Open Wide, O Earth

title: Open Wide, O Earth
author: The Chernobyl Podcast
contenttype: podcast
publication: The Chernobyl Podcast
published: 2019-05-21T01:00:00
sourceurl: https://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/traffic.megaphone.fm/PSM4600613623.mp3?updated=1701793362

word_count: 8294

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 of FDIC, subject credit approval, terms apply. Yes, people are following you. People are following those people. And you see them? They follow me. The KGB is a circle of accountability. Nothing more. Hello and welcome to the Chernobyl podcast, the podcast about the Chernobyl mini-series on HBO. I am Peter Segal and I am here with Craig Mason, the show's creator and producer and writer. Hello again, Craig. Hello Peter. This is the third episode of the Chernobyl podcast. We're talking of course about episode three of the Chernobyl mini-series, which is titled Open Wide O-Earth. We pick up where we left off on episode two, down in the depths in the dark underneath the reactor, with the three men who were colloquially known in stories of Chernobyl as the divers. The divers, even though they weren't really divers, they were engineers, but they knew the subterranean area of the complex. When the lights go out, they're able to kind of just grab pipes that they knew there were certain pipes that would lead them to the room where they could open up the sluice gate. Now for us, we had an interesting problem because if the lights go out, it becomes a radio play at that point with not a lot of talking. What's wrong with that, Craig? Yeah, well, I know. All right. I know. Radio play, not game show. I understand. Defend my medium, but what I believe they use, I'd forget what you call them, but these hand generated. Yeah, I think they're called dynamo. So it's like a little hand crank thing that you have probably seen in like an Army Navy surplus store. And we found the models that were used in the Soviet Union at the time. And they have this wonderful noise. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So we really tried to give you a sense of just putting you in a place. You know, I mean, obviously some of these details were guessing on or inventing, but the goal there is to make you feel what it must have felt like down there. Right. The series director, Johann Rank, thought about that aspect a lot during his work. It was a very, very difficult thing to do. We shot that yesterday. It was literally, I never went to film school or anything like that. But I felt like this was definitely a film school moment to shoot three people who are all looking identical because they're wearing the same outfits. You can't see their faces because they're wearing face, you know, goggles and gas massages. You can't hardly even see their eyes walking around and pitched our blackness and still make it feel like we have to understand that you're scared. We have to understand that they're lost. We have to understand. So how do you do that without going into full pantomime, you know? And it was tricky, it was very frustrating. I had a really hard time because I could see what they were doing and at the same time I didn't want them to go bigger. Like, no, no, let's not do that. You know, you just want them to keep it really small and subdued. But it was tricky. Did they actually complete their mission in the dark? That's my understanding. They completed their mission in the dark. And once it was open, you know, then they were theoretically done with their job and can just head back out. And that's essentially what happened. So the crisis is averted by these three guys. Yeah. And now we do something that we haven't done since episode one is we visit some of the victims of the explosion. Ludmilla has followed her husband thanks to an efficient bureaucrat having a moment of mercy up to Moscow, Moscow hospital number six. Right. And she once again manages the force of her, you know, determination and her love, as you say, to get into to see him and amazingly, they're fine. Yeah. Seemingly so. Seemingly so. Now, later on, we're going to get an explanation for this. Right. But apparently there's something about radiation poisoning that gives you a sort of brief latency. Yeah. It's one of the coolest things of this kind of severe acute radiation syndrome. The initial symptoms are very much like burn symptoms. Right. There's, you can see the skin reddening. There's swelling and vomiting and headaches. But then as those initial kind of what I would guess we would call like almost topical symptom subside, you get a little bit of a break. Right. Seems like you're getting better. But you are not. And what's happening is the, the damage that the radiation has done on a cellular level is taking a little bit of a while to manifest. Right. When it begins to manifest, then things get very, very bad, very, very quickly. Right. And we're about to see that in very, very vivid ways. Yeah. Pretty soon you're going to introduce what is going to happen to them, which is another bit of writing to set up the audience in an effective way, if a dreading way. I want to start with something that isn't in the episode. In the script, you started the episode with the At Love. Yeah. Who we last saw in the reactor room, the guy who more than anyone seemingly was responsible for the accident, the guy who we know denied that the accident happened, he ordered his men to their deaths. Right. And we see him in the hospital in this deleted scene, but not alone. He has a vision of his son. Right. So, The At Love had a son who died of leukemia around the age of 10. The details are a little skimpy, but we know at least that much. We also know that The At Love at the time was working at a naval station near Siberia, helping construct nuclear submarines. So, he was working on the nuclear generators inside of submarines, and there was an accident, right. Which he was cleared of wrongdoing, but he was involved. And he received, by the way, in that accident, allegedly a near fatal dose of radiation, and yet survived. His son, however, shortly thereafter apparently got leukemia and died. The question is, are these two things related? Right. So, one possibility is that the clothing that The At Love was wearing, that he took home, and he kind of contamination there and may have actually led to his own son's death. This was a storyline that I intended to include, but as it turned out, it was too far a field of what ultimately we all felt was the immediacy of the story we were telling. Right. That too flashback in time, or to have any kind of hallucinatory vision seemed a little bit more out of the world of a normal fictional television series, and less in our world. We were so engrossed in the real, that it just kind of threw us out of our rhythms. So, we ended up removing it, but Paul Ritter, who plays The At Love, did a wonderful job, and it's sort of a shame, so hopefully people will get to see those scenes one someday. There was also, again, referring to something that didn't make the final version of the show, and I'll be vague about it. There's a scene later on as scripted, in which The At Love is asked about his son. Yeah. And the character suggests that his attitude toward the accident, his refusal to take responsibility to accept that it was happening. In fact, his arrogance in what he did, the cause of the accident, which will be revealed later, is related to the death of his son. I believe as if he needed to master radiation. Right. And that's not there anymore. Right. My feeling about that scene, which nobody will ever see, at least not in this version, is that it's good that you cut it, because I was like, oh, backstory. We don't need backstory. As it turned out, we didn't need backstory. Yeah. And it is, it's supposition. It's a bit of sort of armchair psychology going on there, which also, I think, left us a little uncomfortable. But one thing that was true about The At Love, at least as people described him, he was an incredibly unpleasant guy from all accounts. Yeah. Very stubborn, very stubborn. And also did have a certain kind of arrogance in regard to radiation. The way electricians sort of, you know, don't mind being shocked and sometimes we'll play around with things because they're used to it. He felt like he had taken the worst that radiation can give. It's, it's not that bad. Yeah. It's overrated. And he can, he's really in charge of the atom, not the other way around. There was something about that to him. Was it connected to what happened to the sun? That is armchair psychology. And I agree with you. I think it did, you know, obviously, I agree because we like, but it was just sort of out of the rhythm of what we were trying to do. Yeah. And one of the reasons I commend that choice is only because I think one of the aspects of this television series that I admire so much is that stuff happened for no good reason. Yeah. And people behaved in ways that made no sense except in the exigencies of the moment. What's interesting is that this moment as we start episode three, things seem okay. The immediate crisis with the thermal explosion has been solved thanks to the courage of the divers, the survivors of the explosion up on the hospital seem fine. Everything's great. It seems there was even, I believe, a parade sequence that you had early in this episode that they were going out and having parades. In fact, the bureaucrat who treated Emily Watson so badly in a moment of bravery in this deleted scene goes out and joins this parade outside X miles away from the radiation blow. Correct. They are, and the Soviet Union in general always wanted to be business as usual. That was their favorite thing to do no matter what was going on. And so they were business as usually going this as hard as they could. Gorbachev in this episode seems, I think, a bit taken aback by the suggestion that this is not going to end anytime soon. And I understand that to some extent that the people in charge of the government through what they thought were remarkable resources. I mean, thousands of helicopter sorties and boron and sand and lead and lives, counting lives, and so great. That fix it. And it's not going to be fixed for a long time. In the first animation of that, or at least direct evidence of that, is Legasov's conversation about the effects of radiation sickness. Cellular damage begins to manifest. The bone marrow dies. Immune system fails. The organs and soft tissue begin to decompose. The arteries and veins spill open like sills. To the point where you can't even administer morphine for the pain, which is unimaginable. For then, three days to three weeks, you're dead. Let's pause for a second and talk about the decision-making process that you and the other producers had about how much of this you were going to show. Yeah. Well, for us, and Johann, I think certainly is included in this as well, our director, Johann Rank, if you are going to limit yourself in many ways by issuing a lot of the usual dramatic tricks and sticking to the real as much as you can, then when there is an aspect of the real that is brutal and extreme, you need to show it too. It was important to me that people understood what was happening to these men because they suffered in terrible ways. And these were not random people suffering. These were heroes. They were saving lives. And in doing so, they put themselves in the line of fire. And this is a fire that doesn't kill you quickly. It kills you slowly and it kills you in an excruciating manner. So Daniel Parker, the head of our makeup department, he really did the primary research on what this does. And came up, I think he had at one point like seven different stages. And of course, depending on who you were and how close you were and how long you were there, the stages were different, but then we also read through a lot of accounts. Ludmilla Ignatenko's account of what her husband looked like was very influential on what we did. We just felt that it was important to show it because it is horrifying. And the last thing that I want this show to do is to scare people about nuclear power. This is not a polemic about nuclear power. However, it's about respecting it for what it can do because what it can do is savage. And the love story that we're telling between Ludmilla and her husband, I think only makes sense in the context of what is happening to him in front of her eyes. Right, which is absolutely horrifying. Yeah, and there's a scene later on in which she grips his hand, which is moving not only because of the condition of his hand, but because of her courage in doing it. Yeah, because these guys were all radioactive, in addition to dying in horrible pain. And in this sense, this is another one of those areas where I agree with you, there is no why. You can say, well, why did she do that? She was told not to do that. Well, because she loved him, but also she's telling herself a story too, I think, in that moment, which is it'll be okay. Right. And her recklessness in, again, skipping ahead a bit, her recklessness in going in to see him when she is pregnant. When she has been told, you're not pregnant, are you? Right. Is that something you had to stop and think about in terms of her attitude? Is she in denial or nothing? Nothing, Bab will happen. What are they talking about? Does she not know? She did it. That's the thing. She tells that story. The way she tells that story is what the doctor asked her was, do you have children? And she lied and said, yes, I have two. And she lied in that moment because she understood the implication of the question was, if you don't have children, this could prevent you from having children. Or God forbid, if you're pregnant right now, affect the baby. And so she lied so that the doctor would think, well, she's got two, so it's okay. Go on ahead. Right. Do you think that she may not have understood the danger she was putting her baby in at that moment? I don't think she understood. I think that she felt that it would be okay. And the truth of the matter is, I don't blame her at all because there wasn't a lot of awareness about what radiation was and how it could harm you. And also, they let her do it. Yeah. In a sense, she was sort of relying on the authority. If an authority says, listen, you're not really supposed to go in there, but you can, but for like 30 minutes, well, how bad could it be? And they're going in there. Yeah. They're doing all, and of course, a lot of those people did have to deal with the impact of that as well. Sure. Let's go back for a moment to Chernobyl. One of my favorite scenes, the coal miner scene, which begins with the telling of a Soviet joke. We used to hear those all the time back in the day. What's as big as a house? Barnes 20 years of fuel every hour, puts out a shitload of smoking noise and cuts an apple into three pieces. A Soviet machine made the car apples into four pieces. These coal miners were brought to Chernobyl to do this project, which will be described to us into them. This is the second time that people have been, Soviet people have been enlisted to go and work on this problem at great risk to themselves. And they go. And they go. And in this case, it wasn't like the miners were what we think of as docile Soviet workers. Miners were tough. We got some really interesting research. We had a wonderful researcher named Mimi Monson, which is a great name, Mimi Monson. And she found this really fascinating article about miners in the Soviet Union. And how they occupied a certain kind of privileged position. By the way, this is one of the reasons why the Soviet Union was so obsessed with building large nuclear reactors. The demand for energy was massive. And most of the energy produced came from coal. So the coal miners had a certain leverage over the nation. And Mikhail Gorbachev himself said that the coal miners was sort of scared him. So they were tough. And they chose willingly to do this again, in part because of a general sense of honor and community. And when someone comes to you and says, listen, there's going to be a permanent disaster. Unless you do this, you do it. Yes. So miners from Tula, which is in Russia, miners from the Dombas, which is in Ukraine, and other places came to Chernobyl. Now, what were they doing? Yes. So I'm curious. When we ended episode two, we understood there was this risk of thermal explosion. Once that was eliminated, the understanding was that sooner or later this fuel was going to melt down. So what's I mean, we talk about melt down all the time. It just means basically that the uranium fuel is getting so hot and reactive that it begins to melt the cladding around it. And it turns into a kind of a lava. And it will start to burn through things below it. There was a possibility that it would burn through the concrete pad underneath the structure. And if it did that, it would enter the water table and it would be a disaster, a possibility. Right. So the miners were asked to dig this tunnel, get underneath that pad, and excavate a room large enough to put in a heat exchanger, which is basically a fancy word for refrigeration unit. That would use liquid nitrogen to cool the space above it and reduce the heat of the lava. All the liquid nitrogen in the Soviet Union. All of the liquid nitrogen in the Soviet Union. In fact, there a little bit of a compression that we made was what happened to Bruchon of Infamine, the two guys that were running the plant. We sort of imply that they'd been arrested very quickly. In fact, it took quite a while for them to be arrested, but they were sidelined pretty quickly as people started to understand that they were probably going to be held responsible. But in these early days, it was Bruchon of actually who was ordered to find all the liquid nitrogen or he would be shot. They literally told him, we'll shoot you if you don't find us the liquid nitrogen. So these miners dug this tunnel, but they were digging it under the impression that it was absolutely necessary. And one of the weird things, and the kind of brutal things about science, particularly nuclear science, is it's based on probabilities. Right. And so at the end of this episode, Legasov says, I've ordered these people to do this. I have effectively killed a large number of them. And I'm doing it because there's a chance we might need it. And in fact, they didn't. So all of that effort and ultimately was unnecessary because it never melted down to the concrete path because it never melted through the concrete pad. So it never got to the groundwater. And that's that's a really it's just a chilling fact that I would put myself in Legasov's shoes there. And you start to realize the cruelty of the situation. You have no choice. A 50-50 chance that you're going to poison the the black sea forever is not it's not acceptable. Right. And so you now have to send 400 men and reportedly about one out of every four of them died. Of cancer or radiation or radiation. Of radiation or radiation or radiation. Yeah, but of course it is important that they went because it gave us what is important for every HBO show an unnecessary nude scene. Yes, well, I think actually necessary. Yes, let me say that again, it gave us what every HBO production much have is a gratuitous nudity scene, which is important. Is that real? Did they actually like take off their clothes and dig naked? Yes, there were some varying accounts of how much clothing got taken off, but more than one said that they took it all off. And for the exact reason that we state in the show, it was brutally hot. You know, we're talking temperatures of I think we say 50 degrees Celsius. So Americans are going to be confused, but it's around 130 degrees. And it was like real oven in there. And they couldn't use fans because it would stir up the dust. And in fact, in the old days apparently it was somewhat customary for miners to work in the nude because of the heat involved. And the truth is that it really didn't expose them that much more because the danger at that point was, I mean, if you're going to be near radiation, your clothing is barely going to do anything. Well, the headminor makes that point the lug is really going to make that much of a difference. It's really not. And the biggest danger to them was what was in the air, which you know, you could try and minimize dust, but you can't eliminate it entirely. There's a scene in which Lagassev does something he doesn't do a lot. He gets angry. Right. And he gets angry because of the 30 kilometer exclusions out. And of course, we'll also need whatever you need. You have it. That should be clear about now. Anything else? No, no, no. Yes, I'd like to address the 30 kilometer exclusions zone. Well, Professor Lagassev, is that you? What exclusions zone? Mine are details, General Secretary. Premier Richkov has determined that. If he determined, then he determined. Look, Professor Lagassev, you are there for one reason only. Do you understand? To make this stop? I don't want questions. I want to know when this will be over. If you mean when will Chernobyl be completely safe? The half-life of plutonium 239 is 24,000 years. So perhaps we should just say not within our lifetimes. And he seems to be angry because it's just so arbitrary. Yeah, it was an incredibly stupid decision. And it was in fact made by Premier Richkov. And no one can seem to understand why. Somewhere in a room far, far away from Chernobyl, this man decided that 30 kilometers would be a good amount of space to evacuate everyone from. So if you were in a 30 kilometer radius of Chernobyl, they would come and get you and take you away. And that made no sense whatsoever. Not only did it make no sense, not that it didn't have no basis in scientific fact, but it was effectively also condemning more people to, at best, shorten lifespans and disease. And here I was using this essentially to help start to move Lagassev's character a bit out of the realm of Soviet zealot. Right. Because you start, I think, in these circumstances, you start to lose your religion. I think both he and Cherbina start to lose their religion necessarily. It can't survive this. You can't keep believing in a system when you are living this nightmare that the system has created and the system keeps perpetuating it and making it worse. Right. Happily, they did then expand that zone quite dramatically. And is that the exclusions on to this day? It is. Right. So, so, so not only were they wrong about the immediate needs of the evacuation, they were wrong about an area that is now completely devoid of human life, except of course, for those who were there to maintain it to this day. Yeah. Essentially, what they landed on after the random 30 kilometer guess was a huge chunk of Ukraine. And I believe a bit of Belarus as well. And it is, that is the evacuation zone to this day. It is, I mean, you can go in and out, but they just very carefully controlled. I've done it. You hand over your passport to soldiers. You go through. We can talk about, I was going to save to this last episode, but we'll talk about it now, I guess. How does, how does one arrange to visit Chernobyl to get inside the exclusions zone? Well, they, you know, for me, happily HBO and Sky sort of arranged are arrival, but we went through a service that does provide a kind of guided tour of the zone. And we also went to the power plant itself. Interestingly, the gentleman who took us through were children in Pripyat. Really? Yes, they were there. So, you, it is a military checkpoint. You have soldiers there, Ukrainian. And they have pretty big guns. And you hand over your passports. They have a list. They write everything down. Then they give you your document back. And you must go through a series of radiation checkpoints. They check you on your way in. Are you radioactive? Nope. Okay. Good. Now you can go in. Then when you get closer or you go inside any of the larger facilities, check again. On your way out, they check you with the understanding. If you ring a bell, you're not leaving. You're not leaving? No, they have to decontaminate. You're not going to let you leave. So there is a certain sense of a reasonable sense of seriousness to this entire production of getting in and out of the zone. And once you are in, you do get a sense very quickly of how massive it is because you're, you're barely seeing any of it. And yet it is just extending to the horizon practically. Right. I mean, the exclusions zone. How big is it? Yeah. Again, this is a question I was saving for later, but I'll ask it now. You presumably visited Chernobyl after X number of years of researching, writing, rewriting, production. How did it feel to actually be there? I'm not a religious man. But I suppose that's about as religious as I'll ever feel because I had spent so much time living in that space in multiple areas of those spaces for so long. And with the people in my mind for so long, that to walk where they walked felt so strange. And also being under that same piece of sky, you start to feel a little closer in a sense to who they were. I felt it probably the most when we were in the city of Chernobyl, which is, well, it's a town of Chernobyl, which is different than Pripyat. It's actually further away, about 20 kilometers away from the power plant. And in the city of Chernobyl, there's a small building that's basically, it was the cultural center. That's where they would put on shows and, you know, songs about Soviet Union and Lenin or whatever. And that is the room where they eventually held a trial that we will talk about in episode five. But in that moment, standing where the outlaw and Femine and Brukanov stood, it was very chilling. Even in a weird way, it was more moving to me than moving through the actual power plant itself. Really? The one thing, though, that I did feel walking through the power plant, a little bit of a better sense of how easy it would be to deny. Because it's so big. You know, it's the weirdest thing. It's a little bit like if you're in a skyscraper, just like this is solid. Yeah. It's not going to like tip over. Correct. You just feel safe within it. I don't know how else to put it. You feel safe. And in that sense, you can start to feel how people would say, it's okay. For sure, it's not like the reactor blew up. This is some other smaller problem. Right. How close can you get to the side of reactor four? Fairly close. I mean, it depends. If you're all geared up and you have a special dispensation, I think you can actually get pretty far inside, although now that it's covered in their dismantling, and it may not be the case anymore. But we got as far as control room three and a pump room for reactor three. We had a safety officer, I guess, that we brought with us as part of the production. And he had a decimator running the whole time. And it would occasionally beep. But, you know, I've learned now that radiation is everywhere. And so I don't freak out if I hear a beep or two. When we got into the pump room for building three, which is now fairly close to. Yeah. Because it was building for a building three, a huge extent of turbine. Correct. And two and one. Yeah. So three is right up against it. And when we got into the pump room of three, the beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, start going up. And, you know, our guide said, you know, we'll only be here for about, you know, a minute. Yeah. It's never leave. It's, yeah, it's something else. Well, back up at the hospital, the KGB appears. And the research efforts are interrupted. Come around. I know you've heard the stories about us. When I hear them, even I am shocked. But we are not what people say. Yes, people are following you. People are following those people. And you see that? They follow me. The KGB is a circle of accountability. Nothing more. Again, because we're dealing with an invented character, I'm assuming you're representing a larger effort by the KGB to prevent this scientific investigation from going forward. Correct. I think that the KGB probably wasn't particularly concerned about the investigation, reading the stories of scientists and some of the jeopardy that they put themselves in. The question was more, who are you going to tell this to? Right. We don't mind necessarily if you know something. But if you're going to talk about it, that's a problem. Right. And there were a number of scientists, one in particular, one source, he was put on trial. And he was put on trial and probably would have been convicted, except at that point, the Soviet Union collapsed. So he was put on trial for what? For talking too much and public about what happened. Essentially, it's for challenging the narrative and questioning superiors and saying things he wasn't supposed to say. So they absolutely faced the same kind of normal repression of speech that everybody faced in the Soviet Union at the time. And the KGB was everywhere. And again, you know, random people would sort of work hand in hand with the KGB, you know, the woman who's the manager of the apartment building would be in touch with the KGB. It was not understood. Yes. How it worked. The part of me who's able to stand aside and just admire clever writing, really enjoyed that little speech by the KGB head. It's like, well, I'm being followed. It's a circle of accountability. It's a circle. It's such a benign way to like to describe or surveillance state. We're all just keeping each other honest, don't you? I mean, that's sort of the the nonsense language. I'm so fascinated by the creepy or wellian nature of repressive bureaucrats in the way they speak. The turns of phrases they come up with are just shocking to me and chilling probably because I love language. Sure. So to see it abused in that fashion is so yeah, I just thought a circle of accountability sounded to me like the sort of thing a bureaucrat wishing to soft pedal the KGB would describe it as. It was amazing. And you know, you always wonder how villains see themselves. Right. Please nobody ever wakes up and says, I'm going to do villainy today. Right. They say, I'm going to do this today for these very good reasons as distorted as they may be. And I thought that was I don't know what a real head of the KGB might say, but maybe probably something like that. Probably something like that. We're back in the Kremlin conference room. And in a weird way, this is sort of the other version of Legasov's earlier speech about radiation poisoning. Correct. He says, this is what's going to happen to those men. Now he's describing to Gorbachev and the rest of the council, this is what we are going to need to do to describe what I believe is called historically the liquidation. That's correct. Yes. So you're exactly right. The the body of the Soviet Union has absorbed this initial shock. It is now had a little bit of a latency period. And here comes Legasov to explain, oh, no, no, no, no, no. In fact, what happens now is this long brutal war that's going to take place over hundreds of thousands of acres and involve hundreds of thousands of men and material and cost. And it must happen. And I think probably they thought, oh, good. Now finally, we can just throw people at this thing. Right. There's a liquidator who described the entire effort. He said, we were thrown upon the reactor just like the sand. Yeah. That's essentially what the Soviet Union did. They just went with volume. Why are they called liquidators? Right. So liquidator was the all-purpose term that the Soviets used for the people that were sent to the zone to clean it up. These were people that were sent to do construction work to chop down trees, to dig up dirt, to use bulldozers. And in some cases to control the animal population, the word liquidator is a bit scarier than in the English language than in Russian. It comes essentially from the Russian word to eliminate. So they were there essentially as kind of disaster abatement positions. But they refer to themselves as liquidators and have always been so. We go back to Moscow for a second after the scene in the Kremlin, in which Lagasov explains what we needed and it is accepted. He goes and finds Kamiya in the prison where she's been put. By the way, interesting production fact, this portrayal of two people in a KGB prison was shot in a KGB prison. This is a former KGB prison. This is now a museum in Vilnius, Lithuania that is dedicated to the many victims of the KGB. So as we moved through it, we were aware that there were the ghosts of history around us. They showed us these rooms. So that's where they would put you. The doors were quite heavy. They were padded on the inside in case you attempted to smash your head against it. There were little slots for food and such. But then there were some grimmer rooms. There was one in particular where the floor sloped down. So it was lower than the entrance to the door. And the idea there was that you would go into that room and they would fill it with water up to your knees or so so that you couldn't sleep. You could sit or lie down because it's water up to your knees. Correct. You could sit, but you couldn't sleep if you fell down from exhaustion. You would drown. And so it was a kind of torture that I would have never even contemplated. It was just awful. And right in the middle of a city, not some far flung gulag thing, just right there in the middle of a city next to this building. That building is your KGB prison where people were tortured. And of course, then there was an execution room where they were put to death. Wow. You know, my writers, I was like, oh, this is a scene. This is one of the very, very few places in this entire series where we stop to make a point. Right. I think it's possible. I think it makes no sense. I think it's what I would say if I was trying to cover my own mistakes. About. I believe them. Then you should pursue it. We have to pursue every possibility, no matter how unlikely, no matter what or who is to blame. The point seems to be about the scientific community involved in Chernobyl and what they were doing and why they were doing it. The point is, yes, you're correct about what they were doing there at the time, but it is also referring in no small way to how this all happened in the first place. We don't quite yet understand that. We will come to understand that. But this notion of what it means to be a scientist and what it means to pursue the truth is at the center of all this. And there is a moment immediately following it where Komyuk tells Lagosov, listen, this is what they said. They said that they did shut the reactor down. They pressed AZ5 and then it exploded. And you see on Lagosov's face a very strange reaction which Sherrod Harris performed to perfection. And it is a sense, we have at least, even if Komyuk doesn't notice it, that this is not altogether shocking to him. That it is stirring a memory of a thing. And he is starting to suddenly realize something and it is making him feel a bit sick. And yet what he says to her after is pursue this at all costs, no matter who is to blame. And so there is the scientist saying, regardless of how I feel and regardless of how this turns out, the truth must be told. Right. There is obviously a character moment there for both of them as you just described. But the series began with the words, what are the cost of lies? So it almost seems as if this is a counterpoint to that. Because lies as we have seen and we will see more of are so devastating, the only response to that problem is to seek the truth no matter what. Yeah, it is a character moment and it is a point moment I think in part because I root Lagosov's character in this statement that lies have a cost. As I was writing this, I remembered suddenly feeling antsy early on in episode three because there was this question in the back of my head that needed to be answered, but we were so busy trying to not blow up half of Europe that we couldn't, we didn't have time to ask it. The question was simply, how did this happen? And now we begin to delve deeply into that question. And for me, it is both character and point because Lagosov is on the front line of this in a very big way and we'll see how that functions for him particularly the end of the next episode and into the final episode. The question of truth and truth seeking and truth telling is not as simple as it would seem, not for him and not for anyone in the Soviet Union. Right. And in much the same way that this episode is mainly about like the long term costs of what has happened, the final episodes are the difficulty of executing that both the as we'll see the liquidation and ultimately the search for truth which has to be done. It has to be done and it will not be done in a clean way. It will not be done in an efficient way. It will come in fits and starts. This is part of the reality of the way this disaster unfolded. It's also one of the reasons why it had to be told in a series of episodes like this over the course of five hours. You can't tell this in say as a movie because the story didn't work that way and the reality of how this kind of unfolded is quite startling. But we know at least this much the show has already put you on a clock. Right. And the clock is there is an explosion and two years later this man is dead. Right. So at this point here in the middle of the series we are starting to see that fuse being lit. And we understand at this point it is going to lead ultimately to his death. And in that sense, although I'm dramatizing these moments, especially with Kamyuku's not was not an actual person, this is in fact what started to happen for Legasa. This is where the fuse was lit and we're going to carry through a very important event that we actually happens in between episode four and five that we don't see but we refer to. Right. There's a shot in this that that stayed with me more than I think then almost any other shot in the whole series. And that is Emily Watson entering the hospital room of Akimov. We've seen Toptenov, the younger man with that wispy mustache who was so horribly burned who even in his hospital bed seems proud that he was the chief engineer in the control room at the age of 25. 25. But then she goes to visit Akimov who was in charge of the room that I don't know his official title. Right. He was the shift chief. The shift chief. Yeah. And we don't see him. Right. We see her face. Yeah. As she looks at him. Yeah. And she says later his face was gone. Yeah. So you made a decision not to show not to up the ante on the physical brutality of what had happened. Yeah. There is a fine line between real and impactful and purposeful and gratuitous. Yeah. And even within the editing of the, for instance, Vasilio Natanko played by Adam Negatus, he, you know, we show the most of what this is how this is ravaged him. Yeah. The fireman we're talking about. Correct. And, you know, one of the things in our initial cut, we we lingered quite a bit longer on him and carry on Tholus who was our executive at HBO. He said, you know, maybe not so much because it's starting to feel a little abusive. And he was right. You know, we kind of went back with fresh eyes and said, yeah, this actually is crossing the line. It seems now like we're almost, you know, enjoying it. We never wanted to be gratuitous or sensationalist in any way. We just wanted to show it was real. In the case of Akimov, we felt like we had done it. And to go further, I mean, Akimov, the description of Akimov, when he died, his body was described as essentially blackened. His skin had gone all the way to like, almost like a charcoal color. It's terrible. And we just didn't feel like to show that to people I think at that point would have been gratuitous. So you never filmed it. You never, no, get put the actor in makeup. We never put the actor in makeup. We never we never want to. I mean, one of the reasons it was so effective and so memorable in addition to Emily Watson doing all the work, we had seen Totinov and we've seen Vasily. Yeah, they looked terrible. Yeah. And the implication is that what Emily Watson is looking at at that moment is far worse. Yeah. And so what we imagine is bad enough. And sometimes that's the strange nature of of telling a story visually like this. Sometimes what you think you're being, I don't know, showing restraint, you're, you know, weird way, you're making it worse. Yeah. But again, this was a terrible thing that happened to these men, awful. And two women, by the way, two women, two security guards at the plant were also exposed to massive amounts of radiation that night as well. And we kind of need to get that across and listen, at the end of this episode, the story that we're telling about how the bodies were handled is true. Right. They were put in bags. They were put in crates. Those crates were put in zinc lined boxes. They were welded shut. They were put in a collective grave. And then concrete was poured on them. Where is that grave, by the way? It's called this is any Russian speaker is going to be very upset with my they gave up on me years ago. They don't worry about it. Mitteninsko, Mitteninsko, cemetery in Moscow. So it's just outside of Moscow. And that's where they are now. And you know, just imagining a burial ceremony where a cement truck backs into place is just mind boggling. Yeah. There's a there's a strong obligation that people then knew who these people were, why they were being buried that way. That the secret was out in a weird way. There was no more, I mean, these people were not being secret away at night. Correct. The secret was out at this point. Yes. And there was a certain amount of discrimination that went on. At least initially, people were terrified of, you know, the people who had been moved out of Pripyat and maybe put into other communities. There was a sense of fear and dread of those people for some. And also there was for a very long time, I think a sense that people like Akimov and Taptunov were to blame. Right. Which is, and I think a reasonable assumption people would make, whoever pressed the buttons in there, obviously, stank and blew it up and there they did all this. And that's not entirely wrong. Right. But it's nowhere near entirely right. When this series is over, I hope that people understand that Akimov and Taptunov in most ways were really innocent and do not deserve playing for any of this. Right. And they certainly didn't deserve what ultimately happened to them. No one does. This has been episode three of their Chernobyl podcast, the only podcast that's even more depressing than the show. It is about you can of course rate this podcast. You can subscribe to it. You can tell your friends about it. You can call them up on the middle of the night because you just can't stop thinking about it and then just, you know, annoy them with telling them all of your thoughts about this podcast. I highly recommend doing that. You can listen to this podcast via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, NPR1 or wherever else you choose to get your podcast that's also available on YouTube. And for the first time ever, the HBO go and HBO now apps. We're finally dragging those apps into the podcast era. I'm Peter Segal and I've had the honor of talking to the shows writer, producer and creator Greg Mason. Thank you, Peter. We'll see you next week to talk about episode four of Chernobyl. 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. 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