#just put this throufh a word counter 1200??? sorry.

[summerfevers]

if you’re up to it i would very much like to know your white collar neal timeline🎤🎤

this turned out to have many asides and be very long so the tl;dr is: peter have you considered that he's just a twenty-something teenage girl :( ?

timeline:

neal born 1984 ish. he's an aries and a millennial

neal, ellen, and neal's mom go into witsec 1987, neal age 3

2003 adler scandal i fucking guess. neal age 19

neal arrested probably mid 2005, 21

neal goes to jail for the first time, i want to say early 2006, age almost 22

pilot is set late summer 2009, age 25

same-sex marriage legalized in new york june 24th 2011, they talk about this in season 3 episode 14 which is soon after. neal's 27

more or less a year later–let's go with less–neal tells sam that he has spent the last decade running from the truth he learned at 18. taking him literally that it was 10 years ago he is now 28 it is the end of season 4 and 2012

the end of season 4 to the series finale is less than a year. he is 29 its 2013.

when we see him in paris he might be 30 but that doesn't count To Me

i present my evidence:

i don't know where we got "neal is 35" from i cant make it work. neal and co. went into witsec (which i have actually since learned is not available to people living in dc, they have their own version but it is not overseen by the federal marshalls, i don't think they can give you as many legal documents like a ssn, and they don't help you set up your new life as much? something about neal's life that would be interesting to explore.) when he was three and ellen says in season 4 that she's been in witsec for Nearly three decades. confirmed 33 or under in season 4

he also says to "sam" more than once that he's spent the last decade running from the truth he learned at 18–he very well could be rounding down here and mean like 12-13 years but i am Choosing to Believe he meant that literally. we are now at youngest 28, it is the last episode of season 4.

now due to the way the show is structured and the fact that it is never really winter. ok maybe winter 1 time because i can see in my mind neal in his little wool coat and earmuffs but largely it is summer and we never have a christmas episode. anyway due to All That our only real anchor in the timeline is that the episode where diana is Grappling with her engagement to Christie happens immediately following june 24th 2011, when same-sex marriage was legalized in new york. and also that later that season in the commutation hearing they say that neal has served 2 years of his sentence. so the pilot was set in 2009 when it aired we are at one year/season. but as the series goes on the episodes and even seasons have increasingly shorter gaps between them, and by season 6 we haven't even finished our four years. by the end of season 4 i want to say we are three years into his sentence and he's 28. between the end of season 4 and when neal dies in season 6 there has got to be less than a year that passes. actually deadass why was neal so obsessed with the pink panther case ending his sentence early we are like months out king. i get the injustice the system is broken they'd keep him forever but to people outside his circle he must have looked sooo silly for that. but whatever. he is 29 when he dies and 30 when we see him again in paris, his roaring 20s of crime and incarceration over.

Anyway where the "neal is 35 or at least claims to be much older than this timeline would say he is" probably came from in-universe is that the adler scandal takes place SEVEN years before s2 when peter confronts neal about it. 2003?????? guys the thing we have to understand, to embrace, about neal's personal timeline is that i do not think anyone in that writers room was really grasping how much they had neal do in so short a time. 2003 he is like 19 guys. maybe by the time peter says it was 7 years ago it was 2011 ? and the adler thing was 2004? but no that couldn't work because it's mid 2011 like a year later in s3. so basically neal walks out of st louis and has a magical girl transformation through which he immediately becomes a great conman and criminal. and he meets mozzie basically straight away. he should still be in like calculus and ap lit at this juncture. and then they go right into the adler con ??? and neal is obviously lying through his teeth to everyone saying he is at least 21 but probably more along the lines of 23. and while most of his aliases are eventually found out by peter if no one else, no one ever goes "wait IS HE a teenager?" no one is guessing this.

so we spend a couple months fucking around and fucking UP with adler, kate probably doesn't know how old we actually are, this relationship cannot actually last very long at all because we are truly on a time crunch right now. we have less than three years for neals entire criminal career before he goes to jail. i know i said on the bullet list he went to jail early 2006 he has got to have been arrested like summer 2005 at the latest to be tried and sentenced by then and i feel like even that might be tight because he was suspected of so many other things they wanted to get evidence for. but how is neal teaching kate to be a criminal less than a year into his own career. i think neal must have been a hardcore improv kid for this to work honestly. i bet he competed. so our golden days of mozzie neal and kate against the world lasts maybe a year at best before neal and kate fight and she leaves and he spends months trying to get her back and get her attention and commits a truly breathtaking amount of crimes in this time.

also i'm skipping through forging bonds right now trying to flesh out this timeline and it was incredibly shady of peter and co to see that kate is doing so much to stay hidden from her ex boyfriend and then to reveal her to neal in order to catch him. like that was fucked up they didn't know neal yet he hadn't been suspected of violent crimes but they didn't know why kate was working so hard to escape him. like it worked out ok (arguably, but that could be a different post) but they had no reason to trust neal not to hurt her like this. she could have been running from an abusive situation he's known to be a talented criminal with no fears about escalating his crimes he could have killed her. one thing about the fbi is that they never once care about kate's safety and it does indeed get her killed one day.

in conclusion neal is known as one of the best forgers in the world when he is arrested in 2005 at age 21 maybe 2 years into his criminal career. here i am 21 what have i accomplished