The Happiness of All Mankind

title: The Happiness of All Mankind
author: The Chernobyl Podcast
contenttype: podcast
publication: The Chernobyl Podcast
published: 2019-05-28T01:00:00
sourceurl: https://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/traffic.megaphone.fm/PSM8434587415.mp3?updated=1701794312

word_count: 8144

This podcast is sponsored by Chase Sapphire Reserve for Business. When you own your own business, you own every decision. I'm Angus, a founder of Elastic. We're the design studio that created the Game of Thrones main title. When you start a business, you're creating a world. I love that thing of like, I don't know how to do this, but I'm going to figure it out. You have to innovate and you have to travel into the unknown. Our small world can change the big world. For business world builders everywhere, the business card that rewards every decision you make, Chase Sapphire Reserve for Business. Cards issued by JP Morgan Chase Bank, and a member FDIC, subject credit approval, terms apply. Hi, and welcome to episode four of the Chernobyl podcast. It's the podcast you listen to when you've watched the HBO series Chernobyl, and you just need to talk to somebody about it. Well, we are here for you. My name is Peter Segal. I'm here with the series writer, producer, and creator, Craig Mason. Good to be here, Peter. It's always good to be back with you. We are talking, of course, about the series Chernobyl being presented on HBO and Sky. And today, of course, we're talking about episode four, the penultimate episode of the series, which I will admit right now is my favorite of the five for three reasons. I guess these aren't spoilers because everybody's watched the episode, I hope, because of the real-time sequence on the roof with the bioro-bots, because of, I don't know what you want to call it, the self-contained story of Pavel, right, the liquidator, and because of one of the greatest tantrums I've ever seen performed on film by Stellan Skarsgard. Let's go through the episode, though, from the beginning, another remarkable little scene with someone who really doesn't want to leave, and that is what I believe I used to call a babushka. Yes. So, I mean, these were the people that were the most resistant. And for good reason, they were old. They had lived their their whole lives. I think when you're, say, 82, 83, you're concerned about a future impending death from radiation exposure is reasonably less than someone else's. And more to the point, your connection to the land you are on is greater than your need to be, quote, unquote, safe. Right. And what I wanted to do with this, first of all, that story is inspired by a real account of a soldier who was moving through the zone and had to evacuate people, and there was a woman milking her cow, and she just didn't get it. And he would dump the milk out, and she would just keep milking again, and he would dump the milk out. And this would happen over and over. And I love the stubborn battle of it all. Yeah. Like, okay, you'll keep milking, and I'll keep dumping, because you can't drink it. And she's like, okay, but I'm not going to go. And I'm going to keep milking it. That felt so beautiful and desperate and bizarre. But it was also an opportunity for me to express where I thought Chernobyl sat in the larger historical picture, the history of tragedy in the Soviet Union and in pre-Soviet, Zara's Russia, and in particular, the tragedy through Ukraine. Right. Ukraine has always occupied this dangerous place trapped between Europe proper and Russia. It is neither Europe, it is neither Asia, it is that Eurasian swathe. It is incredibly valuable land, the bread basket of the Soviet Union. And it was also the first place that would get invaded when Napoleon felt like traipsing into Russia, or Hitler felt like marching into Russia. It was through Ukraine. And unfortunately, on the other side to the east, Ukraine was where Stalin, I think, visited his worst crimes. In the 30s, Stalin's force collectivization, his villainization of what they called kulaks. These were liquidation of the kulaks. The liquidation of the kulaks. So what were the terrible kulaks? They were basically farmers that were successful. Right. So farmers that were considered too bourgeois, too successful, maybe a little too wealthy, they had to be essentially removed from these farms so that the farms could be more collective. Right. Quite a quote. Collective eyes made part of the state. But really, Stalin just didn't like the fact that anybody could have any leverage whatsoever on the central position of the Soviet Union. And if you allow some people to control food supply, they become powerful. The kulaks weren't simply removed. A lot of them were put on trial. They were imprisoned or killed. And the result. When you destroy the economic basis of agriculture, the result is a shortage of food. The other issue is that he was taking the food. Right. And so he would force people in Ukraine to work at length on farms to grow food that they were not allowed to eat. Right. And they began to starve and die. In the streets, there were bodies everywhere. This is one of the great genocides that people don't talk about. In fact, she uses a word that I had never heard. Holodomore. Exactly. And I thought I was pretty up on your history of genocides in the 20th century. But it turns out I didn't know about this one. No, this is a terrible, terrible story. And they estimate somewhere around 3 million civilians died in this forced starvation. And I wanted someone to basically say, this isn't new. This is not new. This is, in fact, how it goes around here. I thought it was so cruel of fate to have visited Chernobyl on this place, on Ukraine, which had had enough. It had had enough. And yet one final, I wish I could have said final, but unfortunately right now there's a little bit of a situation going on in eastern Ukraine in Crimea. But in terms of the Soviet crimes, this was the final Soviet crime against Ukraine. And it was a big one. Yeah, the soldier in the open ends up being somewhat merciful. Right. It's a great little fake. Congratulations in terms of the gunshot and the cow toppling over. I think we should let, especially for this episode, we need to assure everybody, as the ASPC likes to say, no animals were harmed in the making of this episode. Did you get a stunt cow that could fall over? We built one. Oh, really? That's a fake cow. So we have a real cow that she's milking. And then we have a fake cow that we can stand in and topple over. And then we use a little bit of VFX magic to defakeify some of the faker aspects of the fake cow. But yes, of course, the cow is totally unharmed. Do not worry, cow lovers. Cow lovers. As you eat your hamburgers, don't exactly don't worry. They didn't do anything meaningful with this cow, like raise it in an industrial farm. Yes, exactly. But let's not go there. Maybe we just need this moment of levity. It is hilarious to think it's like, cut, bring in the stunt cow. Bring in the stunt cow. Bring in the stunt cow on wheels. I imagine like something out of money python. Pretty much. Yeah, that's, I mean, there are, when you're making a show like this, there are probably more bizarre, amusing things that haven't behind the scene where it just, this is weird. We're out in the middle of a field wheeling in the fake cow. But I did, I do think that there was a, a kind of innate respect for elders in the Soviet Union. And I think that one thing that is, seems in my research was a shared experience of all people was a respect for the great war and the things that people went through. It's, it's getting back to that poem again that there was that, okay, when an old person starts talking about these things, you shut up and you listen. Even if your head hurts, even if you're tired, even if you have to get her out of there, eventually you're going to have to shoot her cow and she's going to have to go, but you listen. Right, exactly. And then you shoot the cow. And then you shoot the cow. And then you get her on the bus. But do we actually see her getting on the bus? We don't see her getting on the bus. It's implied that she gets on the bus. She gets on the bus. She gets on the bus. Also, no humans were injured in the making of this, okay. That's June Watson, wonderful actor. She was great. Yes, she's amazing. And the last person we would have wanted to harm. Yes, don't hurt June Watson. All right, we check in as the episode now begins after the credits with Lynn Miller, who's now moved to Kiev. Right. And we're going to see her again, but we're not going to focus on her. Her pregnancy is happening in the background. And it's obvious that you want to make sure that her story continues in the background of this episode. Yeah, well, this episode is where time really starts to expand. I mean, and so over the course of these episodes, time has been expanding slowly. Right, the first episode was like a day, the second, not even the first episode essentially takes place over eight hours. Right. And then the second episode we're dealing with a day, a day and a half, a third is weeks. Now we're talking about months. Right. Now we're into the long war. And this is a totally different point of view of the accident. There is no running around like a chicken without a head on. There's no panic. There's more of a sense of the slow ground war, a slog that is going to take a long time and won't kill you right away. It'll just chew you up slowly. Right. Much different vibe in this episode. And so I just realized this that, of course, using Lidmilla marking her pregnancy is a way of just establishing, as they say in the screenwriting class as a clock. There's a clock. There's a clock in this episode. We know because the repregnancy continues and completes by the end of this episode, right? Right. That that's how long it's taken. Here we learn at the top of the episode about the roof. Yes. And by the way, this is the first time I'll mention this. We had talked when we began this podcast series about the things that, well, I remembered about Chernobyl and one of the things that I remember, but didn't mention then, was the idea of the sarcophagus. Right. That eventually, and I knew this, it was covered with concrete in sarcophagus to protect it. And I had vaguely known that a lot of people lost their lives or endangered themselves to build it. We never see the sarcophagus being built. Right. Which was that a proactive choice on your part? Yes. And this is an area where I did deviate a bit from the timeline because it would have started to have been built towards the end of this episode. We would have seen large concrete panels being put in place and started to be erected in place. They were already building it. The issue was we can't get really to the top of this thing with that stuff on the roof. So they would have started by this point. But for me, I felt like I didn't want to start something and not finish it. And also, frankly, the sarcophagus itself wasn't really, I think, dramatically fascinating. It was just the solution that they came up with at the time. Right. Instead of focusing on the building of the sarcophagus, we focus on the clearing of the roofs. And this is another instance where the problem they're facing seems almost ridiculously simple, like video game simple. In order to complete this mission, you have to remove the rubble from the roof. Right. But as Lagosov explains, that's the problem. There's all this stuff on the roof. They have to throw it back into the reactor so they can build the sarcophagus over the reactor. It's that simple. And of course, the material is as we've discussed that highly radioactive graphite that landed on the roof at the explosion, which again, we will see in episode five. It was really that simple. They just needed to get the stuff off the roof. They needed to get the stuff off the roof. This was incredibly radioactive material. And even if they weren't building the sarcophagus, which obviously they needed to get up there to do that, rain, wind, anything that would pick that stuff up and move it around, it just, you couldn't leave it up there. Right. It was firing radiation into the air still and would not stop. The division of the roofs into those three sections, a little fact that I, just because of the way we kind of brought General Turokinaev, who's a real man, into this episode, we had to kind of have our characters tell him that they had named these three sections. The roof in reality, he named them, those things after his, I think, his nieces. Really? Yeah. That's sort of nice. Yeah, I guess like, I guess Masha was really difficult. Yes. To a difficult child. Yeah, she was rough. This was the biggest and yet simplest problem they faced and where it went was another one of those things where I think a lot of people will say, really, and the answer is absolutely. Yeah, that was in my notebook, really? Again, we intercut this to the episode, but let's just focus on this for now. Yeah, let's walk through this. So the problem I have is, hey, to get stuff on the roof, it's highly radioactive. You can't send people up there. Right. And one thing we just need to establish as a baseline, which is that I picked up, is that your exposure to radiation is cumulative and it doesn't go away. Right. So for example, if I were to be exposed to this level of radiation as we find out later at a limit of 90 seconds, that's it from my life. Lifetime dose. Lifetime dose. I mean, it's not like I wait a little while and I recover and I can go back and do it again. I'm done. Yeah, after a certain number, you're sort of done. Workers in the radiation industry. I shouldn't say radiation with medical radiation or nuclear power industry. They have certain dosages that they're allowed maximum per year with the expectation that they will work this long and it will add up to this much. And you do wear cumulative, I mean, you'll see throughout the episode, everyone always is wearing a little badge. Yeah. It's a little black, it's just essentially a little film. Or sometimes what looks like a pen light, which was another version of it, all authentic and accurate to the time. And these were, and we wore them. When we went to Chernobyl, we have a little thing clipped to our shirt. And at the end of our time, they take it. And what those things are is essentially it's a little piece of film. Right. And from that piece of film, they can check exposure. How much radiation has this film been exposed to? Yeah. Just like, and the kids, this will be amazing to you. We used to have like photo film that changed when you exposed it to... Right. Let's back up for a second. Film, well, kids, was this thing. This is just a chemical thing. And then if you exposed it to kinds of radiation, it would change. Like what's it called? Magic plastic. Exactly. All right. Magic picture plastic. So they do check. And in this case, when you're talking about that much radiation, it's a function of how close you are, how strong the source is, and how long you're there. Right. That's the math problem. So there are some sources that are so strong that you can't, a second is too long. And of course, protection can help a little bit. In this case, what they were contemplating on that one section of roof was an amount that would essentially lifetime dose you in about a minute and a half. Right. With wearing lead and rubber and boots and all the rest. By the way, parenthetically, rubber and plastic protect you from radiation, because that comes up a lot of the series. They do wear a lot of rubber. I think that's mostly to seal off air. In other words, that's going to keep air out and therefore particles. But lead is the big deal. Now, if you look at the sequence where these guys are going in the roof, and we'll get to how that decision was made, you'll see that they're wearing what looks like dark, crinkly tinfoil. That is lead. But you'd ask like, why is it done like that where it's kind of holes or punched crudely and wires are holding a homemade armor? It was. There was absolutely no real lead protection for any of these people. So what they started to do was scavenge led from the other parts of the nuclear power plant. Buildings one through three, because certain machinery in there was covered in lead to protect it from radiation. They just started taking that lead. Hammered lead is incredibly soft. Hammered out, make aprons out of it or we'll come to understand the egg baskets. It was all homemade and that is so upsetting to me. I mean, I know in the United States sometimes people are shocked to hear that our soldiers have to actually buy their own body armor to upgrade what we give them normally. But there's something. Yes. We used to give them something. They didn't give them anything. Nothing. Right. They had to make their own. Let's get to how they, the people who had to make their armor to go up in the roof got to that point. So we go through the sequence and they're using Russian lunar landers. Lunar cods. Yes. They managed to clean off the first two roofs. And then we get to the Joker. By the way, where did you get a police robot? We built it. You built it. We built Joker. Yes. Yeah. The Lunar Cods that you see in the show are mostly CGI. Yeah. So the initial shots of the Lunar Cods are actually just like a cart with a grip pushing it. It's kind of amusing to watch it on that way. But then they were replaced by these CGI creations. But the Joker, we wanted a real thing because it was going to arrive and be on this truck and move around him. And so we had it constructed for us. And that is exactly what it looks like with the script of Joker. In fact, they're online. You can find photos of Joker in a garbage heap in the zone. Right. Because as we find out pretty quickly, it dies. Oh, yes. And it's killed by the radiation. Killed by the radiation, which is not something they expected to happen. The whole point of getting Joker was that we're told it is designed to withstand this kind of radiation. And it doesn't. And the reason why it doesn't, as we point out in the show, and this is the cause of the great tantrum, is the Soviets, and this is mind blowing to me, they refuse to tell anyone how bad the situation was. Even then, months later, after the world, was aware of Chernobyl and what it meant. They were still soft peddling just how bad it was to the point where they refused to tell the West Germans how much radiation was actually on that roof. So the West Germans said, we can hit that number you've given us. Yeah, our machine will function in that environment. When, of course, the environment was how many times were it? 100 times worse. I think they told them maybe it was like 2,000 rank in per hour, and it was more like 9,000 or 10,000 or 12,000. So I mean, it was just, it was 600% or 700% more than it could handle. And what blows my mind is the Soviet power system thought that that's okay. Why not? Right, let's just see. It's the same kind of attitude that leads to Chernobyl in the first place. I mean, it is weird because, I mean, you can imagine that kind of lie being told a husband coming home. Oh, I had two drinks when he had five. Right. And we all are familiar with that. Well, I'll just try to get away with this lie because it's less embarrassing. Yes. But to apply that to the level of a state dealing with an emergency of this nature is extraordinary to think about that they'd rather not be as you point out later, not be humiliated. Not be humiliated. And just so people don't think that the only casualty here is a robot. In reality, when Joker was put on the roof initially, they believe it wasn't moving because it was stuck on a piece of graphite. And so they sent a couple of guys up there to attach a winch to it and move it physically. So they were up, they were the first people, I think, to kind of roam around on Masha with the protection that they had very briefly to get. And they did. They got it free of that graphite, so it was able to move around. And then it quickly just died because of the radiation. And did it sit up there for the duration? Is it still there? Did they get it off the roof? They got it off the roof. They put it in a one of the many sort of collections of Chernobyl garbage. So radiated machine. And radiated, we passed one. Correct. That's vehicle graveyards and burial pits. And it's there. And it's still quite radioactive. Right. And thus we finally get to biorobots. Biorobots. The notion of biorobots, that's what they were called, came about because there was an attempt to do anything but these ideas that they talk about dropping molten lead, firing exploding bullets, these were entertained. Yes. And one by one dismissed as insane. And in the end, the only option they had was to send men. And as we see, they started from the presumption that a human being could be out in that roof for a total of 90 seconds. Yeah. Lifetime. Lifetime does. The extent of this operation is a little clearer in the script where you make it very clear that this happened over a series of months. Right. They would bring in crews of men who were ordered to do this with a military, were they just conscripted? They were conscripted. They were conscripted guys that were brought there. Yes. The general would give them this briefing, which he gave over and over and over and over again. And by the way, the briefing he gives them, I would say 90% of what you hear from Ralph Inison who plays Tarakanov is actually what Tarakanov said. You will enter reactor building three, climb the stairs but do not immediately proceed to the roof. When you get to the top, wait inside behind the entrance to the roof and catch your breath. You'll need it for what comes next. How do we know that's what he said? We have it, we have a documentary. Oh really? We, a documentary was made so you can watch film of him saying this. The man who's a narrating who was one of the, he was in fact one of the guys who winched the Joker off that rubble. He said it was almost like a prayer that Tarakanov would say over and over and over. So when you listen to that, if some of it sounds a little odd or unscreenriderly, it's because that's exactly what he said. And I just, you know, I'm a sucker for that. I just love that, you know, I have to do that. Similarly, what we hear from him at the very end is exactly what he said. Congratulations, comrades. You're the last of 3,828 men. We lead our way up to a reenactment of one of those, I don't know what you're gonna call it, sorties out onto the roof. It's in real time, it's in if people were to time it on their watches while watching the show, it's 90 seconds or thereabouts. Three thousand men did this. Got suited up, went to the roof, go, ran out, threw maybe one, maybe two pieces of rubble off the roof with shovels. Right, heavy, heavy stuff, ran back in. And they were done. And they were done. Four eggs. Done permanently in the zone, they get sent home. Right. So we don't do a lot of tricks on the show. You know, Yohan and I aren't big and fancy tricks. We don't do a lot of crazy camera moves because we felt that that would interrupt the reality of things. This is one where, you know, from the script stage, I just thought the only value is being with somebody, is being with them for the whole thing and feeling it. What that would be like because it's this terrifying 90 seconds in a place no one is supposed to be at all. Right. And the fact that they're even up there is evidence of a just a systemic failure. Right. And the fact that these people had to be burned up there, so many of them, I presume, so many of them, had shortened lives. There's just no question. There's a lot of things that you can ask about the bio robots where they came from, what their experience was, going there and coming out. But in order to address those questions, we can go over to the other plot thread of this episode, which is the story of Pavel. Right. Tens of thousands of memory conscripted. Hundreds of thousands. Hundreds of thousands of memory conscripted brought to the exclusion zone and put to work liquidating. Liquidating. Obviously you chose to focus on the one person's experience to stand in for the whole. How did you choose this person and this job? So there were some stories in Svetlana Alexević's book, Voices of Chernobyl, that liquidators told. And one of the stories was about liquidators that our job was to go around from village to village with hunting rifles and kill the pets that had been abandoned there. And he told these stories. And he was kind of a tough guy, you know, the way he described it all. And he describes a scene that eventually we do not include in the show mercifully. Yeah, we'll talk about that because it remained in the script. Yes, we'll get to that one. Oh my God. People probably think I've abused them with this episode. They have no idea what could have been. But I thought what a fascinating idea to follow an innocent along with that guy. And watch this unfold in his eyes because we've seen what this does to people, what radiation does to people. We haven't seen what these choices do to people. And that I thought was a really fascinating thing to focus on. Right. So Pavl is a kid. Yeah, basically. He's just some kid who was conscripted, was some guy showed up with a gun, presumably still in his holster and said, you're coming with me, you're going to Chernobyl. It was a summons, you know, they received papers that said, show up at this place. You're going to Chernobyl and that's how they sent people to Afghanistan by the way. Same deal. And he gets there and he comes into this enormous camp. Right, which I'm going to guess because of the things we discussed is very accurate to the actual camps that were built. Yeah, we tried to be as accurate as we could. They would create these camps in various areas where they would either, you know, there were some clear fields. Or sometimes they would take over existing things. We actually then visited what was essentially a holiday camp in the woods. I can't remember the name of it, but it was like basically like the theme was fairy tales. So you're in the woods, there are some cabins, there are some buildings, and then there are wooden statues of mermaids and it's so bizarre. That's actually where Bruchana ended up getting sent to. And one of the things our guides showed us was a pit with boots, all of the boots that the liquidators had left behind was just remarkable to look at these things. They had a massive operation, but this is what the Soviets knew. They knew how to mobilize men. Yeah. And it was men. That's the other thing, you know, the question comes up. I mean, there were some women, we did some research to find out how many. And the best number we could come up with was about 3,000 to 5,000 women out of a revolving number of approaching 600,000. Yeah. Mostly there as medical personnel, or support, cooks, chefs, I mean, still a very sexist system, but largely it was men. Right. Speaking of men, Pavel shows up, an innocent and meets Bacho, who we find out pretty quickly is Afghanistan war veteran. He's a veteran of the system. You go where you're told, you kill who you're told to kill. You enjoy the benefits, which are vodka and the occasional sausage. Right. And you move on with it. Yeah. Before, of course, we go off to do it. We get the egg basket. The egg basket. That's exactly what it was called. And that was real. Give me an egg basket. I've only got the one on it. Give me the fucking basket. Okay. He's with me. You understand? Nobody fucks with him. We make these from lead scrub. Put it on under your balls. No? No, no. You can wait until the radiation gives you a cunt. Yes, now. Over your clothes. Fucking shit. One of the liquidators accounts. Not only does he describe the egg basket, but he's very adamant. Right about this. Tell this that we made these things and we called them egg baskets and we put them on under our crutches to protect our balls from radiation. I have to say the moment where Pavel's like, all right, and he says, I'm doing his pants. And Pavel says, no, you know, put him on over your clothes. I totally would have done that. I would have been like, okay, I'll help you. Poor guy. I know, Pavel. I know. Sticking with Pavel, they're wonderful day in the exclusion zone. The details that you offer that I assume you got from a first person account are chilling. For example, they'll come to you. Yeah. The animals. Because they want to be fed. They associate humans with beings. They're domesticated. Yes. You start shooting them after they come to you for food. Yeah. They run away. Well, then you go inside because they all seek shelter inside. And the fact that he knows this, that he's been able to do this long enough to understand the pattern of the behavior is in and of itself horrifying. Yeah. You know. That is what war does to you. Right. And a lot of the guys that were in the exclusion zone were Afghan veterans, veterans of Afghanistan. And so they had experienced this already with humans. Yes. And this was seemingly much easier. Yeah. And you slowly lose touch with norms. Right. There are new norms that are coming into replace the old ones. And the new norms are simpler rules. Like, for instance, don't let them suffer. Right. Which, that was just something that I thought someone would create as a kind of dignity preserving rule. Yes. At least I'm not making them suffer. At least I'm not making them suffer. He almost has anger about it. Correct. And I think, you know, he tells Pavel a story about the first time he killed someone. And what is implied in that story is that he didn't kill that man quickly. Yeah. And that man suffered. Right. And this is kind of the nightmare that probably knocks him awake at night. And this is why when he goes through here, okay, this part of dignity, I will maintain this. And if I do, everything will be fine. Right. And everything else he puts aside and just deals with it, has lunch. It's almost as if he's like looking at Pavel. Pavel is like not eating his lunch. All right. Well, you know, I'll get a little bit more for myself. Yeah. And then we get, of course, to what will be known forever more is the Chernobyl puppy scene. Yes. Yes. Yes, the Chernobyl puppy. Before we get to the Chernobyl puppy scene, there's a moment where we reveal this propaganda banner. Oh, God. Which is, of course, the title of the episode. And that is, again, taken from a, from a liquidator's account. And I, I just, that was one of those things where I stopped. I just stared at the page. Because, again, as a writer, if you were to dare. Yes. You're up with something like this. You would just be tart and feathered for being on the nose. But for the happiness of all mankind. Right. And it was just strung there over a abandoned village where the people had been evacuated because of radiation. And men are there to kill their pets. The pets that have been left behind. And it's just this bizarre celebratory banner with that ridiculous slogan. Yes. The most over-the-top nonsense. Yeah. It just... Some of us, if you make it in big enough letters and make the banner big enough, people might believe it. For the happiness of all mankind. Yeah. Of all mankind. Yes. Certain lies have to be shouted. Yeah. We have our lunch. And then we move on. Yeah. And then we find our puppies. Yeah. And that also happened. Yeah. That's a real story. And there was a scene following that that we shot and did not choose to move. Right. That was also real. Do you even want to describe? Because it's pretty tough that scene. It is. And I can't be upset as sort of brilliantly dramatic and powerful as it would have been. I can't be upset that you cut it. Yeah. Do you want to describe it? Well, I would say to people that they should read voices from Chernobyl, which is sometimes voices of Chernobyl and sometimes it's Chernobyl prayer. But they should read that book. It's a wonderful book. The account is in there. Long story short. One of the dogs, a puppy, is not dead. Yes. And when they would put the animals in a pit and bury them in concrete. We got a glimpse of that. They were radiated. And the liquidator in his account wants to put it out of its misery. So it's not buried alive. But they've used all their bullets. Yes. And it, again, it was the kind of thing where I felt sick writing it. But I had to. And we shot it. And it was too much. Yeah. It was just too much. Again, it was that a little bit like when we talked about depicting the effects of radiation, acute radiation syndrome in episode three. You don't want to cross a line where you feel like you're excited about upsetting people. Yeah. Because we're not. You know, once we kind of got out of povl said, I mostly want people to watch this and feel what povl feels. Right. If we start feeling like we're there. Yes. You know, then I think it's gone too far. All right. We leave povl. We're talking about this episode in sort of dramatic through lines rather than seen by scene. But the third element of this is the continuation of the investigation. Right. We returned to the hospital. We tried to have another conversation with the out love. Yeah. Whose attitude is it doesn't matter. Yeah. And it's interesting. Because this is a guy who's defiant. But that's the moment where he's actually kind of accepting. Or he's like, it doesn't matter what the story is. Right. The lies will win and I will get the bullet. He knows. Yeah. On some level that even though he says, how do I even know it exploded? He knows it exploded. Yeah. Certainly by this point. Yes. She shows him a picture just to make sure he knows. But I think he also knows in his heart of hearts that something is going on. It doesn't know what it is. What he's sure of as a fairly intelligent citizen of the Soviet Union is that he's going to be blamed for it. Yeah. And most likely be put to death. That seems like a fair guess. Yeah. And there is absolutely nothing. This naive idiot can do about it. She's in here asking for the truth and searching for facts in this place. Yes. In this world. Why? Yeah. And in a way, he's right. There's a constant question that comes up and will again how does an RBMK reactor explode? It's impossible. It can't happen. Right. And that is the core of the mystery that the rest of this series, the final episode, is going to be obsessed with. She goes to a library and archive. She's looking up. Presumably this kind of reactor had been used before. It had a hard episode of the Soviet industrial process. And there's that interesting scene where she asks for certain documents. Yeah. A guy appears. We were never told who the guy is, but we understand what he represents. He allows her to look at one book or article. Yes. And this is an invention to get across a fact. Yeah. Which is that there was a report written by the nuclear engineer scientist named Volkov. And it regarded this flaw. Right. The RBMK was designed to produce an enormous amount of power very cheaply. Right. And to do that, certain things were implemented. Right. And we get into what that is now. And this is a little bit of the science now, but before we get into how that science works, I guess the important fact to know is people knew. Yes. That there had been essentially a mini Chernobyl. In fact, there were a couple of mini Chernobles. By mini Chernobyl, I mean, the phenomenon that led to Chernobyl exploding had happened writ small, right, in a couple of other reactors earlier, years earlier. So they understood that under certain conditions, this could happen. I don't think they ever contemplated that it would lead to an explosion, per se, because the conditions that would lead to the smaller problem occurring were kind of within the realm of expectation, right? Nobody ever expected that a reactor would be put through the paces that the outlaw put it through that night. Then you combine it with this flaw. Yeah. And then you have this disaster. What's important, and we're going to explore that into tale in episode five. But right now, what's important is Komiok has found this out. She has certainly found that there is a secret about these reactors. Correct. And she comes back, and she's back at Chernobyl, and she's talking to Shirabina, and she's talking to Legasov. And it turns out that Legasov knows, and he's always known, that somewhere in the back of his mind, he knew that it wasn't completely inexplicable how this reactor blew up. And we end the episode looking forward to this Vienna conference. Right. So at this point, I don't know how many months, well, at least nine months after the accident, because of course, the last image we have is Ludmilla without her baby. Nine months later, there's going to be a conference. I know it's in Vienna, this conference about atomic energy. And Legasov is going to go, and a discussion happens about telling the truth. They'll go after your family, they'll go after your friends. You have a chance to talk to the world of an area. If that chance was mine. But it isn't, isn't it? I'm known brave as souls than you, whom you, men who had their moment and did nothing. Because when it's your life and the lives of everyone you love, your moral conviction doesn't mean anything. It leaves you. And all you want at that moment is not to be shot. And that's a really powerful moment, because we're talking about the value of telling the truth and standing up and telling the truth no matter what. And Tribina has this moment that I thought was both realistic to someone like him and also profoundly true, i.e., I've known brave men than you. And when the time came for them to tell the truth, damn, the torpedoes no matter the consequences, they couldn't do it because the consequences are real. This isn't, if you'd excuse me, a movie. This isn't where you stand up and tell the truth and you get applauded in the credits roll. Correct. This is where you stand up and you go to prison and your family goes to prison. And he's right. And he's absolutely right. And in fact, you know, for one of the things that was so remarkable about Stalin's scars guard is that he understood instinctively that when he's talking about I've known brave men than you who have failed, he's talking about himself, right? Because every single one of those people at some point or another had a moment where they could have done the, told the truth, done the right thing, been defiant, knowing full well that on the other side of that are bullets or, you know, when they would disconnect you from everything and denounce you publicly, put you on these show trials. He's right. So what's happening here is a kind of devil and angel on the shoulders of Legasov saying, listen, you can't not tell the truth. This has to stop. There are all of these other RBMK reactors out there. This is going to happen again. And on the other side is, what are you talking about? Telling the truth will get you nothing, yes, nothing, it will be denied. It will not be disseminated. All will result in is your punishment. And they're both right. It is an untenable position for anybody to be in. And at that point, what I hope people are feeling, and they haven't seen episode five yet. So they don't know what's coming is that he now has to make an impossible decision. And there may not be a good outcome, unlike most stories that are fictional and designed to uplift or instruct. This one may not possibly have a happy ending. There may be no victory here. So that's where I kind of want to leave people. I promise that for those of you who have come this far, episode five is going to be, I think the most enlightening and you will not leave wondering. You will be certain at the end about everything. But right now, you should be an uncertainty because this man faced what I think is one of the great dilemmas of all time. Yes. And he really did. It's interesting. We've talked about before how you choose not to show LaGosav's family, his social circle. And they existed. He had a wife. He had kids. We don't see them. And for clarity and simplicity, that was a wise choice. But it's easy to forget when you're looking at Jared Harris and actor playing this part really, really well, that the real person was a real person, that he had very, very strong incentives not to rock any boats, just as, just as Sherbena says, you, you think about your family, your friends, your family, your, your status, your position, your job, your identity. I mean, you know, Maslow's hierarchy of needs, the need to belong. Yes. This is the first psychological need we have. That's what they take from you right off the bat. And against that, the noble path probably is pointless. Yes. There is no actual victory there. It's probably only a peric victory. Yes. So it's really difficult, but at the same token, when Komuk tells him what happened to Lude Millas' baby, what she's driving home here is this, yes, to stop. That was another thing I was really curious about. If you look at the way that we've ended, you've ended the prior three episodes, fairly dramatic. The first episode, people playing and what they don't know is a poisonous atmosphere, bird falls in the sky. Go to black. Second episode. These men trying to literally save the world in the dark, in the dark, and their flashlights go out. Black, episode three, the burial of these men who we've seen die, the concrete rising up over their coffins, pretty serious. This episode ends with a bereft woman alone in a room. The ending of this episode is essentially an expression of the truth. The truth is that these young men were sent to this place to be radiated. The truth is that women lost their children and there's other brutally difficult and sad and heartbreaking stories and voices of Chernobyl. One in particular about a man who loses his daughter and it's tragic and it is ongoing. It is true. There is no happy ending there for them. There is no narrative close, right? It just goes on. That pain goes on forever. The question now for the characters who still have decisions to make is, what do I do now in a world with that? That is now part of fact. We leave episode four with the stakes very clear and the choice very difficult facing our scientists and our principal characters and we'll find out what happens and we'll also find out what happened at Chernobyl in episode five when we're back next week. This has been the Chernobyl podcast talking about episode four of the Chernobyl miniseries on HBO and on Sky. I am Peter Segal and I've had the honor of talking about the show with its creator, Craig Mason. You can listen to this podcast which I assume you know because you've been listening to it. It's the Apple podcast, Spotify, Stitcher, NPR1 or wherever else you choose to get your podcast. It's also available on YouTube or the HBO go and HBO now apps. Don't just use them to watch TV, use them to listen to things and of course we'd love it if you were to rate and recommend this podcast especially you know I don't tweet it out. Just tell everybody that this is something they need to do because you'll be wanting to talk about it when you see everybody this weekend. We will be back next week with the final episode of the Chernobyl podcast talking about the final episode of Chernobyl. Thank you, Craig. Thank you, Peter. This podcast is sponsored by Chase Sapphire Reserve for Business. When you own your own business, you own every decision. I'm Angus, founder of Elastic. We're the design studio that created the Game of Thrones main title. When you start a business, you're creating a world. I love that thing of like, I don't know how to do this but I'm going to figure it out. You have to innovate and you have to travel into the unknown. Our small world can change the big world. 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