Chernobyl series finale review: A debt to the truth

The Chernobyl series finale returns to the start to bring everything to a close, in an ending which reminds us that this is all more than just a story.

Vichnaya Pamyat—a funerary chant meaning “Memory Eternal”—is a fitting epitaph for the final episode of Chernobyl, in which the final pieces of history are laid into place and those who sacrificed their lives and their health remembered.

This episode was ruminative in a way the previous episodes were not; it was not a climax so much as an exploration, a quiet laying-out of all the information and a solemn intonation to the future. Much time was spent on explaining the science behind the reactor’s explosion; the extended discussion of the technical details  might have dragged as badly as a middle school physics lesson if they weren’t so inherently fascinating.

Still, it was an interesting choice to put the science rather than the characters at the forefront of the finale—a choice I’m not sure I wholly agree with. While the science is interesting and important, it doesn’t contribute as much to the emotional impact of the show as the characters we’ve come to care about over the past five episodes. It would have been interesting to see Legasov fail to reveal the whole truth in Vienna, and then build the tension to the final trial where he finally comes clean.

Heroes and villains once more

But Chernobyl refuses to become simply another familiar narrative. Once again it returns to the idea of heroes and villains; and though Dyatlov appears to be the easy villain of the story, Legasov reveals that it is hardly that simple.

There are no individual villains, and no singular heroes. Even Legasov himself is explicitly told that he’s not a hero, with a few compelling examples as to why not. This is not a simple tale of bad people punished and good people rewarded. The finale paints Valery Legasov not as a hero, but as a flawed man who ultimately did the right thing—who did what had to be done.

At the end of the day (or more specifically, the end of the miniseries) the events of the Chernobyl disaster hardly need to be dramatized in order to create a dramatic narrative. The true accounts which emerged from the aftermath were all just as powerful as fiction—more so, for being real. The progression of old film footage and historical information at the very end might be the most affecting part of the entire episode.

What had to be done

But the true events of Chernobyl are more than just a story, and for that reason we cannot put them in a neat little box and file them away. The effects and implications of the exploded reactor reverberate to this day.

People have suffered, and continue to suffer; the attitudes of cutting costs and burying the truth which led to that suffering in the first place are still strong today. Ultimately, the “debt to the truth” that Legasov speaks of is also the debt that we owe to history: to remember, and to ensure it does not repeat.

In the final shot before the ending montage, the car carrying Legasov to his new life of obscurity is slowly obliterated by the encroaching forest. Though he seems in that moment to be swallowed up into nothingness, we as an audience know that he will not be erased.

We are hearing his voice even now, and the sacrifice he made was not in vain. He may not have been a hero, but heroes aren’t the only ones who can and must save the world. It takes flawed, ordinary people willing to do the necessary thing, even just once. Sometimes that’s all it takes.

Chernobyl is at its heart a tale about the importance of truth, and the systems which attempt to destroy that truth. Such messages of denialism and environmental disaster could hardly be more timely.