Tear Jerker / Chernobyl

This is the cost of lies.

Given that the Chernobyl disaster occurred in the middle of a large city full of people, how can a series exploring the lives of those personally affected by such a catastrophe not be heartrending?

As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.

Miniseries

Episode 1: 1:23:45

• The miniseries opens with Valery Legasov dying by suicide on the two year anniversary of the accident, down to the minute. Before that, he is shown laying out extra food for his cat so that it won't starve before someone finds him.
  • In real life, Legasov was living with his wife and son at the time of his suicide. It was not just him and his cat. This makes it even worse.
• Poor Sitnikov. He is berated and borderline-gaslighted by Fomin, Bryukhanov and Dyatlov for stating that he saw graphite on the ground. Dyatlov says he'll go on the roof to check, and then his radiation sickness kicks in and he has to be hospitalised. Fomin and Bryukhanov, somehow still in denial, waste no time in drafting him to do the job in Dyatlov's stead. The muted terror and sadness as Sitnikov tries to resist his fate is heartbreaking.

  Fomin: The feed water. Been around it all night. [turning to Sitnikov] You go, then.
  Sitnikov: What?
  Fomin: Go to the main block roof, and report back what you see.
  Sitnikov: [hopelessly] No...no, I won't do that...
  Bryukhanov: Of course you will.

  • Sitnikov gets press-ganged onto the roof at gunpoint, walks across it and looks down into the hole. We see a shot of him from behind. When he turns around, his face has been burned completely red. He has a completely broken, dejected look on his face. He knows that he's already dead. The look doesn't leave his face even as he returns to the conference room as a living piece of evidence of how just bad things are, and Fomin and Bryukhanov panic and yell at him.

Episode 2: Please Remain Calm

• The evacuation of Pripyat: From one moment to another, the people who once lived in one of the most comfortable towns in the Soviet Union are forced to leave behind practically everything they had due to the radiation in the area. Despite being told this was temporary, none of them would ever return to their homes and were forced to seek a new place to live. And this is not counting the health issues that the radiation would cause in them years on from the disaster...
• Four words from a loudspeaker during the evacuation are enough to make your blood run cold: Vnimanie, vnimanie. Vnimanie, vnimanie. You don't have to speak Russian to know the significance of that broadcast (vnimanie is Russian for "Attention!"); it was the original evacuation announcement from 1986, played in Pripyat during the disaster.
• When Pripyat is evacuated, at least one person is forced to leave behind their dog, which runs desperately behind one of the buses to try and get back to its owner. That dog almost certainly starved to death or was shot by the liquidators.
• Gorbachev's and the general council's reaction to the news that Reactor 4's core material is days away from causing a secondary explosion that would render almost all of eastern Europe completely unsuitable for life. This is the moment when the full scope of the disaster has finally become clear to everyone, and the very first step to averting the further impending crisis requires the sacrifice of three lives. Gorbachev is so disturbed that he can barely even speak at this point, and Shcherbina can only stare at the table with a hollow expression.

Episode 3: Open Wide, O Earth

• Firefighter Vasily Ignatenko lies in a darkened room in Moscow Hospital Number 6, blinded and slowly dying from Acute Radiation Syndrome, with his wife Lyudmilla keeping vigil. He asks Lyudmilla to open the curtains, and describe to him what she sees. We are shown that in reality, the view is nothing remarkable — the building of an adjacent hospital wing or some such. However, Lyudmilla instead describes an imaginary, idyllic Moscow cityscape to Vasily, pointing out the Kremlin, Spasskaya Tower, Lenin's Mausoleum and St Basil's Cathedral. She describes the view as "Beautiful". Vasily replies "I told you I'd show you Moscow, didn't I?" as Lyudmilla starts to cry.
• When the head miner Glukhov asks Shcherbina "Will they (the liquidators digging out a tunnel under the reactor) be looked after?" Shcherbina, a career Soviet bureaucrat, looks shaken for a moment before admitting "I don't know." Glukhov takes the answer hard but gives a knowing nod, understanding that Shcherbina gave the most honest answer he could. Glukhov then goes back to his men to continue the dig.
• The realization that Akimov and Toptunov not only had to live out their final days in utter agony, but both also went to the grave mistakenly believing that the explosion was their fault.
• The end of episode where a group funeral is attended by Lyudmilla, and we see her crying as the concrete closes over the coffins. Her face and the image of cement sealing off what remains of her husband really drives home the grief and trauma of losing him in such a way.
  • The mourners are holding mementos of the deceased during the funeral. A couple have pictures of their loved ones, many have their dress caps. Lyudmillia? Vasily’s shoes. She rushed to Moscow right after he was evacuated to the hospital, and she wouldn't be able to return home. All she has to remember her husband by is probably the only non-radioactive article of clothing he has left.
    • This is possibly a reference to an interview Lyudmillia granted after the release of the series: the fact that his feet were swollen too much for shoes was a salient point in her mind that she repeated several times, declaring that he had been buried without his shoes.

Episode 4: The Happiness of All Mankind

• Puppies. It's a difficult scene to watch for any animal lover.
  • Hell, just about everything with animals in this miniseries. In Episode 2, we see a dog running after a bus that is carrying his owner away. In Episode 3, a dog runs up to Shcherbina and Legasov as they walk through the streets at night. In this episode, Bacho tells Pavel that the animals they will be hunting are mostly pets, so they will be happy to see them. And this was what was chosen to show and film. In the behind-the-scenes podcast, Craig Mazin shares a story of the pet burial that was true, but so horrifying that the executives said that recreating and showing it would be tantamount to Torture Porn.
  • One dog Pavel shoots looks over its shoulder as he raises his gun, clearly thinking he must be aiming at something else behind the dog, then looks back at Pavel in a confused manner before Pavel reluctantly pulls the trigger (the dog also suffers for several seconds and needs a coup de grâce). Pavel's entire arc in the episode is rather heartbreaking, considering he, despite knowing it's a necessary job, cannot bear to deal with killing the animals, even when Bacho sternly (but understandably) tells him earlier that It Gets Easier. By the end of the episode, he's stoically now a much older man despite still looking so young as he smokes a cigarette while at the camp to meet the next set of recruits.
• At the start of the episode, a soldier is tasked with evacuating an old woman from a farm. She stubbornly refuses to leave, saying that Whites, Bolsheviks, and Nazis all tried to remove her from this farm. Then the soldier shoots the cow she is milking.
• From the same episode, Lyudmilla goes into labour... and later we find out from Khomyuk that the baby died at just four hours old. Lyudmilla should have died, due to the radiation she was exposed to while hugging and touching Vasily in his last days, but as Khomyuk and the doctors put it, "the baby absorbed it instead." Just to bring the point home, the episode ends in a maternity ward with new mothers and crying babies and the camera pans towards an empty cot... next to the bed of Lyudmilla, who is sitting with a Thousand-Yard Stare. Losing her daughter after losing her husband in horrifying fashion is already an excruciating pain for any mother. Poor Lyudmilla's pain is amplified even more that the last remaining part of her husband Vasily, whom she was so devoted to, is also gone with the tragic death of her newborn daughter, Her loss is total.
  • In some aspects, it's worse in real life for Lyudmilla. For reference, her baby girl was born with cirrhosis of the liver and heart defects. It's known nowadays that babies don't actually absorb radiation from the mother's body, and in fact, tend to be unaffected by parental radiation exposure. That, and it's also been learned that simply being around a person who is radiation afflicted doesn't endanger anyone...which means poor Lyudmilla's baby was doomed either way. No matter what precautions she may have taken, it wouldn't have saved her daughter.
• When the bomb disposal robot that West Germany loaned to clear the graphite off the plant’s roof breaks down from the high radiation, Shcherbina learns via telephone that Moscow undersold the level of radiation at Chernobyl (2,000 Roetgen as opposed to 12,000) to the West German government. The reason being that the State’s official position is that a nuclear disaster on the scale of Chernobyl can never occur within the Soviet Union. In other words, the Soviet government wasted months of precious time that could have been used to seal the reactor earlier and prevent more radiation fatalities, on a solution that was doomed to fail anyway, because their priority was saving face before the West. As a furious Shcherbina destroys his telephone, the anger and frustration in his voice makes it clear that he’s just about had it with the sheer incompetence of the Soviet apparatchik and their inability to treat the disaster seriously even as people continue to die.
• Legasov is told to go to Vienna to testify in front of an international audience as to what happened. Khomyuk can give him an explanation and a proper timeline, but if Legasov reveals it was gross incompetence and a fundamental design failure, the KGB would take ruthless vengeance on him and everyone he loves, because it would be tantamount to "humiliating a nation obsessed with not being humiliated." The best chance they have is to reveal the reasons to the KGB, Legasov not saying a thing about it in Vienna and the KGB maybe letting the scientists remedy the design flaw.

Episode 5 (finale): Vichnaya Pamyat

• The beginning of the episode shows the city of Pripyat before the explosion on April 25, with all the citizens (who would later on be seen at the Bridge of Death) enjoying time together, chatting, shopping and living normal lives...and it being their last time of normality before the disaster happens on the 26th.
  • Even worse, among them we see Vasily and Lyudmilla Ignatenko chatting with a neighbor and playing with a baby. This young couple that is on the cusp of starting their own family, only for it to be taken away from them in a matter of weeks.
• Shcherbina confesses that he believed the initial reports of the accident not because he believed the propaganda, but because they put him in charge—if it was really that bad, they would have sent someone who actually mattered, not him.
• Related to the above, during the first recess when Legasov leaves the hearing and sees Shcherbina sitting by himself, the latter is sat at the end of a bench, hunched over, seemingly utterly exhausted and worn out, it's pretty gut-wrenching to see arguably the series' most powerful and charismatic character brought low to this extent.
• A small one, but there's something heartbreaking about Fomin, Dyatlov, and Bryukhanov having looks of deep regret when they hear Legasov's explanation of why Reactor #4 exploded. It's hard to tell if their expressions are because of them realizing just how badly their actions have ruined everything or the dawning realization that their own government lied to them over something they thought was safe for the sake of their global reputation. Despair Event Horizon doesn't cover it. It also frames Dyatlov blaming everyone but himself for the accident in a new light: He more than likely knows just how badly he's screwed up, but refuses to admit it either out of pride or a sheer inability to comprehend the chain of events.
  • The look Fomin gives after he hears why the reactor exploded. Unlike Bryukhanov and Dyatlov, who have faces of pure regret, Fomin has an expression of heavy pain, as it weighs down on him that he (and his comrades) caused one of the worst nuclear disasters on Earth and lead thousands to their deaths.
• The ending of the miniseries: Legasov is told by Charkov that his position as a scientist and everything else (his accomplishments and such) will be removed from him and he will be forced to have nothing. All for telling the truth. He even goes as far as to tell Legasov that he isn't a hero for making the choice. It doesn't help that Charkov tells him he can never contact Shcherbina nor Khomyuk ever again due to them being connected to the Chernobyl case.
  • Legasov watching Shcherbina and Khomyuk as he's taken away by the KGB, the look on their faces considering his Heroic Sacrifice to finally tell the truth.
  • Makes more as to why Legasov told the truth as well: Shcherbina telling him about his cancer and coughing throughout the episode.
  • Though also a Heartwarming Moments, Legasov and Shcherbina's whole aforementioned conversation, especially since it ends up being the last conversation they will ever have.
• The "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: Legasov died by suicide, leaving his taped account of what really happened to a collective of Soviet scientists, despite the Soviet Union's attempts to silence him. Shcherbina died four years and four months after being sent to Chernobyl, making Legasov's prediction tragically accurate. And although Fomin, Dyatlov, and Bryukhanov were all convicted for violating safety regulations, they were only sentenced to ten years in a labor camp. Fomin even went back to working at a nuclear power plant after his release. ^note Allegedly, anyway - it's unknown what became of Fomin after Chernobyl, as most information that is known is he attempted suicide twice, couldn't manage working at another plant again, and eventually faded out of public perception when the Soviet Union fell.

  • The footage of the real Dyatlov towards the end of his life, frail and sick from radiation, is almost enough to make one feel bad for him.

  • Khodemchuk's fate. Reactor 4, the initial Sarcophagus laid over it for containment, and the later New Safe Containment system all make up his tomb. He is buried in the rubble of the pump room, directly beneath the reactor itself. The radiation made it impossible to recover his body.
  • Despite the thousands who died because of the Chernobyl disaster, the Soviet Union's official death count to the whole mess was (and is still today) 31.
  • The music playing during this sequence deserves mention as well: a heartbreaking Ukrainian rendition of Vichnaya Pamyat ^note 'Memory Eternal' in English as performed by the Homin Lviv Municipal Choir. It's an Orthodox/Eastern Catholic hymn that's sung at the close of funerals and memorial events, asking God to remember the departed when they arrive at Heaven. It's one of two final honors the series gives to those who died in the disaster, and those who sacrificed their lives to make sure it couldn't get any worse.
  • The final slate card for the series:
    In Memory of All Who Suffered and Sacrificed