Decade long shows like The Big Bang Theory and Game of Thrones have finally climaxed and ardent fans have had to finally say "Bazinga!" to Westros.
There's some way to save yourself from 'post-series depression' (a widely accepted non-clinical term for feeling low after finishing a series), by turning to this abysmal miniseries by HBO.
"...and it all started with a big bang (pun intended)," is one way you could associate the three shows together, and here ends the similarity.
We now move on to the little town of 'Pripyat,' along the Ukraine-Belarus border where the story begins.
'What is the cost of lies?'
This first line of 'Chernobyl,' is also the first question asked to an unassuming audience watching HBO's haunting new series about a nuclear meltdown at the site in erstwhile USSR in the April of 1986.
Dubbed as the worst nuclear catastrophe in the history of humankind, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster killed and displaced many, and still affects a million others even three decades into the man-made accident.
Creators Craig Mazin and Johan Rench have come up with a show that is devastatingly good and heart-wrenching, which makes its viewers live the horrors of the moment.
Rather than being a first hand account, the work is rather a thought-provoking linear narrative, which is in most terms, a well-researched and factually dramatic representation of the disaster.
We're taken to the workers at the power plant who are still unconvinced that a nuclear core has exploded in one sequence, while far away in the distance, little children gather over a bridge in the middle of the night to dance in the snowy ash belching from the Chernobyl plant, in the town of Pripyat. First responders to the scene are only informed about a fire and carelessly splash irradiated water all over themselves, when a curious fire fighter at the scene picks up a graphite piece, presumably from the core, to see his hand melt away.
The miniseries is also crash course in science, history, and nuclear physics. The nuclear power plant, now an abandoned ghost town of Pripyat, and the other 80's setting have been intricately brought to life with stark accuracy. The science behind the running of such reactors and the aftermath of nuclear irradiation are brilliantly explained.
What rattles you more than anything is the state of affairs in Soviet Russia at the time. Those in power were way too keen to protect their authority and description, constantly denying the fact that a gigantic catastrophe had taken place.
But what differentiated it from the rest of the world were its people. A 1948 poem at the start of episode two, calls the place a 'bitter land that its people are born to defend.'
The show portrays all of this without giving in to a tad bit of drama, like the scientists working to quell the damage, knowing of its consequences, paramedics administering to the affected, and residents of about a fifty thousand, who evacuate the town without any hesitation on the behest of the police.
Chernobyl is a tense, riveting, and chilling recount of history, put forth with such delicate tangibility. The cost of lies, like in our initial question, was inevitably the cost of lives.
Creator Craig Mazin goes on to explain in an equally intriguing podcast on the miniseries, "..it deals with the danger of narrative and what happens when people choose to ignore the truth. And as it turns out, the truth does not care, the truth will come to pass."
(Opinions expressed are personal)