Chernobyl · Season 1 · Episode 4 · 27 May 2019
S1E4 The Happiness of All Mankind
THE MOMENT The miners' meeting with Gorbachev - men who understand exactly what they're being asked to do, and do it anyway.
The liquidators and the biorobots; the miners tunnelling under the reactor; the rooftop radiation shovellers. Episode 4 is where the human cost is made bodily specific. Three groups of men doing jobs the state cannot admit are killing them. Renck shoots each strand as its own genre: procedural, horror, tragic pastoral.
Full episode analysis below. Spoiler-light verdict above.
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Chernobyl Episode 4 makes the human cost of the disaster bodily specific in a way the preceding episodes, by necessity, could not. Three separate groups of workers are followed across the episode: the liquidators and 'biorobots' clearing the roof; the miners tunnelling under the reactor to prevent groundwater contamination; the animals being systematically destroyed to prevent radiation spread. Each strand is shot in a distinct genre register - procedural, horror, tragic pastoral - and each makes the same argument about the Soviet state's arithmetic of acceptable human cost. The miners' meeting with Gorbachev, where men who understand exactly what they are being asked to do nonetheless agree to do it, was identified by the Rotten Tomatoes critical consensus as the episode's peak: the moment where the show's central horror about institutional dehumanisation is most directly confronted.