OK, right off the bat, there’s a Spoiler Alert in full effect. If you watch USA’s “White Collar” and missed Tuesday’s season premiere, stop reading and come back after you’ve seen it.

Wait, what? You lost me there. (USA photo)

So about that premiere . . . .

Is it just me, or was that resolution to the fall season’s cliffhanger completely unsatisfying? I’m not sure what the show is doing with the whole Neal/Kate thing, but I’m pretty much over it. There were two things about it that bugged me:

— If Kate really is playing a con and never loved Neal, then what on Earth was her plan? That he get arrested and then hope he found a way to break out years later, and to leave insanely complicated clues and hope he finds them as she strings him along needlessly? Why didn’t she just ask Neal for the music box? It seems impossibly intricate and there a million holes in the plan (like, how would she know he’d start working for the FBI?). It all makes my head hurt and doesn’t add up. But if it’s true, Peter got to the bottom of it all way, way too easily. And how could he get a message to Kate so quickly when Neal’s spent months getting nowhere? And to top it off, why did Neal believe it all so easily?

— Or is Peter lying about his meeting with Kate, and we viewers are being told a story by an unreliable narrator? I’m leaning toward this, because the story he told about Kate made absolutely no sense (and totally deflates a major storyline). But again, it doesn’t make a lot of sense (from what we’ve been told, at least) to have Peter be this master con artist/puppet master. As with Kate, there are too many super-complex variables for it to work. And who wears a pinkie ring?!? His explanation that it was just a 10-year FBI keepsake was super anticlimactic (what, it couldn’t have been a fraternity of Satanic agents?). So he’s either an omnipotent evil genius who’s has the world’s greatest con man eating out of the palm of his hand, or else a dude who wears hideous man-jewelry. Or both. Which both go against everything we’ve been led to believe about the character.

I don’t like either option. The layers upon layers of possible schemes and scams and setups make my head spin. It’s a little frustrating, and I really hope these giant plot holes aren’t oversights and will get filled in over upcoming episodes. There seems to be sooooo much that we haven’t been told yet, so I’m willing to give it a little patience and trust where this is all going.

(I’ve gotta say though, that the scene after Peter explains everything to Neal, and Neal leaves Peter and Elizabeth alone, a small part of me hoped she’d turn out to be the mastermind and be all “He knows too much, we have to eliminate him.” Tiffani Thiessen as arch-criminal; how cool would that be?)

I like the series, it’s fun and breezy and I like the whole long con (in theory), but I’m getting afraid that the writers have created a overcomplicated mess that they won’t be able to crawl out of (I’m looking at you, “Damages”).  Just keep your fingers crossed and hope the final resolution will be more “Ocean’s 11” and not “Ocean’s 13.”

So how about it? Am I the only one befuddled? Or has “Jersey Shore” made my brain too spongy to follow a complex storyline?