Somaliland, Transnistria, Nagorno-Karabakh, Ajaria, South Ossetia: places with flags, currencies, and parliaments that no other country recognizes. Simon Reeve spends five episodes visiting them, starting in Moldova, where the president teaches him to fish, and continuing into breakaway territories still running on Soviet-era infrastructure and Soviet-era politics. In Somaliland he ends up acting as an unofficial diplomat and buys a passport from a man known locally as Mr Big Beard; in Georgia he's crammed into a lift with the president. The camera follows him into a mountain region that claims the world's highest rate of longevity, into the minefields around Nagorno-Karabakh where refugee children pelt him with snowballs, and into Mogadishu, where he needs a dozen armed guards to move through the city and gets electrocuted along the way. He meets a villager who sold a kidney to buy a cow and children living in unheated railway carriages. The throughline is simple: sovereignty is a legal fiction in some places, and the people stuck on the wrong side of that fiction still have to eat, farm, and raise children.