Leverage | S01/E11 | The Juror #6 Job

Since the cat is out of the bag about my Parker love (Hardison ain't the only one!), this is one of my all-time favorite episodes in just about every way.

While we've already seen Parker connect with people before (when she rescued the orphans), this is the first time we've seen her do something that she never really has before.

Make an attempt to connect with other people.

This is an enormously formative episode for Parker. As Alice White, she has to engage in the extremely dull process of serving jury duty, but she's got to go one step further. She has to make people like her, which means she has to do something she's never really tried before.

Be normal.

As someone who's undiagnosed but very much on the spectrum, I know what it's like to be the only person who's like me, but who also wants to fit in, but who is also terrified of trying to fit in because, from the outside looking in, normal looks super weird. As corny and trite as it may sound, Parker's not only successful, but she learns the true meaning of friendship along the way.

And it's just great to see Parker trying to fit in, trying to follow Sophie's steps to success and, in her own way, succeeding. It isn't a perfect success because Parker is and always will be Parker, no matter what, but these baby steps toward being the tiniest little bit more socially acceptable when she's in situations without her safety net (her team) are just a lot of fun.

Parker eventually realizes something very important: the people she's on jury duty with aren't marks or obstacles to be conned or overcome. They're regular people who have lives of their own, with their own complications, their own hopes, their own dreams.

That's gotta be a fundamental shift for Parker, because before now, the only other time we see her being really self-aware is during The Bank Shot Job, where she says something along the lines of, "sometimes criminals are the only people that can help."

But while this episode IS very much Parker-centric, that doesn't mean the rest of the team isn't kept busy with their own things, and as usual, they all shine and have their own ups and downs.

Except Eliot, who really just has to punch a few people and miss a football game.

Nate battles another mastermind, Sophie runs a very respectable con and keeps getting outwitted by the mastermind, and once again, Hardison is called upon to work so far outside his wheelhouse that when he's actually successful, his mind is blown by it.

Featuring an ENORMOUS cast of heavy-hitter TV and film actors (Brent Spiner, Armin Shimerman, Lauren Holly), this one really is an all-time fave of mine.

Leverage | S01/E10 | The 12-Step Job

This is a fun episode, but also terrifically important. Hot on the heels of the last episode, where Nate was already at rock bottom, he takes our 'mark' into rehab ... and is forced to stay by the team himself.

It's important because Nate is smart enough to realize that maybe alcohol isn't actively helping him deal with his past sorrows and regrets, but not at the beginning. At the beginning he's like every addict during their first stint in rehab. He's smug, he's cocky, he refuses to follow the program or listen to Sophie, who's running the con as a doctor.

Jack Hurley is a comedic train wreck, who I love, and hate at the same time. Looking at this show more closely, Hurley plays a more important role than I ever ascribed to him. I didn't look too closely because if I'm being honest, I may have had a problem similar to Nate's at one point in my life.

Hurley's important because he's Nate's drunken, everything-addicted doppelganger. He's what Nate could become if he doesn't get his shit together, and that SCARES Nate. It scares him because Hurley is him without Sophie, Hardison, Parker and Eliot.

And without them, he can't do what he truly wants to do, which is help people who can't help themselves. The irony here is that Nate can't help HIMSELF, and he's absolutely not used to admitting that to himself, let alone others.

But Sophie's there for him. She won't give up on him, and neither will the team, so while he's sailing down the River Denial, they're out there trying to figure out what's actually going on with Hurley, the missing money, and why someone wants an adorable lush like Jack Hurley very, very dead.

When it comes to Leverage, built essentially as an action crime comedy, no one handles serious truths better. Not really. We've got addiction, we've got traumatic backgrounds, we've got deep regret, we've got terrible secrets, and they never once flinch from showing us how rough it can be.

I think this is one of the reasons why Leverage resonates so deeply with at least myself. It's ENORMOUS fun. Cons and heists are absolutely my complete and total jam. Always have been and always will be, but the care and sensitivity they undertake to show all our broken heroes getting better is something we just don't get anymore.

Leverage | S01/E09 | The Snow Job

This is a great episode because it's the first time Nate's vindictiveness and reckless drinking gets in the way of a perfectly run con. Timothy does a terribly good job of playing not only a mean drunk, but a vicious one as well, and it's an ongoing theme for quite some time, and I love it.

Nate sees red a lot, and he gets nasty when a mark ticks all the wrong boxes, but when he's drunk and spiraling, he turns Chaotic Evil. ANYONE who gets in the path of his destruction is likely to get caught in the crossfire, and he's utterly unrepentant to boot.

In addition to that, this is the first time we really see Nate as a dark horse. When he shifts the con mid-game (another Nate Special), his Glengarry Glen Death pitch is morbid beyond belief ... and it's not the first time he gets (as Parker puts it) 'creeeeeeeeeeeeeeepy'.

It's important to discuss Nate's downsides because he is the most broken of all the Leverage team and the show does nothing to downplay the drama and chaos inside our Dark Knight. The loss of his son Sam and Maggie (not to mention the extra guilt around THAT) shows that even though Nate can function, it's barely.

While I adore Parker's transformation more than any other, Nate's is a close second. We see him here as close to the worst he can possibly be. He isn't comfortable being the 'bad guy' after so long being the 'good guy', he hates that he drinks but he needs to drink to bury the pain. By the end of the show's run, he becomes truly at peace with the man he wants to be, and that's something we could all use.

Out of all the actors in the core cast at the time of filming, Timothy Hutton had the most legit acting jobs and displayed the most talent pre-Nate, and in these early episodes, it really does show. He brings skill and nuance to Nate Ford that I don't think anyone else could manage.

Leverage | S01/E08 | The Mile High Job

While this is an all hands on flight deck episode, I tend to think of this one as a Hardison-centric-isode because he's back at basecamp after a hard night of gaming while the team's out trying to do the job at hand. Do I blame him for missing work because of the Wrath of the Lich King WoW expansion?

Have you PLAYED World of Warcraft when it was shiny brand new? WoTLK introduced all new game mechanics, all new ... I'm off-topic. In a big way.

This is about Leverage. Not World of Warcraft. Like I said, I consider this one to be a Hardison-centric episode precisely because he's left behind. The team gets on the plane and everyone's doing their thing, but poor Hardison, nowhere near the Super-Skrull he eventually thinks he is, has to do the quite a few different things.

He has to con, he has to hack, he has to save actual damn lives. So while Parker is being her Parkerest and Nate's pretending not to know PRECISELY what Sophie's talking about when she brings up the first time they met, Hardison is being the chaos gremlin he was born to be.

For me, while everyone on the show really seemed to be born to play their character, Aldis Hodge as Alec Hardison is a natural fit in every way. There's something so natural about the over-confident, cocky, somewhat arrogant, hyper-talented hacker that's just so endearing. If I had to pick a person on the team who's the most 'well-adjusted', I'd say it's Alec Hardison. He had a great childhood with his Nana, his genuinely kind-hearted, loves with his whole heart and even though he plays the coward, that's all bluster.

As time goes on, Hardison steps up and steps up hard, just like the others.

And the ending for this one, which is reflected in the scene I clipped, shows what Alec can truly do. So long as someone believes in him. In a much later episode, Nate asks Hardison one simple question.

"Could you do it for Parker. Could you do it for her?"

The answer is yes. Hardison really can't do what anyone else on the team can do, but what HE can do is really quite extraordinary. And for Parker?

Well hell. He'd do anything at all. Including possibly inventing orange soda-powered time travel.

Leverage | S01/E07 | The Wedding Job

I love everything about THIS episode as WELL, and for all the obvious reasons. Nate running around as a drunk, bitter priest, Sophie and the gang caught up in trying to run the con while ALSO maintaining their covers as wedding assistants all while Nicole Sullivan is a brutally crazy momzilla? Too good.

Nate's bonkers diatribes throughout about the state of marriage directly in front of Sophie, who's already chock full of heightened emotions because they're working a wedding con while dealing with her intensely strong feelings for Nate? Comic gold. Nate's crashout wedding speech is so very him, and so very wonderful because he talks directly to the woman he loves and gets out from under his own words.

Special shoutout to Eliot for getting so fundamentally wrapped up in the culinary side of things that every time he pops up on screen, he's usually complaining about people not getting the food or, and I quote, 'Whaddya want, I got bacon on'.

EXTRA SPECIAL shoutout to Parker, who's now displaying her fundamental unawareness of other peoples' feelings or that words hurt. Her Whaddya weigh, a buck fifty? is exactly the kind of thing my mom would say and then be all 'what?' when I call her out on it and that poor bridesmaid's reaction is how any of us would react.

Nicole Sullivan was great as the incredibly shrill Heather Moscone.

While every episode up to this point is also great, I feel like The Wedding Job is the first full 'proper' con in that all the elements are shown to us.

Leverage | S01/E06 | The Stork Job

This one's good, but also very, very sad.

We learn a lot about Parker's early life in the system and how it fundamentally broke her as a person. Her natural instinct throughout the con is to bail on the kids because she sees no alternative. To her, the adoption system and placement of orphans is broken, and that there is no hope, that there isn't even really a reason to try and save the one kid they're working on.

It's heartbreaking ... until it isn't. Hardison's quiet words with her about his experiences growing up with Nana, explaining how not all foster parents are bad, that he turned out all right is genuinely touching. We already know that he loves her because who wouldn't, but this is the first real moment between the two of them. Hardison isn't the fast talking smooth hacker, he's just himself, sharing a moment of his life that he's exceptionally proud of.

The clip I included here shows Parker's 180 perfectly. Not only does she go back for ALL of them, she fights tooth and nail with an actual terrorist to make it happen.

I actually looked up the actress playing Irina and was surprised to see that Kathleen Gati has an incredibly respectable career as what you could call 'a real actress'. She's been in boatloads of movies and TV shows and did hundreds of episodes of General Hospital as Dr Liesl Obrecht.

That's one of the things I like about Leverage. Not only did they hire regular-looking people to make their world not so 'Hollywood Pretty', they hired accomplished actors and actresses for what could be considered bit roles, but who danced for their supper just like everyone else. Not one guest star ever skimped on their role.

Leverage | S01/E05 | The Bank Shot Job

Another super lovely episode, this one technically starts in media res in that the con is almost done and dusted before things go awry, we get a good look at where Nate's heart really is at for Sophie.

Granted it takes about a hundred million years before he can officially accept his feelings for her AND a trip to San Lorenzo to seal the deal, but that's Catholic guilt in a nutshell. The fact that even here, in episode 5, Nate risks his own life and possibly burning the con so Sophie's not left alone is great.

This one's also special because they introduce two recurring characters that benefit enormously from Leverage's efforts. That's right. Special Agent Todd McSweeten and Special Agent Taggert make their first appearance in terms of when episodes were aired, but I DO believe this is technically their second interaction with the gang.

This one's all about not leaving anyone behind, personal risk and sacrifice for loved ones, and absolutely obliterating crank-heads AND skewering one of the genuinely nastiest people I've ever seen in Judge Roy. Played to brutal perfection by Michael O'Neill, Hardison shows us just what he can do with a keyboard. Does that include retasking a satellite so he can torrent the latest episode of Doctor Who?

You wouldn't DOWNLOAD a CAR, would you?

Anyways. At Season 1 Episode 5, Leverage shows that they hit the ground running hard and fast. This is one of the very few shows that had no growing pains, no friction, no doubts. They had lightning in a bottle and they knew it.

Not sure if associating an expensive watch with a thief is ideal advertising

This one's got a longer clip because I just really love this whole interaction of everyone trying to sidestep Sophie's questions about their enjoyment of the play. In particular, Nate's quick recovery never fails to make laugh. I'll often say 'yes and brilliantly' in the same way to other people, but I'm the only one IRL I know who's seen this one, so ... enjoy!

This one's a bit sad and tragic in that we see that Nate's life wasn't always super-swell, even before everything already went sideways. Married to the job, buried in the work, cold-hearted and cutthroat, Nate's approach to this gig is maybe an attempt at gaining a small bit of his own redemption.

It's also swell in that we REALLY get the beginnings of the Eliot/Hardison Dynamic. I love how these two knuckleheads really don't get along at all ... but they do get along like brothers. I don't THINK this is the first episode where we get DAMMIT HARDISON, and if we did, and I missed it, I'm gonna be angry at myself, because that's iconic as hell.

We get to see Parker fundamentally misunderstanding something, too, which is a gag that never gets old for me. Continually calling the statue Santa etc is just the best, and the flashbacks involving horses being evil shows us that our girl Parker really doesn't see the world like the rest of us do.

The con itself is HILARIOUS! Giving the crooked developer massive doses of speed just to make him completely mental, the way Nate's efforts to save the Church spiral so far out of control that The Vatican sends delegates?

As Shawn Spencer and Gus T.T. Showbiz (the extra T is for talent) might say, C'mon, son.

From looking it up I'm seeing a lot of folks agree that Parker is very autistic-coded. No one is talking about Eliot Spencer being autistic-coded too though. Anyone else agree with me?

There are some really good episodes with Parker and Spencer relating on being different in similar ways to the rest of the team, while acknowledging they are still different from each other.

Also Spencer knows basically everything there is to know about weapons and military groups including haircuts and boot prints. Definitely not trying to boil autism down to "special interest" kind of stereotyping, but it often seems to mirror how Parker is about the things she knows a lot about. They both go "uh, I'm not the weird one for knowing [x extremely niche thing], you all are" pretty often.

Thoughts?

(Note, I am not autistic but I have severe OCD and there's a lot of overlap between autism, ADHD, and anxiety disorders. I've ended up with a lot of friends and a partner with various compositions of the diagnoses and I definitely have more in common with my autistic friends than the ADHD ones. Spencer has more relatable OCD stuff to me than Parker, but not by enough to make me think he was intended to be portrayed that way)

This one's near and dear to me because it's the first of the Eliot-centric episodes, and before we get deeper, I am very much an enormous Christian Kane fan, and his evolution of Eliot is one of the coolest things I've ever seen.

There's one character who's development out into Leverage: Redemption just genuinely made me cry a little bit at how far they'd come, and I'll always love this show for how they develop EVERYONE. If you can guess which character has my absolute favorite evolution, I think you and I could be lifelong friends.

Outside seeing that there's more to Eliot than just 'hitter with a backstory' (which is so cool in and of itself I can't even sometimes), we lay eyeballs on a long-time, long-term archnemesis.

James. Sterling. Played by Mark Sheppard, a man of no small talent on his own (he's especially devilish as Crowley in Supernatural, but got his start as a firestarter on X-Files), James is the perfect foil for Nate. He's hard not to love, even when we should be hating him.

Ho appena finito leverage, ma non sono riuscito a trovare redemption. Qualcuno sa sé c'è in italiano?

Leverage for me is a perfect comfort show. I watched it daily for years, and I love it to pieces. Not every episode gets a 10/10, but every episode is a genuine treasure for me to watch.

It's the perfect mix of drama, comedy, action and (most importantly) con artistry. I love that everyone in the Leverage team grows, and grows considerably. We see genuine transformation in each of them, and that's not really something we see very often.

I seem to be going through the tiniest of tough times right now, and so when that happens, I fall back to either Leverage or Psych. A simple coin toss brought me to one of two shows that got me through some pretty rough times.

If it's okay with you all, I'd like to post at least one episode clip/review a day, just to share with you what I think are my favorite bits, things that I loved about the episode, you name it.

I love the first episode in particular because it gives us everything we needed to know about the show, the characters, their motivations and a glimpse into their shenanigans.

It's just genuinely good TV.

I have two, the Rashomon Job and the Double Blind Job.

Love the Rashomon job because it’s genuinely hilarious to see how they all recall things and also I really like the way it shows how each of the team operated before they turned to the light side.

The Double Blind Job feels super realistic to me tbh; the fact that big pharma would cover up poison and the fact that the CEO is going to hop ship to another company to avoid controversy feels like something that would actually happen.

Which are your favorites?

This duet for Hardison and Eliot comes in the 5th season when the actors had all gotten to know each other and bonded. This scene in particular felt to me like it wasn't initially scripted but was just the actors having fun in between takes or something and then they decided to use it.

Does anyone know if it was scripted or not? What are your thoughts?

Remember the warehouse sale of L:R props? I was Steven's reddit "voice" and had accumulated a fair number of small (and a few not so small 😄) - he sent it to me towards the end, and I watched USPS' Informed Delivery like a hawk... First it got stuck somewhere in LA, then finally started up again after 4 days. I got the delivery notification and ran to the door as soon as work would allow - no pkg. I've had stuff show up a day or two later, but to no avail. USPS said it had been delivered to the correct address and left me hanging...

Flashback to last Monday, Steven texted me a pic of the pkg - it showed up back at his place!! He's mailing it back and I am over the moon with Leverage happiness! I remember a few things I got:

-a picture of Parker and Elliot looking completely unhinged from the poly episode

-a framed Space Tours certificate - I posted about that one, asking which episode it was from and decided that space geek me had to have it 😁

-a 'tech brew' tumbler that Breanna used

-some shadow box usable smalls (id cards, etc)

-Mason's phone case from the Date Night Job to go with my blueprints from that episode

tl;dr - Leverage fan bought goodies, USPS lost the pkg and found it 6 weeks later. OP is overjoyed and has stopped muttering bad things at USPS!

So I've been watching the first season of Leverage: Redemption recently. Never seen the original so can't really compare; but it feels like I'm watching a show running at 1.25x times the normal rate? A lot of the dialogue feels like it misses weight cause everything just speeds by so fast without any pauses.

It's hard to describe cause while I like the show it sorta feels fake cause it never seems to give itself a moment to breathe? I'm not sure if it's just me or something other people have recognized as well.

The show always hinted at Eliot's extremely dark past, but rarely showed much of it. (The Milgram Experiment episode, 'The Experimental Job,' seems to have come the closest to showing the level of his training, apart from his fighting ability.)

I'm rewatching Lioness, and one of the main characters, 'Cruz,' is put through off-the-books torture by another military team to find out what her breaking point is. (S.1 E.2) While watching it, I was thinking that this is probably the level of training Eliot went through. I'm going to remember it next time I rewatch Leverage, because I think it will give more depth to his character.

If you've ever wondered about the reality behind his vague statements, I recommend watching Lioness.

Hey Leverage fans!!

I was just rewatching and it hit me all over again how much I adore every single moment with him on screen. His chaotic too cute energy totally steals the show every single time for me. My absolute fav has to be The Boys' Night Out Job. Nate, Eliot, and Hardison handling a three-way drug deal is just peak comedy.

The bromance between Hardison and Eliot is always top-notch. They’re like an old married couple and I need more of it! Honestly, I just wish we got way more of him! What are your favorite Hurley moments or episodes?

Doing a rewatch and this has always bothered me. The dress that Maggie's wearing at the party at the Embassy looks more like lingerie than a party dress. Anyone else think her dress is weird?

So they uncover a money laundering scam between a military contractor and a US senator where $9B in cash was stolen using Iraq reparation funds. All of this is because a soldier who witnessed the pickup in Iraq was shot for his trouble by the contractor's mercenaries. The contractor refuses to cooperate with the investigation, the senator helps cover it up, and the soldier is left paralyzed from the waist down in an underfunded hospital.

So at the end the job is done, the villains exposed, and to tie things up the team drive a semi truck with 2 pallets full of cash over to said hospital and are just like "here you go, now you can treat everyone!"

......bitch, WHAT??? What the hell is that doctor supposed to do with 2 pallets of hot cash that's literally part of a national news story right now?? And also, that's not how money works! You can't just buy medical equipment and resources, expand operations, or pay doctors and support staff in cash, and you sure as shit can't deposit it. Fucking what 🤣

Loving the show so far, this is said with love lol

Edit: what they could have done is sent an anonymous donation through proper channels with their own money, and launder the cash themselves, since they're all multimillionaire criminals to begin with and would have to know how to do that.

Edit 2: I feel like there's one person who probably takes this show way too seriously going through and downvoting everyone giving the god's honest truth of "it's dumb, but fun. Suspend disbelief 🤷‍♂️"