Episode Report Card Sobell: B | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Black Swan Singing to the FBI
By Sobell | Season 1 | Episode 4 | Aired on 10.15.2009
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 ...
Alas, no. Alda smugs some more: "Your partner is right about one thing. I commune with some very dangerous people. I'm friends with those willing to don suicide vests in the name of ideology. I know when a man is willing to sacrifice anything for his cause. And you're not that kind of man, Agent Benford." Really? Because Mark sacrificed a hell of a lot of integrity last week liberating that Nazi, and he's just proven himself willing to spend four minutes of his life with you. He'll never get those minutes back! And sadly, neither will we. Alda continues her goading with, "Even if you start asking the right questions, you're not willing to do what it takes to get the answers. You're that little boy, Agent Benford, alone in the dark." Oh, how I weary of the TV convention of smart criminals -- especially since these sinister brainiacs can never answer the question, "If you're so goddamned smart, why didn't you get away?" The lawbreaking underworld is not exactly filled with lots of Dr. Dooms in training. Would that it were -- I myself tire of seeing men in business suits at international gatherings and think someone in a hooded green cloak and a faceplate would be just the thing to liven up photo ops -- but it's not, and so I grow weary of this comic-quality villainess. Next scene!
We see Agent Gough at his desk, sighing deeply before tapping into the Mosaic project and typing the name "Celia." Surprise, surprise, there are a lot of results for that query. Before Al can spiral into despair or whatever, Mark comes into his office and asks, "Hey, Al, remember that hacker, Mister Cheeto Dust? Give him a call." Oooh, machinations are afoot! Al asks if Somalia's really that important, and Mark says, "Yeah. It's time I got out of the dark."
Ned Ned is just coming to and learning that he's got Addison's Disease. His first question is an entirely reasonable one: "Who's Addison?" "The one vaguely sympathetic character on Grey's Anatomy, since exiled to a ludicrous medical soap opera," Doctor Varley replies. Or perhaps he simply mumbles something about Addison being the cat who described the malady Ned Ned's suffering. Bryce refrains from pointing out that Olivia and her bias against using the future to diagnose in the now nearly killed Ned Ned, but he adds, "We should thank you. Your flashforwards helped us piece it together. If you hadn't told us what you saw, you might have died on the table." Ned Ned, who is still riding that sweet post-anesthesia high, slurs, "I wasn't afraid because I didn't need to be afraid. The future saved me." Bryce, who skipped eating a gun after seeing his flashforward, smiles in understanding. I smile because the show finally, finally elects to trust that we viewers will remember little details like that from week to week.
Olivia's waiting outside Ned Ned's recovery cube and she apologizes, indirectly, by telling Bryce that it was her hangups owing to her own flashforward that prejudiced her against seeing the merit in Bryce's arguments. Bryce admits that his own marvelous, heretofore-unseen flashforward is what biased him toward believing Ned Ned and thereby coming up with the obscure diagnosis in the nick of time. Olivia then gently fishes for a status update on Bryce's mental and emotional health and he glassily repeats, "The future saved me." This makes me wonder: why are we not seeing a wave of suicides from people who saw their futures and decided, "To hell with this all"?
By the way, Dylan Simcoe is back under Olivia's care. She is none too pleased about this.
That night, at stately Benford Manor, Mark greets Nicole very warmly and she gives him the 411 on Charlie's daily activities. None of those activities included recounting in detail what her flashforward was, which is just too bad for Mark, but he does get a chance to talk to Nicole about her flashforward and her subsequent disappearing act. Nicole says sheepishly, "I'm trying to figure out why you guys didn't fire me." Mark tells her she's part of the family, then asks if she'd like to talk about what happened.
"I saw someone drowning me in my flashforward. I saw someone drowning me, and I don't understand, but I felt like I deserved what was happening. Like I'd done something wrong and there was no other way out," Nicole says. We see her in a white dress, being drowned in an impossibly blue and clear body of water. She adds that she saw the man's face while he was doing it. So do we -- and it looks an awful lot like the priest who was so freaked out a few scenes ago. Nicole finishes: "He pushed me back down, and then I was just gone. What did I do to deserve being murdered?" We see her drift to the bottom of the pool, a modern Ophelia. If rosemary's for remembrance, what flower stands for precognition?
Mark's brow is furrowed upon hearing all this, but his brow is furrowed nearly all the time, so it's not like we can gauge how deeply he was affected by Nicole's story. But he consoles her: "I've known you a long time. You didn't do anything wrong, and you won't. Tomorrow, I'm going to have a detective friend of mine from the LAPD come talk to you. We're not going to let anything bad happen. I want to do whatever I have to, to make sure you're safe." But how will he fit it into his busy schedule of getting punched by coworkers and guilting his wife over her flashforward? I worry that the extra responsibility will drive him to the bottle.
Anyway, Mark dispenses some wisdom he should actually heed: "That person you think you saw, that person you worry you'll be? That's not you." Then Charlie comes down and Mark proves he's a hell of a father and employer by cooking all the ladies in the room breakfast-for-dinner. (Scoff all you want: a man who can make pancakes after a bad day is a keeper.)
Back at the hospital, Lloyd's proving that he can scale a steep learning curve with regards to this parenting thing, and he is entertaining Dylan with a story that requires sleight-of-hand tricks. Olivia witnesses this heartwarming vignette on her way home to another heartwarming father-child vignette. Lloyd then says he's off to pick up dinner super-quick, and he's derailed from this errand when his mobile goes off and it's someone named Simon.
We see Simon, who is getting the