A Dutch artist sets out to make a three-part masterpiece. Part one is a lonely nighttime search by flashlight. Part two is crossing the entire Atlantic in a 13-foot boat. Part three never happened, because he disappeared. Nine months later his empty boat was found floating bow-down in the open ocean.

This episode explores the haunting life and work of Bas Jan Ader, the conceptual and performance artist whose art blurred the line between vulnerability and existence itself. We trace how childhood trauma shaped his obsession with surrender, and ask whether his vanishing was a tragic accident or the ultimate work of art.

• How his father, a Calvinist minister executed by the Nazis in 1944 for sheltering Jewish people, anchored a lifelong meditation on loss of control
• The 'falling films' in which Ader deliberately tumbles off ro ...