Ned Ned's operation is not going smoothly at all, just as Bryce flashforwarded two minutes ago. It's not until Olivia reluctantly administers hydrocortisone that Ned Ned comes back from the land of the nearly-dead. We see Bryce watching from an observation room; we do not see him mouthing, "I TOLD YOU SO."

Back at FBI headquarters, Mark is attempting to interrogate the supermodel terrorist Alda. (Honestly, I have long contended that if you really wanted to cripple the Western world, you'd brainwash a few of those teen models as undercover bombers. They travel everywhere without much hassle, they get entrée into all sorts of places, and nobody would think that some six-foot-tall teenager with bee-stung lips is a fanatical jihadi. So this casting of a gorgeous blonde makes sense here.) Alda says, "I knew [Agent Noh] didn't have a flashforward. I didn't know he was going to be murdered 'til now." Mark wants to know how Alda "knew he didn't see anything," and she chalks it up to the Mosaic project. I was unaware that people in federal custody had untrammeled access to the World Wide Web.

The conversation does not improve from there. Alda smugs, "You're wasting your energy on what caused the blackout, who's responsible. You're ignoring the most profound question of all: Why? Do you know what a black swan is? It's a metaphor used to describe a high-impact event, something so rare, it's beyond the realm of human expectation. It comes from the 17th century when scientists assumed that all swans were white. They were wrong." Then Alda busts out her fluent Farsi, but ha ha HA!, Mark is fluent too and he says, "So there's a room and a small boy enters with a candle. What is this, a bedtime story?" Sadly, no. It's another one of Alda's esoteric digressions: "It's a Sufi parable. The man in the room with the candle asks, 'Tell me where this light comes from.' And the boy blows out the candle and replies, 'If you tell me where this light went, I'll tell you where it comes from." Does this parable end with Mark reciting the electromagnetic wave equation and schooling Alda on Maxwell's equations? Oh, please, oh, please ...