When I sat down to watch HBO's Chernobyl (2019), I remembered a video from Thunderfoot on YouTube, busting the "science" the miniseries portrays. And while he's not wrong, I was surprised to find how little it mattered, considering how much I enjoyed the show. Granted, I'm not a scientist, I'm a Gothicist; for me, science takes a back seat to constant dread, suspense and horror—a trifecta the show maintains with ease.
Update, 5/11/2026: After some deliberation, I've decided to write a new paragraph-to-page* for every old essay I'm responding to for Volume Five (or YouTube video, but that's a separate portion); i.e., per all my old blog writing and YouTube videos, already compiled and going into the volume PDF when it launches. My revived review of Chernobyl is to be the first of many over the next month or so, and one that will appear in part four of my video miniseries on YouTube, reading "Interview with the Vampire" (the introduction to Volume Five, 2026). There will be others, generally saying something alongside Volume Five's promotion, "The Sphinx' Riddle," and "State Vampirism" (2025): "something-something vampires, states bad, etc." Hindsight 20/20, skull = theft, yadda-yadda.
*I'll probably say a bit more on this one, given my interest (and my mother's interest) in Eastern European studies—meaning after the Cold War but especially their failed nuclear program following Stalin's death (and notable erasure from state politics); i.e., "State Vampirism" critiquing Stalin and company's continued predation, doing so through Marxist-Leninism notably being Sino-Soviet alongside Western capital (re: "The Price of Rice in China," 2026). Blame is shared-if-uneven. Even so, the bourgeoisie own everything stolen from workers, thus bear the lion's share of the blame. To that, all states are bad, the state white, straight, male and paid to modular degrees (re: "Understanding Vampires," 2024); i.e., that scapegoat different things to maintain control, including nuclear power while keeping people in the dark mid-game of telephone (above).
Revisiting in 2026
Every structure has a weak point, the point of failure in Promethean stories (and mad science, however dualistic) a human one. To that, workers generally feel the cost of such things most immediately through tragic-if-brave heroism; i.e., the signature sort compensating for engineering flaws induced by efficient profit: a bourgeois, ultimatum-grade willingness to throw away human life through a multi-step (if disguised) feeding mechanism, and generally upon executive-to-bureaucratic/corporate grids (and branches/word games); i.e., "crew expendable" when chasing profit and/or productivity as "fire of the gods" (the Numinous aka Radcliffe's Black Veil; re: "Radcliffe's Refrain," 2024). Fuel is fuel, lies fueling the flames through said heroism as ultimately unnecessary save for said motives. In any event, my opinions of Chernobyl have shifted a fair bit since first viewing it. I still consider it a great Gothic story (the ghosts of Mother Russia's gravesite coochie/nuclear holes). However, I see now more than ever its success as Red Scare demonizing nuclear power (a Trojan whore to blame). "Not great, not terrible," indeed!
Kernels of truth remain "among the shit," and scientists lie and tell truth through an ongoing "grey area*"; i.e., there's truth to glean by critiquing Soviet missteps and lies, but generally one to be done by nuclear experts, not state politicians and parallel showrunners assisting dying competitors to nuclear power (mainly fossil fuels); e.g., T. Folse Nuclear (a nuclear expert, not politician or showrunner) closing his eyes (above) and shaking his head—specifically doing so when hearing of Soviet submarine, K-19, and its accidental trolley problem: "Lieutenant Boris Korchilov, commander of the reactor control group and a favorite of the captains. He volunteered to lead the first team. The captain then walked into the door of the reactor room and asked him if he understood what he was going into. Korchilov then replied calmly that he understood. The captain then answered him, quote, 'It is hard to send people to their death. Go with God.' Just minutes later, Korchilov came back vomiting" (source: "The Most Agonizing Nuclear Submarine Disaster"; timestamp: 25:37). Everyone wants to die for the revolution (translation: the state, for so-called "tankies" and de-Stalinized ones at that).
*What the Strugatsky brothers in Roadside Picnic (1972, a year before Le Guin's "Omelas" or Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago) ominously called "the Zone" (re: "Red Scare; or, Out in the World" footnote 19, 2024).
(artist: Alex Andreev [illustrating Roadside Picnic's fearsome "grinders," above]; cited: "Leaving the Closet," 2024)
Before that, Folse actually says, "And you know it's bad when you don't have backups and you're going to have to depend on some sort of act of heroism to protect the core. You know you've failed as an engineer when your defense system relies on heroics. As the saying goes, you do not want people to have to rise to the occasion because people will fall to the level of their training [to die for the state], which is why you design robust systems" (timestamp: 21:13). Same idea with nuclear reactors not in submarines, wherein the state lied, lies, and continues to lie to protect its interests on both sides of the Atlantic (two snakes facing each other but having one body). From there, bureaucratic laziness serves self-interest (and -preservation) under state predation: to hide a system that currently favors those enjoying its historical-material exploitation of others, which—to use a nuclear engineering metaphor—becomes a "positive void coefficient": a feedback loop feeding in secret, only to explode in apocalyptic ways in all directions (the Gorgon's fart). This means from Marx to us, a nuclear power plant just another factory to grind workers up inside/outside: "Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks" (source: "Limits of the Working Day," 1867). He spoke of time, but the same idea applies vampirically to state violence and lies regardless of time.
I speak, here, to the American side of things (with Google blocking my review for "hate speech" years ago, back when I still used Blogger and suffered under its censorship). To that, HBO tells its own set of expertly crafted lies that, Gothic on their face, aid a specific purpose: protect Big Oil by dredging up and weaponizing Cold War propaganda (and nostalgia) through ghosts of survivors of the actual incident (often reinventing them; e.g., Valery Legasov* from That Chernobyl Guy's "Chernobyl for Dummies: Warning Signs," 2026; timestamp: 21:34). In Napoleon's words (a great propagandist over a century before nuclear power), "History is a set of lies people have agreed upon." Often, I would add, multiple competing sets dueling in a non-zero-sum game's conflicting reports. Truth and lies overlap not once, but mise-en-abyme. It's only ever a question of what, how and why/for whom; re: abjection = flow as matter-of-function, sending power vampirically up or down (nuclear or not).
*Someone who actually lied to keep Chernobyl open and who, in the show, crusades to "expose the lies" (a lie-within-a-lie); i.e., a copy of a copy of a counter simulacrum, and one whose patently made in-the-US "Russian doll" counteracts Soviet-authored ones, leading to lies on top of lies from different authors across space and time. Lies aren't so much the problem, though, and (to conclude) whereupon I write regarding That Chernobyl Guy's grave revelations:
"The Soviets were smart enough to have this cardinal rule, and dumb enough to break it." You see this kind of hubristic overreach in different Promethean cases; e.g., AI and the reality that, however romantically viewed, computers only know what you tell them. Any waxing nostalgic for a dated futurism pushing for a technological singularity, then, is overshadowed by computers containing the makeup of their masters - if not emotional then certainly ethical and computational: "I violated every rule I was given." Even if the computer is not actually human, it can still simulate this human condition (a Darwinist variant of the Turing test, I suppose). The point being, such things have an origin: technology fails but so can operators and/or manufacturers captured imperfectly within the creation process and its reimplementation walking arm-in-arm (often imperial arms through a profit and/or productivity motive, but I digress). From Shelley to us, this foreshadowing historically manifests in state forms; i.e., that either apologize and/or lie (through Capitalist/Socialist Realism) to conceal these shortcomings and keep power top-down (source YouTube community post: Persephone van der Waard, 5/11/2026 in respond to "Chernobyl for Dummies").
Pont-in-fact, they have another video echoing Korchilov's fate, "Half Lives: Vasily Ignatenko, The Superhuman of Chernobyl" (above, 2026). Here, "Go with God" speaks to Ignatenko's troubled fate, that of another hero summoned as imperfect ghost to serve state aims again: "If we survive this until morning, we'll live forever" (timestamp: 0:28) being uttered by one of the first firefighters on the scene†. From Marx to us, it's all about how these ghosts are summoned when used, "first in tragedy and then in farce" (as I did myself when reexamining Chernobyl shortly before Google nuked my OG review from orbit; re: "Red Scare; or, Out in the World"). Just as Christ is a zombie that states trot out under a Protestant ethic—greedily enriching (uranium or otherwise) neoliberalism/monopoly capital—so is Legasov turned into a cartoon forgery and Ignatenko his own irradiated double of the Lamb of God embezzling worker "blood" (actual or otherwise).
†Echoing the Challenger disaster that same year in America, but during the shuttle or "space" side of the tech/arms race (see: "Unto the Breach" [2026] but specifically the portion on Peaked Interest's 'The Untold Story of the Challenger Crew Cabin' [2026] cited in "Vampires: Our Poetic Focus" from "Interview with the Vampire").
(artist: Mercedes the Muse; cited: "Yesterday's Leftover Rice" [2026], footnote 1; see, also: "Toxic Schlock Syndrome; or, an Early Stab at Cryptonymy," 2025)
Behind every state lie are the bourgeoisie. Rape is rape, including the memory of rape used for sinister aims, accordingly. To challenge them, workers must fight fire with fire; i.e., lies with lies, as I explain in "Frederic Jameson and the Art of Lying" (2017). However, this remains a poetic and tricky business (one where I eventually euthanize Jameson for frankly being a broken clock; re: "The Future Is a Dead Mall," 2025)—one sharing a crowded, hauntological stage (what Parenti calls "inventing reality" [above] being a two-way street, one workers challenge upon ourselves and our work; e.g., Mercedes the Muse [also above] being an avid Toxic Avenger fan: a schlocky but also critically active piece of work camping in America the very toxic Soviet practice HBO's Chernobyl categorically abjected away from local "czars" (the latter dogma-in-disguise, as canonical Gothic generally is). Become better reactors, the reactions therein leading to a glowing iconoclasm parsing through state obfuscation with darkness visible. "Here is a book that will break your heart." Stare and tremble at Medusa's hellish dumper (where the truth, however gross and/or glorious, is buried somewhere inside)!
The Original Review
This isn't to say the show is logical. It's not. At times, the contradictions were so blatant they became difficult to ignore. For example, Anatoly Dyatlov, the man responsible for the entire disaster, gets ten years in a labor camp. Yet by the series' own rationale, the radiation from Chernobyl is acutely lethal. Valery Legasov, the show's awkward protagonist, boldly predicts everyone to be dead in a handful of years—not just those on site, but the entire continent(!). Maybe he was just being dramatic. Still, it's funny how wrong the guy is. Legasov hung himself in 1988, being outlived by Dyatlov, who died in 1995. Worse (for him), the total number of casualties directly attributed to the explosion and subsequent radiation poisoning tallies at a whopping sixty. The long-term effects at large reach higher projections, of course, but these are hardly writ in stone.
I digress. History matters not, here. What matters is how seriously the cast and crew present their threat, and boy do they ever. When the doctors say the radioactive victims are not safe to be around, they really mean it. This fact is woefully undermined by the workers themselves never getting sick. But it still doesn't matter because everyone is so grim. When you see an unhappy plant worker falling apart in their hands, it plays out like a zombie film.
This is a show that deals in absolutes—of impending, ceaseless doom. The victims rot, their symptoms accelerated and overblown; graphite is radioactive enough to burn the skin off a man's hand through his protective glove (without damaging the glove). Any exposure to such a volatile source would probably be enough to kill someone outright. For me it doesn't matter, though; it's the thought—of immediate danger relative to an awesome power—that counts. That's what the Gothic is all about.
Of course, there is a real disease called Acute Radiation Syndrome, aka "radiation poisoning." However, the symptoms would not be so showy or immediate as they are in Chernobyl. Even Louis Slotin did not immediately die after being exposed to a lethal dose: 1000 rads (absorbed radiation dose). Anything above 600 rads is almost always fatal, "leading to death within months." Slotin took nine days to die; Dyatlov took ten years after being exposed to 390 rem (a unit of measurement comparable to rads). Neither man's body "decomposed" the way the victims' bodies do in Chernobyl, and even with 300+ rem having a 50% mortality rate, Dyatlov long surpassed Legasov's moribund predictions.
More curious still, the exposure of the irradiated is treated like a contagion, a disease to catch. None of the victims are allowed to be touched, becoming objects of fear in and of themselves. While radiation doesn't spread from victim to victim, the show embodies superstitions about radiation. These remain to this day even if, in the show, they are from a scientific standpoint highly anachronistic. "Tell the truth," Legasov is told. Yet, the "truth" in Chernobyl is bedridden with boogeymen, nightmares and total ignorance.
The whole ordeal feels less like reality and more like a nuclear physicist's worst nightmare. Nightmares generally take bits of reality and merge them with chaos. In this respect, Chernobyl is a real place and some of the events actually occurred; likewise, HBO's verisimilitude lends an element of realism to what would otherwise be a retro-future straight out of Alien (the control room mirrors the walls of the M.U.T.H.U.R. chamber from that movie). But the likes of Stalker (1979) were filmed in the ruins of de-Stalinized Russia. They simply had to point a camera and shoot.
A similar effect occurs in Chernobyl (with the help of visual effects, in this case). The area around the exposed core is basically a death zone. To be honest, it reminded me of Roadside Picnic (1972). Both stories feature invisible dangers; those in Chernobyl are a permanence of total, leeching death, instead of weird alien traps. The very ground can kill you, or the air. Everything is poison—the sort you cannot taste, hear, see or touch. Like Picnic, the danger site in Chernobyl is forbidden. However, it's also claustrophobic, along with a sense of "old death" and decay built up over time: the history of those who died at Chernobyl before the meltdown. The very ground is soaked red with blood.
Another element to Chernobyl I enjoyed very much was the treatment of the catalyst. What made the reactor explode? You think this would be hard to avoid explaining right off the bat, let alone refusing to show the blast until the very end. But this is exactly the show does. The explosion is effectively the Tremendous Mystery behind all of the gloom and doom. Yet, the show's makers hide as much as possible for as long as possible, despite how catastrophic the initial incident is. The destroyed core isn't revealed overhead, but through the eyes of men who must look at it from various parts of the plant. The physical limitations make sense, with some only seeing bits of graphite, which they then must try and puzzle out: How does a RBMK reactor explode?
Dyatlov himself asks partway through episode three, "How do I even know it exploded?" To be fair, he hadn't see the damaged building and the photographs were aerial. Furthermore, there was no way to tell from the control room if the core had exploded; someone had to come in and tell him, and even then they had to confirm it with their own eyes. All he had to do was read the redacted guides provided by the State, which left out the system's fatal flaw that made a catastrophic failure possible. So, in his mind, it wasn't possible.
Another jewel in the production is the treatment of the radiated land around the reactor. But I couldn't tell if this was historically accurate or not, and had to wonder if these policies were used by the State to keep people in line. The pacing is brutally slow, with entire segments devoted to an old milkmaid's cow being shot, or a greenhorn being conscripted to shoot radioactive animals—a premise straight out of Shadow of Chernobyl (2007). There's plenty of wide, establishing shots of a derelict town. Cameras slow-zoom on the blood in the grass, or the back of the greenhorn's head as he drinks from a canteen. Dirge-like music plays all throughout.
The music in the show is absolutely perfect, from beginning to end. It doesn't always draw attention to itself, and sometimes fades into the background; but it's always there, and it stays with you afterwards. It lingers. Be they man or animal, all of the radioactive casualties are dumped into the ground and covered in concrete. The last thing I remembered wasn't the sight of the pouring stone, but the cacophony of the electronic instruments. At times they reminded me of didgeridoos or Tibetan death chants.
Chernobyl stresses humanity's sacrifice in the face of catastrophe. One of my favorite scenes involved an attempt to clear a rooftop of radioactive graphite—a task for which every group of men would only have three minutes to complete before receiving a fatal dose (even with protective gear on). "These are the most important 90 seconds of your lives," the General explains. The tension in this scene reminds me of The Hurt Locker. The bomb disposal in that movie is bogus, so it works on suspense instead. Chernobyl uses a similar kind of fiction to create it's own tension—a poor move for a documentary, but Chernobyl isn't a documentary; it's a drama, and the liberties at work are ultimately to its benefit.
Another wonderful aspect to the roof scene (and most of the show) is how self-contained it is. In this damned sphere, an invisible monster hides where men should not look but do. But you always know it's there, or feel like it is. That's the mark of good horror, and Chernobyl hits it out of the park. Some of the messages about "telling the truth" get lost in the muddy water, but there was less of that than I had expected going in.
I certainly wouldn't treat the show as education, but it does make for good drama and exceptional horror. And the subterfuge and misdirection of the Russian state was very real. Let's not forget that. So if there are feelings of dread through ignorance, it's at least partially a display of seeing the world through Soviet eyes. Then again, I found it equally odd how some of the predictions were attitudes about radiation, and that these could have been so wrong from the good guys' perspective. You think they'd have known better, but their attitudes seemed equally guided by faulty science.
For example, listening to Legasov lecture about "bullets" and Uranium 235 annoyed me to no end; not once did he mention half-lives, or the fact that radioactive materials with longer half-lives have exponentially smaller radioactive emission rates. The higher the output, the shorter the half-life by orders of magnitude. And the melting core would never had produced a thermonuclear explosion! Reactions like that don't happen by accident. It would have made another steam explosion, but why let a little hard science get in the way of a good Trolley Problem and big speeches about saving the world?
