Monsters of Television

“Into the fire.”

Mozzie, tugging at the heart strings. Don’t cry, buddy.

It’s all come down to this. Neal, after working for the feds all season, and doing a good job (sometimes so good I wonder how Burke even caught him in the first place), is ready to possibly throw it all away for the dream of a girl he fetishizes and the proverbial “one last job.” Aided by the decidedly hotter Alex and the always faithful Mozzie, the team prepares a plan to steal the music box from the Italian consulate during a conveniently-planned gala. Peter knows Neal is up to something and crashes their planning party. Peter tries to talk Neal out of doing anything illegal but the smarmy look Neal always wears tells Burke that it’s going to happen anyway. Peter’s parting words: “Do the right thing, Neal.”

Central to this series is what Neal thinks is the right thing. He is a principled man, a cultured man, a man both polite and courteous, not even prone to jackassery. By all outward appearances, a gentleman. But then again, he’ll also rob people blind for motives that aren’t entirely clear. Does he only defraud those he feels can afford it? Does he rob just because he likes the nice things? Or does he buck society for some other deep-seated reason? In a binary world, he appears to ride the fence of good and evil, leaning toward one side or the other whenever it suits his purposes. For Neal, though, the world is not binary. It’s all gray. The right thing here is to save Kate. That is his responsibility. And, despite the woman right there that obviously still holds a torch for him, he has an obligation to see this through and chase the dream. The only way to do that is to skirt the law.

Neal’s plan involves him getting Fowler to shut off his anklet which means some backroom dealings. He also has to case the building he plans to rob. He does all this while wearing the anklet. Now, this series has established, beyond everything else, that Neal is a smart guy. Under that fine fedora is a sharp mind. He has to know that Peter would be following him every step of the way. Yet, when Burke shows up, Neal looks honestly confused. Luckily (I suppose?) for Neal, Fowler has that covered, luring Peter into a trap that gets Burke suspended for two weeks (after clobbering higher-ranked Fowler with a nice hit), making him unable to perform any arresting duties. So the threat from last week, where Peter threatened to arrest him if he tried to steal the music box, is now emptier than ever. Instead, Neal and Peter band together against their common enemy: Fowler. They say criminals have a fellowship, that they are “thick as thieves.” But, in a world where criminals are not inherently unsavory, where they, instead, have hearts of gold, the bond among thieves stretches to network in many different kinds of people, from FBI agents to caterers to silver-aged widows. And, despite knowledge of what kind of people they are dealing with (criminals and cops working in cahoots, dogs and cats living together), they can all get along despite their different opinions of how the law applies to them.

While Neal continues his plan to get the music box (a mission Burke plans to use against Fowler as the orchestrator), Burke plans to use a character that hasn’t returned since the pilot, Cindy, to get records off Fowler’s computer. Interesting here is the raising of false stakes. “What happens if Fowler gets the music box?” Cindy asks. “I don’t know,” Burke replies. “But we can’t let that happen.” That’s the kind of stuff you say when you’re protecting the final piece of a doomsday device. Like the motor of music box is going to control the weather machine Fowler’s been building. The world isn’t over, guys. Get a grip.

The caper works out mostly in Neal’s favor. He gets the music box out with some perfectly executed subterfuge and ingenuity on behalf of Team Caffrey only to watch Alex spirit it away. And then bring it back? Here’s the problem with Alex. She’s pretty. She and Neal have a bond, even a little chemistry. But I don’t have enough of a sense of history between these two for her to bring back the priceless item she’s spent at least the last three years plotting to steal. Maybe if this were a full season and not just 14 episodes, they would’ve had time to explore this relationship a little more. It feels a little truncated. But that might be something they dig into during season two.

When it all shakes out, the music box is for someone higher than Fowler and this plot goes deeper than they fully explore in this episode. To reward Neal for his service in this capacity, Fowler’s department offers Neal the opportunity for he and Kate to run off together with new identities, free and clear. With that, we can hear the rationale set out by Mozzie earlier in this episode and one of the major themes of this show’s sister federal-agent/spy-procedural, Chuck: say you get the girl and run off together — can you live a normal life? On either side of the fence here, no matter if you’re a world-renowned art thief or an international spy, the quest for a normal life is often ruined by the realization that the journeymen are not normal people. But they have to try anyway.

Even though this show was picked up for a second season back in December, this episode was obviously planned as a just-in-case-they-don’t-pick-us-up showing as Neal has a farewell tour, even saying goodbye to poor Mozzie (Willie Garson is knocking it out of the park with that character). Burke, after putting two slugs into Fowler’s bulletproof vest, arrives at the airport to say goodbye and try one last time to get Neal to stay. Strangely, Kate, already in the plane, ducks inside the door when she sees Burke. Peter makes Neal hesitate just long enough for the plane to explode, presumably with Kate inside, and then cut to black.

Good cliffhanger for the end of the season. I was actually happy to see the thing go up in flames in my initial reaction, even saying out loud, “Goodbye, Kate.” I thought that would be the end of her for the series and we could move on. But then I realized that it probably just made this thing worse. We’re probably going to hear the name Kate several hundred more times as Neal hunts down who did this to her and to him. The name is almost ruined for me. I can’t wait for him to stand on a raft next season, somewhere in the South Pacific, surrounded by nothing, shouting at the top of his lungs, “KAAAAAAAAAAAAATE!”