction with Dyatlov's recklessness.
• Time-Delayed Death: Outside of absolutely massive doses, death by radiation poisoning is a rather uncomfortable drawn-out affair.
  Shcherbina: They're calling it a "long illness." [It] doesn't seem very long to me.
• Time Skip: The first three episodes more or less continuously cover the week following the explosion. The fourth episode starts four months afterward, and then the fifth takes place a whole year after the disaster.
• Token Romance: Inverted. Legasov's Real Life wife and children are cut because it would have detracted from the actual focus of the show.
• Town with a Dark Secret: Scherbina describes Pripyat as a version of this in the last episode - a town whose recent history is shadowed by the violence that befell its previous inhabitants, which the newest residents couldn't care less about until the explosion.
  "Do you know anything about this town, Chenobyl? It was mostly Jews and Poles. The Jews were killed in pogroms and Stalin forced the Poles out. And then the Nazis came, killed whoever was left. But after the war, people came to live here anyway. They knew the ground under their feet was soaked in blood, but they didn't care. No one ever thinks it will happen to them."
• Tragic Stillbirth: Lyudmilla's baby, thanks to the radiation she was exposed to from being around the plant and spending time with Vasily.
• Translation Convention:
  • Spoken Russian dialogue is translated into English dialogue. However, all written or transmitted messages, such as in television broadcasts, are preserved as Russian.
  • The reason everyone is frequently referred to as "Comrade Legasov" etc. isn't a stereotypical assumption about the Soviet Union, but because the alternative was to use a longer patronymic format which doesn't neatly translate into English. This longer form does show up occasionally, particularly in the final episode, but not as much as in reality. Real Russians would formally address him "Valery Alekseyevich" instead of just saying "Legasov", but use of given names in English is almost always informal (so when Charkov calls him that in the fifth episode, it comes off as the KGB head subtly exercising his power by putting himself on a First-Name Basis unasked-for, instead of still properly courteous).
• Vodka Drunkenski: Pretty much every single male character is shown drinking vodka, at all hours of the day. At the time, vodka was used as radiation treatment (at least according to one townsperson watching the fire, who heard it from his friend at the plant). It is even enforced by the government: the liquidators are given free vodka as reward or to keep morale high. Barry Keoghan's character declines an offer of vodka in one of his introductory scenes, considering it a "bit early", but as the reality of his situation sets in, starts drinking it like, well, water.
• War Is Hell: Bacho tells a "war story" to Pavel: his unit was clearing a house in Afghanistan, he happened upon a man and shot him in the stomach.
  That's it. That's a real war story. There're never any good stories, like in the movies. They're shit.
• We ARE Struggling Together: Even in the face of a nuclear disaster it's a fight to have people get along with what to do to solve it. A lot of the complications come from misinformation and people trying to cover their reputations.
• We Have Reserves:
  • Played sympathetically as most of the people who are knowingly ordering people to risk their lives are doing so only because there is no other option. Mazin intentionally wanted to subvert the idea that all Soviet officials were spendthrift with human life. Gorbachev visibly takes a moment to digest being asked to authorize "killing three men." Shcherbina, Legasov, and Tarankanov exhaust every possible idea to avoid sending people onto the Masha section of the roof before they're forced to accept it.
  • Deconstructed in another aspect however: While the number of people required to contain the disaster was indeed enormous, the Soviet fixation on not accepting the scale of the incident to its people and the world to save face leads to all of the workers and soldiers sent there being given minimal protection against the radiation. As the showrunner said, the Soviet leadership didn't understand how to deal with the earlier, more scientific problems, but a large-scale, blunt problem like "we need 700,000 men to scrub down everything in a 20-mile radius"—that was something they knew how to do. Like World War II or industrial projects, throwing large numbers of men at a problem, at a level unthinkable in the free societies of the West, was a uniquely Soviet advantage. On the other hand, they make it a point to show a new liquidator who isn't even a soldier, causing another to gravely realize that they're starting to run out of men.
• Wham Episode: Episode 4, "The Happiness of All Mankind." After unrelenting human suffering has been on full display for three episodes, the show goes for the gut punch detailing how pets and domesticated animals have to be dealt with because of radioactive contamination, in conjunction with the actions of the "bio-robots" used to clear the plant's roof of lethally radioactive debris. And, just to really pile on the pain, Lyudmilla's baby dies hours after being born because of radiation exposure.
• Wham Line:
  • Just to finally illustrate to Shcherbina how dangerous the situation is, Legasov yells at him that the two of them already only have five years to live just because they're in the area, even without going inside the disaster zone. It shakes Shcherbina in a way that nothing up until that point has (in real life, Shcherbina actually lived shorter than Legasov's prediction here - four years and four months).
  • "It's not 3 roentgen. It's 15,000."
• Wham Shot: One of the most horrifying shots of the entire mini-series is that of a clean-up worker's torn boot in episode 4.
• "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: Episode 5 ends with this, along with footage of the real people and events.
  • Legasov's tapes were recovered after his suicide and circulated through the Soviet scientific community. Eventually, the flaw in the RBMK reactors was rectified.
  • Shcherbina died four years and four months after being sent to Chernobyl.
  • After their release from prison, Dyatlov died from radiation-related illness while Fomin was given an administrative job at another nuclear plant.
  • Lyudmilla suffered multiple strokes and was told by doctors that she would never have a child. They were wrong. She eventually gave birth to a son and they live in Kiev.
  • About 100 miners who took part in the digging operation beneath Reactor #4 never lived past age 40.
  • It is believed that of all the people who viewed the fire from the railway bridge in Pripyat, none of them survived.
  • More than 300,000 people were displaced by the disaster. They were told it would be temporary.
  • The total cost in human lives remains unknown. While it is estimated that thousands of people died, the official Soviet figure, which remains unchanged since 1987, is 31.
  • Mikhail Gorbachev presided over the USSR until its dissolution in 1991. He later wrote that "Chernobyl was the main cause for the collapse of the Soviet Union."
  • A new containment structure was completed in 2017, which is expected to last 100 years.
• The Whole World Is Watching: It takes the rest of the world finding out something has happened in Chernobyl for the Party to start seriously taking action if for no other reason than to save face on the international stage, but it's still a major embarrassment. In one scene, Gorbachev mentions that he's been on the phone all day apologizing to their allies and their enemies.
• Woken Up at an Ungodly Hour: In the first episode, sometime after the explosion, which occurred at 1:23:45 AM, Dyatlov calls plant director Viktor Bryukhanov, who is highly annoyed, first at being awoken at this hour, and second that there's been an explosion at his power plant. Bryukhanov then demands they call chief engineer Nikolai Fomin, irritably stating, "If I'm up, he's up!"
• Women Are Wiser: Women in the series, especially in the first two episodes, are depicted as more cautious and sensible than their male counterparts.
  • Khomyuk, a Composite Character representing the greater scientific community, arrives at Chernobyl to reveal to Valery the problem of smothering the fire with sand. Throughout the story she acts as a voice of reason and advocate for truth and integrity, urging Valery to tell the truth when he would just as soon tow the party line. Even in her introductory scene, her intuition that a serious accident has occurred is played against her male colleague, who is reluctant to believe the radioactive isotopes in the air are the result of anything so large-scale and unthinkable by their technical standards.
  • Immediately after the explosion, Lyudmilla seems to sense that something is horribly wrong, pointing out the disturbing color of the fire and wondering about the danger from chemicals. This is contrasted with her husband, who is almost jovially confident that the fire is nothing dangerous. Her intuition fails her once Vasily is in peril, however.
  • Zinchenko, the female doctor at the Pripyat hospital, correctly predicts that it's a bad sign when the hospital hasn't yet admitted any patients from the fire, as well as the call for iodine pills. She represents a generation of younger, mostly female doctors who were more open to modern medical practices than their older colleagues, who are represented by the male doctor who dismisses her fears.
  • After Khomyuk fails to convince Garanin of the seriousness of the disaster, she makes a second attempt with his female secretary, giving her a bottle of iodine pills and instructing her to take them and travel east. The secretary, in contrast to her boss, respects Khomyuk's scientific credibility and immediately takes one of the pills.
  • This gets brutally subverted in the third episode, as Lyudmilla constantly being around her husband has dire consequences for their unborn child. She wouldn't even be around him that much if the head nurse on duty followed the rules in place for radiation sickness and stopped giving into pity by letting her around him (and his fellow firefighters) so much. Khomyuk then gets herself arrested in when she catches Lyudmilla in the same room as Vasily and loudly announces her intentions to tell of what she has seen, which she later admits was foolish of her since she should have been aware that the KGB was following her every step at that point.
• You Are Already Dead: As a general rule, any character who develops a radiation burn (especially on the face) is likely to die, very soon, and very, very horribly.
  • The people heavily exposed during the hours after the accident by looking directly into the reactor core are treated as dead men walking.
  • Valery asks for permission to 'kill three men' by sending them to open a valve beneath the reactor to drain the water before the catastrophe becomes greater when the reactor's core's materials touch the water; their exposure to the radioactive water underneath the core will be fatal in a few weeks at most. In Real Life though, all three men survived.
• Your Days Are Numbered: Lots of characters are all too aware that the amount of radiation exposure they've received will kill them. If they're lucky, in a few years time—if they're unlucky . . . not quickly enough. Legasov tells Shcherbina that both of them are doomed to die of cancer within five years just from coming to Chernobyl.^note Legasov will actually die in two years by suicide in protest of the Soviet government's coverup, and Shcherbina died four years later due to reasons which will never be revealed, after a 1988 decree prevented Soviet doctors from citing radiation as a cause of death or illness. Though accounts say that they were both in poor health in the years leading up to their deaths anyway.

---

"To be a scientist is to be naive. We are so focused on our search for truth, we fail to consider how few actually want us to find it. But it is always there. Whether we see it or not, whether we choose to or not. The truth doesn't care about our needs or wants, it doesn't care about our governments, our ideologies, our religions. It will lie in wait for all time. And this, at last, is the gift of Chernobyl. Where I once would fear the cost of truth, now I only ask: what is the cost of lies?"

---