Please Remain Calm AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast The Chernobyl Podcast

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Episode: Please Remain Calm

Author: HBO
Duration: 00:49:55

Episode Shownotes

Peter Sagal and Craig Mazin discuss the second episode of Chernobyl. With untold millions at risk after the explosion, nuclear physicist Ulana Khomyuk (Emily Watson) makes a desperate attempt to reach Valery Legasov (Jared Harris) and warn him about the threat of a second explosion that could devastate the continent.

Mazin sheds light on the real-life scientists who inspired the composite character Khomyuk and demystifies how nuclear radiation works. He also gives context about seemingly small details, like the poem being read on the radio, and we get more surprising answers from Sagal's "really?" questions. The Chernobyl Podcast is produced by HBO in conjunction with Pineapple Street Media. Original music by Kaan Erbay. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Summary

In the second episode of The Chernobyl Podcast, Peter Sagal and Craig Mazin explore critical moments after the Chernobyl disaster, focusing on Ulana Khomyuk's efforts to warn about a potential second explosion. They highlight the challenges faced by female scientists within the male-dominated Soviet scientific community, the socio-political dynamics of the time, and the scientific intricacies of radiation exposure. Mazin provides insights into the real-life inspirations for Khomyuk’s character and discusses important themes such as sacrifice, duty, and moral dilemmas faced by scientists amidst bureaucratic denial, enhancing the understanding of human resilience during one of history's worst nuclear accidents.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Please Remain Calm) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:04 Speaker_09
You know, I believe that the Russia we fight for is not the dull town where I lived at a loss, but those country tracks that our ancestors followed, the graves where they lie with the old Russian cross.

00:00:20 Speaker_09
I feel that for me it was countryside Russia that first made me feel I must truly belong. to the tedious miles between village and village, the tears of the widow, the women's sad song.

00:00:35 Speaker_09
By old Russian practice, mere fire and destruction are all we abandon behind us in war. We see alongside us the deaths of our comrades. By old Russian practice, the breast to the fore. Alyosha, till now we've been spared by the bullets. But when,

00:00:54 Speaker_09
for the third time my life seemed to end. I yet still felt proud of the dearest of countries, the great bitter land I was born to defend.

00:01:15 Speaker_03
Welcome to the Chernobyl podcast. This is Peter Sagal. This is a podcast about the miniseries Chernobyl being broadcast on HBO and Sky. Today we are talking about episode two, titled Please Remain Calm.

00:01:29 Speaker_03
We are here again with the show's creator, producer, and writer, Craig Mazin.

00:01:34 Speaker_10
Good to be back.

00:01:34 Speaker_03
It's always a pleasure to see you here, far, far away from the events you wrote about.

00:01:41 Speaker_03
To recap, at the end of last episode, the image we were left with was a bird falling from the sky, presumably because of the radiation pouring out of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, which had blown up about 12 hours before.

00:01:54 Speaker_03
And quite importantly, that bird falls out of the sky, and no one notices. Because as of the end of episode one, no one really knows, because of secrecy and denial, how bad things actually are.

00:02:09 Speaker_03
So, the episode begins with a poem in Russian over a radio. And what is that exactly?

00:02:16 Speaker_10
So, I was looking for, again, just the idea being that if you're going to tell a story in the Soviet Union, place it... And this was the kind of thing that you would hear on Soviet radio.

00:02:27 Speaker_10
It was largely skewed towards classical music or patriotic poetry of this sort. This is a beautiful poem written by a poet named Konstantin Simonov, and the poem is called To Alexei Surkov. And this was written in July of 1941.

00:02:42 Speaker_10
Which was right after the invasion of Soviet Union by the Nazis. Correct. What I loved about it, as I just went through looking for poems in this one, I thought, oh, wow, this encapsulates the spirit of the people that went to battle with Chernobyl.

00:02:59 Speaker_10
In this, you get it all. As far as I'm concerned, the great bitter land I was born to defend.

00:03:05 Speaker_10
So there's an acknowledgment that this place, the Russia that we fight for, it's full of dull towns, it's full of country tracks, graves everywhere, women mourning and crying, and it seems quite miserable, and you're constantly being shot at, and yet you... and yet, and yet, still...

00:03:27 Speaker_10
feel proud of the dearest of countries, the great bitter land. I was born to defend this notion that the whole purpose of life inside this place is to defend the country in which you are.

00:03:41 Speaker_10
And it starts to make sense when you think about the people that went to Chernobyl, many of them doing these things voluntarily, in a sense, flying helicopters over an open nuclear reactor, going into irradiated water, just being a scientist and staying there.

00:03:57 Speaker_10
you feel an extension of this notion of being born for this. This is why you exist.

00:04:03 Speaker_03
And again, we've talked about this a number of times, but I'm sitting here and I'm like contrasting, like, what's the most popular poetry about America? America the Beautiful, Purple Mountain's Majesty, Fruited Plains. We don't talk about America.

00:04:15 Speaker_03
We don't talk about patriotism in anything like that. I mean, the fact that they're like, it's sad, it's bitter, It's sometimes tedious, but it's ours, and our job is to... There's even a reference to bullets. To die for it. It's extraordinary.

00:04:32 Speaker_10
Oh, absolutely. This is a man talking about his duty to his country while he's walking by endless graveyards of people that have taken bullets before him. You know, obviously, we made a choice there to do it in Russian.

00:04:45 Speaker_10
We tried as best as we could whenever there wasn't somebody speaking in a scene, which isn't frequently, but this is a great example, to be as accurate as we could and to do it in Russian.

00:04:58 Speaker_10
All the lettering, for instance, throughout the show is in Cyrillic. Hopefully, people get the point. We don't do a lot of translating for them. But it helped us situate this story in the place.

00:05:09 Speaker_03
And we begin the episode in Belarus, right? Where we meet a new character, Ulana Komyuk.

00:05:18 Speaker_03
Now, we've talked in episode one of this podcast about how carefully you wanted to adhere to reality that these were real people, presented as they were, doing what they did, but Ulana is a fictional character.

00:05:30 Speaker_10
We had this challenge right off the bat. There were hundreds of scientists that ultimately worked on the problem of Chernobyl.

00:05:40 Speaker_10
Valeriy Lugasov, played by Jared Harris, was kind of the scientist in charge of this effort, but there were so many more who were involved, and those scientists... A lot of them actually were in positions of opposition, essentially, to Legasov.

00:05:56 Speaker_10
They were, at times, more aggressive about the potential dangers. They challenged him on some of the solutions that he was considering. And in order to consolidate these many, many people into one, I felt I had to create a composite character.

00:06:11 Speaker_10
Just right off the bat, this is played by the incredible Emily Watson. I want to talk for a second about gender. The Soviet Union was, in many ways, very regressive in terms of its gender politics. The power structures are almost entirely male.

00:06:27 Speaker_10
And the show reflects that. There's, you know, I don't know, probably 90% of the characters are male. That reflects the reality of what happened in the Soviet Union. But one area that they were fairly progressive in was science and medicine.

00:06:40 Speaker_10
There were probably a higher proportion of female medical doctors in the Soviet Union in 1986 than there were in the United States. And there were quite a few female academicians who worked in programs like nuclear science programs. So...

00:06:54 Speaker_10
I thought it was an important thing to show where the Soviets actually were kind of progressive in this regard. You'll see a lot of the doctors in the show are women because that reflected the reality.

00:07:07 Speaker_10
So, we invested a lot of this stuff into Emily's character, this sense of a check on Legasov. And also, frankly, just to get into Legasov's character, if I may, for a second.

00:07:19 Speaker_10
So, at the end of episode one, he's called by this man named Boris Shcherbina, who's... That's a real man, was a real man, played by, in this case, Stellan Skarsgård, also amazing.

00:07:29 Speaker_10
And Shcherbina asks Legasov if he is an expert in RBMK reactors, and Legasov sort of starts to say, I am. In fact, he wasn't. Legasov worked, he was the, you know, very high up.

00:07:42 Speaker_10
at the Kurchatov Institute, which was the premier nuclear physics institute in the Soviet Union, but he was more in the chemistry area of things.

00:07:50 Speaker_10
I mean, he knew a lot about radiation and the chemistry of radioactive materials, but he was not really an expert on the function of an RBMK nuclear reactor, and a lot of other people were.

00:08:02 Speaker_00
Right.

00:08:03 Speaker_10
And those people, very frequently, had to kind of help him out and explain to him in certain ways, this is why this is happening and this is why this is not.

00:08:11 Speaker_10
So, one of the other functions of the character of Ulan Okomyuk is to, frankly, be a little bit smarter. Be a little bit smarter, a little bit more aware, and a challenge to him to do better, as they say.

00:08:22 Speaker_03
So, we begin the episode with Emily Watson's character in a lab. She doesn't know anything about what's happened because no one knows anything about what's happened. The town has been cut off.

00:08:32 Speaker_03
A window is opened, a radiation detector goes off, and she very quickly understands not only that there's been an accident, but what kind of accident. it was.

00:08:41 Speaker_03
She uses a spectrometer to figure out that a particular isotope that would come from a nuclear reactor explosion is now in the air. Is that reflective of reality?

00:08:49 Speaker_03
Did people begin to see across the Soviet Union and Europe that something bad had happened through that method?

00:08:53 Speaker_10
Correct. That specific story is inspired by an account in Voices of Chernobyl from a nuclear physicist in which that exactly happened. They opened a window, an alarm went off, this entire institute presumed

00:09:07 Speaker_10
that this level of radiation they were detecting was the result of a leak from inside the lab. They figured out fairly quickly that it was coming from outside. And they did call Chernobyl, and no one answered the phone.

00:09:22 Speaker_10
I think this was basically when they started to realize something terrible had happened. And when they started to call, people would say things like, nope, no problem, stop asking questions, you don't wanna ask that question. It was sort of that deal.

00:09:34 Speaker_10
But while this was happening fairly quickly inside of the Soviet Union, the cloud was moving its way across Europe and eventually would arrive in Sweden, where this... I wish we'd had time to shoot.

00:09:47 Speaker_10
I would've loved to have shot the scene, but it's the scene where, and this is what happened, a worker at a Swedish power plant basically sets off an alarm.

00:09:58 Speaker_10
and he sets off an alarm because his shoe has picked up a piece of dirt that has a piece of fallout from Chernobyl. Right.

00:10:04 Speaker_03
But in the episode, we now are in Pripyat again, in the hospital. People are now finally coming to the hospital with terrible radiation burns. We see an old doctor trying to use milk?

00:10:17 Speaker_10
That's accurate. That's accurate. There was a limited understanding, at least among the older doctors, who were not trained at all in this kind of thing, as to what this even was.

00:10:27 Speaker_10
And there was a frightening prevalence of what I would just call kind of folk medicine going on there. And, of course, one of the other doctors realizes pretty quickly, and this is again inspired by true events, that...

00:10:42 Speaker_10
Uh, these are not normal fire burns. Which, by the way, milk is not acceptable for those either. Yeah, okay. Important note for those at home. Correct.

00:10:50 Speaker_10
But once they realized that these are nuclear burns, they did remove all the clothes from the firefighters and they did bring them down to the basement, and those clothes are there today.

00:11:00 Speaker_03
Right. It's still radioactive. Correct. Yeah. We'll get into what happened to those men, uh, and some women, I guess, with the doctors themselves. So, the doctors themselves received radiation burns just from dealing with the patients.

00:11:13 Speaker_03
This is something I found myself thinking a lot about. One of the bizarre, it seems almost unbelievable, natures of radioactivity is...

00:11:20 Speaker_03
if you become irradiated by being exposed to something like Chernobyl, then you are just as dangerous, or at least dangerous, in exactly the same way whatever you were exposed to.

00:11:31 Speaker_03
It seems to, like, have an endless sort of contagion, coming back to our horror movie thing. If you've touched it, then you're contagious. If I touch you, I can get burned, and so on and so forth.

00:11:41 Speaker_10
Yes, depending on the circumstances. These particles we're talking about are atomic, they're subatomic, these neutrons. And when you have these particles on you, and in you, just from breathing.

00:11:54 Speaker_10
If I breathe these things in from smoke, they're in my body. They are now radiating inside of me outwards.

00:12:00 Speaker_10
There's a terrible story, I mean, it's a shocking story, from the night of that we contemplated shooting and just couldn't fit it in, where a guy named Gorbachev, who's the dosimetrist in episode one, who says, are they bombing?

00:12:12 Speaker_10
Which, by the way, a lot of people in the plant thought that was what was going on. He rescues another guy, tries to rescue another guy who doesn't make it.

00:12:20 Speaker_10
And in the account, he had been carrying this guy and the guy's hand had been loosely resting on Gorbachev's back.

00:12:27 Speaker_10
And when he finally puts the guy down, he feels a burn on his back and he lifts his shirt and there's a burn in the shape of a palm print. on his back because that man's hand was that radiated. And it burned him in the shape of a handprint.

00:12:41 Speaker_10
It's just startling and terrifying.

00:12:43 Speaker_03
Yeah. And we'll get to more of that later and what happens to those men, which we'll talk about. But let's talk about what is... one of the key scenes, if not the key scene, where we start what we might think of as a more traditional story.

00:12:56 Speaker_03
We meet our hero, Legasov, and his counterpart, Shcherbina. This is a scene in the Kremlin. Jared Harris playing him, he seems to not know what it is he's been brought in to talk about. He doesn't know anything, just like nobody else knows anything.

00:13:09 Speaker_10
Yeah, he was told that there had been a minor industrial incident. Anytime there is an accident at a nuclear power plant, it's prudent for the government to make sure things are going okay.

00:13:23 Speaker_10
I think one of the reasons that Legasov was called was because Legasov was... a rather zealous member of the party.

00:13:32 Speaker_10
He was considered a real Soviet, and a loyalist, and somebody that you could count on to just, you know, tow the party line, as they say.

00:13:42 Speaker_10
Not to take away from his expertise, he was a brilliant scientist in his own right, but that's why he was called in. I think, that is my suspicion.

00:13:50 Speaker_10
And the manner in which he kind of deduces that there may be something worse and the motivation to go there, this is a compression and combination of a number of events. That the way that scene unfolds is my own interpretation of things.

00:14:05 Speaker_03
Yeah, it seems pretty dramatically sharp, you know, that he's reading the notes. By the way, that's an amazing bit of acting on Jared Harris's part. To sort of show that you just saw the worst news in the world on a piece of paper.

00:14:18 Speaker_08
I'm sorry, I'm so sorry. Page three, the section on casualties. A fireman was severely burned on his hand by a chunk of smooth black mineral on the ground outside the reactor building. Smooth black mineral. Graphite. There's graphite on the ground.

00:14:37 Speaker_06
There was a tank explosion. There's debris. Of what importance that could be.

00:14:41 Speaker_08
There's only one place in the entire facility where you will find graphite. inside the core. If there's graphite on the ground outside, it means it wasn't a control system tank that exploded. It was the reactor core. It's open.

00:14:53 Speaker_03
Let's talk about the scene in the Kremlin. First of all, we finally get to meet somebody we recognize, Gorbachev. It's a fine, fine replica of his, of his, of his winemark. Yes.

00:15:02 Speaker_03
We tend to think in the, in the West of Gorbachev as a relatively heroic figure because we credit him with voluntarily ending the Soviet Union. I don't know how accurate that is, but that's how we tend to think of him. Right.

00:15:14 Speaker_03
He comes across as not tremendously heroic, and certainly not a leader here. He comes across as yet another Soviet bureaucrat, the top Soviet bureaucrat, who seemingly, like everybody else, is concerned for his own reputation, position, and future.

00:15:33 Speaker_10
I did not want to show what I think is essentially an invention of who Gorbachev was. I don't think Gorbachev was a bad guy by any stretch.

00:15:44 Speaker_10
I mean, in the long run of Soviet premieres, certainly the Brezhnev and Andropov and Chernenko run there, he was good. that he came along and he did a lot of good, but he was a bureaucrat.

00:15:55 Speaker_10
I mean, you don't become the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union because you're, you know, a super reformer. Also, he just had no idea. None of them really knew.

00:16:08 Speaker_03
Speaking of bureaucrats and apparatchiks, let's talk about Legasov's counterpart, who will be an important part in this series as it plays out, Shcherbina, played by Stellan Starsgard.

00:16:17 Speaker_03
His official title is Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers and Head of the Bureau for Fuel and Energy. What does that mean? What I actually mean is, are we dealing with a very powerful man in the Soviet system? Are we dealing with a bureaucrat?

00:16:34 Speaker_03
Are we dealing with somebody who needs to be feared? Somebody who fears? What was his position in the power structure?

00:16:41 Speaker_10
Yeah, he was up there. Um, no one ever expected that Shcherbina would be taking over. He was not that guy. He wasn't the person you talk about if Gorbachev dies, who takes over. No, there are other guys.

00:16:52 Speaker_10
And there are also other powerful people in the Soviet Union that we don't hear much about, like Premier Ryzhkov and... You probably remember Andre Gromyko. Andre Gromyko was incredibly influential inside that government.

00:17:03 Speaker_10
Barbara Scherbina was more like, probably on par with the Secretary of Agriculture. But he was somebody you wouldn't want to mess with. So he posed no real threat to the people that were in power. but he could definitely mess your life up.

00:17:17 Speaker_10
I mean, he's pretty high up in position.

00:17:20 Speaker_03
Yeah, and as we see in this episode, he's somebody who, I don't know if the correct expression is rules, but let's say he administers through intimidation. He's not particularly a nice man.

00:17:28 Speaker_10
Well, and this is, you know, fairly accurate to accounts that Shcherbina was tough. He was a tough guy. He wasn't quite as tall as Stalin is. Who is, ultimately.

00:17:38 Speaker_03
I'm not even sure if Stalin's Starsguard is as tall as Stalin's Starsguard is.

00:17:41 Speaker_10
The Stellan Skarsgård is as tall as Stellan Skarsgård. He's actually taller than you think Stellan Skarsgård is. But Shcherbina was definitely quite a few counts of him trying to yell things into existence.

00:17:54 Speaker_10
He was a gruff guy, he was a tough guy, but he also was, as it turned out, the right guy to send. I think that he, from what I read, quickly figured out that this was a war, and it had to be won, and he was kinda in it to win it.

00:18:13 Speaker_03
Yeah. But getting back to this meeting, we leave the meeting. Legasov has at least convinced them that there's enough reason to go take a look. He gets sent, along with Shcherbina. Neither of them seem happy to go. They're going.

00:18:28 Speaker_03
Just speaking as an admirer of narrative tricks, having somebody being threatened with being thrown out of a helicopter, if he doesn't explain something clearly, gives it some stakes, as they say in the screenwriting classes being held all over the place around us.

00:18:41 Speaker_03
We get there, and there's a very dramatic scene as they fly in, and Shcherbina wants to take a look right down into it. And Legasov, in the end, successfully convinces the pilot not to do that. This will come up a lot.

00:18:54 Speaker_03
It happens very dramatically here, but there seems to be a significant increase in danger of being right over the pile as opposed to being right next to it, which seemed to me to be counterintuitive only because of the way I imagine radiation spreading in every direction.

00:19:07 Speaker_10
CRAIG Sure. So, here's the deal with radiation, because it... It's very frustrating when you read about it because you're trying to make sense of, well, why did this person die and this person not die?

00:19:19 Speaker_10
So, your exposure to radiation is defined essentially by three factors. One, how much radiation is coming from the source? Two, how far away are you from it? And three, how long are you in that spot?

00:19:34 Speaker_10
The reactor is... Imagine this nuclear reactor is essentially kind of like a big pit in the ground. This is sort of just a big... It's like a big tub.

00:19:42 Speaker_10
And it's inside this build, so there's still walls around it, because remember, all that force went upward. The nuclear fuel is inside that reactor, and in this moment, it is burning. The graphite, which is part of it, is also radioactive, is burning.

00:19:57 Speaker_10
So, the radiation that is spread outwards and around is essentially been carried up by smoke. Particles that are radioactive are being carried by smoke and spread around. But inside this big open tub is the real stuff.

00:20:10 Speaker_10
Uranium, which is firing essentially straight up into the air, because the stuff that's going sideways is running into essentially the tub itself, which was designed to kind of hold radiation.

00:20:21 Speaker_03
When Legasov explains, he uses a metaphor that I don't think I've come across before for radiation, which is the metaphor of bullets.

00:20:27 Speaker_03
The idea is, one way to think of it, is these are physical particles that will tear through flesh, that will tear through anything, and cause extraordinary, if microscopic, damage.

00:20:37 Speaker_10
That's exactly what they are. They are very, very, very tiny, tiny, tiny bullets.

00:20:41 Speaker_03
So, there's also the continuing story of Emily Watson's character, Alana Komuk. She's out there, she's made no connection with our other characters.

00:20:50 Speaker_03
She's continuing to try to both find out what's going on and bring the word of it to the people who need to know. And there's a great scene with that bureaucrat.

00:20:59 Speaker_09
Right.

00:21:01 Speaker_11
There has been an accident at Chernobyl, but I've been assured there is no problem.

00:21:05 Speaker_07
I'm telling you that there is.

00:21:07 Speaker_11
I prefer my opinion to yours.

00:21:09 Speaker_07
I'm a nuclear physicist. Before you were Deputy Secretary, you worked in a shoe factory.

00:21:17 Speaker_11
Yes, I worked in a shoe factory. And now I'm in charge.

00:21:24 Speaker_10
One of the quirks of the Soviet system, we think of it as just a huge palace built on lies, but some of it was true. For instance, this notion that it would be a government of the worker, by the worker, for the worker.

00:21:39 Speaker_10
a lot of the people that did end up as high-level bureaucrats were workers. So, a number of these people did come out of factory positions. They worked in a factory, they became the foreman of the factory.

00:21:51 Speaker_10
They then became sort of the head of a council that dealt with five of the factories. And eventually, you become the chairman of the Communist Party of an entire Soviet Socialist Republic.

00:22:02 Speaker_10
We do know that in the direct aftermath of the explosion, there was a concerted effort to instruct all of the bosses, the party bosses, to do nothing. And one of the unfortunate coincidences of this accident is that it occurred...

00:22:22 Speaker_10
five days before May 1st, which is the International Workers' Day. I mean, it's Labor Day. It's probably, I guess, it was the most important holiday in the Soviet Union. So, we're talking about parades.

00:22:34 Speaker_10
And in Kiev, in Minsk, there were party officials who, honestly, it seems to me, begged. Begged to cancel the parade. And they were told, not only will you not cancel the parade, but you'll be walking in it too. And they did.

00:22:52 Speaker_03
And there was a scene in the original script in which that bureaucrat gets up and walks out and marches in the parade, even though he knows.

00:22:58 Speaker_10
He knows and he tries. You know, he tries. And I think that that's what I wanted. You know, unfortunately, we just had to... Some things we lost for time, but I did want to show, and I'm glad I get a chance to talk about it here, that...

00:23:10 Speaker_10
A lot of these people would, when they were told to do something, they would do it convincingly. But they weren't monsters. They would then try to work behind the scenes in some sort of diplomatic, bureaucratic way to do what was correct.

00:23:26 Speaker_10
In this case, and this is where, you know, I look at somebody like Gorbachev and I think, you knew this was going on. they were told to get out on the streets. And we have photos of, you know, the May Day Parade in Kiev, 1986.

00:23:39 Speaker_10
And when you look at these photos, every single one of those people is in danger.

00:23:44 Speaker_03
Right.

00:23:44 Speaker_10
In direct danger.

00:23:45 Speaker_03
Yeah, and people knew that this was the king.

00:23:48 Speaker_10
On the inside.

00:23:49 Speaker_03
Yeah, but they didn't know.

00:23:50 Speaker_10
None of the people marching knew.

00:23:52 Speaker_03
Yeah, there's a great moment in this episode where we find out that the kids in Germany are being told to stay inside as people look out at the kids playing a few kilometers from the plant.

00:24:00 Speaker_10
Exactly correct. So by the time Moscow finally says, okay, okay, we have to evacuate this town, The rest of the world already knows. People have been getting pulled off the streets.

00:24:13 Speaker_10
There were curfews in places like Germany or East Germany and West Germany, but not in Pripyat. And that's the shocking, just shocking.

00:24:21 Speaker_03
So, as it turns out, one cast member actually lived through this. Stellan Skarsgård grew up in Sweden, which, as we had talked about, was the first country outside the Soviet Union to have an inkling of what was going on.

00:24:34 Speaker_05
So the smoke and the dust was carried with the winds northwest over Sweden, over northern Sweden and eastern Sweden. And for years, we could not eat mushrooms that we picked in the forest.

00:24:46 Speaker_05
We could not eat reindeer because the reindeer ate mosses that were infected. And you can still sort of detect radiation in some parts of Sweden, sometimes in animals and sometimes in plants.

00:25:04 Speaker_03
Let's talk a little bit about the victims. Everybody understands in this business that it's always best to focus on individual stories to represent a group of people. You chose the story of Lyudmila. Was she real?

00:25:15 Speaker_03
And why did you choose her to represent the larger group of victims here?

00:25:20 Speaker_10
She is real, and her husband, Vasily Yurtenko, lived, was real. He was a firefighter. And the actions that occurred that night are... very much inspired by a story that she tells. Um, that she tells in the book, Voices of Chernobyl.

00:25:36 Speaker_10
So, I really took her story. I tried to tell it as accurately as I could because it is... just incredibly moving and beautiful. I didn't really do anything to embellish it or change facts. I really just took what was there that she reported.

00:25:55 Speaker_10
And I found her story to be... the most heart-wrenching of all the stories that I read, because it was so much about... Love.

00:26:08 Speaker_10
Characters played by, um, Jessie Buckley, who, you know, in talking about this with her, she said she was... she was attracted to playing this character because the character was just all about love. And how love just blinds you to almost anything.

00:26:23 Speaker_10
And Adam Nogaitis plays her husband Vasili, who's just kind of the paragon of heroism. And there's actually a wonderful documentary about Ludmilla also. It's a Swedish documentary. I don't know if it's findable.

00:26:37 Speaker_10
Ludmilla Roast is what I think it is in Swedish. Anyway, it's a beautiful documentary. If anyone can find it, it's well worth watching. Right.

00:26:44 Speaker_03
We have that remarkable scene in the hotel. And that great line, you know, they're standing there in the middle of a nuclear disaster, and somebody says, -"Well, there's a hotel."

00:26:52 Speaker_03
This is before the town is evacuated, so life is going on, and Imwok's Legasov into a bar.

00:26:59 Speaker_03
And it's funny, I didn't understand exactly what happened with that glass until I went back and looked at it again, where the bartender offers him a glass that's been turned open-side-up. And he says, I'll take the one that's turned over.

00:27:10 Speaker_03
Just a small little thing.

00:27:11 Speaker_10
CRAIG DUNNAN Which is a minor attempt to, you know, be safe. I mean, it's... I feel like sometimes as humans, when we are in situations that are overwhelming, we seek to comfort ourselves and...

00:27:25 Speaker_10
the most minuscule ways, even if we know they're not significant, and they won't change anything, we try. But Pripyat was functioning. And so this is the Polissya Hotel, who's the hotel in Pripyat.

00:27:40 Speaker_10
We replicated it, I think, you know, the exterior of it, I mean, with the help of visual effects and down to the brick, I believe, or chunk of concrete, as it were. And yeah, that's where he stayed.

00:27:51 Speaker_10
And that's where they all stayed for a while, actually. Even after the evacuation, a number of the people that were supervising this effort to put this fire out were headquartered at the Palacio Hotel.

00:28:02 Speaker_03
Here's actor Jared Harris talking about just that.

00:28:04 Speaker_08
There's this couple who are there who start asking him questions about why he's there and what he's doing there. Is everything alright with the site? And he has a choice at that point to tell them the truth or to lie.

00:28:17 Speaker_08
And it was one of the things that I discussed with Johan and with Craig is that's sort of the point that he steps into the story at that point where

00:28:27 Speaker_08
Because he lies to them about the fact that there's nothing to worry about, at that point, he owns the outcome of what's going to happen. He's now responsible for what's going to happen.

00:28:38 Speaker_08
Up until that point, he was an innocent who was plucked from his life and plonked into this situation. But the moment that he lies, he now owns responsibility for the outcome.

00:28:50 Speaker_03
So they finally evacuate Pripyat. One of the things I was struck was how orderly it was. And I was like, oh, you're evacuating an entire town of how many people? 50,000. 50,000 people. 50,000 people are being evacuated from this town.

00:29:02 Speaker_03
And I could only think of what that would be like if they tried to do that to a similar town in America. People would be yelling, people would be complaining, people would be demanding that they're allowed to bring that or bring this.

00:29:11 Speaker_03
Calling their lawyers. Exactly. I'm not leaving. Whatever. We get a little bit of that later in the series, but everybody just got up and said, all right, and they climbed onto the bus.

00:29:19 Speaker_10
Very Soviet. So, the buses were Kiev municipal buses.

00:29:24 Speaker_10
They expected that they were going to have to evacuate this town as they were monitoring the radiation coming from the plant, and as they were dropping the sand and the boron and the lead, it started to get a little better, then it started to get much worse, and they said, okay, it's time.

00:29:37 Speaker_10
So they were prepared. They had a thousand, I think it was a thousand, Kiev buses, which is probably all of the buses in Kiev, waiting at night, just waiting. And then they eventually get the signal the next day, it's on.

00:29:52 Speaker_10
And a caravan of a thousand buses makes its way to Pripyat. And the citizenry, by all accounts except one, so I went with all accounts, was incredibly orderly.

00:30:05 Speaker_10
Again, reflective of the society in which they lived and grew up, the police said, you're coming with us, you're getting on the bus, you can take one suitcase, no pets, you'll be back in a few days. Get on the bus. And everybody said, okay.

00:30:21 Speaker_10
And I'll wait in the line and get on the bus. With very little protest. I mean, normally, you'd look at that and say, like, oh, my God, they're leading lambs to a slaughter, but really, they're leading the lambs away from the slaughter.

00:30:33 Speaker_10
But they're doing this on a scale that, like you say, is unimaginable in the West. And they went to the hospital and said, everybody out. Including all the sick people. And they said, okay. And they got on the buses. And they drove away.

00:30:46 Speaker_10
And they never, ever, ever came back.

00:30:48 Speaker_03
PETER TUROWSKY Right. And what do we know about those people and where they ended up? Were they all just dispersed to the Soviet Union? Did they end up in Kiev?

00:30:54 Speaker_10
CRAIG MCLUCKIE So, initially, a lot of them did end up in Kiev. I mean, they were held in a bunch of places.

00:31:00 Speaker_10
In fact, somebody told me that there was a resort that was someplace people would go in the winter to get away from the cold, and this was, you know, in the spring, summer, and so it was somewhat empty at this point.

00:31:11 Speaker_10
So they sent a lot of them to this resort, which in and of itself is just mind-boggling that... They've been evacuated from their radiated town, and now they're kind of like in a... some sort of spa resort, briefly.

00:31:22 Speaker_10
But eventually, what the Soviets do is they just build another city called Slavutich, which is just outside of the zone, and it's kind of like... Here, here's another Pripyat. Everybody go live there."

00:31:35 Speaker_10
And a lot of people did, in fact, go and work in Slavutich. And to this day, a lot of the people that still work at the power plant monitoring the electrical switches, because it's still part of the grid, live in Slavutich.

00:31:47 Speaker_10
And what's more Soviet than that? We'll just, uh, we'll do it again. Do over.

00:31:52 Speaker_03
Yeah, we'll just do it again. Nobody will say anything. People will just go. I mean, there's so many things that happen in this series that I've never seen depicted on film before, because they're so crazy, even though they were real.

00:32:05 Speaker_03
So many of the things that happened in episode one. In episode two, we're coming up on the climactic incident, which seems so much like a movie, I almost don't believe it. And this is, of course, the sluice gates. So, let's back up a little bit.

00:32:21 Speaker_03
Khamyuk comes to Chernobyl, to Pripyat. And with this news, she has figured out that what he's doing, she's found out through her rather coded conversation what Legasov is doing with the boron in the sand.

00:32:35 Speaker_03
She figures it out, and as she explains when she finally arrives, you're making a mistake. You think that the water underneath the reactor is gone, but I have figured out that it's not gone. Let's stop right there. Is that based on truth?

00:32:50 Speaker_03
Is that based on a miscalculation and then a better calculation? Essentially.

00:32:54 Speaker_10
Legasov's plan was to drop sand and boron and then start mixing it with lead. And there were actually a couple of scientists who made the argument that the most effective thing to do would actually be to just let it burn out.

00:33:09 Speaker_03
We should stop and maybe for my own edification, when we talk about the thing being on fire, there's really two different kinds of fire.

00:33:14 Speaker_03
There's one like almost traditional fire, the graphite's burning, smoke, particles, flames, that's one fire that's going on and they need to put out, because that's spreading radiation in the form of a cloud and smoke.

00:33:26 Speaker_03
But then there's the nuclear reaction, which is now uncontrolled. The control rods are gone. It's blown up. So you have all this uranium that's in a... It's basically a burning nuclear pile. Uncontrolled fission. That's a separate problem.

00:33:41 Speaker_03
And it seems as if Legasov understands that if he puts out the fire with a boron, the other one's still gonna go on. It's gonna get hotter and hotter and hotter. And then we have the classic meltdown where it sinks into the Earth.

00:33:52 Speaker_10
The fuel, he is aware... will probably melt down, but they have time. Because underneath the reactor are essentially layers.

00:34:02 Speaker_10
There's a shield and then there's a big concrete pad, and this is designed specifically to slow down a meltdown, and so they'll have time to get underneath it and deal with it. And what they came to understand with...

00:34:14 Speaker_10
terror was that they were days away from a thermal explosion. So the idea there is you have a container, a very rigid steel container, I think, possibly concrete, of about 7,000 cubic meters of water, which is a lot.

00:34:33 Speaker_10
And if melting nuclear fuel burns through and hits it, that will flash vaporize all that water to steam. And then what is a bomb? A bomb is basically a lot of pressure inside a very rigid container that finally snaps.

00:34:47 Speaker_10
That would have destroyed all of the other three reactors, which, by the way, were still operating. Yes.

00:34:55 Speaker_03
Let's stop for a second. Somebody mentions that. And I honestly... I literally couldn't believe it. So there's reactor number four has blown up.

00:35:06 Speaker_03
The worst nuclear accident that has ever occurred, as Legasov says, this has never happened before in the history of the planet. That's happening over here.

00:35:14 Speaker_03
And the other end of the building, they're just running the nuclear reactors for power like normal?

00:35:19 Speaker_10
Why in the world would they do that? They needed it. And this is the part that's kind of shocking. It's one of the reasons the accident happens in the first place, and we'll get to that detail later on in the series.

00:35:34 Speaker_10
But this power plant was powering most of Kiev, basically. It was the linchpin of Ukrainian power. If they shut it all down without any other preparation, that's devastating to an entire city and economy and industry.

00:35:52 Speaker_10
And listen, those other three reactors were humming along just fine.

00:35:57 Speaker_03
I know. It's just insane. So there were people who were getting up and going to work and putting on the paper outfits, just like we saw in episode one, standing there and running their reactors.

00:36:06 Speaker_10
Correct. While helicopters are buzzing constantly overhead, dropping sand, lead and boron on a burning open nuclear reactor, you know, maybe a half a kilometer away from you. I believe that reactors one through three functioned mostly through the 90s.

00:36:25 Speaker_10
They started getting shut down in the late 90s, and the final one, I think, was reactor three, was shut down in the year 2000.

00:36:32 Speaker_03
All right. So, let's just say, that's crazy. And get back to our story. There's a description of the results if this thermal explosion happens, which basically, to summarize, makes Europe uninhabitable.

00:36:47 Speaker_10
Well, at the very least, it would make Ukraine and Belarus uninhabitable for quite some time, and it would have had a terrible impact on most of Europe.

00:36:56 Speaker_03
So, it's very real. What Legasov warns is real. And the solution that they come up with was real. The only way to prevent this from happening. the corn melting down, hitting that water, would be to drain the water.

00:37:09 Speaker_03
The only way to drain the water is to send somebody inside the flooded basement of the destroyed reactor, somebody who knew what they were doing, to physically open some valves, or we call them sluice gates.

00:37:19 Speaker_10
Yeah, basically to open the gates that were holding all the water in those steam suppression bubbler pools. And so you needed people that could... basically find it in the dark. It was an absolute maze down there.

00:37:32 Speaker_10
The level of water, I think a lot of people have reported that, you know, it was like, you know, swimming in a fishbowl. It wasn't quite like that.

00:37:39 Speaker_10
The water, I think, got as far up to their chests, you know, but they were in full scuba gear, and there were three of them, and those were the three of them. Those are their names. And they did it.

00:37:51 Speaker_03
Yeah. It's interesting, because I noticed this, especially going through the script, that those three actors basically have one line of dialogue each. Well, not quite. They stand up and they say their names.

00:38:00 Speaker_10
Which was important to me. I felt, you know, these three men did something that is so... remarkable.

00:38:08 Speaker_10
And when you read the real accounts, it doesn't take place in quite that dramatic, you know, Spartacus moment of just standing up amidst a group of men, but they were asked and they said, -"Okay." Well, that's what I gotta do. That's what I gotta do.

00:38:21 Speaker_03
Before that happens, of course, Legasov goes back to the Kremlin. And he has that scene where he's explaining the situation, where we find out about what might happen and what he's going to do to stop it. Is that real?

00:38:33 Speaker_10
What is real is that they all knew when they came up, this was hardly the only mission like this, they all knew that there were certain missions where they needed to kill people.

00:38:45 Speaker_10
That part is true, and there's a phrase that they started to use called counting lives, which Gorbachev, I think, uses in this scene.

00:38:53 Speaker_10
And this became a running theme of counting lives, where in order to assess what they should do next, one of the factors was, how many lives will we take?

00:39:04 Speaker_10
Because some of them, there was no way to do it unless you were willingly sending people to what was certainly going to be their death. So, I wanted to dramatize that notion, which was a very real thing in a moment.

00:39:18 Speaker_10
And I thought it was important, too, for the audience to know that... the Soviets were not blithely sending people to their deaths. This was not a kind of... evil empire where people just went, who cares? Just kill a bunch of people until it goes away.

00:39:35 Speaker_10
No, they were... This was very difficult to do. And they didn't want anyone to die. And they were, unfortunately, in a position where they had no choice. And they were weighing, essentially, either this amount of people will die or this amount.

00:39:50 Speaker_10
Let's count lives and see which one is better.

00:39:52 Speaker_03
Yeah.

00:39:53 Speaker_03
And then, of course, there's the key scene of the episode in which, having made this decision of what they have to do to prevent this disaster, they go, and Legasov kind of lamely... tries to, uh... By the way, again, props to Jared Harris, because it's one thing to act nobly, it's another thing to act cravenly.

00:40:11 Speaker_03
And he does both brilliantly.

00:40:12 Speaker_10
He really does. He's so good. And he occupied, not only did he occupy this man's mind in this remarkable and convincing way, but also his body. There are a number of moments where he stumbles as he walks, he's clumsy, he's reticent, he's awkward.

00:40:33 Speaker_10
And I think that adds a lot to what is ultimately... a character that we have seen but never seen kind of realistically, and that's the scientist hero. Um, typically, the scientist hero is far too good-looking and muscular and brave.

00:40:50 Speaker_03
Played by Denise Richards, for example.

00:40:52 Speaker_10
Denise Richards is also named Christmas Jones. Yeah, so, and they're named Christmas, which, you know, is not... Typical, um, but, you know, for me and for Johan, when we were casting, and this is not, I mean, these are all beautiful people.

00:41:06 Speaker_10
All actors are, have remarkable facial symmetry. But it was important that we never felt like we were glitzing this up in any way. Um, that we wanted to keep it Soviet and real. All ordinary people, and they would offer people these...

00:41:24 Speaker_10
as you said, lame incentives. 400 rubles, I think? Plus a medal, maybe? 400 rubles, you get a promotion. There's an implication that if something should happen to you, your family would get taken care of in some way. Sometimes. But mostly, it's nothing.

00:41:40 Speaker_10
I mean, really, what they're saying is, would anybody like to die for their country?

00:41:44 Speaker_03
Which is essentially what Shabina says. You know, we are the people who do this. We do what must be done. And that's convincing.

00:41:52 Speaker_03
Did you have to, as you worked on this, put aside... Because, again, I kept coming back to the difference between this very real story and the fictional stories that we've been fed about disasters, about heroes.

00:42:04 Speaker_03
Did you find yourself in the writing process going through that sort of evolution? Like, this is how it happened in the movies, but I can't do that, because this is real.

00:42:11 Speaker_03
And putting that aside and moving to what your best estimate is of what really happened.

00:42:16 Speaker_10
Yeah, I mean, there were times when I would think, like, well... This feels like an action movie cliche, but it happened. I can't not say what happened. That's the point. I have to say it. So let me at least try and not, you know, gild the lily.

00:42:30 Speaker_10
But yeah, in general... For me, and then for Johan when he was shooting, we always were shy about anything that felt... cliche or conventional. We always wanted to kind of go in the other direction.

00:42:45 Speaker_10
If something would seem like it would be really big, we wanted to make it really small.

00:42:49 Speaker_03
Yeah, and one of the things I noted about the production, and we're talking about Johan Ranck, the director, I notice so many times where, for example, there is no stirring music. There is no tension music. There's no fanfares.

00:43:02 Speaker_03
The music score is almost like a heartbeat, almost like a background sound that indicates tension and terrible danger. It's almost like you can hear the radiation, but no more.

00:43:12 Speaker_03
And there is a remarkable focus through the lighting on just the gritty realism of it. I don't think there's a single, like, technically beautiful shot.

00:43:22 Speaker_03
except maybe the one of the light going up in the air in the very first episode, in the whole thing. It's all very gritty and real and Soviet and... CRAIG. Soviet.

00:43:30 Speaker_10
By design. I mean, we really wanted to, again, put you in that world. And also, I think, when you're dealing with something this inherently dramatic,

00:43:41 Speaker_10
there's only danger in adding your own drama on top of it because you're just diminishing the truth, which is shocking in and of itself. It's one of the reasons I'm glad you mentioned our scores composed by Hildur Agudnadóttir.

00:43:57 Speaker_10
I'm not pronouncing that exactly the right Icelandic way because literally it's the hardest language on the planet. But Hildur did a gorgeous job. She is a genius. And so much of what she did was to not do the normal thing.

00:44:25 Speaker_10
Because when you go, dum-dum, da-da-da-dum-dum, da-da-da-dum-dum-dum, you're telling people, feel things, feel things. And we really just wanted you to feel them honestly. And then the score was there to kind of just be with you, not lead you.

00:44:51 Speaker_03
As we approach the climax of this episode, the three men go into the plant. It's dark, they've got their flashlights. It's incredibly confusing, which is, again, brilliantly depicted.

00:45:02 Speaker_03
That there are pipes everywhere, it's incredibly dark, even with their torches. And the end of the episode is their flashlights all go out. And I literally said to my wife, you've got to be kidding me.

00:45:15 Speaker_10
Were you kidding us? CRAIG BENNETT No, no.

00:45:18 Speaker_10
So, there's versions of this story, some of which have gone a little bit into urban legend, and we've done, I think, a really good job of presenting what I think is more the down-the-middle version of what happened here.

00:45:33 Speaker_10
So there was a moment that actually he didn't even put in that was even scarier where one of the guys reported that he sort of waved his dosimeter and he saw through like a crack in the wall something glowing.

00:45:51 Speaker_10
and he held his dosimeter up, it kind of went off the scale, and he just said to his other guys, we need to move quickly. So that's something I left out, but there were a number of accounts that indicated that the lights went out.

00:46:03 Speaker_10
And again, this is kind of cobbled together from multiple accounts, but yeah, that's... as far as we could tell, that is an accurate account.

00:46:13 Speaker_03
Yeah. So, three men alone in the dark with the fate of the continent in the balance. It's a fine place to end an episode and this podcast. I'm Peter Sagal.

00:46:26 Speaker_03
It's been my pleasure to host this episode of the Chernobyl Podcast along with the show's creator and writer and producer, Craig Mazin. Episode three of Chernobyl airs next Monday at 9 p.m. Eastern on HBO. You can always subscribe to this podcast.

00:46:42 Speaker_03
You can rate it. You can review it. You can call up your friends using your phone and tell them they must listen, because what a great thing to listen to. You can also listen, of course, on SoundCloud, YouTube.

00:46:52 Speaker_03
You can also listen via the HBO Now and HBO Plus. Go apps, and wherever else you get your podcasts, including listening to them from the air via your fillings, if that works for you.

00:47:05 Speaker_03
We'll be back next week with episode three of the Chernobyl podcast, talking about episode three of the Chernobyl miniseries. Thank you again, Craig.

00:47:13 Speaker_10
Thank you, Peter.

00:47:26 Speaker_07
I run a school for young women.

00:47:28 Speaker_01
We're not a threat to anyone. In the new HBO original series, Dune Prophecy, it is sisterhood above all. I'm Greta Johnson.

00:47:37 Speaker_04
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.

00:47:45 Speaker_01
Stream Dune Prophecy Sundays starting November 17th exclusively on Max, and you can listen to new episodes of the podcast every Sunday night.