Please Remain Calm

title: Please Remain Calm
author: The Chernobyl Podcast
contenttype: podcast
publication: The Chernobyl Podcast
published: 2019-05-14T01:05:00
sourceurl: https://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/traffic.megaphone.fm/PSM5681447772.mp3?updated=1701793001

word_count: 8522

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 to credit approval, terms apply. No, I believe that the Russia we fight for is not the dull town where I lived at a loss. But those country tracks that our ancestors followed, the graves where they lie with the old Russian cross. I feel that for me it was countryside Russia. That first made me feel I must truly belong. To the tedious miles between village and village, the tears of the widow, the women said so. By old Russian practice, mere fire and destruction, are all we abandoned behind us in war. We see alongside us the deaths of our comrades. By old Russian practice, the breast to the fore. Alyosha, till now, we've been spared by the bullets. But when, for the third time, my life seemed to end. I yet still felt proud of the dearest of countries. The great bitter land I was born to defend. Welcome to the Chernobyl podcast. This is Peter Segal. This is a podcast about the mini-series Chernobyl being broadcast on HBO and Sky. Today we are talking about episode two titled Please Remain Calm. We are here again with the show's creator, producer and writer, Craig Mason. Good to be back. It's always a pleasure to see you here far, far away from the events you wrote about. To recap, the end of last episode, the image we were left with was a bird falling from the sky, presumably because of the radiation pouring out of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, which had blown up about 12 hours before. And quite importantly, that bird falls out of the sky and no one notices. Because as of the end of episode one, no one really knows because of secrecy and denial, how bad things actually are. So the episode begins with a poem in Russian over a radio. And what is that exactly? So I was looking for, again, the idea being that if you're going to tell a story in the Soviet Union, place it. And this was the kind of thing that you would hear on Soviet radio. It was largely skewed towards classical music or patriotic poetry of this sort. This is a beautiful poem written by a poet named Konstantin Simanov. And the poem is called To Alexei Serkov. This was written in July of 1941, which was right after the invasion of corrupt Union by the Nazis. Correct. What I loved about it as I just went through looking for poems in this one, I thought, oh, wow, this encapsulates the spirit of the people that went to battle with Chernobyl. In this, you get it all. As far as I'm concerned, the great bitter land I was born to defend. So there's an acknowledgement that this place, the Russia that we fight for, it's full of dull towns, it's full of country tracks, graves everywhere, women mourning and crying. And it seems quite miserable. And you're constantly being shot out. And yet you, and yet and yet still feel proud of the dearest of countries. The great bitter land I was born to defend this notion that the whole purpose of life inside this place is to defend the country in which you are. And it starts to make sense when you think about the people that went to Chernobyl, many of them doing these things voluntarily in a sense, flying helicopters over an open nuclear reactor, going into irradiated water, just being a scientist and staying there, you feel an extension of this notion of being born for this. Yeah. This is why you exist. And again, we've talked about this a number of times, but you're sitting here and I'm like contrasting like what's the most popular poetry about America? America, the beautiful, in Purple Mountains, Majesty, Fruited Plains. We don't talk about America. We don't talk about patriotism in anything like that. I mean, the fact that they're like, it's sad, it's bitter, it's sometimes tedious, but it's ours and our job is to, there's even a reference to bullets to die for it. Correct. It's extraordinary. Oh, absolutely. This is a man talking about his duty to his country while he's walking by endless graveyards of people that have taken bullets before him. You know, obviously, we made a choice there to do it in Russian. We tried as best as we could whenever there wasn't somebody speaking in a scene, which isn't frequently, but this is a great example to be as accurate as we could and to do it in Russian. All the lettering, for instance, throughout the show is in Cyrillic. Right. Hopefully, people get the point. Right. We don't do a lot of translating for them, but it helped us situate this story in the place, right? And we begin the episode in Belarus, right? Right. Where we meet a new character, Ilana Komeyuk. Right. Now, we have talked in episode one of this podcast about how carefully you wanted to adhere to reality that these were real people presented as they were doing what they did, but Ilana is a fictional character. Right. We had this challenge right off the bat. There were hundreds of scientists that ultimately worked on the problem of Chernobyl. Valery Legasso, played by Jared Harris, was kind of the scientist in charge of this effort, but there were so many more who were involved. And those scientists, a lot of them actually were in positions of opposition, essentially, to Legasso. They were, at times, more aggressive about the potential dangers. They challenged him on some of the solutions that he was considering. And in order to consolidate these many, many people into one, I felt I had to create a composite character. When I'm just right off the bat, this played by the incredible Emily Watson. I want to talk for a second about gender. Right. The Soviet Union was, in many ways, very regressive in terms of its gender politics. The power structures are almost entirely male. And the show reflects that. There's, you know, I don't know. We probably 90% of the characters are male. That reflects the reality of what happened in the Soviet Union. But one area that they were fairly progressive in was science and medicine. There were probably a higher proportion of female medical doctors in the Soviet Union in 1986, and there were in the United States. And there were quite a few female academicians who worked in programs like nuclear science programs. So I thought it was an important thing to show where the Soviets actually were kind of progressive in this regard. You'll see a lot of the doctors in the show are women because that reflected the reality. So we invested a lot of this stuff into Emily's character, this sense of a check on Lagosov. And also, frankly, just to get into Lagosov's character, if I may for a second. Of course. So at the end of episode one, he's called by this man named Boris Sherbena. That's a real man. Was a real man played by, in this case, Till and Scars are also amazing. And Sherbena asks Lagosov, he is an expert in RBMK reactors. And Lagosov sort of starts to say, I am. In fact, he wasn't. Lagosov worked. He was the, you know, very high up at the Karchatov Institute, which was the premier nuclear physics institute in the Soviet Union. But he was more in the chemistry area of things. I mean, he knew a lot about radiation and the chemistry of radioactive materials. But he was not really an expert on the function of an RBMK nuclear reactor. And a lot of other people were. Right. And those people very frequently had to kind of help him out and explain to him in certain ways, this is why this is happening. And this is why this is not. So one of the other functions of the character of a Lanukomius is to frankly be a little bit smarter. Right. Be a little bit smarter, a little bit more aware, and a challenge to him to do better, as they say. So we begin the episode with Emily Watson's character in a lab. She doesn't know anything about what's happened because no one knows anything about what's happened. The town has been cut off. Right. A window is opened. A radiation detector goes off. And she very quickly understands. Not only that there's been an accident, but what kind of accident it was. She uses a spectrometer to figure out that a particular isotope that would come from a nuclear reactor explosion is now in the air. Is that reflective of reality? Did people begin to see across the Soviet Union in Europe that something bad had happened through that method? Correct. That specific story is inspired by an account in voices of Chernobyl from a nuclear physicist in which that exactly happened. They opened a window and alarm went off. This entire institute presumed that this level of radiation, they were detecting was the result of a leak from inside the lab. They figured out fairly quickly that it was coming from outside. And they did call Chernobyl and no one answered the phone. I think this was basically when they started to realize something terrible had happened. And when they started to call, people would say things like, nope, no problem. Stop asking questions. You don't want to ask that question. It was a sort of that deal. But while this was happening fairly quickly inside of the Soviet Union, the cloud was moving its way across Europe and eventually would arrive in Sweden. Where this, I wish we had had time to shoot. I would have loved to have shot the scene, but it's the scene where, and this is what happened, a worker at a Swedish power plant basically sets off an alarm. And he sets off an alarm because his shoe is picked up a piece of dirt that has a piece of fallout from Chernobyl. Right. But in the episode, we now are in Pripyat again in the hospital. Yeah. People are now finally coming to the hospital with terrible radiation burns. We see an old doctor trying to use milk. That's accurate. That's accurate. There was a limited understanding, at least among the older doctors, who were not trained at all in this kind of thing as to what this even was. And there was a frightening prevalence of what I would just call kind of folk medicine going on there. And of course, one of the other doctors realizes pretty quickly, and this is again inspired by true events that these are not normal fire burns. Well, by the way, milk is not acceptable for those either. Yeah, okay. Important note for those at home. Correct. But once they realize that these are nuclear burns, they did remove all the clothes from the firefighters and they did bring them down to the basement and those clothes are there today. Right. It's still radioactive. Correct. Yeah. We'll get into what happened to those men in some women, I guess, with the doctors themselves, received radiation burns just from dealing with the patients. Yeah. This is something I find myself thinking a lot about. One of the bizarre, it seems almost unbelievable, nature's of radioactivity is if you become irradiated by being exposed to something like Chernobyl, then you are just as dangerous or at least dangerous in exactly the same way whatever you were exposed to. It seems to have an endless sort of contagion coming back to our horror movie thing. If you've touched it, then you're contagious. If I touch you, I can get burned and so on and so forth. Yes, depending on the circumstances, these particles we're talking about are atomic. They're subatomic. These neutrons. And when you have these particles on you and in you, just from breathing. Yeah. If I breathe these things in from smoke, they're in my body. They are now radiating inside of me outwards. Right. There's a terrible story. I mean, it's a shocking story from the night of that we contemplated shooting and just couldn't fit it in. Where a guy named Gorbacheco, who's the docentrist in episode one, who says, are they bombing? Which by the way, a lot of people in the plant thought was that was what was going on. He rescues another guy, tries to rescue another guy who doesn't make it. And in the account, he had been carrying this guy and the guy's hand had been loosely resting on Gorbacheco's back. And when he finally puts the guy down, he feels a burn on his back and he lifts a shirt and there's a burn in the shape of a pump print on his back because that man's hand was that radiated. And it burned him in the shape of a hand print. It's just startling and terrifying. Yeah. And we'll get to more of that later and what happens to those men, which we'll talk about. But let's talk about what is one of the key scenes, if not the key scene where we start, what we might think of as a more traditional story. We meet our hero, Lagosov and his counterpart, Sierbina, this is a scene in the Kremlin. Jared Harris playing him, he seems to not know what it is he's been brought in to talk about. He doesn't know anything just like nobody else knows anything. Yeah, he was told that there had been a minor industrial incident. Anytime there is an accident at a nuclear power plant, it's prudent for the government to make sure things are going okay. I think one of the reasons that Lagosov was called was because Lagosov was a rather zealous member of the party. He was considered a real Soviet and a loyalist and somebody that you could count on to just, you know, tow the party line is, let's say, not to take away from his expertise. He was a brilliant scientist in his own right, but that's why he was called in, I think, that is my suspicion. And the manner in which he kind of deduces that there may be something worse and the motivation to go there, this is a compression and combination of a number of events. That the way that scene unfolds is my own interpretation of things. It seems pretty dramatically sharp, you know, that he's reading the notes by the way. That's an amazing bit of acting on Jared Harris' part to sort of show that you just saw the worst news in the world on a piece of paper. I'm sorry, I'm so sorry. Page three, the section on casualties. A fireman was severely burned on his hand by a chunk of smooth black mineral on the ground outside the reactor building, smooth black mineral graphite. There's graphite on the ground. There was a tank explosion, there's debris of what importance that could be. There's only one place in the entire facility where you will find graphite inside the core. If there's graphite on the ground outside, it means it wasn't a control system tank that exploded, it was the reactor core, it's open. Let's talk about the scene in the Kremlin. First of all, we finally get to meet somebody who we recognize, Gorbachev, who's a fine replica of his wine mark. We tend to think in the west of Gorbachev as a relatively heroic figure because we credit him with voluntarily ending the Soviet Union. I don't know how accurate that is, but that's how we tend to think of him, right? He comes across as not tremendously heroic and certainly not a leader here. He comes across as yet another Soviet bureaucrat, the top Soviet bureaucrat who, seemingly like everybody else, is concerned for his own reputation, position, and future. I did not want to show what I think is essentially an invention of who Gorbachev was. I don't think Gorbachev was a bad guy by any stretch. I mean, in the long run of Soviet premieres, certainly the Brezhnev and Andropov and Trenenko run there. He was good that he came along and he did a lot of good, but he was a bureaucrat. I mean, you don't become the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union because you're a super reformer. Also, he just had no idea. None of them really knew. Speaking of bureaucrats and Apparachics, let's talk about Lagosov's counterpart, who will be an important part in this series as it plays out, Shurbina, play by Stalin's Starsguard. His official title is Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers in Head of the Bureau for fuel and energy. What does that mean? What I actually mean is, are we dealing with a very powerful man in the Soviet system? Are we dealing with a bureaucrat? Are we dealing with somebody who needs to be feared? Somebody who fears? What was his position in the power structure? He was up there. No one ever expected that Shurbina would be taking over. No one, he was not that guy. He wasn't the person you talk about if Gorbachev dies, who takes over. No, there are other guys, and there were also other powerful people in the Soviet Union that we don't hear much about like Premier Rishkov. And you probably remember Andre Gromiko. You know, Andre Gromiko was incredibly influential inside that government. But Shurbina was more like, probably on par with the Secretary of Agriculture, but he was somebody you wouldn't want to mess with. So he posed no real threat to the people that were in power, but he could definitely mess your life up. I mean, that was pretty high up in position. Yeah, and as we see in this episode, he's somebody who, I don't know if the correct expression is rules, but let's say he administers through intimidation. He's not particularly a nice man. Well, then this is fairly accurate to accounts that Shurbina was tough. He was tough guy. It wasn't quite as tall as Stalin is. Who is, ultimately. Correct. I'm not even sure if Stalin's Star's Guard is as tall as Stalin's Star's Guard is as tall as Stalin's. It's absolutely fabulous. The Stalin's Guard is as tall as Stalin's. He's actually taller than you think Stalin's but Shurbina was definitely quite a few counts of him trying to yell things into existence. He was a gruff guy. He was a tough guy, but he also was, as it turned out, the right guy to send. I think that he, from what I read, quickly figured out that this was a war and it had to be one and he was kind of in it to win it. Yeah. But getting back to this meeting, we leave the meeting. Legasov has at least convinced them that there's enough reason to go take a look. He gets sent along with Shurbina. Neither of them seem happy to go. They're going. Just speaking, as a admirer of narrative tricks, having somebody being threatened with being thrown out of a helicopter, if he doesn't explain something clearly, gives it some stakes, as they say, in the screenwriting classes, they held all over the place around us. We get there. And there's a very dramatic scene as they fly in and Shurbina wants to take a look right down into it. Right. And Legasov, in the end, successfully, convinces the pilot not to do that. This will come up a lot. It happens very dramatically here, but there seems to be a significant increase in danger of being right over the pile, as opposed to being right next to it, which seemed to me to be counterintuitive only because of the way I imagine radiation, spreading in every direction. Sure. So here's the deal with radiation, because it's very frustrating when you read about it, because you're trying to make sense of, well, why did this person die and this person not die? So your exposure to radiation is defined essentially by three factors. One, how much radiation is coming from the source? Two, how far away are you from it? And three, how long are you in that spot? Right. The reactor is, imagine this nuclear reactor is essentially kind of like a big pit in the ground. This is sort of just a big, it's like a big tub. And it's inside this building, so there's still walls around it, because remember, all that force went upward. The nuclear fuel is inside that reactor, and in this moment it is burning. The graphite, which is part of it, is also radioactive as a burning. So the radiation that is spread outwards and around is essentially been carried up by smoke particles that are radioactive or being carried by smoke and spread around. But inside this big, open tub is the real stuff. Right. Uranium, which is firing essentially straight up into the air, because the stuff that's going sideways is running into essentially the tub itself, which was designed to kind of hold radiation. When Lagasseh of explains, he uses a metaphor that I don't think I've come across before for radiation, which is the metaphor of bullets. Right. The idea is, one way to think of it is these are physical particles that will tear through flesh, that will tear through anything and cause extraordinary if microscopic damage. That's exactly what they are. They are very, very, very tiny, tiny, tiny bullets. So there's also the continuing story of Emily Watson's character, Lana Comiouk. She's out there. She's made no connection with our other characters. She's continuing to try to both find out what's going on and bring the word of it to the people who need to know. And there's a great scene with that bureaucrat. Right. There has been an accident at Chernobyl, but I've been assured there is no problem. I'm telling you that there is. I prefer my opinion to yours. I'm a nuclear physicist. Before you were deputy secretary, you worked in a shoe factory. Yes, I worked in a shoe factory. And now I'm in charge. One of the quirks of the Soviet system, we think of it as just a huge palace of built on lies, but some of it was true. For instance, this notion that it would be a government of the worker, by the worker, for the worker. A lot of the people that did end up as high-level bureaucrats were workers. So a number of these people did come out of factory positions. They worked in a factory. They became the foreman of the factory. They then became sort of the head of a council that dealt with five of the factories. And eventually you become the chairman of the Communist Party of an entire Soviet socialist republic. We do know that in the direct aftermath of the explosion, there was a concerted effort to instruct all of the bosses, the party bosses, to do nothing. And one of the unfortunate coincidences of this accident is that it occurred five days before May 1st, which is the international workers day. I mean, it's labor day. It's probably, I guess, it was the most important holiday in the Soviet Union. So we were talking about parades. And in Kiev, in Minsk, there were party officials who, honestly, it seems to me begged, begged, to cancel the parade. Right. And they were told, not only will you not cancel the parade, but you'll be walking in it too. Right. And they did. And there was a scene in the original script in which that bureaucrat gets up and walks out and marches in the parade, even though he knows. He knows and he tries. He tries. And I think that that's what I wanted. Unfortunately, we just had to, some things we lost for time. But I did want to show, and I'm glad I get a chance to talk about it here that a lot of these people would, when they were told to do something, they would do it convincingly. But they weren't monsters. They would then try to work behind the scenes in some sort of diplomatic bureaucratic way to do what was correct. In this case, and this is where, you know, I look at somebody like Gorbachev and I think, you knew this was going on. They were told to get out on the streets, and we have photos of, you know, the Mayday Parade in Kiev, 1986. And when you look at these photos, every single one of those people is in danger. Right. In direct danger. Yeah. And people knew that this was the king. On the inside. Yeah. But they didn't. None of the people marching knew. Yeah, there's a great moment in this episode where we find out that the kids in Germany are being told to stay inside as people look out at the kids playing a few kilometers from the planet. Exactly correct. So by the time Moscow finally says, okay, okay, we have to evacuate this town. The rest of the world already knows. People have been getting pulled off the streets. There were curfews in places like Germany or East Germany and West Germany, but not in Pripyat. Right. And that's the shocking, the shocking. So as it turns out, one cast member actually lived through this. Dylan's scars guard grew up in Sweden, which as we had talked about, was the first country outside the Soviet Union to have an inkling of what was going on. So the smoke and the dust was carried with the winds northwest over Sweden, over another in Sweden, an eastern Sweden. And for years, we could not eat mushrooms that we picked in the forest. We could not eat reindeer because the reindeer ate mosses that were infected. And you can still sort of detect radiation in some parts of Sweden, and sometimes in animals and sometimes in plants. Let's talk a little bit about the victims. Everybody understands in this business that it's always best to focus on individual stories to represent a group of people. You chose the story of Ludmilla. Was she real? And why did you choose her to represent the larger group of victims here? She is real, and her husband, Vasily Nutenko lived, was real. He was a firefighter, and the actions that occurred that night are very much inspired by a story that she tells, that she tells in the book Voices of Chernobyl. So I really took her story. I tried to tell it as accurately as I could because it is just incredibly moving and beautiful. I didn't really do anything to embellish it or change facts. I really just took what was there that she reported. And I found her story to be the most heart-wrenching of all the stories that I read because it was so much about love. And characters played by Jesse Buckley, who, you know, and talking about this with her, she said she was, she was attracted to playing this character because the character was just all about love. And how love just blinds you to almost anything. And Adam Negatus plays her husband, Vasily, who's just kind of the paragon of heroism. And there's actually a wonderful documentary about you'd Miller also. It's a Swedish documentary. I don't know if it's findable. Ludmilla Roast is what I think it is in Swedish anyway. It's a beautiful documentary if anyone can find it. It's well worth watching. Right. We have that remarkable scene in the hotel. And then at that great line, you know, they're standing there in the middle of a nuclear disaster and somebody says, well, there's a hotel. Yeah. This is before the town is evacuated. So life is going on. And M.W.O.X. Legasov into a bar. And it's funny. I didn't understand exactly what happened with that glass until I went back and looked at it again where the bartender offers him a glass that's been turned open side up. Right. And he says, I'll take the one that's one of this turned over. Just a small little thing. Minor attempt to, you know, be safe. I mean, I feel like sometimes as humans, when we are in situations that are overwhelming, we seek to comfort ourselves in the most minuscule ways, even if we know they're not significant and they won't change anything, we try. But the appropriate was functioning, right? And so this is the Policia Hotel. It was the hotel in Pripyat. We replicated it, I think, you know, the exterior of it. I mean, with the help of visual effects and down to the brick, I believe, or chunk of concrete is it where... And yeah, that's where he stayed. And that's where they all stayed for a while, actually. Even after the evacuation and number of the people that were supervising this effort to put this fire out, we're headquartered at the Policia Hotel. Right. Here's actor Jared Harris talking about just that. There's this couple who are there who start asking him questions about why he's then, what he's doing then, is everything all right with the site. And he has a choice at that point to tell them the truth or to lie. And it was one of the things that we've discussed that I discussed with Johan and with Craig is at sort of the point that he steps into the story at that point, where... Because he lies to them about the fact that there's nothing to worry about, at that point, he owns the outcome of what's going to happen. And he's now responsible for what's going to happen. Up until that point, he was an innocent who was plucked from his life and plonged into the situation. But the moment that he lies, he now owns responsibility for the outcome. So they finally evacuate, Pripyat. One of the things I was struck was how orderly it was. Right. And I was like, oh, you're evacuating in the entire town of how many people? 50,000? 50,000 people. 50,000 people are being evacuated from this town. And I could only think of what that would be like if they tried to do it to a similar town in America. People would be yelling, people would be complaining, people would be demanding that they're allowed to bring that or bring this. Calling their lawyers. Exactly, I'm not leaving, whatever. We get a little bit of that later in the series, but everybody just got up and said, all right. And they climbed onto the bus. Very Soviet. So the buses were key of municipal buses. They expected that they were going to have to evacuate this town as they were monitoring the radiation coming from the plant. And as they were dropping the sand and the boron and the lead, it started to get a little better. Then it started to get much worse. And they said, okay, it's time. So they were prepared. They had a thousand. I think it was a thousand key of buses, which is probably all of the buses and key of waiting. At night, just waiting. And then they eventually get the signal the next day, it's on and a caravan of a thousand buses makes its way to appropriate. And the citizenry by all accounts except one. So I went with all accounts. Yeah. Was incredibly orderly. Again, reflective of the society in which they lived and grew up, the police said, you're coming with us. You're getting on the bus. You can take one suitcase, no pets. You'll be back in a few days. Get on the bus and everybody said, okay. And I'll wait in the line and get on the bus. Right. With very little protests. I mean, normally you'd look at that and say, oh my god, they're leading the lambs to a slaughter. But really, they're leading the lambs away from the slaughter. But they're doing this on a scale that like you say is unimaginable in the West. And they went to the hospital and said, everybody out, including all the sick people. Right. And they said, okay. And they got on the buses. And they drove away. And they never, ever, ever came back. Right. And what do we know about those people and where they ended up? Or they all just dispersed to the Soviet Union? They ended up in a cab. So initially, a lot of them did end up in a cab. I mean, they were held in a bunch of places. In fact, somebody told me that there was a resort that was some place people would go in the winter to get away from the cold. And this was, you know, in the spring, the summer. And so it was somewhat empty at this point. So they sent a lot into this resort, which isn't enough itself. It's just mind-boggling that they've been evacuated from their radiated town. And now they're kind of like in a, some sort of spa resort briefly. But eventually, what the Soviets do is they just build another city called Slavutic, which is just outside of the zone. And it's kind of like, here, here's another Pripyat. There, everybody go live there. And a lot of people did in fact go and work in Slavutic. And to this day, a lot of the people that still work at the power plant monitoring the electrical switches because it's still part of the grid live in Slavutic. And what's more Soviet than that? We'll just do it again. Read, do over. Yeah, we'll just do it again. Nobody will say anything. Exactly. People will just go. I mean, there's so many things that happen in this series that I've never seen depicted on film before because they're so crazy, even though they were real. So many of the things that happened in episode one. In episode two, we're coming up in the climactic incident, which seems so much like a movie, I almost don't believe it. Right. And this is, of course, the slewskates. Yeah. So let's back up a little bit. Kamyuk comes to Chernobyl to Pripyat. And with this news, she has figured out that what he's doing, she's found out through her rather coded conversation, what Legosov is doing with a boron in the sand. She figures it out. And as she explains when she finally arrives, you're making a mistake. You think that the water underneath the reactor is gone, but I have figured out that it's not gone. Let's stop right there. Is that based on truth? Is that based on a miscalculation and then a better calculation? Essentially. Legosov's plan was to drop sand and boron and then start mixing it with lead. And there were actually a couple of scientists who made the argument that the most effective thing to do would actually be to just let it burn out. We should stop and make my own notification. When we talk about the thing being on fire, there's really two different kinds of fire. There's one like almost traditional fire, the graphite's burning, smoke, particles, flames. That's one fire that it's going on and they need to put out because that's spreading radiation in the form of a cloud and smoke. But then there's the nuclear reaction, which is now uncontrolled. The control rods are gone, it's blown up. So you have all this uranium that's in a, it's basically a burning nuclear pile, uncontrolled fission. That's a separate problem. And it seems as if Legosov understands that if he puts out the fire with a boron, the other one's still going to go on. It's going to get hotter and hotter and hotter and then we have the classic meltdown where it sinks into the earth. The fuel he is aware will probably melt down, but they have time, right? Because underneath the reactor are essentially layers. There's a shield and then there's a big concrete pad and this is designed specifically to slow down a meltdown. And so they'll have time to get underneath it and deal with it. And what they came to understand with terror was that they were days away from a thermal explosion. So the idea there is you have a container, a very rigid steel container, I think possibly concrete of about 7,000 cubic meters of water, which is a lot. And if melting nuclear fuel burns through and hits it, that will flash vaporize all that water to steam and then what is a bomb? A bomb is basically a lot of pressure inside a very rigid container that finally snaps. That would have destroyed all of the other three reactors which by the way were still operating. Yes, let's stop for a second and talk about that. Somebody mentions that. Yeah. And I honestly, I literally couldn't believe it. So there's reactor number four has blown up. That's right. The worst nuclear accident that has ever occurred, as Lagassev says, this has never happened before in the history of the planet, that's happening over here. Yep. And the other end of the building, they're just running the nuclear reactors for power like normal. Yep. Why in the world would they do that? They needed it. And this is the part that's kind of shocking. It's one of the reasons the accident happens in the first place and we'll get to that detail later on in the series. But this power plant was powering most of Kiev basically. It was the lynch pin of Ukrainian power. If they shut it all down without any other preparation, that's devastating to an entire city and economy and industry. And listen, those other three reactors were humming along just fine. I know. It's insane. So there were people who were getting up and going to work and putting on the paper outfits. That's right. It's like we saw an episode one standing there and running their reactors. Correct. While helicopters are buzzing constantly overhead, dropping sand lead and boron on a burning open nuclear reactor, maybe a half a kilometer away from you, I believe that reactors one through three functioned mostly through the 90s. They started getting shut down in the late 90s and the final one I think was reactor three was shut down in the year 2000. All right, so let's just say that's crazy and get back to our story. There is a description of the results if this thermal explosion happens, which basically to summarize makes Europe uninhabitable. Well, at the very least, it would make Ukraine and Belarus uninhabitable for quite some time and it would have had a terrible impact on most of Europe. So it's very real. What Legasov warns is real. And the solution that they come up with was real. The only way to prevent this from happening, the corn melting down hitting that water would be to drain the water. The only way to drain the water is to send somebody inside the flooded basement of the destroyed reactor, somebody who knew what they were doing to physically open some valves or we call them sluice games. Yeah, basically to open the gates that were holding all the water in those steam suppression bubbler pulls. And so you needed people that could basically find it in the dark. It was an absolute maze down there. The level of water, I think a lot of people have reported that it was like swimming in a fish bowl. It wasn't quite like that. The water I think got as far up to their chests, but they were in full scuba gear and there were three of them and those were the three of them. So they're names and they did it. It's interesting, because I noticed this, especially going through the script, that those three actors basically have one line of dialogue each will not quite. They stand up and they say their names. Which was important to me. I felt these three men did something that is so remarkable. And when you read the real accounts, it doesn't take place in quite that dramatic Spartacus moment just standing up amidst a group of men, but they were asked and they said, okay, well, that's what I got to do. That's what I got to do. Before that happens, of course, Legasov goes back to the Kremlin, and he has that scene where he's explaining the situation where we find out about what might happen and what he's going to do to stop it. Is that real? What is real is that they all knew. When they came up, this was hardly the only mission like this. They all knew that there were certain missions where they needed to kill people. That part is true and there's a phrase that they started to use called counting lives, which Gorbachev, I think, uses in the scene. And this became a running theme of counting lives where in order to assess what they should do next, one of the factors was how many lives will we take? Because some of them, there was no way to do it unless you were willingly sending people to what was certainly going to be their death. So I wanted to dramatize that notion, which was a very real thing in a moment. And I thought it was important too for the audience to know that the Soviets were not blively sending people to their deaths. This was not a kind of evil empire where people just went, who cares? Just kill a bunch of people until it goes away. No, this was very difficult to do and they didn't want anyone to die and they were unfortunately in a position where they had no choice. And they were weighing, essentially, either this amount of people will die or this amount. Let's count lives and see which one is better. Yeah. And then, of course, there's the key scene of the episode in which I've made this decision of what they have to do to prevent this disaster. They go and Legasa kind of lamely tries to, by the way, again, props to Jared Harris because it's one thing to act nobly. It's another thing to act cravingly and he does both brilliantly. He really does. He's so good and he occupied, not only did he occupy this man's mind in this remarkable and convincing way, but also his body. There are a number of moments where he stumbles as he walks, he's clumsy, he's reticent, he's awkward. Yeah. And I think that adds a lot to what is ultimately a character that we have seen but never seen kind of realistically and that's the scientist hero. Right. Typically, the scientist hero is far to good looking and muscular and played by Denise Richards, for example. Denise Richards as well as Christmas Jones. Yeah, and they're named Christmas, which is not typical, but for me and for Johann, when we were casting, and these are all beautiful people, all actors have remarkable facial symmetry eyes, but it was important that we never felt like we were glitzing this up in any way that we wanted to keep it Soviet and real, all ordinary people, and they would offer people these, as you said, lame incentives. 400 rubles, I think, plus a metal, maybe? 400 rubles, you get promotion. There's an implication that if something should happen to your family would get taken care of in some way, sometimes, but mostly it's nothing. I mean, really what they're saying is, would anybody like to die for their country? Which is essentially what your being a says. You know, we're the people who do this. We do what must be done, and that's convincing. Did you have to, as you worked on this, put aside, because again, I kept coming back to the difference between this very real story and the fictional stories that we've been fed about disasters, about heroes? Did you find yourself in the writing process going through that sort of evolution? Like, this is how it happened in the movies, but I can't do that, because this is real, and putting that aside and moving to what your best estimate is of what really happened. Yeah, I mean, times when I would think like, well, this feels like a action movie cliche, but it happened, I can't not say what happened. That's the point, I have to say it. So let me at least try and not, you know, go the lily, but yeah, in general, for me, and then for Johann, when he was shooting, we always were shy about anything that felt cliche or conventional. We always wanted to kind of go in the other direction. If something would seem like it would be really big, we wanted to make it really small. Yeah, and one of the things I noted about the production, and we were talking about Johann Runk the Director, I noticed so many times where, for example, there is no stirring music. There is no tension music. There's no fan fares. The music score is almost like a heartbeat, almost like a background sound that indicates tension and terrible danger. It's almost like you can hear the radiation, but no more. And there is a remarkable focus through the lighting on just the gritty realism of it. I don't think there's a single like technically beautiful shot, except maybe the one of the light going up in the air in the very first episode, in the whole thing. It's all very gritty and real and Soviet and... Soviet. By design. We really wanted to, again, put you in that world. And also, I think when you're dealing with something this inherently dramatic, there's only danger in adding your own drama on top of it because you're just diminishing the truth, which is shocking in and of itself. So one of the reasons I'm glad you mentioned our scores composed by Hilder a good nodotter. I'm not pronouncing that exactly the right Icelandic way because literally it's the hardest language on the planet. Yes. But Hilder did a gorgeous job. She is a genius and so much of what she did was to not do the normal thing. Because when you're telling people, feel things, feel things. And we really just wanted you to feel them honestly. And then the score was there to kind of just be with you. Not lead you. As we approach the climax of this episode, the three men go into the plant. It's dark. They've got their flashlights. It's incredibly confusing, which is, again, brilliantly depicted. Yeah. That there are pipes everywhere. It's incredibly dark, even with their torches. And the end of the episode is their flashlights all go out. And I literally said to my wife, you've got to be kidding. Were you kidding us? No. No. So there's versions of this story, some of which have gone a little bit into urban legend. And we've done, I think, a really good job of presenting what I think is more of the down the middle version of what happened here. So that's what I'm going to do now. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to handle it. Yeah. Yeah. That was strange. I'm always rolling in. All of the main components are, though, basically the first one. So he knew something was going to come back to the studio, to get us out of this business. So we came back to that studio, urging... So the studio... Um, I suppose, the first one of the buildings is a glorious building we've talked about in that case. that indicated that the lights went out. You know what again, this is kind of cobbled together from multiple accounts, but yeah, that's as far as we could tell, that is an accurate account. Yeah, so three men alone in the dark with the fate of the continent in the balance, it's a fine place to end an episode and this podcast. I'm Peter Segal, it's been my pleasure to host this episode of the Chernobyl podcast, along with the show's creator and writer and producer Craig Mason. Episode three of Chernobyl, airs next Monday at 9 p.m. Eastern on HBO. You can always subscribe to this podcast, you can rate it, you can review it, you can call up your friends using your phone and tell them they must listen because what a great thing to listen to. You can also listen of course on SoundCloud, YouTube, you can also listen via the HBO now and HBO go apps and wherever else you get your podcasts, including listening to them from the air, via your fillings of that works for you. We'll be back next week with episode three of the Chernobyl podcast, talking about episode three of the Chernobyl mini-series. Thank you again, Craig. Thank you, Peter. 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