This show put into perspective the devastating, bleak, and morbid nature of the Chernobyl disaster. In this episode one thing that struck me was the image of the firefighter Ignatenko’s decaying body and the dedication of his wife to him. It’s extremely disturbing to realize how radiation sickness, particularly ARS, slowly consumes your body in such a way, and to be afflicted by it is like watching yourself succumb to an inevitable doom. In the show, the wife Lyudmilla steadily watches her husband suffer through this terrible process as his entire body looks increasingly mutilated. To add to the tragedy of the situation, she was carrying their child, and so at the time she risked exposing the child to radiation as if sealing the Ignatenko legacy into a grim fate, forever cursed by radiation and the Chernobyl disaster. The image of the physical deformation of Ignatenko and other victims of radiation sickness viscerally captures the horror, regret, and ugliness associated with this disaster.