From the beginning, viewers of HBO’s miniseries Chernobyl know more than the characters themselves about what’s to come—like Titanic, its very name is a spoiler. And so the opening scenes are shocking for what they don’t contain: no deafening boom, no crowds running screaming from a shower of glowing rubble. Instead the disaster’s unfolding is muffled by bureaucracy, as the lead engineer at the power plant insists crossly that there may have been some lesser industrial accident, but that the core of the reactor has not exploded—it can’t have.

On a podcast the accompanies the miniseries, its creator Craig Mazin talks to the radio personality Peter Sagal about this disconnect. “If you or I were somewhere, and someone said ‘there’s a fire at the nuclear power plant, but it’s not the core, it’s just a fire—do you want to go see?’ We would say No! Are you insane?” So it’s particularly harrowing to watch the people in the nearby town of Pripyat gather on a bridge to watch the fire glow, the power-plant workers slog through irradiated water in flooded chambers, the fire-fighters spraying their hoses into a radioactive fire in their shirtsleeves. The situation is a perfect vehicle for suspense, which Alfred Hitchcock famously described as arising when the audience knows something the characters don’t. Our understanding of the risks associated with nuclear energy is shaped by what’s about to happen to the people of Chernobyl—but they haven’t lived through it yet.

A few of these people stand out in the story. Some have remarkable insight: Valery Legasov (Jared Harris) is a chemist who, in this retelling, is one of the first people to realize that the core of the nuclear reactor itself has exploded, when he reads a report that chunks of a black shiny mineral are littered around the site. The material is graphite—used to slow the speed of fast neutrons to allow for nuclear fission—and was only present inside the reactor core. Ulana Khomyuk (Emily Watson), a nuclear physicist working hundreds of miles from Chernobyl, figures out what has happened when some equipment in her distant lab registers extra radiation. (Legasov is a historical character; Khomyuk is a composite character, who, Mazin says, is intended to represent many of the scientists who took risks to work at Chernobyl after the explosion.)

Lyudmilla Ignatenko (Jessie Buckley), the wife of one of the fire-fighters who was called to the power plant immediately, thinking he was putting out an ordinary fire on a roof, gets more screen time than most, and unlike the scientists and bureaucrats, she’s noteworthy not for her knowledge, or her obstinacy, but her pure feeling. Her husband and the other firefighters quickly get sick with radiation poisoning and are taken to a Moscow hospital. When she follows, and maneuvers her way into the restricted ward to see him, experiencing several heartbreaking medical consequences, Lyudmilla—who is also based on a real person—is a powerful reminder of what the disaster did to individual families.

The nation needs the energy. It becomes a demon. And like any good horror-story monster, it is both dangerous and poorly understood.

But nuclear energy itself is perhaps the show’s most developed character—it’s certainly the one that undergoes the most dramatic narrative arc. It is constantly talked about, its nature endlessly debated and described. It had been a necessity. Posters in the towns around Chernobyl refer to “the friendly atom”; one reads “Our goal is the happiness of all mankind.” Even as crews scramble to contain the radioactive material and prevent a meltdown that would poison the groundwater and render Ukraine uninhabitable forever, the other three reactors at the power station are still running—the nation needs the energy. It becomes a demon. And like any good horror-story monster, it is both dangerous and poorly understood.

