Chernobyl episode 4 review: A slow unraveling

After the intensity of previous episodes set in the more immediate effects of the disaster, what marks “The Happiness of All Mankind” is the quiet.

A time jump begins this episode, as the evacuation efforts move beyond Pripyat and into the surrounding countryside, the liquidators move in to scour as much of the radiation from the landscape as possible, and scientists continue to face the problem of how to contain a melting-down nuclear reactor. There is no longer a threat of another massive explosion, nor the immediate horror of deaths caused by acute radiation poisoning. Now the efforts are entering the long haul, and it’s that sense of bone-deep exhaustion which permeates Chernobyl episode 4.

The episode’s opener touches on both the impacts of the disaster on a personal, individual level, as well as touching on the history of suffering in the area. When told she must leave the home where she lived all her life, the woman runs through a laundry list of horrors and atrocity that she and people like her have borne.

Multiple revolutions, two World Wars, Stalin’s regime, and the Holodomor—a man-made famine which killed millions in Ukraine and has been labelled by some as a genocide. But in the end, it’s the advancing army of invisible radiation which forces the woman to abandon her childhood home at gunpoint, on orders from the Soviet government.

“What do I care about safe?”

Touching on these historical details provides important context for Chernobyl. The disaster took place in an area that had already suffered so many atrocities inflicted on it from the outside in. The nuclear plant explosion was in many ways the final incident in that long chain of events. As the show continues to explore the concept of blame, it is becoming clear that the explosion could have been averted if knowledge of the flaw in the reactor’s core had not been repressed by government agencies.

In episode 1, Legasov discusses the idea of blame; that after a disaster of this magnitude, that is obviously the first question on everyone’s mind. But though he establishes Diatlov as the obvious villain—a man whose position and personality make it easy to lay the full weight of responsibility on his shoulders—the problem is that there is no singular source of blame.

When the implications of such an event will last for centuries, there can be no clean tying-up of loose ends. People cannot simply nod their heads and move on. This makes the idea of exploring the catastrophe in a narrative, which in many ways requires a neat ending, so much more interesting.

“Don’t let them suffer.”

The subplot of liquidators killing off animals (mostly pets) in the Chernobyl exclusion zone was a vast departure from the focus of previous episodes, and yet it worked so exquisitely well within the context of the show. It was a self-contained vignette about loss of innocence; its storytelling was so elegant and its setting so vivid that I felt like I was watching an adaptation of a classic short story nestled in the heart of the show. This episode focuses on how the disaster impacts individual people on a deeply personal level, and this digression from the main plot did it masterfully.

Lastly, we see what became of Lyudmilla Ignatenko and the child she was carrying while sitting at her husband’s deathbed, unknowingly bathed in fatal amounts of radiation. Handling such a tragic topic in a dramatization requires walking the line between providing a moving story, while not exploiting the anguish of real people.

Chernobyl was very sensitive in this regard; however, I did feel that in this episode, Ignatenko’s tragedy was reduced to a winning point in the argument between Legasov and Khomyuk about whether to reveal the truth about the incident. Igantenko received only a few brief scenes, and no dialogue. In an episode dedicated to exploring the personal repercussions of a global catastrophe, she was nonetheless depersonalized. I hope the final episode will give her a chance to speak.

From the soundtrack to the slow pacing, “The Happiness of All Mankind” was a ruminative, poignant exploration of the disaster’s long-term effects. Where the final episode will go from here remains to be seen.