For some reason I thought this was going to be 3-part series. Part of me is annoyed I didn't get conclusion while another is glad to have two more weeks of this.

Trying again, last try.

Just read up on the three engineers.

after the divers emerged and the celebrating began, was anyone else screaming at them to stop celebrating and to start hosing them down?

Easily the best show I've seen in at least a couple of years.

The shot of the work detail/draftees signing up ...

one thing I don't get....why are the others just hanging around right outside the reactor, when the one guy last episode had to line his truck in lead just to get a reading?

That was really hard to watch. This wins all the makeup awards.

The pregnant wife drove me crazy....gtfo of there!

I got a couple of guesses:

--They lined his truck that first night because they were still clinging to the delusion that they may might make it out of there alive. We're a week or two in now, and that delusion has been abandoned.

--the sand and boron haven't completely stopped the radiation, but have been successful in staunching it pretty good.

--They're outside the building, a lot of concrete between them and the hotspot.

--Most of the radiation is going straight up, carried by the 2000-degree temps inside.

These are all just guesses.

I didn't have a problem with wife defying orders**. She doesn't seem to have any friends or family, any reason to live without her bread-winning fireman husband. And Young People In Love, you know how that goes.

** = Until she said she was pregnant! WTF, lady???

I'm absolutely loving this show.

What a horrific way to go , and yeah that wife was ****ing annoying me.

jared harris is legit awesome. he was awesome in the crown. he was meh in the expanse, but def not his fault.

a guy i play poker with went to chernobyl as a tourist! last year. he said it cost a lot, but he didn't say how much. you sign a bunch of stuff saying you wont' sue when you die of cancer, and you put on a bunch of protective gear and walk around. he said it was amazingly cool. but i wouldn't wanna do it.


also, i'm surprised at all the people in the hospital clinging to life only to suffer like crazy. just end it early imo

godamn this show is awesome.

wooderson wtf are u babbling about.
it's ****ing hilarious that u somehow think it would be fine if they had American accents but British are a dealbreaker.

Episode 3 was one of the best (and most horrifying) episodes of television I've ever watched.

Apparently, the when the writers were researching for the show, they found a Gorbachev quote where he said that Soviet coal miners were the only people he feared because they knew they couldn't be replaced and were not afraid to go on strike.

You should watch The Terror if you haven't seen it.

After watching The Terror and now Chernobyl, I want to watch EVERYTHING Harris is in. Two of my favorite shows in the last few years.

i loved the terror. i was just on a cruise in alaska and we were cruising around glacier bay. of course it was nothing like the terror, but i was still thinking of the show

Mad Men!

Binged the podcast today. Highly recommend, thanks for the tip.

FYI, the average salary at the time was around 150/month. Since it was a communism, everyone got a salary very close to it, so say from a 100 to maybe max 250 for people who weren't ranked high in the communist party.

Much of the living accommodations were state sponsored, so you could rent a 4-room apartment for less than 20 a month, pay 4 cents for electricity, get a haircut for 15 cents. The thing is, due to the embargo with the foreign world, products were always a deficiency, so for the 400 rubles you could buy a washing machine, for which you had to wait in line. Even a pair of real jeans cost 150 (a whole months salary).

Cheapest car was around 5k


and you'd probably be sitting in a waiting list for more than 5 years before you got the option to buy.

Basically the miners didn't have an option whether to go or not anyway (unless they wanted to see the inside of a prison), the 400 bonus is just so the communist party could write in their propaganda articles how brave men did a tough and dangerous job out of love for the communist regime and therefore got "graciously" rewarded. Money-wise it's a bit of a slap in the face.

Nice post, thanks.

Podcast full of Soviet background stuff like this....living in a town like Pripyat was a *reward*, the plant needed tending to, those folks needed support like hospitals and movie theaters etc...and the stores were *stocked*, no lines/waiting for basic stuff.

Yeah the show didn't explain this but Pripyat wasn't a pre-existing city that they built the plant close to, it was a planned community built to service the power plant.

This was a common "integration" strategy by the soviet union btw. They'd build whole cities or large districts in the pre-existing big cities from the ground up in the occupied countries, start a wildly ineffective factory or whatever, and relocate a lot of their own people into them so as to overflow the countries with russian language and customs.

From what I've read (and seen on some history themed shows) Pripyat was easily the most desired location in the USSR. Anybody with the job skills to work in and around the power plant wanted to go there.

The show's really well done. I'm probably enjoying it a bit less than most because unfortunately I already knew more or less everything about the incident already (for some weird reason I got super obsessed with Chernobyl for a while like 15 years ago).

Now here's a really long shot, but worth a try: Does anyone recall reading a blog around 2005 where some Ukrainian chick on a motorcycle went on her own to Pripyat (long before they started organizing tours there)? She went inside the abandoned houses, school, swimming hall, amusement park etc and posted tons of photos on her blog. I vaguely recall some really creepy **** like a two-headed cow or something just hanging out in the middle of the ghost town's former main street. That blog was making rounds on the internet a couple of years before social media became a thing and I think it got fairly popular.

edit: FOUND IT. Holy **** it's been ~14 years since I last read this. Thankfully all the images are stll there and it's still a really really great read. Enjoy! And probably not the best idea to read right before bed, there are images of mummified dogs and stuff in there. In case you don't want to read through the whole thing, here's a glimpse of what it's like.

edit 2: Oh cool, she's apparently written a book about this called Chernobyl Surfing. But that's the original blog I'm almost sure. Love the oldschool look too, damn so many memories from that era of the internet