1:23:45. Lies & Heroic Sacrifice
Dec. 7th, 2022 09:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
canyonwalkerYesterday I wrote about 1:23:45, the first episode of HBO's 5-part miniseries Chernobyl. In that blog I addressed just the opening scene of the episode, a crackling monologue by scientist Valery Legasov. There's a lot more to the episode than just that scene, of course. Don't expect a ratio of 1 episode = 1 blog as I write about this miniseries. There's too much to unpack. Just episode 1 will stretch to at least 3 blogs.
While the episode starts with Legasov, portrayed by actor Jared Harris, who'll be the main character of the miniseries, it switches away from him after the opening few minutes. It does that with an arrangement that is very unusual for narrative storytelling. Legasov commits suicide.
Yes, his suicide is fairly factual. Legasov killed himself 2 years after the explosion. There are conflicting accounts of exactly which day it occurred on (2 years post-accident vs. 2 years plus 1 day), as well as where it occurred (home vs. office). What's strange about this is the narrative structure. It's like, "Introduce the main character, make him likable... and kill him in Act 1 Scene 1." Shakespeare would be rolling in his grave! That's extreme even by Game of Thrones character-killing standards. 🤣
The show next introduces two minor recurring characters, Vasily and Lyudmilla Ignatenko. They are awakened in the middle of the night in their Pripyat apartment by the sudden explosion less than 2km away. They see the burning reactor through their window.
Vasily is a firefighter and is shown in the poster for the episode. He knows he will be called to fight the fire so he starts getting ready. As we see later in the episode, the firefighters go right up to the wreckage of the exploded nuclear reactor. They are not afraid.
Of course, part of their fearlessness is ignorance. They literally don't know how dangerous it is. They've never been trained on what radioactivity is, despite working as emergency responders in an "atom city" devoted to staffing a nuclear power plant. The specific dangers of this accident haven't been explained either. The nuclear core has exploded, and radioactive material is literally on the ground at their feet as they carry hoses toward the fire, yet they've been told they're fighting a "roof fire" with burning tar.
The lies that left initially hundreds of people, and soon millions, unaware of mortal danger, started within seconds of the explosion. This is shown in the third scene of episode. In the control room plant operators are stunned by the explosion.
In the control room we meet characters Anatoly Dyatlov (pictured above, played by Paul Ritter), Leonid Toptunov (pictured, background), and Aleksandr Akimov (not pictured). They're all a bit stunned. They're not sure what's happened. Dyatlov, the deputy chief engineer, goes immediately into damage control mode. And by "damage control" I mean personal damage control.
Dyatlov blames Akimov and Toptunov for screwing up even though they were a) following his orders, and b) nobody's even sure what's going on yet. Despite nobody in the control room being sure what's happened, Dyatlov asserts it's an explosion in one of the control tanks. As other operators stumble into the control room to report that, no, it's not the control tanks, it's the whole reactor core, he dismisses them as delusional.
Dyatlov also blocked objective information that would've indicated the dangerous nature of the situation. Radiation dosimeters carried by the operators reported 3.6 Roentgen/hour— a level that's series but not "OMG, run away!" But as various technicians pointed out, 3.6 was the top of the scale for those dosimeters. The techs wanted to get to meters with higher scales; Dyatlov shut that down as a waste of time. It should be a requirement for passing even high school science classes to know that when a meter is pegged at the top of its scale the true measurement is likely well above that level.
The lie of 3.6 took on a life of its own. Dyatlov reported it to the plant manager and chief engineer, who relayed it up through the bureaucracy all the way to Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, as well as to the local executive committee in Pripyat. 3.6 was key to the lie in that it was dangerous but not that dangerous. The local committee added to the situation of lies by deciding that the appropriate thing to do in this circumstance was to seal the city, so nobody could get out, and also cut the phone lines. It was an exercise in Orwellian doublethink to hold simultaneously that 1) the accepted "truth" isn't that bad yet 2) it's also so dangerous that it must be kept from people.
Thus, because information was suppressed, a number of people sacrificed themselves without realizing their danger in the moment. The firefighters took the brunt of it as they rushed in to a situation with false information and no protection.
There were instances of informed sacrifice, though. As the episode frames it, most of the operators in the plant knew what happened. Dyatlov was in denial for his own reasons, but most of the others figured it out from the information available. I mean, there was at least one person who entered the control room and said he saw the containment vessel destroyed. Others subsequently went and saw it themselves— knowing that even to look meant taking lethal doses of radiation. They knowingly walked to their own deaths believing that by doing so they would save countless other lives. Instead Dyatlov and his superiors rebuked them as liars when they confirmed reports of an open core and a full-on meltdown.
Update: keep reading: Why I watched Chernobyl - same as why Mazin created it!
While the episode starts with Legasov, portrayed by actor Jared Harris, who'll be the main character of the miniseries, it switches away from him after the opening few minutes. It does that with an arrangement that is very unusual for narrative storytelling. Legasov commits suicide.
Yes, his suicide is fairly factual. Legasov killed himself 2 years after the explosion. There are conflicting accounts of exactly which day it occurred on (2 years post-accident vs. 2 years plus 1 day), as well as where it occurred (home vs. office). What's strange about this is the narrative structure. It's like, "Introduce the main character, make him likable... and kill him in Act 1 Scene 1." Shakespeare would be rolling in his grave! That's extreme even by Game of Thrones character-killing standards. 🤣
The show next introduces two minor recurring characters, Vasily and Lyudmilla Ignatenko. They are awakened in the middle of the night in their Pripyat apartment by the sudden explosion less than 2km away. They see the burning reactor through their window.
Vasily is a firefighter and is shown in the poster for the episode. He knows he will be called to fight the fire so he starts getting ready. As we see later in the episode, the firefighters go right up to the wreckage of the exploded nuclear reactor. They are not afraid.
Of course, part of their fearlessness is ignorance. They literally don't know how dangerous it is. They've never been trained on what radioactivity is, despite working as emergency responders in an "atom city" devoted to staffing a nuclear power plant. The specific dangers of this accident haven't been explained either. The nuclear core has exploded, and radioactive material is literally on the ground at their feet as they carry hoses toward the fire, yet they've been told they're fighting a "roof fire" with burning tar.
The lies that left initially hundreds of people, and soon millions, unaware of mortal danger, started within seconds of the explosion. This is shown in the third scene of episode. In the control room plant operators are stunned by the explosion.
In the control room we meet characters Anatoly Dyatlov (pictured above, played by Paul Ritter), Leonid Toptunov (pictured, background), and Aleksandr Akimov (not pictured). They're all a bit stunned. They're not sure what's happened. Dyatlov, the deputy chief engineer, goes immediately into damage control mode. And by "damage control" I mean personal damage control.
Dyatlov blames Akimov and Toptunov for screwing up even though they were a) following his orders, and b) nobody's even sure what's going on yet. Despite nobody in the control room being sure what's happened, Dyatlov asserts it's an explosion in one of the control tanks. As other operators stumble into the control room to report that, no, it's not the control tanks, it's the whole reactor core, he dismisses them as delusional.
Dyatlov also blocked objective information that would've indicated the dangerous nature of the situation. Radiation dosimeters carried by the operators reported 3.6 Roentgen/hour— a level that's series but not "OMG, run away!" But as various technicians pointed out, 3.6 was the top of the scale for those dosimeters. The techs wanted to get to meters with higher scales; Dyatlov shut that down as a waste of time. It should be a requirement for passing even high school science classes to know that when a meter is pegged at the top of its scale the true measurement is likely well above that level.
The lie of 3.6 took on a life of its own. Dyatlov reported it to the plant manager and chief engineer, who relayed it up through the bureaucracy all the way to Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, as well as to the local executive committee in Pripyat. 3.6 was key to the lie in that it was dangerous but not that dangerous. The local committee added to the situation of lies by deciding that the appropriate thing to do in this circumstance was to seal the city, so nobody could get out, and also cut the phone lines. It was an exercise in Orwellian doublethink to hold simultaneously that 1) the accepted "truth" isn't that bad yet 2) it's also so dangerous that it must be kept from people.
Thus, because information was suppressed, a number of people sacrificed themselves without realizing their danger in the moment. The firefighters took the brunt of it as they rushed in to a situation with false information and no protection.
There were instances of informed sacrifice, though. As the episode frames it, most of the operators in the plant knew what happened. Dyatlov was in denial for his own reasons, but most of the others figured it out from the information available. I mean, there was at least one person who entered the control room and said he saw the containment vessel destroyed. Others subsequently went and saw it themselves— knowing that even to look meant taking lethal doses of radiation. They knowingly walked to their own deaths believing that by doing so they would save countless other lives. Instead Dyatlov and his superiors rebuked them as liars when they confirmed reports of an open core and a full-on meltdown.
Update: keep reading: Why I watched Chernobyl - same as why Mazin created it!
