After "Game of Thrones" went kaput in one of the most anticlimactic ways possible, HBO needed another flagship. Yet instead of focusing on a long-term TV show they made a 5-episode mini-series and believe it or not it was a huge success. "Chernobyl" is one of the most devastating things I have ever seen and felt. From a television perspective, its quality is above and beyond anything.

"Chernobyl" is merciless and relentless in its dramatization. So much so, that at times it ends up over-dramatizing, almost not being satisfied with itself. You might argue--well, of course, the disaster that happened on that fateful night could've changed the course of history. Exactly, so this constant aesthetic bleakness feels unnecessary, overproduced at times, sensationalized, impressionistic--it was the facts and the screenwriting which give off the true drama.

But this is not what I will focus on when I will discuss "Chernobyl", which is why I wanted to get the negatives out of the way. What I will focus is on the way it succeeded to use the disaster itself as a bridge between the Soviet philosophy and the suffering of the people. In the end, the scientific mishaps could be traced all the way to the decaying and toxic philosophy of the Soviet Union. An extremist view I heavily oppose. Mikhail Gorbachev said that the Chernobyl disaster was one of the main causes of the collapse of the Soviet Union--and he is right. The explosion could easily be viewed as a metaphor for the Soviet philosophy--one which is built on instability, cutting corners. And like the menacing view of the power plant, the Soviet Union is also driven by a prideful presentation, their egos hiding an inevitable chaos. "Out power comes from the perception of our power"--indeed!

Solutions to the chaos do present themselves, yet they are often represented as human sacrifice. Few of which could've been avoided if the administrators would have let go of their pride. The scene in the first episode, in which an elderly man among the many plant officials spews forth an anecdote prompting to the picture of Lenin on the wall and telling his peers to bask in the glory of the chaos, its powerful, representative of the Soviet thought-killing machine. Like the reactor was spewing toxicity in the air, so was he spewing his own toxicity--and on and on and on...

Despite its physical disaster approach, "Chernobyl" depicts an even greater evil manifested by dangerous philosophies. Its intelligence relies a lot on the sides. Whereas the front-runner is the technical disaster, the true lingering evil relies in its unseen insight. It was the Soviet Union that murdered all the innocent man, women and children, the radiation was just the means.