Lyudmilla is depicted as „stupid“ and selfish in the series. In reality she was looking after the injured firefighters - not just her husband - and helped them cleaning, peeing, clean up when they defecated in the bed, cleaned wounds, helped them drink (early) and later on just helped get a few drops of water on their lips, helped them eat (as long as they were able to). A lot of the hospital staff was scared of the Chernobyl victims and straight up refused to get near them and treat them, that‘s why Lyudmilla stepped in and took over as a nurse for the firefighters.

Her exposure to radiation was not from the firefighters (radiation is not contagious in 99% of the cases, only if the victims would have ingested decaying material) as they have been decontaminated by removing their clothes and showers. She was in Pripyat when the reactor exploded, she got radiation from the accident itself and from the fallout during the early hours after the explosion.

Radiation kills the immune system by destroying bone marrow, no new blood cells can be produced. Even today if someone gets radiation sickness, they can‘t have visitors unless they wear full sterile suits and masks. Not to protect the visitor but to protect the victim. If a visitor carries a virus, bacteria or fungal spore, the victim wont survive because they don‘t have an immune response to fight it off. There are some limited treatments available now (transfusion of blood, including blood cells instead of just plasma, infusion of antibodies, general immune therapy, virostatica, antibiotics, fungizides or even bone marrow transplants.


But yeah, bottom line is HBO did her dirty with the portrayal and lack of explanation. On the other hand, the people back then also did not get explanations due to lack of knowledge. A lot (if not most) of knowledge we have nowadays surrounding radiation and it‘s impact on the human body and environment stems from the Chernobyl accident.

Fun fact: some places in Europe (like Switzerland for example) have to check wild boar for radiation still today if they are intended for human consumption. Wild boar eat mushrooms in the forests, mushrooms are notorious for accumulating radioactive particles that were kn the ground (due to Chernobyl fallout and rain that the winds blew over). If the wild boar radiation levels are above the threshold, it they can‘t be eaten and have to be destroyed/exposed of as radioactive waste.

"We're going to need a new phone"... Stellan Skaarsgard drops the dead-pan-est line of all time.

--Shannon

Another reminder... when Lyudmilla stayed with her husband... HE was not a danger to HER.  Once your contaminated clothes are removed, and you've taken a shower, you're not giving off radiation (except maybe in your bodily fluids or if your bones themselves have become radioactive.)  SHE was a danger to HIM, because his immune system had been destroyed.  If she so much as SNEEZED on him, he'd probably be dead.

From what I understand, her baby died of a heart defect.  Now, I don't know if the defect was due to radiation or not, BUT.  If it WAS because of radiation, it would've been because of the initial exposure.  Remember, she was in Pripyat, less than 3 kilometers (less than 1.9 miles) from the reactor!

Lyudmila didn't go back - she is shown in Kyiv (Kiev here in the titles). People from Pripyat were resettled to surrounding cities. Regarding staying in Moscow - moving to Moscow was about as easy as emigrating to the West in the soviet times. You needed the registration which was extremely difficult to obtain. And you'd be treated as a second class citizen by the "true" Moscovites... There were people who came to Moscow in the fifties and sixties to work (cheap difficult jobs), and when I grew up there in the eighties the derogatory term for them still existed and was used as a slur. Also, people from Chernobyl weren't welcome addition no matter where - due to lack of official information a lot of fear, rumours and horror stories surrounded the Chernobyl explosion. So they were seen as contagious etc. You can see the older lady with the cigarette giving her a side-eye. (Probably also judging a pregnant woman without a husband.)

In answer to some other things you wondered about...for one thing, the Glitter Fairy has struck again! LOL
5:27 It's the Soviet Union...she probably did not have a choice about where she lived...since she was from Ukraine, they most likely would have sent her back there. Plus, whatever family or friends she still had may well have all lived in Ukraine.

5:36 Pretty much as you guessed...the first job of "cleaning up" the radioactive material from the disaster, is to map out where the radioactive material has settled...which is done by using sensitive detectors to detect where the "hot spots" are and where the relatively "safer" zones are. They also want to find heavily contaminated objects like that bicycle so that they can determine whether they should be decontaminated before they are disposed of, or if they are too contaminated to even bother trying to clean them in any way before they throw them in the radioactive dump.

12:41 I could be wrong, but one of the liquids the Soviets reportedly sprayed as part of the Chernobyl "cleanup" was PVA...polyvinyl acetate...a synthetic polymer that formed a sticky coating upon whatever it was sprayed. I believe that the show is depicting the Soviets spraying it on areas with a lot of radioactive dust in the efforts to prevent the dust from spreading. So they were not spraying to kill the trees...but by binding the radioactive dust to many of the trees, a bunch of them would probably die. The stuff from the trucks could be the same kind of thing...or it could have been plain old water and soap to get the low level radioactive particles wash away or go into the sewers or get trapped in the ground locally.

First time in a very long while I have seen such charismatic and genuinely natural people reacting to a series 😊🎬☢️ You are such a beautiful couple, and the way you interact with each other feels so real, warm, caring, and alive. Honestly, it is rare these days to find reaction channels that still feel human instead of feeling like everything is made only for algorithms and views.
I have already watched episodes one, two, three, and now episode four of Chernobyl with your reactions ☢️📺 and I genuinely love the way you do it. You do not cut too much from the actual series, so the viewer can really understand what is happening and why certain scenes emotionally hit you. At the same time, you do not endlessly pause the episode for thirty minutes of random talking 😄 Everything feels balanced, natural, respectful, and immersive. For me personally, this is almost the perfect reaction format 🎥✨
Even though English is not mine first language, and I often watch with Dutch subtitles 🇳🇱😊 I can actually understand your English surprisingly well, which honestly does not happen very often for me. Your voices are clear, natural, calm, and very easy to follow 🎧✨
And the funny moment with the water bottle absolutely made me smile 😂💧☕ It instantly reminded me of mine loved person, because he also constantly tells me to drink more water instead of coffee all day long 😄 And whenever I cough, he gives me literally the exact same worried look 😂 So that entire moment felt incredibly real and familiar to me.
It genuinely made me happy to subscribe to your channel 😊✨ Thank you for bringing such a warm atmosphere and real human energy even into such a heavy and emotional series as Chernobyl ☢️🌌 Wishing you both lots of success, warmth, good health, and many more beautiful reactions in the future. 😘👍

Whatever you guys do.....no matter how big this channel may get....do not ever ...and I mean ever, edit out the hilarious banter between you two in these videos!
"Sink juice". 🤣🤣🤣🤣

It's always a good sign when a video starts with a little water boarding. lol

Oh boy...episode 4...you are not alone in not being prepared for this...it is the toughest episode for almost everyone to watch and react to.
The cow was going to be killed regardless of whether she stayed or left...it was contaminated as was its milk.

Something that does not get mentioned in the show is that many of the men who went out onto those incredibly radioactive roof sections actually volunteered to go back out more than once in order to save others from having to be "biorobots".

The 90 seconds per man time limit for going out on that most dangerous roof section was specifically calculated to be equivalent to about 50% of the maximum allowable lifetime dosage for an average human male...so they were trying to specifically avoid killing anyone. Of course, see my note above about the many men that volunteered to go out on that roof section more than once...and there were certainly those like the man we see who ended up out on that roof for more than 90 seconds for any number of other reasons. But in any event, the Soviets knew that 90 seconds out there would mean each man would have a bout of radiation sickness to deal with, but they were definitely trying to keep every man's dosage to a survivable level.

Also, that huge revelation that the Soviet State knew about the fatal flaw in the shutdown system and both covered it up and did nothing to fix it, all the while lying to even the plant operators about the safety of the RBMK reactors, is something that could only happen in a totalitarian state like the USSR...where there is no free press or free scientific establishment for whistleblowers to talk to when they know about wrongdoing by the State.

Finally, the idea that the baby absorbed the radiation and saved the mother is not a scientific one...it is based on some things that people remembered other people saying years ago, so are subject to all the fallibilities of human memory. In reality, babies are at least ten times more sensitive to radiation than adult humans, so Ludmilla's baby could/would have gotten a lethal dose of radiation just from the initial exposure from being in Chernobyl.

😂 Matt has glitter because he just changed out of his cinnamon roll outfit

Why do yanks wear caps indoors?