Open Wide, O Earth

Lore & Background

The three plant workers complete their mission with hand-pumped flashlights and drain the reservoirs in the basement. A team of miners from Tula is then authorised to excavate beneath the core so that a heat exchanger can be installed. Shcherbina tells Legasov privately that the KGB is watching them. Legasov asks Khomyuk to interview Dyatlov, Akimov and Toptunov and to find the cause of the explosion.

In Moscow, Lyudmilla finds her husband Vasily apparently recovering, which Legasov explains is only a latency period. Within weeks Vasily, Akimov and Toptunov die.

Before they do, the two operators give Khomyuk their accounts, and she learns that the emergency shutdown button triggered the explosion. She is arrested after confronting a nurse and released at the demand of Legasov. The episode ends with the burial of Vasily and other first responders in graves sealed with concrete.

Reader's Guide

This is a dramatisation, and several of its threads involve invented or disputed material. Khomyuk, who carries the investigation in the episode, is a fictional composite of the many scientists who worked on the accident. The idea that Vasily was dangerous to his wife is also shown; a medical responder later said that such beliefs were false, and that once he had been showered and was out of his contaminated clothing he would not have been a danger to others.

The first broadcast on HBO drew 1.063 million viewers in the United States. The miners, led in the series by a crew chief played by Alex Ferns, are among the lesser-known stories of the disaster that the series set out to tell.