Seventy percent of the Chernobyl disaster's radioactive fallout came down not on the plant's own country, but here. A third of the population died in the Second World War. And the man who's run the place since 1994 calls himself, without much irony, Europe's last dictator. Ray heads into Belarus for rebuilt cities, reintroduced bison, a Nobel Peace Prize awarded to a man still sitting in prison, and a country caught, quite literally, between Russia and the rest of Europe.

For more than three hundred years, Barbados was the one Caribbean island that never changed hands between European powers — a colonial oddity that shaped everything from its rum to its politics. Ray visits the birthplace of the world's oldest rum brand, the only place George Washington ever set foot outside continental North America, and the country that swapped a Queen for a President in 2021 and named Rihanna a National Hero on the very same night.

It's built almost entirely on the world's largest river delta, born out of a language movement and a war of independence, and it just elected its first government since a 2024 uprising ended fifteen years of one-party rule. Ray wades into Bangladesh for Sundarbans tigers, the world's longest natural beach, a Nobel Peace Prize won by lending $27 to bamboo weavers, and a country that's literally the only one on Earth named after its own language.