10 Best TV Episodes Of 2019
4. Vichnaya Pamyat - Chernobyl
At the time of writing, the final episode of Chernobyl sits on a 9.9 IMDb rating, averaged out from nearly 50,000 votes. It's safe to say that people enjoyed it, then.
'Enjoy' is perhaps the wrong word though. There isn't really anything 'enjoyable' about Chernobyl, a show about the titular disaster that makes Threads looks like a Saturday morning children's cartoon, but this final episode proved there was more to it than a pervasive sense of dread and the perverse spectacle of seeing s**t hit the fan so thoroughly.
Vichnaya Pamyat essentially works as a courtroom drama and veers away from the set-pieces that defined previous episodes, as the lead investigators and people actually on the ground floor of this disaster, the people who helped save millions of lies, fail to overcome government bureaucracy and expose the truth.
For as horrible as the radiation poisoning was (and it was horrible) Chernobyl always managed to evoke the most dread when it merely lingered on dumb people in positions of power making dumb decisions. That's never more true than here, presented through a spectacularly directed episode that jumps back to the first episode to bring this mini-series full circle.