<em>Chernobyl</em> Is a Gruesome, Riveting Fable

There’s a scene early in where a man pries open a metal door and accidentally looks right into the exposed core of a nuclear reactor—a blinding, lethal, white snowstorm of poison and chaos that scorches him where he stands. This is, you might reason, not a bad metaphor for life online in 2019: the surprises, the gravitational yank of innocuous portals, the toxic aftershock. And then one episode later, Ulana Khomyuk (played by Emily Watson) has a conversation with a Soviet apparatchik about the “incident” at Chernobyl that brings the analogy fully home. “I’ve been assured there’s no problem,” the bureaucrat says..”