The monster in the labyrinth had a name: Asterion, meaning star, and he was a prince of Crete. This episode builds a chronological biography of the Minotaur beginning with King Minos's plea to Poseidon for a sign of divine favor, his refusal to sacrifice the white bull that emerged from the sea, and the curse that drove Queen Pasiphae, daughter of the sun god Helios, into the hollow wooden cow built by Daedalus.

The hosts follow Asterion's isolated childhood, the labyrinth as a possible alternative to killing family and incurring miasma, the death of his half-brother Androgeus in Athens, and the tribute of seven youths and seven maidens that 19th-century mythologists read as a memory of Minoan economic dominance. They then reexamine Theseus, who needed Ariadne's thread, abandoned her on Naxos, and forgot to change his black sails, causing h ...