White Collar creator Jeff Eastin knew from the 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...
. Mozzi, well he's a rich man for sure.
