As someone who was not present for parts 1 and 2 of the Friday Film Chernobyl series, I went into part 3 with an “aw yikes, I’m gonna be so lost” mentality, so I was pleasantly surprised when I could still follow the plot along quite easily.
This episode was the part where they showed a lot of the fallout/repercussions following the main incident and so there were a couple of gruesome scenes that I kind of had to look away from… I will say that I thoroughly enjoyed watching with the subtitles on because some of the scary scenes would have the sound effects/music captioned on the bottom and made it more bearable to watch (Friday night and all).
It was a pretty sad episode overall… I felt really bad watching maybe 80% of the people there come to terms with their eventual and quickly approaching death. I was super conflicted about the scenes in the hospital where the wife went to visit her husband because you could clearly see how close they were to each other but on the other the back of my mind was constantly going “no no no they told you to stay away you’re going to die” so that was pretty sad too. There were also some political sections that I had a harder time following due to not having much context but overall I enjoyed the episode. I signed up for parts 4 & 5 so I’m looking forward to those as well.
This show, in my opinion, does an amazing job at showing how this one event tragically affected the lives of so many. The directors didn’t just focus on those who were immediately affected by the explosion, but also everyone that was affected by the aftermath. They focused on the awful working conditions for the workers, they helped us sympathize with the inexperienced nuclear engineers, even some of the high ranking officials were really affected by what happened. While it is very sad to watch at time, I think the directors did an amazing job at showing what a tragedy this event was.