That wasn't my takeaway. I thought it was very well done. Maybe what we take away from the series depends on the perspective we go into it with.

What I saw this series attacking was not the Soviet Union nor the concept of nuclear power. Rather, it attempted to highlight what happens when you entrust a process in which details are important to an organizational structure whose inherent nature involves an endless attempt to get truth to bow to ideology.

This flaw in bureaucracy is not inherent to the Soviet system. It is what all bureaucracies do, whether we are talking about our own political bureaucracy or the bureaucracies that run our businesses, or our medical system, or the research that determines our perspective on climate change.

But details are important. To everything. And putting our hands over our ears in response to details that do not conform to our political ideology eventually destroys us all.

That's why Legasov's "quotes" ( I know these are not quotes from the real Legasov) echo in our heads, or at least should:

"The truth doesn’t care about our needs or wants. It doesn’t care about our governments, our ideologies, our religions. It will lie in wait, for all time."

"When the truth offends, we lie and lie until we cannot even remember it's there. But it is still there."

These quotes could be used in a documentary about the 2008 financial crisis and more broadly to discuss the entire concept of fiat money and central banking and the process of financialization -- to discuss what destroying the informational content of supply and demand and wealth and value does to a system which depends on all of these to maintain balance and healthy productivity.

They could be used in a documentary about the catastrophic decision to attack Iraq over non-existent WMD or more broadly to discuss the concept of empire and what chasing it does to a nation.

They could be used to describe a scientistic mindset hell-bent on replacing the balance of nature with the dictatorship of chemicals no matter how badly it thins ecological buffers and eventually destroys the ecology along with ourselves.

And it could also describe a political system gone off the rails as it turns its powers of investigation against its own citizen politicians and attempts to stifle free speech and necessary discourse in favor of the brain dead monotony of political correctness.

The flaws in the concept of Communism, Socialism, and Fascism are all the same -- they defer to central control, which means they ignore feedback as a mechanism of steering a system.

The opposite end of the spectrum is freedom, which allows feedback to steer a system unhindered. This conversation desperately needs to happen in our society because we are losing the big picture, which is why we have Antifa running around beating up people whose political ideas they disagree with in the name of protecting us from a system that beats up people whose political ideas we disagree with. Insanity -- but that's how you can smell approaching totalitarianism.