The Mystery of the Missing Treasure

Last season’s major arc, Vincent Adler and the Nazi Treasure, ended with a pretty big revelation: Mozzie had somehow gotten into the vault where Adler was hiding the treasure and managed to steal it before anyone else could get there, liberating the ill-gotten gains and secreting them away while making it look like all the treasure had burned up. Before we can get into the meat off the third season, we have to address the fact that this is a pretty silly cliffhanger. While I appreciate the idea that Mozzie stole the treasure so he and Neal could live out the life they always wanted with their “one big score” under their belts, the timeline for all of this to play out didn’t work.

The way it’s presented on the show, Adler secrets the treasure and then, soon after, the feds (Neal included) find the location and show up just in time to watch the treasure burn, supposedly. The show tries to say, “oh, well, Mozzie used the antenna he made to track the treasure,” but the antenna pointed to the Nazi sub, not the treasure itself. Once the treasure was loaded on a truck and moved to the warehouse (where it was being stored) the antenna wouldn’t work anymore. The only way, then, for Mozzie to know where the treasure was is if he was tracking Adler (which he says he wasn’t) or got a tip from Neal and somehow got there mere minutes before the feds and looted the place out right quick. It just doesn’t work.

But then, let’s be real: most of the cliffhangers on the show are perfunctory at best. Someone gets in trouble and then we cut to a commercial break. As soon as the show is back, that big issue before the commercials is suddenly dealt with in seconds. Most episodes have at least one segment like this, if not more. The season finales, which all end on cliffhangers, are the same. To consider this season two into season three cliffhanger bad we have to acknowledge that all the show’s cliffhangers are bad, and that’s just the way it is. You accept it and you move on because the show isn’t going to change.

That then leaves us with Mozzie and Neal as the sole owners of billions of dollars in lost Nazi treasure. While it’s fun to consider the implications of what that all means for our heroes, we also have to consider the fact that this is Nazi treasure. These might be treasures that Neal and Mozzie stumbled on and now have, and they weren’t the ones to originally steal it, but every bit of Nazi treasure has blood on it from all the people the Nazis killed to get that stash of loot. Neal and Mozzie keeping it instead of, you know, returning it to the families these treasures belong to says a lot more about their characters than I think the shows meant to say. “Oh, look at these two finally having the score of their dreams,” instead of, “these two are monsters that are trying to benefit off the blood spilled 50 years earlier.”

Really, if I’m being honest, the show should have stayed as far away from Nazis as it could. Yes, it was an easy way to set up a bad guy that no one would mind the guys stealing from. You know, it’s just a bunch of already dead Nazis. But any other source would have been better, frankly. Make it a dead Russian czar, or a group of corrupt oligarchs, or something. Anything that doesn’t make Mozzie and Neal seem like the worst people in the world for refusing to turn the treasure over to the rightful owners who just want their heritage back.

Anyway, that soap box out of the way (now that we can finally discuss spoilers from the previous season and how they apply to this one), the show does get a lot of mileage out of our two criminal protagonists having a ton of loot. As soon as they get it, Peter suspects that Neal stole the treasure. Neal can legitimately say he didn’t, because it was Mozzie that did the deed without Neal knowing, but just having it makes Neal as much an accomplice as anyone. So the first half of this season is the cat and mouse game between Neal and Peter as the FBI agent chases the con man once more.

The series formula is hardwired at this point and essentially it boils down to: Neal loves working with Peter and he enjoys working with the FBI, but Neal is always going to be a criminal, and so Peter will always be chasing after him for one reason or another. Whether it’s because Neal is pursuing the mystery of Kate, or chasing the music box, or Nazi treasure, or keeping said treasure, Neal is going to be Neal. And that works. The show’s overarching story can get the best mileage possible when it’s Peter against Neal. Neal doing something sneaky, trying to pull and dast one, develops so much tension for the show.

It only fails when the series isn’t able to actually deliver on the overarching story in the end. I felt the reveal of the Nazi treasure was silly at the time (and problematic when you think about it), but the idea that Neal and Mozzie would want to keep the treasure does make sense. The only issue is that, if they keep the treasure and get away with it, well, then the show isn’t really the show anymore. You can’t have White Collar if Neal and Peter aren’t working together. Any talk of one of the two riding off into the sunset to have a retirement can only work if you know the show is ending. The show isn’t going to end halfway into its third season. So, clearly, something will come up that will delay Neal being able to sell the treasure, or will force him to lose it, or some other twist. That’s the way serialized storytelling like this works.

In other words, it doesn’t really work. While the main plots of the shows various episodes are great – Neal and Peter go on a treasure hunt to find a kidnapped girl, or Neal and Peter help Mozzie escape his past as well as Chicago gangsters, or Neal steals the ill-gotten gains from another con man and goes on an illicit spending spree with Sarah – the overarching plot does, at times, feel perfunctory. There are interesting moments, like when Neal has to hide the evidence of a Degas that Mozzie sold from their stash, and then parachutes off the top of a building just as Peter is about to see him, but for the most part the big plotline just… exists. I could live without it.

I think maybe if the overarching plots weren’t so central to the storytelling of the show, I’d like them better. The show started with the mystery of, “what happened to Kate?” and that was a complete dud. Then it’s been trying, ever since, to find a storyline that has worked and, as of yet, hasn’t quite found anything that could hold the show. The police procedural elements have been solid, with some fantastic case-of-the-week episodes that far outside anything in the serialized story, and that really just goes to highlight the issue with White Collar: it would be better if it didn’t try so hard.

Look, serialized storytelling has its place. If Neal and Peter had a big bad they were chasing, some master criminal that was leaving them clues, Riddler-style, after certain heists, it would add an air of mystery and give them someone to chase. While the show can get tension out of Peter mistrusting Neal and Neal being the dirty criminal, it feels like that can only go so far before it becomes dull. We’re in the third season now and, well, it’s dull. I’d rather watch them chase the Dutchman, or Adler, or some other con man than watch them futilely chase each other. They’re the leads of the show and the series is never going to get to a point where that changes, so it should stop pretending otherwise.

As I’ve said before, White Collar is fine when it plays with its overarching storylines. Those, though, aren’t what I’m here for. I’m here for the cases each week because that’s where this show really shines.