A Marine pinned down in the Pacific was terrified not of enemy fire but of a medic cutting away his uniform and exposing the pink women’s undergarments beneath. This episode looks past the worst director of all time label at Edward Davis Wood Jr., born in Poughkeepsie in 1924, dressed as a girl by a mother who wanted a daughter, salvaging discarded lobby cards behind the local theater, and filming the Hindenburg with his first camera hours before it burned.

We separate his mythologized combat stories from the clerical and body-recovery duties and filariasis of his real service, then follow his 1947 arrival in Hollywood, his friendship with a declining Bela Lugosi, the bait-and-switch that turned exploitation money into the personal film Glen or Glenda, the chiropractor stand-in hiding behind a cape in Plan 9 from Outer Space, Night of the Ghouls sitting unpaid in a lab for 25 years, more than 80 pulp novels, adult films directed in drag, alcoholism, eviction, and his death at 54 in 1978 days after his life’s work was thrown in a dumpster.

• The pen names Angora and Oktav Telmig and what they reveal
• How Wood supported Lugosi through addiction and institutionalization
• Why making an earnest film about cross-dressing in 1953 was accidentally pioneering
• The Golden Turkey Awards, Tim Burton’s 1994 biopic and the Church of Ed Wood
• Whether a creator who transfers a feeling to an audience has succeeded at art