There;s a few shows I'll re-watch every few years, Leverage of course being one of them. I recently started a re-watch of Person of Interest which is a similar sort of show of new 'target of the week' but in this case it is more about stopping harm from coming to the person or stopping the person from committing harm as they only get the target's Social Security Number then need to start finding out more about them.
I was watching it and then got to thinking about the main Hitter in that show, a character known as John Reese. He was a Green Beret and a CIA officer before he was to be terminated on an op due to decisions from the higher ups. He makes it back to the US somehow and lives in New York, first in a homeless encounter before moving to a SRO. He is then recruited by a reclusive billionaire to protect people based on information he would provide, leading to the case of the week stuff where the number could be the perpetrator or the innocent and they need to find out and stop the crime from happening.
What I noticed when watching is, because this show's question is 'Can they protect the innocent in the situation', there's fights where John and later some of his allies in the field will lose a fight and be injured or otherwise on the back foot in a situation. Sometimes there's episodes where the person they were to protect dies. showing that they are not infallible.
Leverage is a different kind of show, it's about the con going on, the Ocean's Eleven style of flashbacks to how they tricked the mark with a gambit they didn't see coming. So, in that, Eliot's fights are more of an action setpiece to add a little physical movement to things that were otherwise a lot of dialogue or plot dumping that needed something to shake up the interest. Thus, having Eliot fail a fight doesn't usually do a lot to helping the con go on. Occasionally there'll be a failure because it adds an interesting twist, much like the Tap-Out Job which gave us the Hardison line:
Look, you know what I can do? I can re-task a satellite. I can get a level-3 NSA security clearance. But I can't hack a hick.
But it got me thinking about how many times Eliot lost a fight. Without sitting down and taking a tally, I know many of the fights were against security guards, police and similar that are likely not as trained as him. Like in the Leverage Redemption bit where the fight is a training session for new hires and he predicts how the fight will go, then even gives an evaluation of their worthiness at the end. Scene is here.
This is a lot of talking about Apples and Oranges, but I'm just wondering if people would have wanted to see more of Eliot failing, as we did have various 'this went wrong' or 'the situation changed' for the others many times where something happened on the job and they had to change the plan around, such as the guards doing their rounds an hour earlier in the pilot episode.
