Tragedies with Invisible Enemies

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It happens in broad daylight, which is unnerving enough. The real sadness comes from the idea that no one was trying to do any harm.

In 1987, in the central Brazilian city of Goiânia, cesium powder from a decommissioned radiology machine spread through a neighborhood. What started out as a quick attempt to salvage some material and trade it for quick cash unknowingly started a chain of events that led to a massive mobilization of public health efforts to contain the unprecedented spread of radioactive material. Unsurprisingly to anyone who has watched these kind of events unfold in the four decades since, it also led to political maneuvering, liability mitigation, and a giant overarching question of who deserves what kind of care in the wake of an unforeseen crisis. 

“Radioactive Emergency,” the latest Netflix drama series from Brazil, is not only a record of that period but a balancing of it. It’s a biographical story of an entire region told with minimal abstractions and shortcuts. But there’s a clarity in the act of telling, a recognition that assigning immediate blame is not only counterproductive in this case. It’s almost impossible. 

Instead, “Radioactive Emergency” becomes a mirroring of all our more modern catastrophes, where even when a chain of events can be traced fairly clearly to an inciting incident or an unfortunate case of horrible luck, the biggest culprits are invisible. They are unseen killers, either artificial or chemical or an idea perpetuated through generations, leaving the most vulnerable holding the bill when chance finally makes it come due. 

The opening episode follows the powder from person to person in a tight-knit neighborhood. A pair of young men sort through the shuttered radiology clinic looking for scrap metal to flip. They find something far worse in the heart of an abandoned machine and the capsule they pry from the inside soon makes its way to a local garage. The garage’s boss Evenildo (Bukassa Kabengele) is immediately taken with the luminescent sandlike stuff spilling out of its casing and onto his workroom table. It quickly becomes something of a local party trick, with local families taking a handful of it for themselves, playing with it on kitchen counters and even using it as exotic accessories. It’s weeks before anyone involved starts to realize the severity of the consequences. 

There’s a danger in historical dramas like this that a show could pick the wrong central representative. Whenever a hero is at the center, it’s the show affixing a particular lens through which to view everyone else. In those versions, there are survivors and victims and one person has an outsized effect on who lands where. “Radioactive Emergency” has its share of virtuous folks. Márcio (Johnny Massaro) is the nuclear expert pulled into the fray when this all erupts during a routine trip home to visit his father. Soon, Brazil’s top nuclear energy commission official Dr. Beny Orenstein (Paulo Gorgulho) is also called into service, building a response team from scratch. Hospital staff and family members chip in to provide physical and moral support. Threading all of these experiences, hopping between people in various circles surrounding the breach’s epicenter, keeps the show from being too vague and generalized about what it was like to live through this. 

That sense of specificity is especially important when everyone in this story is racing against time and a whole host of those other unseen villains. There’s the cesium itself, shimmering its radiant blue in the darkness of a garage at night. (Director Fernando Coimbra manages to find the perfect way to show how someone might be drawn in by the powder, while also never letting the audience lose sight of the destruction that came in the substance’s wake.) A repeated refrain throughout the series is that enough bystanders see what happened to these families as justified, or at least a problem of their own making that they can solve somewhere else. (For as much as “Radioactive Emergency” is made up of willing helpers, Coimbra, creator Gustavo Lipsztein, and the rest of the series writing staff show how that desire to help often goes hand in hand with having to plead their case with someone far more apathetic.) If those weren’t enough, Márcio and Orenstein and the rest have to fight the uphill battle against public officials whose knee-jerk reaction is considering the optics of how all their preventative measures will play out, weighing the saving of lives against the inconveniencing of others’. 

(The closest thing that “Radioactive Emergency” has to a person front and center to lob virtual tomatoes at is someone spiritually linked to our modern everyday crises of affordability and consolidation and lack of accountability. Not to spoil who it might be but here’s a hint: It starts with an “L” and ends with a “andlord.”)

Just as this crisis unfolded in the wake of Chernobyl, “Radioactive Emergency” does share recognizable DNA with “Chernobyl.” There’s the similar brand of tension, watching the chaos of nature build exponentially while people do everything in their power to keep everything from blowing past “catastrophe” and into the range of “widespread cataclysm.” In what surely also happened in both real-life cases, the series show how those called for the initial damage assessment are convinced their equipment is broken, only to find that the atmospheric danger is so great that their devices can’t even process it. From there, it’s a question of (just as in fictional apocalypses, too) how to make people understand the weight of the situation while also keeping calm everyone who isn’t affected (yet). 

For as much as the show trusts its individuals and invests in their respective arcs, “Radioactive Emergency” does sometimes succumb to the Very Serious Biopic Moment where two characters stare at each other meaningfully in silence before the music swells and one of them delivers a definitive statement impossibly drenched in import. (One episode ends with a beat like this.) There are conversations around boardroom tables that, instead of leaning into the banality of bureaucracy, try to offer up some stirring moments of human spirit. The degree to which you might find that effective depends on how profound you believe someone can be in a conference room, no matter how much handsome, period-appropriate wood paneling there might be. 

In the wake of the Season 2 finale of “The Pitt,” folks have been pointing out that the camera never deviates from eye level. You feel like you’re trapped in the hospital because you never get anything other than the visual perspective of a person moving through it. As straightforward as “Radioactive Emergency” is at times, there are times when it does step away from biopic mode and indulges a more visually inventive side. During the moment when the lead-lined capsule is opened at the beginning, releasing the material from its cage, the camera slowly descends upon the two young men tempting fate. This is how tragedy starts, not with a bang but with a crane and a crowbar. 

“Radioactive Emergency” takes on a delicate task, to show how Evenildo was instrumental in distributing the cesium throughout his neighborhood without making him the object of scorn or mockery. This show presents him as essentially a small business owner who sees a chance to give something nice and magical to his family and friends. He reacts to this powder the same way that a dad might see a glow-in-the-dark toy at a museum gift shop or on an arcade prize wall. It’s a small thing that inspires awe and brings a smile to a kid’s face. Misguided and careless in retrospect, obviously, but driven by the unspoken assumption that nothing this dangerous would just be left behind for the public to stumble on. He grows defensive when the people who come to his work and his home seem to be acting an awful lot like police officers. Again, an entirely understandable response, especially from someone protective of not only himself but the means for providing for his family. 

So, there’s another invisible villain for you: the erosion of public trust. The further the show goes through the timeline of this tragedy, the more you realize how much more of it could have been neutralized had there been a greater sense of cooperation between institutional response and the community it’s charged to serve. Piecing together details in retrospect keeps Márcio and Orenstein and their skeleton crew of colleagues chasing a week-old ghost that stayed hidden for longer than it needed to. 

This is not the kind of story you watch expecting there to be a rosy outcome. So how best to layer in the emotions that can balance out the pain that’s surely to come? “Radioactive Emergency” finds different ways to lean on family. We see it through Evenildo, played by Kabengele with a blend of stubbornness and sincerity. His response to this tragedy is driven by pride, but that erodes over time as everything else (house, business, the familiarity of the everyday) falls away to leave nothing else but the people left around him. There is a heroic puppy-dog nature to Márcio, bolstered by Massaro’s ability to let some genuine fear and uncertainty creep through at unexpected moments. And at the risk of invoking that Pennsylvania doctor show again, there are the tiny triumphs that come with a hospital drama giving its patients at least a slightly better shot at a slightly better life, knowing that we’re all heading toward the same ending. 

“Radioactive Emergency” is also worth watching by virtue of where it chooses to end. This is not merely a 30-45 day ordeal to be bottled up and stashed away. Pretending the danger is cleared away once the powder is contained doesn’t serve anyone in Goiânia, particularly when the underlying issues that exacerbated the tragedy very much still persist. We see death and loss and shaken trust. Rather than ending there on a note of pure devastation, “Radioactive Emergency” makes room for a finale that centers on where this community heads next. That ending dilemma focuses, once again, on responsibly and sacrifice. Individuals and communities are left to shoulder the burden that those before them chose to either downplay or outright ignore. Even after an ordeal that underlines the importance of not punting health- and environment-related issues to somewhere out of sight, “Radioactive Emergency” shows how tempting (and, in some cases, politically expedient) that choice can still be. The most insidious enemy is the assumption that next time the problem won’t be as bad. Or, even worse, that a next time will never come. 

“Radioactive Emergency” is available to stream on Netflix.