White Collar 4.11 Family Business - SPOILERS
JUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUNE!!!!!!
High stakes Candyland! June and Mozzie! ♥♥♥
To get over there that fast you know Peter ran out the door to go to Neal’s and make sure he’s okay as soon as Neal hung up on him.
And Peter asks Neal if he’s okay and Neal says no, I’m not. Oh, Neal. Which shows not only how messed up he is but also how much he really has come to trust Peter.
Neal and Mozzie getting drunk on counterfeit whiskey = ♥♥♥ And this, along with Peter’s reaction, fits in with my personal headcanon that Neal only allows himself to get really drunk when it’s for necessary work-related reasons.
Neal has his own ideas about what Ellen deserves, and what her killer deserves, and he’s willing to go off-book on his own if Peter doesn’t agree. This failed to blow up into a source of conflict in this episode, but I expect it’s going to come back later in the season. (At least he’s not shooting at people this time. Yet.)
I don’t trust James. And I remember thinking at the end of 4.10 that if Neal embraced his father quickly then he’d turn out to be evil by the end of the season, whereas if he kept pushing him away in 4.11 they’d change it around by the end of the season and have Neal and James tearfully reconcile. I remember thinking the first impression is going to be the wrong one, and the first impression we get with this episode is that James is a good guy who’s made mistakes but he loves his son and wants to be a part of his life.
Whatever happens this is going to end badly. Neal wants to trust James; he’s resentful at first but he jumps on the first scrap of evidence suggesting that James is telling the truth and clings to it. I hope James is evil, at least partly because I think he’s either going to be evil or he’s going to end up dead and this thing where they kill off ALL of Neal’s loved ones is getting old. Having his dad turn out to be evil would be a different variety of Neal angst.
(Anyone else think it’s suspicious that Sam would have given James Ellen’s PO box information? Sam would have no reason to trust James, and I’m half wondering if James killed Sam and stole his identity. Also, was James on that short list of people who knew where Flynn was?)
Also, now I really have to write that fic about that time Kate went to Ellen and didn’t take the Raphael. And then the two of them had a conversation about partners, and lies, and trust, and forgiveness.
At the same time, though, I really hope they don’t try to draw explicit parallels between James’ crimes and Neal’s. For one thing, that has the potential to slide too far into heavy-handed moralizing, which I’m not a fan of. But also I feel like Neal and James are very different people with very different life stories and the parallels don’t actually work. I don’t think their character flaws are at all alike and I don’t think their situations or their crimes are all that comparable. James’ story (if his story can be believed, and I’m by no means convinced it can be, but taking it at face value for the moment) really doesn’t work as a moral cautionary tale for Neal.
James portrays himself as basically a decent guy with weak morals who let temptation get the better of him and did something he knew perfectly well was wrong, and after that everything snowballed out of his control and he ended up doing more and more things he knew were wrong, and hating it and himself the whole time, but he couldn’t see a way to extricate himself.
And I’m going to argue that Neal has very strong morals. Neal’s problem is more a lack of imagination - he doesn’t think through the greater ethical implications of what he does if it isn’t immediately obvious that it’s going to hurt someone right in front of him - and major trust issues and a failure to consistently think through the long-term consequences of his actions. Which is a problem, but understandable given the circumstances in which he grew up - he spent most of his childhood in a very unstable situation, which would have taught him not to plan ahead or think about the future but to grab whatever opportunities were in front of him in the present.
Neal’s moral code is limited and incomplete - it doesn’t include things like “you shouldn’t take other people’s stuff”, for example - but it’s very strong. We’ve seen Neal take great personal risks and make great sacrifices because he believes it’s the right thing to do, even before he started working for the FBI. (This is the guy who went up against Ryan Wilkes and nearly got killed for it because “he was going to hurt people”.) Neal gets in trouble when he doesn’t think or he can’t figure out what the right thing to do is in a certain situation; it’s very rare that Neal does something knowing that it’s wrong.
Neal enjoyed his life of crime. He loved the challenge and he was proud of his skills. And I don't think it was all roses and cappuccino in the clouds - I'm sure it was a hard life, in a lot of ways - but I don't get the impression he felt guilty about it at the time. Whereas James seemed like he hated what he was doing the whole time and wanted out but couldn't figure out how to get out.
In James’ defense - and as another example of how James’ situation and Neal’s are completely different - once he took the cash it would have been very hard for him to walk away from the Flynns. James had a wife and a three-year-old son to support, and he didn’t know how to make enough money to support them without a salary or how to hide them from the Flynns without help from WitSec. When Neal was running cons he would never have worked with people like the Flynns, but if Neal ever found himself mixed up in a job he didn’t want to be a part of he could always run. People like the Flynns couldn’t have blackmailed Neal into working for them by threatening his family because Neal’s family was Kate and Mozzie, both of whom were career criminals and perfectly capable of taking care of themselves and totally comfortable with living on the run and changing their identities when they needed to; if anyone tried anything like that the three of them could leave town and disappear together.
But James knew taking that cash was wrong. And he didn’t feel like he had no other options. A cop’s salary isn’t a lot but it didn’t seem like he and his family were in desperate poverty. He didn’t think what he was doing was harmless; he says he was constantly afraid of his family and Ellen finding out he was a dirty cop. It wasn’t a situation where he didn’t realize he’d screwed up until people started getting hurt.
So I really hope they're not going to try to turn this arc into an object lesson for Neal about how stealing and lying are bad and will screw up your life. Because James, as he's been portrayed in this episode, doesn't work as a "there but for the grace of God" version of Neal; their situations were entirely different.