Last night on White Collar, after Neal learned he might soon have his sentence commuted, Peter suddenly found himself on the receiving end of A LOT of brown-nosing. This included profuse apologies, choice Yankees tickets, and Neal’s FACE going all puppy-dog. What kind of monster could resist that? And anyway Neal was super super sorry about that whole treasure debacle, and he was looking to make it up to Peter however he could. That’s when a 15-year-old prep school student arrived at the bureau with a neatly bound presentation that had a clearly marked thesis statement: Someone at his school was pilfering financial aid funds!
Next thing we knew Peter was posing as an international businessman looking to enroll his son at Manhattan Prep. As he talked shop with the school’s dastardly financial administrator (Dylan Baker), a waiting Neal was mistaken for a substitute English teacher and jumped at the chance to be involved, particularly because the villain’s daughter was a student in the English class he’d be teaching. What followed was basically some of the most outrageous poetry porn ever televised, wherein Neal recited tons of romance poetry from memory (while wearing a suit and tie and glasses and that face) and brought an entire class of teenagers to their knees while all over the nation lady viewers’ biological clocks started exploding in unison. When Peter saw what Neal was doing, he entered the classroom and the two of them had some kind of weird poetry argument about betrayal? It made no sense to the students, but at that point I doubt anyone noticed or cared.
So obviously the mark’s daughter developed a crush on Neal and hired him as a tutor, which meant he suddenly had access to the mark’s apartment. At the same time, Peter had bonded with the mark over their shared love of trashy mistresses, and suddenly Diana was posing as Peter’s tattooed, smart-mouthed, pregnant personal tramp and they were all dining together on finger sandwiches or whatever rich people eat. Oh and Neal had also decided to involve that original male student because the kid had a crush on the daughter and Neal wanted to use him as a romantic deflector, which ended up working out great because at the same time Mozzie had become personally invested in hooking the two teens up by using forged poetry and hair gel. Anyway, during lunch Peter distracted the mark while Neal sneaked into the guy’s home office to copy his entire computer onto a thumb drive in six seconds.
The next day at school the evil financial dude totally figured out what was going on and suddenly Peter was tied up and being forced onto a table saw in the wood shop. That’s when Neal went all Heisenberg on everybody and threw down a smoke bomb Mozzie had whipped up in the chemistry lab. He rescued Peter, Diana arrested Dylan Baker, and the young kid ended up winning over the girl (with the help of Mozzie having filled her locker with roses). In the final scene Peter informed Neal that he wouldn’t, in fact, rat him out for the whole treasure thing. Whew, that was close! Just kidding, that was not close. What kind of monster would put Neal in prison? Peter ain’t no monster! Even his wife was like, “Neal’s awesome. Deal with it.” DEALT.
Also, just FYI:
And for those of you eccentric types who prefer the non-Bomer faces on this show, here you go:
But let’s get real:
What was YOUR favorite part of this week’s White Collar?
