very beginning how the show would end. Or so
he thought. "The last moment was going to be a
couple years in the future," Eastin told me when I
called him to discuss the series finale. "Neal has
just gotten out. It's the first he had been off his
anklet and has been a free man. He walks down
and, standing at the apex [of the Flatiron
Building], he's flipping a coin. He flips the coin,
it comes up heads, and he walks to the left and
he walks down and there's Mozzie and they get
into a limo and we realize that they're going to
go off to be the greatest criminals. Suddenly
we're back to Neal at the apex of the building,
flipping the coin, and it comes to tails, and he
walks to the right and goes into the FBI. We
realize that it's two years later and Neal's
actually taken Peter's place at the FBI and he's
become possibly the world's greatest lawman.
Then we go to back to Neal at the apex of the
building and he flips the coin and then the coin
lands on his hand and we cut to black."
However, that's not how the USA drama said
farewell on Thursday. After Neal (Matt Bomer)
and Keller (Ross McCall) got away from the rest
of the now-apprehended Pink Panthers with a
nice chunk of change from the Federal Reserve
heist, Keller got greedy, and he and Neal
struggled with a gun before it went off, shooting
Neal in the chest. Keller escaped, but it wasn't
long before Peter (Tim DeKay) found him and
shot him when he tried to take a hostage. Peter
turned the corner to see a visibly weakened Neal
being loaded into an ambulance, at which point
Neal told Peter—finally—that Peter was his best
friend. The exchange would be the last one the
two ever shared, as Peter and Mozzie (Willie
Garson) were next seen standing over Neal's
dead body in the morgue, in what was by far the
episode's most emotional moment.
A year later, Peter and Elizabeth (Tiffani
Thiessen) were the parents of a beautiful baby
named Neal, natch, and Mozzie was back to his
old ways. When Peter received a mysterious
bottle of Bordeaux, he did some digging and
found Neal's secret storage unit, which
contained a photo of the ambulance driver
(whom we then saw that Neal had paid off), and
a mannequin dressed just like Neal with a bullet
mark on its chest, and a newspaper boasting a
headline about new security at the Louvre. The
final moments of the series revealed Neal in his
best suit and fedora, walking the streets of Paris
with a smile on his face.
I chatted with Eastin about his decision to
change the ending, what fans didn't see in the
finale and whether a White Collar TV movie will
ever happen. Here's what he had to say...
This ending left much less open to
interpretation. Why was this the right ending?
The flipping-the-coin ending I had before played
with this idea of Neal trying to figure out who he
was. Is he like Peter with the beautiful wife and
the white picket fence and the dog? Or is he
more like his father, which is the con man and
the ultimate art thief? I liked playing on that
vagueness, but then Matt and Tim had come to
me and said, "We have this ending." What this
ending said that I liked better was that the chase
goes on. … The more I thought about it, it's like,
"You know what, this is my universe that I
created. I can do with it what I want," and it's
much more fun to think that Neal is off robbing
the Louvre than it is [to think about him
being] settled down and living somewhere with
his white picket fence. Neal is who he is. As I
said before, he wanted to be good, but he was
born bad, and at the end of the day, Neal's going
to go do what he is the best at.
Why was faking his own death specifically the
only way out for him instead of jumping on a
plane and jetting off to a country with no
extradition treaty?
We've done the extradition thing and something
also drew Neal back. I had long debates
internally just thinking, "So what's the way to do
this?" Neal's done this and run and then come
back. By actually letting the world believe he's
dead, that was really the one way he could do it
where he was free and clear. The biggest
challenge really was hopefully convincing the
audience that Neal actually was dead. The only
way to do that was if Mozzie believes it, then I
think people may believe it. Personally, that
moment in the hallway always gets me choked
up where Peter is holding his anklet and says,
"You're free." There wasn't a dry eye in the
house when we were filming that one. It was
that idea that we could believe that Neal was
gone and life continued after. There wasn't
anybody chasing Neal. Mozzie moved on. Peter
moved on. Peter and Elizabeth had a kid and
named it Neal. Life really has moved on. That
was the only way to ensure that nobody was
following him. So this way we ensure that the
slate is really clean.