After Months of Horror, ‘Chernobyl’ Almost Gives Us Catharsis

Chernobyl ends with a finger point. After hours spent chronicling dogs being murdered, young families slowly dying, and countless innocent people, both young and old, sacrificing their lives to help their fellow man, their country, and the world at large, the fifth and final episode of Chernobyl chronicles a court case that explains exactly what happened the night of April 26, 1986. As much as a relief it is to go a solid hour of this show without witnessing graphic death, “Vichnaya Pamyat” is also Chernobyl at its most hostile. And after all the pain this miniseries has chronicled, that hostility feels oh-so-justified.

Ever since Chernobyl first introduced us to a batch of wide-eyed, young technicians clearly unequipped to handle the horrors ahead, this series has grappled with how the disaster ever happened. Chernobyl Episode 5 outlines what caused nuclear reactor No. 4 to explode in no uncertain detail. “Vichnaya Pamyat” sees Boris Shcherbina (Stellan Skarsgård), Ulana Khomyuk (Emily Watson), and Valery Legasov (Jared Harris) testifying under oath about what happened the night of the nuclear explosion. But before they even enter the court room, Khomyuk gives her longtime colleague a choice. Legasov can either lie under Soviet Union orders, which he’s done many times before. Or at the risk of his life, career, and family, he can tell the truth.

Ultimately Legasov and his newfound allies go with the latter — the truth. Over its five-episode run Chernobyl has featured some truly remarkable performances and some shocking cinematography, but this deceptively humble court scene showed Chernobyl at its best.

Skarsgård channeled his character’s growing fury with the government he once loved into his Episode 4 breakdown. Because of this, the Shcherbina who appears on the stand is a hacking wisp of himself. He explains the higher-ranked decisions that led to the disaster with the energy of a dead man walking. Thanks his own radiation poison, that’s essentially what he is. Watson’s Ulana Khomyuk is the next to follow, and immediately she becomes the trio’s emotional center. Under her testimony, which is accompanied by flashbacks to that fateful night, the believed to be incompetent factory workers fade away and are replaced by the truth. The men who were on reactor No. 4’s night shift were never trained to complete the test laid out before them that night. They didn’t know all of the ins and outs of the dangerous substance they were handling. Their chief engineer was only 25 years old. They were innocent men following the orders of a corrupt system that refused to take no for an answer.

That’s when Harris’ Legasov sweeps in with the full horror of the disaster. As he walks forward to testify, an unnervingly close shot follows his every move as the world shakes around him. At this moment he’s the one person capable of fully explaining why what happened wasn’t a fluke; even though being honest will cost him everything. The explosion of the RBMK reactor was the failure of a shoddy system that never prided safety over utility — not really.

“Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth,” Harris’ Legasov says during his most powerful moment. “Sooner or later that debt is paid.”

As the text at the end of the episode clarifies, this moving trial isn’t exactly what happened. Though Legasov did testify under oath, the specifics of the trial were brushed aside to reframe the disaster as something that wasn’t explicitly the Soviet Union’s fault. It wasn’t until the real Valery Legasov recorded the truth behind all of the Soviet Union’s lies and killed himself that what actually happened was ever acknowledged. In reality Legasov only had a few years left before illness caused by radiation would claim him too.

For the past four episodes Chernobyl has contented itself with showing audiences the men and women who died because of the nuclear reactor explosion, in painstaking detail. It would have been predictable for Chernobyl to end with another sad or horrific story. God knows there are enough of them. Instead, it ended on a note of clear anger. In its final moments, it clearly stated who was to blame for the senseless tragedy: an ineffective and cruel government. It’s appalling that so many lives were lost. It’s shocking to know that a whole country was in some ways destroyed. But through it all there’s a sick sort of pleasure to take away from Chernobyl‘s unwavering truth. This is what happens when a government doesn’t put its people first. And it could have killed us all.

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