Chernobyl: Please Remain Calm. The Team Assembles.

[canyonwalker]

The second episode of the 2019 HBO miniseries Chernobyl is entitled, "Please Remain Calm". It relates key parts of the story from 6 hours to 36 hours after the nuclear power plant explosion. During that time a team is assembles to lead efforts to understand what's happened with the explosion and contain its dangers. These are the main characters through the rest of the miniseries.



Two of these main characters are Dr. Valery Legasov and Boris Shcherbina (pictured above, left and right). Legasov, portrayed by Jared Harris, is a respected scientist and deputy director of the Kurchatov Institute. Shcherbina, portrayed by Stellan Skarsgård, is deputy chairman of the council of ministers, picked by Gorbachev and seniormost party leaders to coordinate this effort.

Legasov and Shcherbina's first scene together is a rocky one. Legasov has been invited to a briefing with Secretary General Gorbachev and a dozen senior officials. Shcherbina gives a briefing full of bullshit passed up to the chain to him by the craven plant managers who've basically lied their asses off (we saw this in the first episode, 1:23:45) about the extent of the accident. Shcherbina is an unwitting accessory to the lies because he's not educated on nuclear physics. But that's why Legasov is there.

Legasov smells the proverbial rat moments before the briefing by spotting key details in the written brief document. He basically explodes during the cabinet meeting when the accident is written off as "well under control", warning Gorbachev and all the ministers that the accident is likely far, far worse than reported. He argues there's likely been a core breach. Gorbachev and all the ministers are displeased with this news and the way in which it's delivered... but as Gorbachev says partly in criticizing him, "All I hear are suspicions and no facts." He instructs Shcherbina and Legasov to go to Chernobyl in person to find the facts.

Those two men aren't the only ones finding facts early on. Before we see Legasov and Shcherbina on-screen in this episode we meet the miniseries's third main character, Dr. Ulana Khomyuk. She's deputy director at the Byelorussian Institute for Nuclear Physics in Minsk



The episode actually opens with Khomyuk in one of her labs. It's Saturday morning, and only she and one of her research staffers are there. They open a window for fresh air... and a radiation alarm in the lab triggers immediately. She quickly collects a swab from the dust on the outside of the window and analyzes it with a spectrometer. The primary isotope is Iodine 131— a fission byproduct of Uranium 235, which could only come from a nuclear reactor's exposed core. With a bit of telephone sleuthing she determines the problem's at Chernobyl, over 400km away.

While Legasov and Shcherbina are real people who were key members of the team responding to the Chernobyl crisis, Khomyuk is fictional. Showrunner Craig Mazin emphasizes that she is a composite character, an amalgamation of the literally 100+ scientists who rushed or were sent to Chernobyl from across the Soviet Union. Introducing her makes it easier and more effective to tell the narrative.

It turns out Legasov, while very intelligent, is not actually the best person scientifically for the job. He's not a nuclear physicist! He's a physical chemist. He's distinguished and knows a lot about the behavior of radioactive materials, but he's not an expert on nuclear reactor design. Khomyuk knows reactors way better than he does, and points out a nearly fatal flaw in his plans later in this episode.

Keep reading: Three Go Forth

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Diversity

[canyonwalker]

Some people have questioned whether the writers took modern (2019-era) liberties by making the fictional character Dr. Khomyuk a woman. In 1986 there were few women with STEM PhDs and even fewer in prominent STEM roles such as a major university department chair. But that's an interesting thing about the USSR in the late 1970s through 1980s. Women in STEM were uncommon in the West at the time. They were more common in the USSR. The Soviet Union in that era made it a point of pride that not only had they built a strong cadre of STEM PhDs but that they had educated and promoted way more women in STEM than the West. That was one of many points they used in propaganda to show the West— and their own people— that the Soviet socio-political and economic system was superior to capitalism.