You’re not wrong about the book or the show
That show does a great job of creating moments of sheer terror, like the rooftop liquidators and the divers. The way Harris’s character explains the disaster during the hearing is also brilliant.
Harris and Hinds are good in everything they do.
I saw some background on that recently (which is what triggered my re-watch), and this is one of the few historically inaccurate elements of the show. There was a trial and Dyatalov and others got the sentences mentioned in the show, but there was never a moment in the trial there or anywhere else where Lagasov got to demonstrate the cause of the accident.
The show took poetic license to do that because it was otherwise the dry findings in various reports. The background piece was talking about how well the show was made and this was one thing that was specifically highlighted. The scene is essentially a huge exposition dump, but the show got away with it because they’d spent the previous four episodes teasing the audience as to the cause of the explosion. “RBMK reactors don’t explode” we are told repeatedly.
From the get-go, we see the accident through the eyes of various characters, none of whom knew at the time WTF had happened, so neither do we. We get to find out shit when they do, and the story rolls along from disaster to crisis to tragedy; all the while with the audience knowing that our main protagonist kills himself in the end.
So when Harris spends half of Ep 5 going through what would otherwise be a momentum crushing exposition dump, the audience is absolutely gagging to hear every piece of minutiae.
It was all I could do not to play Ep 5 first!
If you haven’t partaken previously, I highly recommend Dan Simmons’ other books. He successfully genre-hops, so you have a lot of choice. I have not read any of his crime novels, but the Hyperion Cantos (2 sets of 2 books) and the Illium / Olympos pair are all incredible if you are into fantasy/sci-fi.
In the fantasy/sci-fi genre his books are typically in pairs where the first will be open-ended but the second won’t pick up exactly where the first left off. The genius of his writing is that the second novel of the pair will backfill the jump between the books in such a way that you are never left hanging.
I know. Just saying that the way they explained it in the show is the best visualization I’ve seen of the RBMK reactor and why the house of cards came down.
Yup. Interchanging between the court room and the reactor control room was just so compelling. I imagine they dumbed down some of it for us, but the way it was shown made it easy to follow - even though the cue cards were in Russian!
An ex of mine grew up in Sopot, Poland (great place to visit, btw) and she and her sister were 7ish when it happened. Apparently nobody knew anything was wrong until a bit later that spring when their hair started falling out. She remembered standing in line for stuff and looking at the other people and telling her mom “they don’t have eyebrows either”
Fuck the Soviet Union.
It was fascinating and VERY eye opening listening to their and their friends’ stories of “life behind the iron curtain”
I would not have thought that people got a big enough dose of radiation to have such outward signs of acute radiation syndrome. Poland (and the rest of the world) knew that something was up within two days of the explosion, and within another few days had administered iodine treatment to over half the population. They also dodged a lot of the worst radioactive fallout.
Yeah, I know the worst/most of it went to Scandinavia, but what you’re saying is not how it happened on the Baltic coast. I have no reason not to believe 20+ people telling the same story.
And no, they were not told what really happened for quite a while. “Get in line, here’s some iodine, it’s good for your blood”
I started reading The Gulag Archipelago a while back.
The utter disregard for human life was staggering.
All in the guise of a great cause.
ETA: but mostly it was people being vindictive, indifferent, or just psychopathic.
My favorite Lit teacher gave me her used copy of that book when I was 16…that hits a little bit (also Graham Greene’s Power and the Glory)
First time I was in Krakow, we’re walking around next to a who-knows-how-old rock wall and she says “we have to cross the street”, “OK”. There’s a well-worn diagonal path from one side of the road to the other and then few hundred feet or so later there’s another diagonal back. It was where the Nazis lined up people and shot them by the thousands.
That’s fair.
Landman is good.
Watched the first episode last night.
Billy Bob is very good.
Those conversations with his daughter. Holy cow.
Looking forward to watching E2.
Landman is utterly ridiculous… and entertaining as hell. Billy Bob is in full Bad Santa mode and I’m here for it.
And yes, the convos with the daughter… yikes. Or the convos with the ex-wife… nice to see Ali Larter getting work again.
Just watched Episode 2. Billy Bob is a tour de force, as good as the first episode was, he really ramps it up in the second episode. His interactions with the doctor and the police officer are instant classics.
Episode 3 continues to deliver.
His ex is a lot to handle.