Brought to You by Ford

I will discuss the actual plot of this second half of the second season, but before we get into that I want to address something that has become more and more prevalent within White Collar across these two seasons (and, well, it’ll continue through the rest of the series): product placement. White Collar had a lot of product placement and not all of it is very gracefully done. In fact, some of the product placement moments stick out so much, and feel so wrong in the context of the series, that they pull you out of the show. This is product placement done poorly.

I think we’re all used to a certain small amount of product placement in our shows and movies. Cassie Webb drinks a lot of Pepsi in Madame Web. That cute alien sure did enjoy Reese’s Pieces in E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial. And damn if there weren’t a ton of beer and car logos featured in everything Michael Bay has ever directed. Some of it goes with the territory, of course: movies and shows are expensive to make and sometimes dropping a can of soda, a bag of chips, or a car into a shot means a company will pay the studio a bit of scratch and that can ease the budget for whatever is getting made. Most of the times it’s subtle and you can easily ignore it and keep focused on the show

Sometimes even overt product placement can work to a show’s advantage. For Community to stay on the air, production studio Sony had to cut deals with some advertisers and do product promotion in the show. Dan Harmon very clearly looked over the contracts and found ways to make their required placements work in the show, creating an entire storyline about Subway buying Greendale Community College one season (and the students working to subvert the effort), while Honda had an entire episode that both regurgitated their marketing speak while also poking so much fun at the very concept of product placement. It was brilliant.

White Collar, sadly, doesn’t have any of that grace when handling its product placement. Whether the writers didn’t have the skill at deftly working it into their stories, or the contract they were under required it to be very overt, the product placement in White Collar sticks out like a sore thumb. Sure, not every show can do what Community could, you would expect that the creative team behind a show could find a better, more organic way to handle it than how White Collar approached their product placement but… nope. Not here anyway.

The average product spot for White Collar goes as such: two of the characters get into a Ford car because they’re on a case. One of them then remarks, “oh, I wonder how traffic is going,” or, “wait, I need to call someone.” Something along those lines. Then the camera very overtly points to whatever feature they’re about to use – telephone options on the dashboard, direction assistant in the car’s central hub – before letting the dialogue of the show continue. The characters will point out the feature, talk about it, and then the show can finally move on at that point. But wait, right as they drive off, of course, we then flash on the rear of the car for that Ford logo. It’s so… slimy.

This is the average interaction but sometimes it’s even more sketchy. This second half of the second season features Caffrey and Berrigan getting involved in a high speed chase. Standard for a procedural, of course. But to aid in the chase, Barrigan goes out of her way to enable traffic assist while Neal asks her about it. This is in the middle of a scene that is supposed to be frenetic, which is being filmed as a high-energy moment with shaking cameras and pounding music… and then we have this bit of product placement. It’s so incongruous, so out of place in the episode, that it actually ruined the whole sequence. This kind of thing should not have been done.

The thing that really sticks out, though, is the fact that this is all product placement for a show that ran from 2010 through 2014. Most of the products on display that the show is so proudly displaying aren’t even being made anymore. Ford is still making cars but they’re at least a full model or two beyond the cars displayed in the show. The features work differently now, interfaces have changed dramatically, and nothing they show off really works the way we expect now. And that doesn’t even take into account the stuff the show is trying to sell us that outright has gone belly up, like Blackberry phones. Good luck buying those now.

I mention this because shows and movies can be timeless in their storytelling. White Collar, for the most part, exists in its own nebulous time period that could be ten years ago or right now. Aside from the occasional comment on politics (like gay marriage being approved in the State of New York) it would be hard to know when this show was made. The product placement, though, ages it. From the cars to the phones to everything else the show has to sell us, it’s painfully apparent what time period the show came from in these moments. If the show hadn’t gone in so hard on the product placement the way it did it could have maintained a certain level of timelessness. This stuff cheapens the series.

Anyway, that rant over, let’s talk about the plot of this half of a season. The first half of the season gave us more about the music box. It’s a McGuffin, everyone wants it, but now we have to figure out what. The back half tells us the why and, well, it’s kind of out of left field. Like, really, very out of left field. It’s the kind of twist you really think should have been established far earlier in the series but since it wasn’t it makes it feel like the writers were just pulling ideas from a hat when populating this second half of the season and decided to go with something that could be crowbarred in to fit what was already written. Like a puzzle box without an actual solution when they first started setting it up.

As it’s revealed, the man behind the curtain that was pulling not only Kate’s strings but also those of FBI agent Fowler was Vincent Adler (Andrew McCarthy), Neal’s former boss. Way back, when Neal was first becoming a proper con artist, he went into the employ of hedge fund manager Adler. The goal was to steal Adler’s assets and run away with the fortune. But as it turned out, Adler was running a massive ponzi scheme and, before the authorities could catch him, Adler fled. Since then, he’s been plotting and scheming, waiting for a way to get a fortune together, and what he stumbled upon was the real mystery of Catherine the Great’s music box.

As it turns out, the music box has a secret compartment within it that could only be opened with a key that Neal’s con artist friend, Alex (Gloria Votsis), had. That key revealed a second music reel, and that music reel was a code to find the treasure. That treasure, in turn, was a secret German U-Boat loaded with stolen Nazi treasure, a fortune in the millions upon millions. Adler wants it, and that’s why he needs the music box, which Neal supposedly stole all those years ago. Yes, it’s a lot.

Does this plotline tie into everything the show had set up before? Technically, yes. If you made a list of all the elements that were established – Kate under the thrall of a powerful figure, someone wanting a music box for some reason, someone having the power to control an FBI agent, someone know Neal could get the job done, somehow all of this connecting to Alex – then, yes, the way this plotline resolves does technically check all those boxes. The writers managed to write themselves out of the corner they were in.

Does it resolve well, though? Eh, not so much. The fact is that for all the elements that were established, and all the things that had been set up and thrown around for Kate and the music box storyline, German U-Boat loaded with Naxi treasure was far from the most obvious, or even more graceful, solution. This is one step away from, “and the music box opens a portal into Narnia,” level of storytelling. It’s dumb. It feels so out of place, especially for a show about an FBI agent and a con artist tracking down white collar criminals. This belongs on a different series.

This is why I comment, again and again, that the overarching plotline for the first two seasons of White Collar isn’t the reason to watch the show. The serialized story is pretty awful. The reason to watch the series is for the case-of-the-week storytelling and the fun between the characters. Even in a bad plotline like this, that still shines through. It’s not a perfect series, but if you go in for the right reasons, it pays off. Unlike the music box storyline.