Jean-Paul Sartre is the subject of this episode, the third in a BBC series that also covers Nietzsche and Heidegger under the shared title borrowed from Nietzsche's 1878 book of the same name. The film traces Sartre's role in shaping existentialism, the philosophy built around the claim that existence precedes essence and that people are condemned to define themselves through their own choices, without appeal to God or fixed human nature. It places Sartre's ideas against the backdrop of postwar Paris, where he became as much a public figure as an academic one, and against his political commitments, which put him at odds with contemporaries over questions of freedom and responsibility. Commentary and archival material fill in the connections between Sartre's writing and the two philosophers who came before him in the series, tracing how a term he never coined came to define his work anyway.