There's a backstory thing in White Collar that is confusing me

[sholio]

I had forgotten until hitting "Bottlenecked" on my rewatch that Keller and Neal apparently had a rivalry going over Kate.

And I have no idea how to reconcile that with the "Forging Bonds" version of Neal and Kate's history. Neal and Keller met in Monaco, and Neal didn't go to Europe and do his whole Copenhagen/France/Italy grand tour thing until after breaking up with Kate. So when did Keller have a chance to meet Kate? Or even find out about her? I can totally buy that Keller and Kate never had anything going on, and that he's simply messing with Neal (which was my impression when I originally watched the episode, too). What I can't figure out is how Keller and Kate could possibly have had enough interaction for Neal to reasonably think it's a possibility, or to fit with Mozzie's comment that the thing between Keller and Neal was "always about Kate".

Thoughts? Am I forgetting something important that would make this all make sense? Or is this one of those things that is just never going to make sense, because as of season one they hadn't worked out a lot of the details yet, and they could only shoehorn so much backstory into "Forging Bonds"? *g*

Comments

[ratcreature]

It's probably best to think of the backstory as malleable and stretchy like as if it was a comics timeline...

[sholio]

Oh! :D I think comics timelines are an excellent thing to compare it to (although the fact that they've managed to screw their own timeline so thoroughly in just two and a half seasons is pretty impressive *g*). But, yeah, that's a good comparison; I'm already fairly adept at thinking of comics backstory as somewhat squishy and non-literal, or at least prone to change without notice.