The start of this episode is intentionally foreboding. It reminds me very much of the pre-accident scenes in HBO’s “Chernobyl.” I had never heard of the Aberfan incident before this episode, but just from the shooting style and content, I could tell that something bad was about to happen to those children. This haunting atmosphere is repeated during the credits, which are shown over film of children playing in their schoolyard.

There’s an absolutely gorgeous shot of a little girl running out into a heavy rainstorm with a red umbrella. It’s shot so that almost all color has been drained from the scene; it looks black and white except for that one red umbrella, with one singing little girl under it. It almost evokes the red balloon from “It.” I doubt that was exactly what they were going for though. Red umbrellas on a black and white background are a surprisingly common motif in a lot of photography and paintings , you can find it all over the place.

On second watch, it became obvious that the green coal tips are visible in almost every outside shot of the pre-accident sequence; they are so huge that they overwhelm and hang over every person and every thing in the whole village. You can see them at the end of the main street, behind the schoolteacher as he talks to his class, and behind the children and the miners as they go to and from their homes.

Interestingly enough, the green from the tips seems to become a theme throughout the entire episode, seen in both the costuming, the lighting, and the scenery. Almost everyone in this episode wears green. I believe this symbolizes the huge impact the disaster had on the entire nation; everyone was impacted and heartbroken over it. The Queen wears numerous green outfits (at least two house robes, a green floral shirt, and a green cardigan, I may have missed one or two as well), the crowd yelling at the politicians and the National Coal Board reps is wearing a LOT of green, Tony wears green as he goes off to Aberfan, Margaret wears a green dress as he kisses her on his way out the door and a green striped shirt at breakfast with her family. In the Buckingham palace scenes, they spend a lot of time in one particular green room. There’s even a green lighting over some of the scenes; the one that stands out most is when Harold Wilson is taking off his coal-dust covered shoes at the end of the day and looking absolutely defeated. The amount of green in this episode is just absolutely bonkers; I was half expecting to hear some proto-environmentalism come up to tie more into the “green.”

Of course, the most devastating use of green comes during the funeral, in the green cloth (?) lining the huge grave, filled with the coffins of 81 children. The crowd at the funeral is still surrounded by those giant green hills all around them (how many of them are coal tips vs hills? It’s so unnerving not to know).