... epiphany!

[sholio]

My rewatch of White Collar season three just hit 3x11, and I caught something about Keller that I never caught before! Which made a lot of things more clear!

When they're talking over the plan to sneak into the warehouse using the truck, this exchange happens:

Keller: Barcelona, 2001, huh?
Neal: It was Madrid. But yeah.

And Keller starts to tell an anecdote about one of their heists, but gets cut off.

THAT is where Neal was before he was in New York. He was in Europe, with Keller! All of a sudden a lot of things about Neal's timeline make so much more sense -- well, okay, admittedly a lot of his timeline is still slightly screwed up and confusing, but it does mean that not all of his Europe references had to have taken place in the relatively short time period after he broke up with Kate and went to Copenhagen, but before he got caught. In fact, a lot of it obviously didn't. He met Keller in Monaco, apparently scammed his way around Europe with him for a while, then came to NY at some point after he and Keller had their falling out. (The possibility still exists that he hooked up with Keller again for a little while after the Copenhagen thing -- or possibly Keller came to New York, which would explain how Keller knows Kate, without contradicting the "backgammon in Monaco" story for how Keller and Neal met.)

And it fills one of the big holes in Neal's backstory.

It is interesting that Neal apparently ran with Keller before he met Mozzie and all the stuff in the flashback episode happened. Neal had to have been a very different kind of con artist then, since he was relatively new to nice suits and high society and all the things Mozzie and Adler introduced him to. It is interesting to imagine young!Neal as a somewhat more Keller-like brand of con artist. (Well, not the violent part, obviously, but in terms of his general personal style.)

Comments

[veleda_k]

Oh, that does clear things up considerably. I never put that together.

Man, I wish there were more (any) Keller and Neal fics from that era. 3x11 gave us a look at just how much history there is between them.

Perhaps what I found most compelling is that as much as Keller is capable of caring for anyone (which is to say, very, very little), he seems to care about Neal. Sure he'll kill Neal without a pause, but he seems to genuinely regret that the partnership went South. And so much of what he does seems to be aimed at getting a rise out of Neal.

It's interesting to imagine how the partnership got started. Keller had more experience and, at least at first, would have been the man with the plan, while Neal, even without the refinement he later learns, likely had the charm to pull it off. (Keller has a certain charisma, but he's not charming, while I think even younger, rougher Neal would have been.)

[sholio]

*nods* It opens up some really fascinating possibilities with Neal and Keller! Ever since "Forging Bonds", Neal's past always seemed very constrained to me -- operating on the assumption that everything he did that wasn't in New York had to be in a few short months after he broke up with Kate. But this opens things up considerably, and leads to some really fascinating speculation about what his early days with Keller were like, since he would have been so young and quite possibly very different from the Neal we know now.

There's a fairly interesting discussion between me and soteriophobe over on LJ, about what a Keller-Neal partnership might have looked like. We speculated that Neal was rougher around the edges in those days, and Keller was a little more happy-go-lucky and less ruthless than he became later -- I mean, they were both the same people deep down, but their surface similarities may have been a lot greater in those days. And "Checkmate", I think, is the first time when you see that both of them seem to look back fondly on those days and regret the loss of what they once had. (Back when Keller was first introduced, Neal instantly smacks down any suggestion that he and Keller were friends or partners, but having seen the later Keller episodes, I now think that this is basically Neal still being angry and hurt at having found out that Keller wasn't the person he thought he was. By "Checkmate", he's moved past that a little bit, and in a better mental place overall, and he's able to look back on his time with Keller with regret more than anger.)