Craig Mazin and Johan Renck, 2019 recommended by Amy Hill and Kate Rosen

John Mulaney has observed that, as a kid, he “always thought that quicksand was going to be a much bigger problem than it turned out to be”, and I guess it goes to show how even eight and a half years can constitute a real generation gap, because while I can relate to his experience, in my case the problem I expected to dominate my adult life was not quicksand but radiation poison­ing.  I mean, yes, there was a lot of quicksand in the cartoons I watched as a kid, but those cartoons kept getting interrupted by news updates about the meltdown at Three Mile Island, sixty miles away.  Then Reagan was elected, the Cold War heated back up, and the TV I watched, the books and comics I read, and the lessons at school all seemed to agree that even in the unlikely event we managed to avoid a full-scale thermonuclear conflagra­tion that would wipe out any life on Earth more advanced than the insects, I would spend my adulthood on a planet pockmarked with Exclusion Zones, caused by suitcase nukes, dirty bombs, and unstable reactors.  My father had a radar detector on the dash­board of his car; I assumed that when I eventually got my license, in the same spot of my lead-lined car would be a Geiger counter.  “Hey, if you’re coming to visit, take I‑90 because I‑95 has one of these on it:”

But as it turned out, of the various disasters I have lived through as an adult, the closest to what I had envisioned was the pan­demic.  There was something eerily familiar about returning a few weeks later to my hastily abandoned classroom to retrieve some essentials, wearing protective gear despite everything seeming as normal as could be… except for the intellectual know­ledge that something imperceptible, yet all around me, might have dire health consequences for me down the road.  But it wasn’t quite the same.  Humankind has endured plagues for mil­lennia.  To die decades early of thyroid cancer brought on by cell damage inflicted by gamma ray exposure, on the other hand, would at least be a demise befitting the Atomic Age.  Chernobyl is a five-hour miniseries about the 1986 reactor explosion in the USSR that sent thousands to premature but era-appropriate graves⁠—with some of those graves made of concrete, entombing phalanxes of zinc coffins⁠—and about the decisions that kept that fate from being shared by tens of millions more.

Chernobyl won critical acclaim and a raft of awards for how thoroughly it brings the Soviet Union of the mid-1980s back to life.  A few years ago I watched some Youtube travelogues by a British guy poking around the former USSR looking for relics of the Soviet era, and the locales here certainly matched those videos.  Even the text has been uncommonly well considered: the creators not only commissioned a custom font to evoke the time and place, but added just the right touch of chromatic aberration to perfectly nail the technology of the period.  Of course, this is much more than just A Day in the Life of the Soviet Union.  Even though I was old enough to be paying at least cursory attention to the news when Chernobyl happened, and even though I’ve been very interested in history for most of the time since then⁠—I even audited a course on Soviet history! I’ve read multiple books about atomic accidents!⁠—much of the detail here was new to me.  Filling in the blanks for those of us who didn’t already know the blow-by-blow of Chernobyl is an inherently valuable project, but it does raise the question: why tell this story in 2019?  Was it inspired by Fukushima, and just took eight years to get from concept to screen?  Had it been even just a couple of years later, I would have assumed that the global response to covid, for better or for worse, was the inspiration, but the chronology doesn’t work for that one.  The answer seems to be that Chernobyl is rooted not in a parallel to a specific event of the 2010s, but in the timeless yet exceedingly timely theme of the conflict between power and truth.

It doesn’t take a whole lot of digging to unearth this theme⁠—it’s right there on the surface.  One of the climactic scenes of the series comes after the closest thing to a main character, scientist Valery Legasov, deviates from the testimony he has been slated to give at a show trial for some of the Chernobyl directors in order to point out that, while those men had in fact been blatant­ly contemptuous of safety standards, the state is also to blame, both for cutting corners at every turn in constructing its nuclear plants and for suppressing a report about a design flaw in those plants.  He is immediately imprisoned, but the KGB higher-up assigned to his case informs him that he will not be shot as he undoubtedly would have been under Stalin; rather, his testimony will be suppressed, and he will be permanently cut off from the scientific community.  And they have a Nineteen Eighty-Four-style dialogue about whether truth is anything more than what those with power wish it to be.  The darkly optimistic message is that, yes, ultimately real truth wins out, in the form of catastro­phe.  In the 1970s, the Soviet authorities successfully concealed the truth about the flaws in the RBMK class of nuclear reactors… for about a decade, at which point the explosion at Chernobyl brought them to light.  We see this again and again throughout the miniseries.  The first installment focuses on the immediate aftermath of the accident: workers rush in to report that the reactor has exploded, and the martinet in charge insists that it has not⁠—that the workers accept his word over the evidence of their own eyes.  The problem for him is that while he can brow­beat his underlings into submission, he can’t browbeat 3900 milliseiverts of hard radiation, and soon he has to stop berating the bearers of bad news because he’s too busy vomiting.  Nor does the bone marrow cancer that kills him buckle to his adam­ant denials.  By the fourth installment, weeks have passed, yet the Soviet government continues to understate the scale of the disaster, claiming that the radiation level on the roof of the plant, where chunks of radioactive graphite need to be cleared away, is 2000 roentgen; the problem is that delicate circuitry doesn’t care what number you’ve made up, and the robot the West Germans send across the Iron Curtain to help with the cleanup effort is immediately fried by the 15,000 roentgen of radiation actually present.  There are many other examples⁠—again, the series is not subtle.

At the time the final installment of Chernobyl takes place, I was in ninth grade.  One of the books we studied in English class that year was Animal Farm.  This was Orange County during the Cold War, so the theme of the unit was basically “Soviet Union bad”.  Thirty-two years later, about three months before Chernobyl premiered, I was a student teacher taking over a couple of soph­omore World Literature classes, and there on the syllabus I in­herited was Animal Farm⁠—and this was at a school without hardwired lesson plans, so I had to write a unit of my own.  So how do you teach Animal Farm in 2019, to students born a dozen years or more after the Soviet Union had ceased to exist?  It turns out that it’s very easy, because the tactics the pigs use in the novel⁠—gaslighting, scapegoating, moving the goalposts, the cult of personality, etc.⁠—are far from unique to the USSR.  When the students reached the part when Squealer changes “No ani­mal shall sleep in a bed” to “No animal shall sleep in a bed with sheets”, there was no need to draw parallels to the Stalin era when I could just pull up some recent headlines.  Similarly, it’s not hard to see the contemporary relevance of a government that makes up numbers when you have this guy in the White House:

There actually is a case to be made for this view of reality where something like net worth is concerned: to a great extent econo­mics is just mass psychology, after all.  But things like the num­ber of people to attend an inauguration ceremony are not a matter of psychology but of counting, and Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts” have no more validity than the Soviet Central Committee’s figure of 2000 roentgen.  And as we would find out a year after Chernobyl, there are realities impervious to these sorts of lies.  You can lie to a guy in a cheap red hat that a mask won’t protect him from covid but hydrochloroquine and inver­mectin will.  But you can’t lie to the virus, and it will kill that guy.  This miniseries gives a wide estimate of 4000 to 93,000 killed by the Soviet lies that led to the Chernobyl disaster, but we see how people like Valery Legasov, Boris Shcherbina, and Mik­hail Gorbachev, not to mention thousands of miners, firefighters, engineers, nurses, and many more, saved fifty million.  Over 1.2 million Americans have died from covid.  Studies indicate that the majority of those could have been saved if not for what one study termed the Trump administration’s “sluggish and chaotic response”, a product of everything we see in the miniseries: “insensitivity to threat warnings”, “overconfidence”, “denial and wishful thinking”, and “obsess[ion] with […] optics”.  Instead the administration took its lead from the pre-glasnost Kremlin, and racked up a body count that dwarfed that of Chernobyl.

Danny Strong, Michael Weiner, Zoe Sarnak, and Michael Mayer, 2024

As noted in previous articles, I have been trying to justify living in such an expensive area by taking more advantage of its cul­tural opportunities, and the one that’s been on all the local bill­boards lately was the world premiere of this “rock musical” at the Berkeley Rep, so I took Ellie to see it.  It turns out to be about exactly the same stuff as Chernobyl: the conflict between truth and power.  And it’s even less subtle about it.  Chernobyl may have characters expli­citly talk about the themes, but it does throw in some memorable lines, like Legasov’s sign-off in his dia­logue with the KGB deputy: “‘Why worry about something that isn’t going to happen’. Oh, that’s perfect. They should put that on our money.”  Galileo doesn’t even dress up its subject matter to that extent⁠—this is a show in which the pope declares, “Power decides truth, not the other way around!”  But maybe criticizing a musical for lacking nuance in its dialogue is like criticizing a canary for lacking the word power of Alex the parrot. 

I haven’t watched a lot of musicals, so I really only have one reference point⁠—and even if I did have more than one, the fact that Galileo’s “book” was written by Danny Strong, a.k.a. Jona­than from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, meant that I could hardly avoid comparing what I saw to “Once More, With Feeling”, the musical episode of Buffy.  Though of course the fact that the billboards explicitly promoted Galileo as “a rock musical”, and that I likely wouldn’t have gone to see it if they hadn’t, also called to mind the Who.  Pete Townshend always said that his primary concern in writing Tommy and Quadrophenia, which he suspected he had failed to achieve, was that they work first and foremost as great rock and roll records: “I mean, anybody can write an opera.”  I had expected that the Buffy musical would be funny, and was not surprised that it advanced the storyline of the season in genuinely moving ways, but I was kind of shocked that the songs⁠—by Joss Whedon, who had never written a song before⁠—were a strength of the episode rather than the weak link.  The opener (“Going Through the Motions”) and climac­tic song (“Something to Sing About”) are so good that for the past 20+ years I’ve gotten them stuck in my head just as often as any song in my actual music collection.  And Galileo doesn’t mea­sure up on that count.  Maybe this is unfair, since I’ve only heard the songs once, and it takes a while for music to grow on me⁠—I had to listen to my second-favorite album, Fino + Bleed by Die Mannequin, for a month before I really got into it.  But the com­posers of a musical have to know that their audience is going to be primarily composed of people who are seeing the show for the first and only time, not people who are going to be involun­tarily exposed to the songs a hundred times on the radio⁠—the songs have to work on that first listen.

As it turns out, the biggest strength of Galileo is not what’s on the stage but what’s above it, for the projection work is a big plus.  When Galileo tries out his telescope for the first time, and the handful of dots over his head turn into a dense, glittering starfield, it’s a nifty moment.  The highlight for Ellie was a simi­lar moment near the end, when the actors come out in modern dress with the Hubble Deep Field projected behind them.  As for the worst thing about the experience⁠—well, that was not what was on the stage but what was out in the audience.  I know that to be a good progressive I’m supposed to believe in society, but being around people is the fucking worst.  Even the trip there started on a sour note, as we got onto a near-empty train, only for a middle-aged woman to come in after us, plunk down into a seat nearby, and start playing a video on her phone, the speaker blasting away.  Then, in the theater, the sights and sounds of the show were overwhelmed by the stench of the cologne of the guy who sat next to me.  If this is society, then maybe I actually would prefer to live in the world according to Margaret Thatcher.

The Man in the High Castle (season 4)
Philip K. Dick and Frank Spotnitz, 2019

One thing that has vexed me about a lot of the shows I’ve watched in recent years⁠—most of them from the Marvel Cine­matic Universe⁠—is that the imperative in the screenwriting world to “raise the stakes!” means that each season becomes a grim exercise in putting the heroes through hell.  However, by its final season, The Man in the High Castle is nearly out of heroes.  The three main characters in the series who could be classed as the good guys are Juliana, Frank, and Tagomi.  Juliana is still around as season four starts.  Frank was killed off near the end of season three.  And Tagomi is killed off at the beginning of season four, without the actor even appearing on screen⁠—because the actor was unavailable, and if there’s one thing more vexing than “raise the stakes!”, it’s storylines being torpedoed by extradie­getic factors.  So I was braced for ten episodes of “let’s torment Juliana”… and was pleasantly surprised to find that the show goes a different way.  This season is ten episodes of “let’s tor­ment the villains”!  John Smith the American Reichsmarschall and Takeshi Kido the Kempeitai chief in San Francisco are the ones who get dragged over the coals this time around, all their vulnerabilities given a series of excruciating pokes, and it’s an interesting move: normally the torment of the heroes is meant to be painful to the audience, but here the automatic sympathy prompted by a suffering protagonist is balanced by the fact that these are the baddies… and at the same time, the automatic feeling of triumph prompted by the comeuppance of the baddies is balanced by the fact that they have become the protagonists.  And as for the actual hero?  Juliana is slotted in as the implac­able antagonist, on her way to fuck up the focal characters’ plans.  Except while normally the question would be how the hero thwarts said implacable antagonist, in this case the ques­tion is how the protagonists’ plans to thwart her will be thwar­ted in turn, because, y’know, she’s the good guy.

As for those plans: the book on which this series is based ended with a meta twist, as Juliana reaches the titular man (Hawthorne Abendsen, writer of an inspirational alternate-universe book in which the Allies win World War II) and learns that her universe, the one in which the Axis won World War II, is fictional.  And in the previous chapter, Tagomi had actually traveled to our world.  This series runs with the multiverse idea and “raises the stakes” by having the Nazis open up a portal to a world that seems to be our own.  Once the technology has been perfected, the idea goes, they will no longer be safely sequestered in an alternate universe but will be able to invade us.  There is a suggestion that a handful of Nazi agents have already taken to meddling in our timeline to make it more amenable to their aims⁠—which would explain a lot of recent history, come to think of it.  So what do you do when the bad guys have been defeated and you need to wrap up your forty-hour story with a bang, but you don’t really have a great idea for an ending?  And your source material ended on a strange note?  The answer, often, is to go weird⁠—as my beloved Pleas­antville did⁠—aiming for a wow that may not necessarily make a lot of sense.  In this case, the wow is that the portal opens mo­ments after the good guys have taken over the access point, and Juliana looks on in wonder as Hawthorne Abensen beatifically strides into the portal to explore alternate worlds, as people from across the multiverse amble into this one.  And… whut?  The big happy ending is that randos from Earth‑2 and Earth‑616 and Earth‑31337 stroll into a universe… where the Nazis control three quarters of the world?  That’s, uh, that’s a choice, all right.  Still, of all the versions of this show that could have existed, this was far from the worst.

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