In the woods downriver from Carlyle College, botanist Liz Nash discovers a corpse that has been ritually buried with a watch inscribed in Latin and a cross fashioned from sticks. The murder victim, Oxford English professor Murray Hawes, was known around the university as a harmless eccentric obsessed with Lewis Carroll's cryptic poem The Hunting of the Snark. This legendary theological and philosophical work, Hathaway elucidates, presents an impossible quest in which the hunters don't know what they're looking for, yet the danger is in finding it. Scholars and monomaniacs alike have devoted their lives to cracking The Snark's unfathomable code.
And so Lewis and Hathaway embark on an impossible quest of their own, from the Oxford botanical gardens, where Hawes regularly foraged for meaning, to the office of Carlyle's Reverend Dr. Conor Hawes, Murray's estranged brother. Conor makes no secret of his bitter rivalry with Murray, but he is somehow connected to a secret society at Carlyle College, an exclusive club whose coveted membership two goth students, Vincent and Mia, are desperately trying to secure.
Airs Sunday, July 8, at 8pm on Channel 5.
http://video.pbs.org/video/2244549604