In the late 1970s, Brazilians living under a military dictatorship needed a way to mock the government without getting arrested. Their solution? They borrowed from American pop culture, calling the regime's unelected, hand-picked politicians "bionicos" — after The Six Million Dollar Man's Steve Austin. It's one of the strangest collisions of entertainment and political resistance in modern history, and this episode tells the full story.

We start with the political crisis: a Brazilian military government bypassing democratic elections to install loyal officials in positions of power, and a public searching for coded language to express their outrage safely. Then we trace the unlikely source of that code word back to Martin Caidin's 1972 novel Cyborg, the original story of a test pilot rebuilt with mechanical limbs after a catastrophic ...