London, summer 1936: Salvador Dalí arrived to lecture on modern art in a full deep-sea diving suit, holding a billiard cue and leading two Russian wolfhounds, and nearly suffocated on stage while the audience laughed, assuming it was performance. This episode strips away the spectacle to find the calculating man beneath: born in Catalonia in 1904, nine months after the death of an older brother whose name he was given, raised by a strict atheist lawyer father, and shattered at sixteen by his mother's death.

We follow him to Madrid, where he befriended Luis Buñuel and Federico García Lorca while obsessively studying Velázquez and Vermeer at the Prado, building the classical mastery that made his hallucinations feel real. We unpack the paranoiac-critical method, his meeting with Gala in 1929 and her role as ruthless business architect, his vi ...