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Episode: Open Wide, O Earth

Author: HBO
Duration: 00:48:20

Episode Shownotes

Peter Sagal and Craig Mazin discuss the third episode of Chernobyl. Lyudmilla Ignatenko (Jessie Buckley), a Pripyat resident, ignores warning about her firefighter husband’s (Adam Nagaitis) contamination; Valery Legasov (Jared Harris) lays out a decontamination plan, complete with human risks. On the podcast, Mazin breaks down how they filmed the

divers scene with additional commentary from director Johan Renck. Sagal and Mazin talk about scenes that were left on the cutting room floor, how much of Jessie Buckley's actions mirror the real Lyudmilla Ignatenko's, and more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Summary

In this episode of The Chernobyl Podcast, the discussion centers around the emotional narrative of Lyudmilla Ignatenko as she navigates her husband's radiation poisoning. The episode examines the brutal realities faced by Chernobyl's responders, emphasizing the complexities of their choices amidst bureaucratic negligence and psychological turmoil. Craig Mazin and Peter Sagal draw parallels between character decisions and broader themes of love, sacrifice, and the pursuit of truth against oppressive regimes, highlighting the human cost and personal tragedies intertwined with this historical disaster.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Open Wide, O Earth) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_03
Yes, people are following you. People are following those people. And you see them?

00:00:08 Speaker_02
They follow me.

00:00:11 Speaker_03
The KGB is a circle of accountability. Nothing more.

00:00:24 Speaker_10
Hello, and welcome to The Chernobyl Podcast, the podcast about the Chernobyl miniseries on HBO. I am Peter Sagal, and I am here with Craig Mazin, the show's creator and producer and writer. Hello again, Craig. Hello, Peter.

00:00:37 Speaker_10
This is the third episode of The Chernobyl Podcast. We're talking, of course, about episode three of the Chernobyl miniseries, which is titled Open Wide, O Earth.

00:00:45 Speaker_10
We pick up where we left off on episode two, down in the depths, in the dark, underneath the reactor, with the three men who are colloquially known in stories of Chernobyl as the Divers.

00:00:57 Speaker_08
The Divers. Even though they weren't really divers, they were engineers, but they knew the subterranean area of the complex. Right.

00:01:06 Speaker_08
When the lights go out, they're able to kind of just grab pipes that they knew there were certain pipes that would lead them to the room where they could open up the sluice gate.

00:01:15 Speaker_08
Now, for us, we had an interesting problem, because if the lights go out, it becomes a radio play at that point with not a lot of talking.

00:01:21 Speaker_10
PETER What's wrong with that, Craig?

00:01:22 Speaker_08
CRAIG Yeah, well, I know. I know. Radio play, not game show. PETER I understand. I'm going to defend my medium.

00:01:29 Speaker_10
But what I believe you have, they use, I forget what you call them, but these hand...

00:01:33 Speaker_08
Yeah, I think they're called Dynamo. So it's like a little hand crank thing that you have probably seen in like an Army-Navy surplus store. And we found the models that were used in the Soviet Union at the time, and they have this wonderful noise.

00:01:48 Speaker_08
So we really tried to give you a sense of just putting you in a place, you know. I mean, obviously, some of these details we're guessing on or inventing, but the goal there is to make you feel what it must have felt like down there.

00:02:02 Speaker_10
Right. The series director Johan Renck thought about that aspect a lot during his work.

00:02:07 Speaker_07
It was a very, very difficult thing to do. We shot that yesterday.

00:02:09 Speaker_07
It was literally, I never went to film school or anything like that, but I felt like this was definitely a film school moment to shoot three people who were all looking identical because they're wearing the same outfits.

00:02:20 Speaker_07
You can't see their faces because they're wearing face, you know, goggles and gas masks. You can hardly even see their eyes.

00:02:27 Speaker_07
walking around in pitch dark blackness and still make it feel, we have to understand that they're scared, we have to understand that they're lost, we have to understand, so how do you do that without going into full pantomime, you know?

00:02:39 Speaker_07
And it was tricky, it was very frustrating, I had a really hard time because I could see what they were doing and at the same time I didn't want it to go bigger, like, no, no, let's not do that, you know, you just...

00:02:49 Speaker_07
want them to keep it really small and subdued, but it was tricky.

00:02:53 Speaker_08
Did they actually complete their mission in the dark? That's my understanding. They completed their mission in the dark, and once it was open, you know, then they were theoretically done with their job and can just head back out.

00:03:07 Speaker_08
And that's essentially what happened.

00:03:08 Speaker_10
So, the crisis is averted by these three guys. And now we do something that we haven't done since episode one, is we visit some of the victims of the explosion.

00:03:19 Speaker_10
Lyudmila has followed her husband, thanks to an officious bureaucrat, having a moment of mercy, up to Moscow, Moscow hospital number six.

00:03:29 Speaker_10
And she, once again, manages, on the force of her determination and her love, as you say, to get in to see him, and amazingly, they're fine. Seemingly so. Now, later on, we're gonna get an explanation for this.

00:03:45 Speaker_10
But apparently, there's something about radiation poisoning that gives you a sort of brief latency.

00:03:51 Speaker_08
Yeah, it's one of the cruelest things of this kind of severe acute radiation syndrome. The initial symptoms are very much like burn symptoms. There's, you can see the skin reddening, there's swelling, and vomiting, and headaches.

00:04:09 Speaker_08
But then as those initial, kind of what I guess we would call almost topical, symptoms subside, you get a little bit of a break. It seems like you're getting better, but you are not.

00:04:21 Speaker_08
And what's happening is the damage that the radiation has done on a cellular level is taking a little bit of a while to manifest. When it begins to manifest, then things get very, very bad very, very quickly.

00:04:35 Speaker_10
And we're about to see that in very, very vivid ways. Pretty soon, you're going to introduce what is going to happen to them, which is another bit of writing to set up the audience in an effective way, if a dreading way.

00:04:53 Speaker_10
I want to start, though, with something that isn't in the episode.

00:04:56 Speaker_10
In the script, you started the episode with the Atlov, who we last saw in the reactor room, the guy who more than anyone seemingly was responsible for the accident, the guy who we know denied that the accident happened.

00:05:10 Speaker_10
He ordered his men to their deaths. And we see him in the hospital in this deleted scene, but not alone. He has a vision of his son.

00:05:18 Speaker_08
Right, so Dyatlov had a son who died of leukemia around the age of 10. The details are a little skimpy, but we know at least that much.

00:05:29 Speaker_08
We also know that Dyatlov, at the time, was working at a naval station near Siberia, helping construct nuclear submarines. So he was working on the nuclear generators inside of submarines, and there was an accident. Right.

00:05:45 Speaker_08
which he was cleared of wrongdoing, but he was involved. And he received, by the way, in that accident, allegedly, a near-fatal dose of radiation, and yet, survived. His son, however, shortly thereafter, apparently, got leukemia and died.

00:06:02 Speaker_08
The question is, are these two things related? Right. So, one possibility is that the clothing that Dyatlov was wearing that he took home, any kind of contamination therein, may have actually led to his own son's death.

00:06:18 Speaker_08
This was a storyline that I intended to include, but as it turned out, It was too far afield of what ultimately we all felt was the immediacy of the story we were telling.

00:06:34 Speaker_08
That to flash back in time or to have any kind of hallucinatory vision seemed a little bit more out of the world of a normal fictional television series and less... in our world.

00:06:47 Speaker_08
We were so engrossed in the reel that it just kind of threw us out of our rhythm. So we ended up removing it, but Paul Ritter, who plays Dyatlov, did a wonderful job. And it's sort of a shame, so hopefully people will get to see those scenes someday.

00:07:01 Speaker_10
There was also, again, referring to something that didn't make the final version of the show, and I'll be vague about it, there's a scene later on, as scripted, in which Dyatlov is asked about his son.

00:07:12 Speaker_10
And the character suggests that his attitude toward the accident, his refusal to take responsibility, to accept that it was happening,

00:07:20 Speaker_10
In fact, his arrogance in what he did to cause the accident, which will be revealed later, is related to the death of his son. I believe as if, like, he needed to master radiation or something. And that's not there anymore.

00:07:34 Speaker_10
My feeling about that scene, which nobody will ever see, at least not in this version, is that it's good that you cut it. Because I was like, oh, backstory. We don't need backstory. As it turned out, we didn't need backstory.

00:07:47 Speaker_08
And it is, um, it's supposition. It's a bit of sort of armchair psychology going on there, which also, I think, left us a little uncomfortable.

00:07:58 Speaker_08
But one thing that was true about Dyatlov, at least as people described him, he was an incredibly unpleasant guy from all accounts. Very stubborn, very stubborn. And also, did have a certain... kind of arrogance in regard to radiation.

00:08:14 Speaker_08
The way electricians sort of, you know, don't mind being shocked and sometimes will play around with things because they're used to it. He felt like he had taken the worst that radiation can give. It's not that bad. It's overrated.

00:08:29 Speaker_08
And he's really in charge of the atom, not the other way around. There was something about that to him. Was it connected to what happened to the sun? That is armchair psychology, and I agree with you. I think it did.

00:08:39 Speaker_08
You know, obviously, I agree because we look at it.

00:08:41 Speaker_10
But it was just sort of out of the rhythm of what we were trying to do.

00:08:45 Speaker_10
Yeah, and one of the reasons I commend that choice is only because I think one of the aspects of this television series that I admire so much is that stuff happened for no good reason.

00:08:55 Speaker_10
And people behaved in ways that made no sense except in the exigencies of the moment. What's interesting is that this moment as we start episode three, things seem okay.

00:09:06 Speaker_10
The immediate crisis with the thermal explosion has been solved thanks to the courage of the divers. The survivors of the explosion up in the hospital seem fine. Everything's great, it seems.

00:09:18 Speaker_10
There was even, I believe, a parade sequence that you had early in this episode, that they were going out and having parades. In fact, the bureaucrat who treated Emily Watson so badly,

00:09:29 Speaker_10
in a moment of bravery in this deleted scene, goes out and joins this parade outside, X miles away from the radiation plume.

00:09:35 Speaker_08
CRAIG MCLUCKIEN Correct. They are, and the Soviet Union in general, always wanted to be business as usual. That was their favorite thing to do, no matter what was going on. And so, they were business as usual in this as hard as they could.

00:09:48 Speaker_08
Gorbachev, in this episode, seems, I think, a bit taken aback by the suggestion that this is not going to end anytime soon.

00:09:58 Speaker_08
And I understand that, to some extent, that the people in charge of the government threw what they thought were remarkable resources. I mean, thousands of helicopter sorties and boron and sand and lead and lives, counting lives. And so, great. Fix it.

00:10:15 Speaker_08
And it's not gonna be fixed for a long time.

00:10:18 Speaker_10
And the first animation of that, or at least direct evidence of that, is Legasov's conversation about the effects of radiation sickness.

00:10:27 Speaker_05
and the cellular damage begins to manifest. The bone marrow dies. The immune system fails. The organs and soft tissue begin to decompose.

00:10:40 Speaker_05
The arteries and veins spill open like sieves, to the point where you can't even administer morphine for the pain, which is unimaginable. Within three days to three weeks, you're dead.

00:10:56 Speaker_10
Let's pause for a second and talk about the decision-making process that you and the other producers had about how much of this you were going to show.

00:11:05 Speaker_08
Yeah. Well, for us, and Johan, I think, certainly is included in this as well, our director, Johan Renck,

00:11:14 Speaker_08
If you are going to limit yourself in many ways by eschewing a lot of the usual dramatic tricks and sticking to the real as much as you can, then when there is an aspect of the real that is brutal and extreme, you need to show it too.

00:11:34 Speaker_08
It was important to me that people understood what was happening to these men because they suffered in terrible ways. And these were not random people suffering. These were heroes. They were saving lives.

00:11:49 Speaker_08
And in doing so, they put themselves in the line of fire. And this is a fire that doesn't kill you quickly, it kills you slowly, and it kills you in an excruciating manner. So Daniel Parker, the head of our makeup department,

00:12:03 Speaker_08
He really did the primary research on what this does. And came up, I think he had at one point, like seven different stages. And of course, depending on who you were and how close you were and how long you were there, the stages were different.

00:12:18 Speaker_08
But then we also read through a lot of accounts. Ludmilla Ignatenko's account of what her husband looked like was very influential on what we did. And we just felt that it was important to show it because it is horrifying.

00:12:32 Speaker_08
And the last thing that I want this show to do is to scare people about nuclear power. This is not a polemic about nuclear power. However, it's about respecting it for what it can do. Because what it can do is savage.

00:12:49 Speaker_08
And the love story that we're telling between Ludmil and her husband, I think... only makes sense in the context of what is happening to him in front of her eyes.

00:12:58 Speaker_10
PETER Right. Which is absolutely horrifying. And there's a scene later on in which she grips his hand, which is moving not only because of the condition of his hand, but because of her courage in doing it. Yeah.

00:13:09 Speaker_10
Because these guys were all radioactive, in addition to dying in horrible pain.

00:13:14 Speaker_08
And in this sense, this is another one of those areas where I agree with you, there is no why. You can say, well, why did she do that? She was told not to do that.

00:13:25 Speaker_08
Well, because she loved him, but also, she's telling herself a story too, I think, in that moment, which is... It'll be okay.

00:13:33 Speaker_10
CRAIG And her recklessness in, again, skipping ahead a bit, her recklessness in going in to see him when she is pregnant, when she has been told, -"You're not pregnant, are you?"

00:13:44 Speaker_10
Is that something you had to stop and think about in terms of her attitude? Is she in denial? Or nothing bad will happen? What are they talking about? Does she not know?

00:13:51 Speaker_08
CRAIG She did it. I mean, that's the thing. She tells that story. The way she tells that story is what the doctor asked her was, do you have children? And she lied and said, yes, I have two.

00:14:02 Speaker_08
And she lied in that moment because she understood the implication of the question was, if you don't have children, this could prevent you from having children. Or God forbid, if you're pregnant right now, affect the baby.

00:14:13 Speaker_08
And so she lied so that the doctor would think, well, she's got two, so it's okay. Go on ahead.

00:14:18 Speaker_10
Do you think that she may not have understood the danger she was putting her baby in at that moment?

00:14:21 Speaker_08
I don't think she understood. I think that she felt that it would be okay. And the truth of the matter is, I don't blame her at all, because there wasn't a lot of awareness about what radiation was and how it could harm you.

00:14:38 Speaker_08
And also, they let her do it. In a sense, she was sort of relying on the authority. If an authority says, listen, you're not really supposed to go in there, but you can, but for like 30 minutes. Well, how bad could it be? And they're going in there.

00:14:50 Speaker_08
They're doing it all, and of course, a lot of those people did have to deal with the impact of that as well.

00:14:54 Speaker_10
Sure. Let's go back for a moment to Chernobyl. One of my favorite scenes, the coal miner scene, which begins with the telling of a Soviet joke. We used to hear those all the time back in the day.

00:15:07 Speaker_12
Here's what he is. Works as big as a house, burns 20 liters of fuel every hour, puts out a shitload of smoke and noise, and cuts an apple into three pieces. A Soviet machine made to cut apples into four pieces!

00:15:28 Speaker_10
These coal miners were brought to Chernobyl to do this project, which will be described to us and to them. This is the second time that people have been, Soviet people have been enlisted to go and work on this problem at great risk to themselves.

00:15:44 Speaker_10
And they go. And they go.

00:15:45 Speaker_08
And in this case, it wasn't like... the miners were what we think of as docile Soviet workers. Miners were tough. We got some really interesting research.

00:15:58 Speaker_08
We had a wonderful researcher named Mimi Munson, which is a great name, Mimi Munson, and she found this really fascinating article about miners in the Soviet Union and how they occupied a certain kind of privileged position.

00:16:09 Speaker_08
By the way, this is one of the reasons why the Soviet Union was so obsessed with building large nuclear reactors. The demand for energy was massive, and most of the energy produced came from coal.

00:16:19 Speaker_08
So the coal miners had a certain leverage over the nation, and Mikhail Gorbachev himself said that the coal miners sort of scared him. So they were tough.

00:16:30 Speaker_08
And they chose willingly to do this again, in part because of a general sense of honor and community. And when someone comes to you and says, listen, there's going to be a permanent disaster unless you do this, You do it.

00:16:46 Speaker_08
So, miners from Tula, which is in Russia, miners from the Donbass, which is in Ukraine, and other places came to Chernobyl. Now, what were they doing? So, when we ended episode two, we understood there was this risk of thermal explosion.

00:17:04 Speaker_08
Once that was eliminated, the understanding was that sooner or later, this fuel was gonna melt down. We talk about meltdown all the time.

00:17:10 Speaker_08
It just means, basically, that the uranium fuel is getting so hot and reactive that it begins to melt the cladding around it, and it turns into a kind of a lava, and it will start to burn through things below it.

00:17:23 Speaker_08
There was a possibility that it would burn through the concrete pad underneath the structure, and if it did that, it would enter the water table and it would be a disaster. a possibility.

00:17:36 Speaker_08
So the miners were asked to dig this tunnel, get underneath that pad, and excavate a room large enough to put in a heat exchanger, which is basically a fancy word for refrigeration unit, that would use liquid nitrogen to cool the space above it and reduce the heat of the lava.

00:17:53 Speaker_08
All the liquid nitrogen in the Soviet Union. All of the liquid nitrogen in the Soviet Union. In fact, a little bit of a compression that we made was what happened to Brukhanov and Fomin, the two guys that were running the plant.

00:18:04 Speaker_08
We sort of imply that they've been arrested very quickly. In fact, it took quite a while for them to be arrested, but they were sidelined. pretty quickly as people started to understand that they were probably gonna be held responsible.

00:18:18 Speaker_08
But in these early days, it was Brukhanov, actually, who was ordered to find all the liquid nitrogen or he would be shot. They literally told him, we'll shoot you if you don't find us the liquid nitrogen.

00:18:28 Speaker_08
So these miners dug this tunnel, but they were digging it under the impression that it was absolutely necessary. And one of the weird things and the kind of brutal things about science, particularly nuclear science, is it's based on probabilities.

00:18:45 Speaker_08
And so, at the end of this episode, Legasov says, I've ordered these people to do this. I have effectively killed a large number of them. And I'm doing it because there's a chance we might need it. And in fact, they didn't.

00:19:01 Speaker_10
So, all of that effort ultimately was... Was unnecessary. Because it never melted down to the concrete pad.

00:19:07 Speaker_08
Because it never melted through the concrete pad, so it never got to the groundwater. And that's a really... It's just a chilling fact that I would put myself in Legasov's shoes there And you start to realize the cruelty of this situation.

00:19:24 Speaker_08
You have no choice. The 50-50 chance that you're going to, you know, poison the Black Sea forever is not... it's not acceptable. And so, you now have to send 400 men, and reportedly, about one out of every four of them died.

00:19:41 Speaker_10
of cancer or radiation-related disease. Yeah, but of course, it is important that they went because it gave us what is important for every HBO show, an unnecessary nude scene.

00:19:51 Speaker_08
Yes, well, I think actually necessary in this case.

00:19:53 Speaker_10
I'm sorry, let me say that again. It gave us what every HBO production must have is a gratuitous nudity scene, which is important. Is that real? Did they actually, like, take off their clothes and dig naked?

00:20:02 Speaker_08
Yes, there were some varying accounts of how much clothing got taken off, but more than one said that they took it all off. And for the exact reason that we state in the show, it was brutally hot.

00:20:13 Speaker_08
You know, we're talking temperatures of, I think we say, 50 degrees Celsius, so Americans are gonna be confused, but it's around 130 degrees. I mean, it was like a real oven in there, and they couldn't use fans because it would stir up the dust.

00:20:26 Speaker_08
And in fact, in the old days, apparently, it was somewhat customary for miners to work in the nude because of the heat involved.

00:20:35 Speaker_08
And the truth is that it really didn't expose them that much more because the danger at that point was, I mean, if you're gonna be near radiation, your clothing is barely gonna do anything. Well, the head miner makes that point to Lagos.

00:20:50 Speaker_08
Is it really gonna make that much of a difference? It's really not. And the biggest danger to them was what was in the air, which, you know, you could try and minimize dust, but you can't eliminate it entirely.

00:21:00 Speaker_10
There's a scene in which Legasov does something, he doesn't do a lot, he gets angry. And he gets angry because of the 30 kilometer exclusion zone.

00:21:12 Speaker_13
And, of course, we'll also need... Whatever you need, you have it. That should be clear by now. Anything else? No, no, no.

00:21:17 Speaker_11
Thank you. Yes, I'd like to address the 30-kilometer exclusion zone.

00:21:22 Speaker_13
Professor Legasov, is that you? What exclusion zone?

00:21:25 Speaker_12
Minor details, General Secretary.

00:21:27 Speaker_13
Premier Ryzhkov has determined that... If he determined, then he determined. Look, Professor Legasov, you are there for one reason only, do you understand? To make this stop. I don't want questions. I want to know when this will be over.

00:21:41 Speaker_11
If you mean, when will Chernobyl be completely safe? The half-life of plutonium-239 is 24,000 years, so perhaps we should just say not within our lifetimes.

00:21:50 Speaker_10
And he seems to be angry because it's just so arbitrary.

00:21:54 Speaker_08
Yeah, it was an incredibly stupid decision, and it was, in fact, made by Premier Ryzhkov, and no one can seem to understand why. Somewhere in a room far, far away from Chernobyl,

00:22:07 Speaker_08
this man decided that 30 kilometers would be a good amount of space to evacuate everyone from. So, if you were in a 30-kilometer radius of Chernobyl, they would come and get you and take you away. And that made no sense whatsoever.

00:22:22 Speaker_08
Not only did it make no sense, did have no basis in scientific fact, but it was effectively also condemning more people to, at best, shorten lifespans and disease.

00:22:33 Speaker_08
And here, I was using this essentially to help start to move Legasov's character a bit out of the realm of Soviet zealot. Because you start, I think, in these circumstances, you start to lose your religion.

00:22:51 Speaker_08
I think both he and Shcherbina start to lose their religion necessarily. It can't survive this.

00:22:57 Speaker_08
You can't keep believing in a system when you are living this nightmare that the system has created, and the system keeps perpetuating it and making it worse. Happily, they did then expand that zone quite dramatically.

00:23:13 Speaker_10
And is that the exclusion zone to this day?

00:23:15 Speaker_08
It is.

00:23:15 Speaker_10
Right. So, so... So not only were they wrong about the immediate needs of the evacuation, they were wrong about an area that is now completely devoid of human life, except, of course, for those who were there to maintain it to this day.

00:23:29 Speaker_08
Yeah, essentially, what they landed on, after the random 30-kilometer guess, was a huge chunk of Ukraine, and I believe a bit of Belarus as well. And it is, that is the evacuation zone to this day.

00:23:44 Speaker_08
It is, um... I mean, you can go in and out, but it is very carefully controlled. I've done it. You hand over your passport to soldiers, you go through these checkpoints.

00:23:55 Speaker_10
I was gonna say it to this last episode, but we'll talk about it now, I guess. How does one arrange to visit Chernobyl to get inside the exclusion zone?

00:24:02 Speaker_08
Well, they, you know, for me, happily, HBO and Sky sort of arranged our arrival, but we went through a service that does provide a kind of guided tour of the zone, and we also went to the power plant itself.

00:24:17 Speaker_08
Interestingly, the gentleman who took us through were children in Pripyat. Yes, they were there. So you, it is a military checkpoint. You have soldiers, they are Ukrainian, and they have pretty big guns.

00:24:31 Speaker_08
And you hand over your passports, they have a list, they write everything down, then they give you your document back. And you must go through a series of radiation checkpoints. They check you on your way in. Are you radioactive? Nope. Okay, good.

00:24:44 Speaker_08
Now you can go in. Then when you get closer, you go inside any of the larger facilities, check again. On your way out, they check you. with the understanding if you ring a bell, you're not leaving. You're not leaving? No, they have to decontaminate you.

00:24:56 Speaker_08
They're not gonna let you leave. So, there is a certain sense of... a reasonable sense of seriousness to this entire production of getting in and out of the zone.

00:25:06 Speaker_08
And once you are in, you do get a sense very quickly of how massive it is, because you're barely seeing any of it, and yet, it is just extending to the horizon, practically.

00:25:17 Speaker_10
I mean, the exclusion zone, how big it is. Again, this is a question I was saving for later, but I'll ask it now. You presumably visited Chernobyl after X number of years of researching, writing, rewriting, production.

00:25:30 Speaker_10
How did it feel to actually be there?

00:25:33 Speaker_08
I'm not a religious man, but I suppose that's about as religious as I'll ever feel.

00:25:39 Speaker_08
Because I had spent so much time living in that space, in multiple areas of those spaces for so long, and with the people in my mind for so long, that to walk where they walked felt so strange. And also,

00:25:58 Speaker_08
being under that same piece of sky, you start to feel a little closer, in a sense, to who they were.

00:26:05 Speaker_08
And I felt it probably the most when we were in the city of Chernobyl, which is, well, it's not really a city, it's a town of Chernobyl, which is different than Pripyat, it's actually further away, about 20 kilometers away from the power plant.

00:26:16 Speaker_08
And in the city of Chernobyl, there's a small building that's basically, it was the cultural center. That's where they would put on shows and, you know, songs about the Soviet Union and Lenin or whatever.

00:26:29 Speaker_08
And that is the room where they eventually held a trial that we will talk about in episode five. But in that moment, standing where Dyatlov and Fomin and Brukanov stood, it was... it was very chilling. Even in a weird way,

00:26:46 Speaker_08
it was more moving to me than moving through the actual power plant itself. Really? The one thing, though, that I did feel walking through the power plant, a little bit of a better sense of how easy it would be to deny. Right. Because it's so big.

00:27:05 Speaker_08
You know, it's the weirdest thing. It's a little bit like if you're in a skyscraper, just like, this is solid.

00:27:10 Speaker_10
Yeah, it's not gonna, like, tip over.

00:27:11 Speaker_08
Correct. You just feel safe within it. I don't know how else to put it, you feel safe. And in that sense, you can start to feel how people would say, okay, for sure, it's not like the reactor blew up. This is some other smaller problem.

00:27:27 Speaker_10
Right. How close can you get to the site of reactor four?

00:27:31 Speaker_08
fairly close. I mean, it depends. If you're all geared up and you have a special dispensation, I think you can actually get pretty far inside, although now that it's covered and they're dismantling it, it may not be the case anymore.

00:27:43 Speaker_08
But we got as far as control room three and a pump room for reactor three. We had a safety officer, I guess, with it that we brought with us as part of the production, and he had a dosimeter running the whole time.

00:27:56 Speaker_08
and it would, you know, occasionally beep. But, you know, I've learned now that radiation is everywhere, and so I don't freak out if I hear a beep or two.

00:28:04 Speaker_08
When we got into the pump room for building three, which is now fairly close to... Yeah, because it was building four, building three, a huge extent of turbines.

00:28:14 Speaker_10
Correct.

00:28:14 Speaker_08
And then one. Yeah. So three's right up against it. And when we got into the pump room of three, the beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep started going up. And, you know, our guide... said, you know, we'll only be here for about, you know, a minute.

00:28:27 Speaker_08
And then we'll leave. It's, yeah, it's something else.

00:28:33 Speaker_10
Wow. Back up at the hospital, the KGB appears, and the research efforts are interrupted.

00:28:40 Speaker_03
Comrade, I know you've heard the stories about us. When I hear them, even I am shocked. But we are not what people say. Yes, people are following you. People are following those people. And you see that?

00:28:57 Speaker_02
They follow me.

00:28:59 Speaker_03
The KGB is a circle of accountability. Nothing more.

00:29:05 Speaker_10
Again, because we're dealing with an invented character, I'm assuming you're representing a larger effort by the KGB to prevent this scientific investigation from going forward?

00:29:14 Speaker_08
I think that the KGB probably wasn't particularly concerned about the investigation. Reading the stories of scientists and some of the jeopardy that they put themselves in, the question was more, who are you gonna tell this to?

00:29:30 Speaker_08
We don't mind, necessarily, if you know something, but if you're gonna talk about it, that's a problem. And there were a number of scientists, one particular, um, one source, he was put on trial.

00:29:42 Speaker_08
And he was put on trial and probably would've been convicted, except at that point, the Soviet Union collapsed.

00:29:48 Speaker_10
So, it was... He was put on trial for what? For talking too much in public about what happened at Chernobyl?

00:29:51 Speaker_08
Essentially, yes, for challenging the narrative and questioning superiors and saying things he wasn't supposed to say. And... So, they absolutely faced the same kind of normal repression of speech that everybody faced in the Soviet Union at the time.

00:30:07 Speaker_08
And the KGB was everywhere. And again, you know, random people would sort of work hand-in-hand with the KGB. You know, the woman who's the manager of the apartment building would be in touch with the KGB. It was understood.

00:30:23 Speaker_10
That's how it worked. The part of me who's able to stand aside and just admire clever writing, really enjoyed that little speech by the KGB head. It's like, I'm being followed. It's a circle of accountability. It's a circle of accountability.

00:30:34 Speaker_10
It's such a benign way to describe our surveillance state. We're all just keeping each other honest, aren't you?

00:30:40 Speaker_08
I mean, that's sort of the nonsense language. I'm so... fascinated by the creepy Orwellian nature of repressive bureaucrats and the way they speak. The turns of phrases they come up with are just shocking to me and chilling.

00:30:59 Speaker_08
Probably because I love language. So, to see it abused in that fashion is... So, yeah, I just thought a circle of accountability sounded to me like the sort of thing a bureaucrat wishing to soft-pedal the KGB would describe it as.

00:31:16 Speaker_10
It was amazing. And, you know, you always wonder how villains see themselves. Because nobody ever wakes up and says, I'm gonna do villainy today. They say, I'm gonna do this today for these very good reasons, as distorted as they may be.

00:31:27 Speaker_10
And I thought that was, I don't know what a real head of the KGB might say, but maybe. Probably something like that. Probably something like that. We're back in the Kremlin conference room.

00:31:36 Speaker_10
And in a weird way, this is sort of the other version of Legasov's earlier speech about radiation poisoning. He says, this is what's going to happen to those men.

00:31:46 Speaker_10
Now he's describing to Gorbachev and the rest of the council, this is what we are going to need to do. To describe what I believe is called historically the liquidation.

00:31:54 Speaker_08
That's correct. Yes, so you're exactly right. The body of the Soviet Union has absorbed this initial shock. It has now had a little bit of a latency period, and here comes Legasov to explain, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no.

00:32:09 Speaker_08
In fact, what happens now is this long, brutal war that's gonna take place over hundreds of thousands of acres. and involve hundreds of thousands of men and material and cost, and it must happen." And I think probably they thought, oh, good.

00:32:27 Speaker_08
Now, finally, we can just throw people at this thing. There's a liquidator who described the entire effort. He said, we were thrown upon the reactor just like the sand. And that's essentially what the Soviet Union did. They just went with volume.

00:32:43 Speaker_08
Why are they called liquidators? Right, so liquidator was the all-purpose term that the Soviets used for the people that were sent to the zone to clean it up.

00:32:52 Speaker_08
These were people that were sent to do construction work, to chop down trees, to dig up dirt, to use bulldozers, and in some cases, to control the animal population.

00:33:03 Speaker_08
The word liquidator is a bit scarier than in the English language than it is in Russian. It comes essentially from the Russian word to eliminate. So they were there essentially as kind of disaster abatement positions.

00:33:15 Speaker_08
But they refer to themselves as liquidators and have always been so.

00:33:18 Speaker_10
We go back to Moscow for a second after the scene in the Kremlin in which Legasov explains what will be needed and it is accepted. He goes and finds Kamyuk in the prison where she's been put.

00:33:31 Speaker_08
By the way, interesting production fact, this portrayal of two people in a KGB prison was shot in a KGB prison. This is a former KGB prison. This is now a museum in Vilnius, Lithuania, that is dedicated to the many victims of the KGB.

00:33:47 Speaker_08
So as we moved through it, we were aware that there were, you know, the ghosts of history around us. They showed us these rooms, so that cell, that's where they would put you. The doors were quite heavy.

00:33:58 Speaker_08
They were padded on the inside in case you attempted to, I don't know, smash your head against it. There were little slots for food and such, but then there were some grimmer rooms. There was one in particular where the floor sloped down.

00:34:13 Speaker_08
And so it was lower than the entrance to the door. And the idea there was that you would go into that room and they would fill it with water up to your knees or so. So that you couldn't sleep. Right.

00:34:23 Speaker_08
You couldn't sit or lie down because it's water up to your knees. Correct. You could sit, but you couldn't sleep. If you fell down from exhaustion, you would drown. And so it was a kind of... torture I would have never even contemplated.

00:34:36 Speaker_08
It was just awful. And right in the middle of a city. Not some far-flung gulag thing, just right there in the middle of a city next to this building and that building is your KGB prison where people were tortured.

00:34:47 Speaker_08
And of course, then there was an execution room where they were put to death.

00:34:50 Speaker_10
Wow. You know, my writer's eye was like, oh, this is a scene. This is one of the very, very few places in this entire series where we stop to make a point. Right.

00:34:59 Speaker_14
All right.

00:35:01 Speaker_10
They think it's possible.

00:35:02 Speaker_14
I think it makes no sense. I think it's what I would say if I was trying to cover my own mistakes.

00:35:09 Speaker_04
But?

00:35:11 Speaker_14
I believe them.

00:35:15 Speaker_04
Then you should pursue it. We have to. Pursue every possibility. No matter how unlikely. No matter what or who is to blame.

00:35:28 Speaker_10
The point seems to be about the scientific community involved in Chernobyl and what they were doing and why they were doing it.

00:35:36 Speaker_08
The point is, yes, you're correct about what they were doing there at the time, but it is also referring in no small way to how this all happened in the first place. We don't quite yet understand that. We will come to understand that.

00:35:49 Speaker_08
But this notion of what it means to be a scientist, and what it means to pursue the truth, is at the center of all of this. And there is a moment immediately following it, where Komyuk tells Legasov, listen, this is what they said.

00:36:05 Speaker_08
They said that they did shut the reactor down, they pressed AZ-5, and then it exploded. And you see on Legasov's face a very strange reaction, which Jared Harris performed to perfection.

00:36:16 Speaker_08
And it is a sense, we have at least, even if Komiuk doesn't notice it, that this is not altogether shocking to him. That it is stirring a memory of a thing. And he is starting to suddenly realize something, and it is making him feel a bit sick.

00:36:34 Speaker_08
And yet, what he says to her after is, pursue this at all costs, no matter who is to blame. And so there is the scientist saying, regardless of how I feel, and regardless of how this turns out, the truth must be told.

00:36:49 Speaker_10
There's obviously a character moment there. for both of them, as you just described. But... the series began with the words, -"What are the cost of lies?" So, it almost seems as if this is a counterpoint to that.

00:37:05 Speaker_10
Like, because lies, as we have seen and we'll see more of, are so devastating, the only response to that problem is to seek the truth no matter what.

00:37:14 Speaker_08
Yeah, it is a character moment, and it is a point moment, I think, in part because I root Legasov's character in this statement that lies have a cost.

00:37:24 Speaker_08
As I was writing this, I remembered suddenly feeling antsy early on in episode three because there was this question in the back of my head that needed to be answered, but we were so busy trying to not blow up, you know, half of Europe that we didn't have time to ask it.

00:37:41 Speaker_08
And the question was simply, how did this happen? And now, we begin to delve deeply into that question. And for me, it is both character and point. Because Legasov is on the front line of this in a very big way.

00:37:56 Speaker_08
And we'll see how that functions for him, particularly at the end of the next episode and into the final episode.

00:38:01 Speaker_08
The question of truth and truth-seeking and truth-telling is not as simple as it would seem, not for him and not for anyone in the Soviet Union.

00:38:10 Speaker_10
Right. And in much the same way that this episode is mainly about, like, the long-term costs of what has happened, the final episodes are the difficulty of executing that.

00:38:21 Speaker_10
Both the, as we'll see, the liquidation and ultimately the search for truth, which has to be done.

00:38:28 Speaker_08
It has to be done, and it will not be done in a clean way. It will not be done in an efficient way. It will come in fits and starts. This is part of the reality of the way this disaster unfolded.

00:38:42 Speaker_08
It's also one of the reasons why it had to be told in a series of episodes like this. over the course of five hours. You can't tell this in, say, as a movie, because the story didn't work that way.

00:38:55 Speaker_08
And the reality of how this kind of unfolded is quite startling. But we know at least this much. the show has already put you on a clock. And the clock is, there is an explosion, and two years later, this man is dead.

00:39:10 Speaker_08
So at this point here, in the middle of the series, we are starting to see that fuse being lit. And we understand, at this point, it is going to lead, ultimately, to his death.

00:39:21 Speaker_08
And in that sense, although I'm dramatizing these moments, especially with Komyuk, who's not, was not, you know, an actual person, This is, in fact, what started to happen for Legasov.

00:39:33 Speaker_08
This is where the fuse was lit, and we're gonna carry through a very important event that we... actually happens in between episode four and five that we don't see, but we refer to.

00:39:41 Speaker_10
Right. There's a shot in this that stayed with me more than I think than almost any other shot in the whole series, and that is... Emily Watson entering the hospital room of Akimov.

00:39:52 Speaker_10
We've seen Toptunov, the younger man with that wispy mustache, who was so horribly burned, who even in his hospital bed seems proud that he was the chief engineer in the control room at the age of 25.

00:40:06 Speaker_10
But then she goes to visit Akimov, who was in charge of the room. I don't know his official title.

00:40:12 Speaker_08
PETER Right, he was the shift chief. PETER The shift chief.

00:40:15 Speaker_10
And we don't see him. We see her face as she looks at him. And she says later his face was gone. So you made a decision not to show, not to... up the ante on the physical brutality of what... had happened.

00:40:33 Speaker_08
Yeah, there is a fine line between real and impactful and purposeful. and gratuitous.

00:40:41 Speaker_08
And even within the editing of the, for instance, Vasily Ignatenko, played by Adam Nogaitis, he, you know, we show the most of what this is, how this has ravaged him. Yeah, the firemen we're talking about. Correct.

00:40:54 Speaker_08
And, you know, one of the things in our initial cut, we lingered quite a bit longer on him, and Cary Antholis, who was our executive at HBO, he said, you know... Maybe not so much because it's starting to feel a little abusive." And he was right.

00:41:12 Speaker_08
You know, we kind of went back with fresh eyes and said, yeah, this actually is crossing the line. It seems now like we're almost, you know, enjoying it. We never wanted to be gratuitous or sensationalist in any way. We just wanted to show it was real.

00:41:26 Speaker_08
In the case of Akima, we felt like we had done it. And to go further... I mean, Akima, the description of Akima when he died, his body was described as essentially blackened. His skin had gone all the way to like, almost like a charcoal color.

00:41:42 Speaker_08
He... It's terrible. And we just didn't feel like... To show that to people, I think, at that point, would have been gratuitous.

00:41:54 Speaker_10
So you never filmed it? You never put the actor in makeup and filmed it?

00:41:57 Speaker_08
We never put the actor in makeup. We never wanted to.

00:42:00 Speaker_10
I mean, one of the reasons it was so effective and so memorable, in addition to Emily Watson doing all the work... We had seen Totonov and we've seen Vasily. They looked terrible.

00:42:12 Speaker_10
And the implication is that what Emily Watson is looking at at that moment is far worse. And so what we imagine is bad enough.

00:42:20 Speaker_08
And sometimes, that's the strange nature of telling a story visually like this. Sometimes... what you think you're being, I don't know, showing restraint, you're, in a weird way, you're making it worse.

00:42:35 Speaker_08
But again, this was a terrible thing that happened to these men. Awful. And two women, by the way, two women, two security guards at the plant were also exposed to massive amounts of radiation that night as well. And we kind of need to get that across.

00:42:51 Speaker_08
And listen, at the end of this episode, the story that we're telling about how the bodies were handled is true.

00:42:57 Speaker_08
They were put in bags, they were put in crates, those crates were put in zinc-lined boxes, they were welded shut, they were put in a collective grave, and then concrete was poured on them. Where is that grave, by the way?

00:43:13 Speaker_08
It's called, this is... Any Russian speaker's gonna be very upset with my... They gave up on me years ago, don't worry about it. Mitininsko... Mitininsko Cemetery in Moscow. So it's just outside of Moscow. And that's where they are now.

00:43:27 Speaker_08
And, you know, just imagining... a burial ceremony where a cement truck backs into place. It's just mind-boggling.

00:43:37 Speaker_10
Yeah. There's a strong implication that people then knew who these people were, why they were being buried that way. That the secret was out in a weird way. There was no more... I mean, these people were not being secreted away at night. Correct.

00:43:49 Speaker_10
The secret was out at this point.

00:43:50 Speaker_08
Yes. And there was a certain amount of... that went on, at least initially. People were terrified of, you know, the people who had been moved out of Pripyat and maybe put into other communities.

00:44:04 Speaker_08
There was a sense of fear and dread of those people for some. And also, there was, for a very long time, I think, a sense that people like Akimov and Taptunov were to blame. Which is, I think, a reasonable assumption people would make.

00:44:20 Speaker_08
Whoever pressed the buttons in there obviously stank and blew it up, and they did all this. And that's not entirely wrong. But it's nowhere near entirely right.

00:44:32 Speaker_08
When this series is over, I hope that people understand that Akimov and Tatunov, in most ways, were really innocent and do not deserve blame for any of this.

00:44:41 Speaker_10
Right, and they certainly didn't deserve what ultimately happened to them. No one does. This has been episode three of the Chernobyl podcast, the only podcast that's even more depressing than the show.

00:44:52 Speaker_10
It is about... You can, of course, rate this podcast, you can subscribe to it, you can tell your friends about it, you can call them up in the middle of the night, because you just can't stop thinking about it, and then just, you know, annoy them with telling them all of your thoughts about this podcast.

00:45:06 Speaker_10
I highly recommend doing that. You can listen to this podcast via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, NPR One, or wherever else you choose to get your podcast. It's also available on YouTube. And, for the first time ever, the HBO Go and HBO Now apps.

00:45:24 Speaker_10
We're finally dragging those apps into the podcast era. I'm Peter Sagal, and I've had the honor of talking to the show's writer, producer, and creator, Greg Mazin. Thank you, Peter. We'll see you next week to talk about episode four of Chernobyl.

00:45:51 Speaker_14
I run a school for young women.

00:45:53 Speaker_00
We're not a threat to anyone. In the new HBO original series, Dune Prophecy, it is sisterhood above all. I'm Greta Johnson.

00:46:02 Speaker_01
And I'm Ahmed Ali Akbar. Join us on the official Dune Prophecy podcast, where we unpack each episode with the show's creators, cast, and crew.

00:46:10 Speaker_00
Stream Dune Prophecy Sundays starting November 17th exclusively on Max, and you can listen to new episodes of the podcast every Sunday night.