How does a drowned character from Hamlet become a Royal Navy destroyer, a neo-psychedelic band, an EDM record label, a hurricane name, and a moon of Uranus? This episode works through a disambiguation list of everything named Ophelia and tracks how the word detached from Shakespeare’s play to become what the hosts call a linguistic Trojan horse for prestige and dark poetry.

The journey moves from 19th-century painters like Delacroix, Redgrave, and Millais through Dali’s surrealist Hamlet series, into music from the 1970s to Pink Pantheress, and finally out to sea, into the weather, and into orbit.

• Why Victorian artists fixated on Ophelia, and how Millais’s botanically precise painting offered a respectable way to gaze at madness and mortality
• How 20th-century surrealists stripped away the water and flowers to keep only the idea of a mind unraveling
• The phonetic theory: why the sound of the name itself, from Natalie Merchant to the Lumineers to Ophelia Records, does the heavy lifting
• A 1912 German hospital ship, the 1915 HMS Ophelia, and what naming a warship after a tragic girl says about how militaries sanitize violence
• Ophelia, Virginia, Ophelia Plads in Copenhagen, hurricanes, asteroid 171 Ophelia, and why astronomers reach for literature to name distant rocks