Brace yourselves. This one is long.
I'll admit it. When I first tuned in to the pilot of USA's White Collar last year, I really only did it because I wanted to see Bryce Larkin (Matt Bomer's role on NBC's Chuck) as a charming con-man instead of smarmy super spy. My hopes for the show weren't terribly high. The premise sounded a little too much like the ending of Catch Me If You Can for my tastes.
Since the pilot aired, I've only watched two episodes on Hulu. The rest I've seen live when they aired.
I say this to demonstrate the depth of my awe and devotion to this show, as a busy college student fully aware of, and at ease with, the new media markets that are available to young tech savvy viewers like me.
The show plays itself out like a masterfully executed con. An overarching through-line pulls the audience along with Neal from episode to episode, all the while slipping in new players and new information for viewers to sort out. The brilliance of White Collar comes from its subtlety. The writers have mastered the art of the mislead and foreshadowing. They’re the con man and we’re the FBI agent.
To Jeff Eastin and the writers at White Collar, I have only this to say. “It’s my job to catch you. It’s your job to not get caught.”
This week's episode was brilliant. From almost the moment Burke walked in Neal’s door, I started chanting “It’s a flashback episode, it’s a flashback episode!” over and over again at my TV, much to the annoyance of my younger brother, who is also a fan. You see, I wasn’t excited because I would get to learn how Neal and Mozzie met, or how Neal and Kate fell in love. I was excited because finally we, as the audience, would get to uncover the missing pieces in the through-arch fractal puzzle that our main characters have possessed all along. This episode would give us the chance to figure out if we were smarter than Neal and Peter by pitting us against one another on a relatively even playing field.
So here’s what this episode told me.
One, Adler is the top of the Music Box food chain. He’s not working for someone else or being held against his will. Whether or not the fractal is his final goal or just another piece of a larger puzzle remains to be seen.
Two, Adler has been (and still is) working a “long-con” on Neal from the moment they met.
Three, Alex is in on it, working for Adler, and has been all along.
Four, so is Kate, but she’s conflicted about it. And she’s not dead.
Five, Mozzie isn’t working for Adler. But the writers have set it up so that he could be.
Here’s why.
The nature of the long con is simple. “You ingratiate yourself, become a trusted friend, and then convince him [The Mark] to tell you.” Mozzie’s words. Assume for a moment that I’m right, that Adler is conning Neal, trying to use him to find the music box. How would he go about doing it? He’d ingratiate himself, become a trusted friend and convince him. But he can’t get close to his mark, because it would mean Neal would be getting close to him too, and as Alex points out later in the episode, grifters tend to know their own. So how would he do it? He’d use his pretty assistant.
Vincent Adler barely seems to notice Neal except as a fly buzzing around his ear. He’s casually and politely interested in what Neal has to say, but eager to move on. I’ll point out that this is very similar to how Neal acts towards Peter when he passes off the Unfinished Business to help make the point. Instead, he passes Neal off to Kate and walks away. Almost immediately, Kate “guesses” Neal’s true motives (upon seeing the bottle of Bordeaux… we’ll come back to that) playfully accusing him of being “here to cozy up to my boss.” Kate knows from the get-go what Neal is up to, if not every detail or even the nature of the con, so it’s reasonable to suspect that Adler does as well. Also, maybe it’s just the actress, but when Kate says goodbye to Neal after their first meeting, she places a bit of an emphasis on his false name. It’s almost exactly the same emphasis that Alex will put on the name later when she reveals she knows Caffrey’s secret.
All the romantic viewers are now screaming. “But Kate loves Neal! She wouldn’t con him!” Well, as Mozzie points out so eloquently, “Every con man gets his heart broken. Once.” Kate’s motivations come shining through in her first conversation with Neal, standing before a piece of art. When Neal tells her he’s dabbled in art, Kate reveals, “I tried, but the romance of being a starving artist wore off very fast.” When Adler disappears, and she and Neal are left unemployed, she complains to Neal saying, “No money! No Jobs! It’s all gone!” Kate is a person who enjoys the finer things in life, just like our good buddy Neal, and she has realized that romantic notions of artistry are not enough to get them for her. She needs money. So let’s assume that this means that she can be bought, even if it doesn’t mean that she was.
So what makes her appear to be Adler’s pawn? The fact that Adler keeps pushing Neal on her. He practically throws them together in the first meeting, he gives Neal his assignments through her so that they will have time to interact. He inquires about their relationship encourages it, telling Neal, “You and Kate have gotten close. You look good together.”
So what happens with Kate after Adler disappears to whatever tropical island or Siberian silo he hides in and stops visibly manipulating Neal and Kate’s relationship? She starts pulling cons with Neal and Mozzie showing a skill that usually comes from practice (granted, there’s a cut scene before we see her in the cop outfit, we didn’t get to see the Neal and Mozzie Train Kate Montage, but it might have existed). She accepts Nick as Neal alarmingly easily (granted, we don’t get to see Neal actually tell her, she might have thrown a fit). She even goes so far as to try to convince Neal she’s more important than his friends. After Caffrey has claimed the false password, he walks with Kate with his new hat. Neal tells her he has to go. “I promised a riend, I can’t back out,” he tells her. What is her response? “I think you should blow off said commitment” (granted, this is all in the context of a flirtatious conversation, and attributing deeper meaning to it might be a bit of a stretch).
Here’s the kicker though. When Kate leaves Neal, what is it that makes her leave? She admits that it’s not Alex. She says that it’s that Caffrey tried to con her. What if she gets upset with Neal because he isn’t including her in the search for the music box, the thing she’s been working towards all along? What if her disappearance is her pulling out of the con when she realizes that Neal, the man she’s grown to love, isn’t going to give her what her boss wants? So when Neal finds her again, Adler starts to use her again. Enter Pilot Episode.
There’s also Alex. Assume for a moment that she’s a plant: hired by Adler to fake an investigative attack on his company to test Neal’s skills. Only after Caffrey catches her does he learn about the music box. She practically tells Neal that he wants it when she says her target is “Something Adler doesn’t have.” Neal counters with, “He has everything.” And she nails the point home with “He doesn’t have this.” There’s also the interesting exchange between Alex and Adler in his office while Neal watches over them. I suggest watching that particular scene again with her potential complicity in mind.
Subtlety Abounds
This has all been just surface level analysis of characters and potential motivations. Plus, that would be a ridiculously long con for Adler and Kate to be pulling on Neal. Assuming that the writers are as brilliant as I’ve been giving them credit for, then if I’m right about where the show is heading, the episode should be laden with subtle foreshadowing. Guess what? It is.
Let’s do an SAT style analogy. Neal is to Adler as Kate is to Neal. Do the writers hint at Neal’s upcoming role reversal? You bet they do.
Adler tells Neal, “You’ve got diverse interests.” Neal’s response is, “like you. Art is my passion.”
Later Adler points out their similarities himself starting a conversation with “Nick, men like you and I…”
Caffrey brings the bottle of Bordeaux as a gift for Adler, it later will become a symbol or Kate and Neal’s romantic future.
About his fake relationship with Kate, Neal says “I feel like I could blink and it would all be gone.”
Additionally there are at least 8 references in the episode to cons taking an extensive amount of time. References to long cons or time clocks and the like. I’ve time stamped them for you based on the Hulu clock I used when I re-watched the episode.
Mozzie – “A long con” 6:24
Mozzie – “Our clock is five months” 10:52
Neal – “The job became my life” 22:34
Mozzie – “Every day with Adler counts” 24:20
Burke – “You and Mozzie were still running the long con” 25:30
Neal – “Every con has an expiration date” 25:37
Neal – “I have to be somewhere by six. It’s a commitment I made a long time ago” 28:51
Neal – “You said it yourself. This is a long con.” 29:53
Finally, for those of you still reading, here are some interesting lines (taken way out of context) that could be potentially hinting towards this version of the rest of the season if you want them to be.
Burke: “And Kate was there the whole time”
Alex: “I don’t work for anyone. Yet.”
Neal: “Trying to make the lie real”
Mozzie: “Don’t kid yourself, Kate doesn’t even know your real name”
Mozzie: “She cares about Nick Haldan and he doesn’t exist”
Adler: “Some people say ‘dress for the job you want.’ I say dress like the man you want to be”
Adler: “Don’t sell yourself short. Kate will love you for who you really are. As will others”
Mozzie: “Neal. This smells like a trap.”
Neal: “He conned us.”
Burke: “He conned everybody.”
And my personal favorite:
Burke: “Nobody saw this coming?”
... I did.
Now all that remains is for the writers to take the show in a completely different direction that I didn't see coming at all and blow my mind yet again.
