magibrain

So, What Happens In Burma has this exchange:

Peter: In the last year, it was held in a secured vault at a state mining facility, under army guard, in the middle of a jungle.
Neal: Not exactly a prime location for a college kid to just walk in and grab it.
Peter: No. The mine is in the Mogok Valley.
Neal: You can get there by a helicopter or a seven-hour jeep ride over some nasty terrain.
Jones: You just know these things?
Neal: Yeah, that's why they keep me around.
Peter: Mm.
Neal: You'd need some muscle, a cargo plane, and a few grand in bribe money just to get started.
Peter: You would?
Neal: And who knows what else? Because I've never considered stealing gems in Burma.

(Emphasis added.)

In Forging Bonds, when Mozzie walks in with the information on Kate's whereabouts, Neal is doing some red-ink work on a map. The conversation there:

Neal: Hey. Rubies in Burma. I'm gonna need a bush plane to get–

–and then he sees the look on Mozzie's face and asks him if his pigeon died.

That sure looked like he was planning a heist. And even if he wasn't planning on going through with it (though "I'm gonna need" seems a lot more committed than "I would need"), the fact that he had apparently gone to the trouble of plotting out what looked like modes of ingress suggests that "considering" is at least the minimum of what he was doing.

Which is amusing, considering Neal's insistence that he never lies to Peter. And really, "I've never considered stealing gems in Burma" doesn't leave a lot of room for ambiguity.

So, I kinda have to wonder which of the following is the correct explanation for that:

1) Neal totally forgot about that incident, despite the fact that he was recounting it in a flashback in the previous episode.

2) Neal was lying about never lying. (Either because he's deliberately trying to mislead Peter or because he's not consciously aware that he's lying/doesn't consciously choose to lie, sometimes, when he lies.)

3) Neal didn't lie to Peter prior to bringing up that particular rule in Need To Know, but after that, he just let Peter assume that this was the rule he'd be operating under in the future, and ditched the rule. (Though, doesn't an episode in S5 contradict this? I can't remember if it was specifically stated.)

4) Neal was making a general statement of his lack-of-consideration to the whole meeting room, and does not consider responding to one of Peter's statements with a lie to be lying to Peter so long as he's not directly addressing Peter.

5) The writers forget about the no-lying rule while writing.

6) Forging Bonds dances on canon's corpse and should not be regarded as an authoritative source.

I'm a fan of #6, personally. Then, adopting #6 does tank two of my favorite pet theories: one, that Diana is a Time Lord, and two, that Neal got on a Greyhound from St. Louis to NYC, and the Greyhound had a series of increasingly improbable mishaps and it took them five years to get there.*

*Context is as follows:

magibrain: I was trying to write out this short precanon thing and then discovered that I couldn't because nothing made sense. Like, one of the things I tried to do was figuring out how old Neal was when/when it was that he came to New York.

magibrain: But. Okay.

storyinmypocket: Split the difference and include a note re: the show's plot holes?

magibrain: 1. In Wanted, Neal tells Maya that he came to New York because he had to leave the place he was from, which was St. Louis.

2. He also tells Maya that his first friend there was Mozzie.

3. In Forging bonds, he tells Peter that he met Mozzie when he had just arrived in the city.

4. He tells Peter that Mozzie approached him to pull the con on Adler – a con with a clock of five months. To start pulling that con, he had to cash in some of the bonds, which put him on Peter's radar.

5. Peter chased Neal for three years, and then Neal was in prison for most of four, and then, if we're generous with the season-equals-year calculation, by the end of S3, he's been working with Peter for three more years. That puts us up to Judgment Day.

6. In Judgment Day, Ellen and Neal have a conversation about how Neal ran on his 18th birthday, and that was the last time Ellen saw him. Ellen says it was "almost a decade and a half ago".

magibrain: … 3+4+3 ≠ 15. Or even 14 or 13.

magibrain: All I wanted to know is if Neal would still have a gut "…aren't there US marshals who are supposed to stop this sort of thing from happening?" reaction to Mozzie randomly showing up in his apartment. That's all I wanted to know.

magibrain: And then I went and reviewed canon and had a Mordecai shipper meltdown.