Ned realizes somewhere around the moment when Meyer says second World War that, actually, summarizing the events of the last century is hardly the kind of light conversation he was hoping for to distract him from their current situation. But he doesn't want to go back on his offer, just because the majority of human history seems to amount to horror and tragedy. He'll just try to balance it as much as he can with the good things.

So as he starts carefully layering the fruit into the pie crust, he talks. Picks up where he imagines Meyer left off, tells him about the end of Prohibition, about the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. He tells him about Pearl Harbor, WWII, D-Day. Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the Holocaust. Tells him about Communism and the Cold War, about spies and McCarthy and mutually assured destruction, Vietnam and Korea and puppet dictators across Latin America. Tells him about the collapse of the British Empire and independence movements all around the globe. Tells him about Watergate and the sexual revolution and hippies, the war on poverty, the war on drugs. Tells him about civil rights and women's rights and gay rights, the collapse of the Soviet Union.

At that point, he realizes that he's been talking for a very long time without pause, without even looking up from the pie which is now entirely filled. He glances over at Meyer, realizing he probably should have gone slower, given more context, found more evidence of human decency to mix in with all the rest.