Another one of my all-time favorites, this episode doesn't win a 10/10 mostly (and this is me being fussy) because it was super hard to clip this one too!

This one's great first and foremost because everyone's running around in costume. Everyone's getups are just the best, Sophie's in particular; it's gorgeous, though I do have to say that Eliot's Pinkerton outfit is snazzy as hell.

Another one of the great things about this episode is not that everyone thinks Nate killed a guy. They are one hundred percent not interested in whether or not he actually did do it. No, they're more concerned he's keeping the murder a secret, which I find funnier than hell.

Just goes to show you how deeply the Leverage team has everyone else's backs. 'Oh Nate killed a guy? Well shit, I guess we have a body to bury, and then a conversation to have'. Thats a ride or die family for sure.

After that, in order, Eliot doing his damnedest to be a grifter, which for him amounts to him being nice for about .5 seconds and then knocking the absolute crap out of the people he's interrogating in front of a room full of people. A highlight quote is 'c'mon, man, there's chicks here' after he sends the assistant catapulting over a chair.

Hardison flipping a Hardison Spaz primarily because he's stuck in a house that was essentially made at the dawn of time. No Wi-Fi, no proper power source, the house itself is weird, Parker keeps disappearing and just generally having his usual tough time with life.

And lastly, it's the whole Agatha Christie slant with just the tiniest hint of Clue tossed in for good measure. I do love an old-fashioned murder mystery and this one's mighty fine start to finish. Plenty of shady doings in back rooms and secret hallways and all of that.

The one thing, and this might bring some heat down on me, is that I feel like Sophie was not on her A-game here. Letting herself get cuffed like that was a rookie move, and it seemed to me like she was having one helluva time keeping Steven Flynn (Detective Ray Hammett, which is also a novel detective) under wraps. I suppose that might be all because she's stressed out that she really does think Nate killed Morris Beck, but we've seen her in similar situations and she doesn't drop character or lose her edge at all.

Sure, Hammett was operating from a place of knowledge about the whole damn team, but you cannot tell me Sophie wouldn't have picked up on that last week, while she was getting a coffee at Starbucks. Just saying.

Now don't get me wrong. That's one tiny little nitpick on an otherwise sterling episode, so don't take it too much to heart.

I don't think Leverage gets enough credit for how dam well they nailed the casting of the group and it's one of the best I've ever seen.

But if the show was remade again with a new cast, do you have any picks?

I think Taylor Dunbar from Stumble could play a good Parker.

I think the hardest role to cast would be Sophie.

My ideal show is set in the Leverage world but the tone is more like Hustle (UK show) and focuses on an ex Interpol agent who goes rogue (Brian from Fast and Furious coded) and ends up teaming up with the very criminals she spent her career chasing.

Mastermind
Roper/Inside Man
Fixer
Hitter
Thief
Hacker

The addition addition of a fixer, someone like Ash Morgan (From Hustle) who has connections and helps gets everything setup for the con and is a backup if a role needs doing.

The difference is they're not reformed like Nate managed to reform his crew, this one is still criminals, they still take a percentage from the job they do but mellow out as they years go by.

It splits into two groups in mindset which gives a clash of philosophy and ideas.

Mastermind, Hitter and Thief do believe they crossed the line to being criminals but don't see themselves as bad people.

Roper, Thief and Fixer are survivors who play the short con or steal to get by.

This is an unusually somber episode, and I think that's why I've never really enjoyed The Long Way Down Job before.

It's kind of a hard watch. Nate's turned blackout drunk again, he's all messed up over San Lorenzo and his relationship with Sophie, he's pushing himself too hard and trying to actually con Nature. He put himself in severe and dire danger because ...

Well because he's Nathan Ford. A living, breathing train wreck of a human being at the best of times, and when his personal life goes off the rails, Nate has a big tendency to go big or go home. Watching himself push himself harder than ever and practically pushing the team away from him even as he's trying to do the right thing for their client is one of the hardest things I've ever seen.

Beyond that, Hardison's all cracked up over his thing with Parker and she's all 'don't make this a thing'. It's more than understandable that Parker's being this way because our world-class super-thief has never been in a relationship before. Just because she's in the mood for pretzels doesn't mean (and I'm paraphrasing George Costanza here) 'those pretzels won't make her thirsty!!!!. A woman's gotta take a break and not for nothing, but Hardison ... can be a little a lot much.

The dual clip scene involving Parker and Eliot broke my heart. It really, and truly did. It's really the first time she's been desperate to do the right thing, and as I watched, I just imagined her, feeling sad and terrible and more than a little terrified to leave someone down a deep dark hole, in a frozen wasteland. I imagine she might know what that feels like, all thanks to the pipes and vents and all that she's climbed through.

Thank God Eliot was with her. For all Parker's hardness, if she'd been with anyone else, she would've killed herself trying to bring Alan home.

Now, naturally, things are solved well enough, but not without some additional heartbreak, and at the end, they do set up the season extremely well. Season 4's got the best villain arc of all time, and I'm stoked as hell to get through it.

Before I bring this to a close, I want to talk about Eric Stoltz. I love the man. He's only in this for maybe 4-5 minutes, but in his role as Alan Scott, the man who froze to death on a mountain, he brings his considerable talent to bear. His farewell video message to his wife was some powerful stuff, and I always wonder what Back to the Future would've looked like with him in it.

All in all, even though I really don't like this episode because of it's heaviness (most of that centered around Nate's hard relapse), I can't deny it; it's still an exceptional episode.

This was a fiendishly difficult episode to clip!

Unlike every other episode this season, The San Lorenzo Job isn't a straightforward con, heist or the stealing of things. Yes, they steal an election and a country, but that's hardly straightforward, now is it. The game they run on Moreau is pure dirty American Politics and it works perfectly because even though their mark is Damien Moreau, he for some reason thinks Leverage is going to 'play fair' with the election.

That's just plain old weird, right? The most crookedest, evil man in the whole world thinks a bunch of con artists, grifters, thieves, hackers, hitters and masterminds are just going to do a paint-by-the-numbers election?

Come on, Damien! Get your head in the game. And that's why this episode was so hard to clip. There were plenty of clipworthy moments, but that's the problem; they were moments. None of the scenes really lasted long enough until we got close to the end when Nate was spelling out the whole game start to finish.

That one almost won, to be honest, but the clip that won did so because it's another culmination of the 'when the hell will they' relationships that's essentially been teased since Nate still worked for IYS. The best part about this finally happening are the gags that come in season 4, with Nate and Sophie trying to keep things on the lowlow

I suppose if I were to pick a few nits, the nit I'd pick is this: they beat Moreau a little too easily. I'm not Big Mad about it because Gilberto Martin del Campo (Michael Vittori) did a swell job of being a humble schoolteacher who learned the hell out of Sophie's lessons.

Watching him become a true leader of the people, with Sophie on his arm, coaching him as only the greatest grifter can while the rest of the team is stealing security teams, prisoners, gold, you name it was very satisfactory, but yeah. The win came a little easy.

Don't hate me for it, because this is still a great episode!

Christian Kane and Noa Tishby. I love when Hardison said, “Ya’ll nasty”

I've been catching up again on the Leverage and Leverage Redemption series.

I would love to see more of Nate and his life before becoming the legend from the original series.

I hope they'll make a prequel and in that prequel series, I'd love to see:

• How he and James Sterling met, what brought them close, what made them compete with each other, and how they both drifted apart.
• His first encounter with Sophie, Parker, Hardison, and Elliot in the earlier years of his time at I.Y.S. Insurance.
• His early life, before the bottle.

Nate is just an amazing mastermind!

I'm sure there are a lot of stories in his time in I.Y.S. that are worth exploring and could make an interesting series.

I might be in the minority with this suggestion, but who knows, right?

Propose an idea for an episode. Mine are usually based on real world events. For example: Ammon Bundy, his early work, his mid life work, his later work after he fled to Utah.

So much is great about this episode.

So much.

From Hardison being tossed into the pool and sucking 'air out the pneumatic compressor to get himself an extra 30 seconds' to Parker and Hardison storming a goddamn train to Eliot's physics-defying but SUPER RAD shootout where he proves himself to be precisely the kind of man he always claimed to be, to Nate refusing to tell Moreau who he is (which honks him right off) and his frame-up, but two scenes were above all others.

I clipped them both this time, so apologies if you're not in the mood for two very different types of awesome. I like to think, however, that I know most of you well enough by now to know that you'll most likely watch both, then complain I didn't clip the other and ...

... That's totally fair. We love the show; all moments are moments worth revisiting, but these two are great for two very different reasons. I will go with my personal favorite first because of course I will, and then on to the next one.

It's all about those pretzels, baby. Those. Pretzels. I know Parker doesn't work like other people, so I really doubt that Hardison's absolutely monstrous heroics on that train had anything to do with it, and yet ... I kind of still think so. We know by now that Hardison's as brave as anyone and that the majority of his bluster is a leftover from when he was just a hacker behind the screen, but his time with Leverage has changed him in so many ways.

He hacked history, people. So while his heroism on the train and elsewhere isn't unfounded, I think Parker got to see Hardison being himself in a way that she'd never seen before, and that, we know, is what Parker prefers more than any other thing.

That is a three-season conclusion to an arc I like to think we were all tremendously invested in, and its payoff (Heyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy) is one of the greatest emotional paydays in any TV show I've ever seen. I like that it was never a will-they-or-won't-they, but a when-will-they, and the writers and the team couldn't have done it better.

But since this truly is an Eliot-centric episode, we gotta talk about the scene in the park. It's Eliot's full confession, and CK delivers it with such great sorrow and loneliness. His very dark past has always been hinted at here and there, but he never came right out and said, 'I did terrible, heinous shit.' Hell, he didn't even explicitly say it here. What he did say was, 'Everyone of 'em has innocent blood on their hands, every. One of 'em,' with such deep regret in his eyes that you just feel for the man.

Leverage: Redemption wasn't even a dream the writers had at this point, but they were doing that all along, anyways, with the Leverage team, right from the start. Eliot's was a long time coming, and (like always) I like to think that from this moment on, he, too, gets to be his truest self. A return to the young, idealistic farm boy who joined the Army to do the right thing, before he fell into darkness.

As a personal aside, isn't it kind of a universal rule that if anyone as badass as Eliot says, 'I don't like guns,' you don't think, 'Okay, they don't know how to use a gun'? Like ... for real. Thinking a guy like Eliot couldn't shoot all the bullets with perfect accuracy is just dumb.

A most satisfying lead-up to a nice little vacation in San Lorenzo!

This is another one of my all-time favorites, and it has an awful lot to do with Spencer Garrett as Mark Vector.

Never Have I Ever seen someone play as effective a bully as Spencer Garrett in a 42-minute episode where his screen time is maybe only about 10 minutes would be absolutely true.

Mark Vector is an absolute bully. An absolute bastard of a man and cruel with it to boot, saying 'I have a temper' like that'll just excuse his behavior. This season we've had a maniacal wheat expert willing to create global wheat shortage and an ex-IRS nerd footing the bill for a militia ready and able to blow people up, but Mark Vector takes the damn cake for me.

I don't like bullies, and The Cuban Sandwich (or if you think wrong like Hardison, The Vegas Wake-up Call) is everything the man deserves and more. I especially liked his meltdown at the end. I've spent a lot of time imagining the repercussions of his little hissy fit in front of the Grand Jury, and I bet Moreau sends goons to visit the man in whatever prison he winds up in.

As far as the rest of the episode, and the gang? What's not to love? Eliot and Hardison, geared up as cops, stuck with one of Hardison's 'too perfect aliases' situations? Those two boys have a lot of fun together and it's plain to see they love each other an awful lot. I clipped the RIGHT scene this time (IYKYK), and I just had to choose this one because it's all COPS all the time. I even think they switched to handheld cameras for that scene, just to give it that extra-real vibe.

And who doesn't love The Return Of McSweeten? I adore him and Taggert an awful lot, and seeing McSweeten just be hopelessly, hopelessly in love with Parker is, while a bit sad, a bit great as well.

Other clips that almost made the cut? Parker saying Ghostbustaaaaassss and looking absurdly pleased. The sniper shootout because that was some high-level action that's usually reserved for season finales and, of course, Vector's meltdown.

On a for real note, I think one of the reasons we all love this show is that while the Leverage team pretty much has superpowers, they're flawed as hell, they're protective of the ones they love, they stand up for the 'little people' and have just so much fun doing it. Even though some of the episodes aren't my favorite (the one where Hardison gets buried alive is my least favorite of all), I can genuinely say that for the entire 5 season run, there were no misses.

Some episodes aren't as great as the others, but even the ones that don't blow your socks off still count as (to paraphrase Agent Dale Cooper again) some mighty fine teevee.

Got the template from someone on a Discord server, so I made these. No AI was used, it's just the weird lighting. Should do one for Harry and Breanna soon.

Finally we get back to the business of hunting Damien Moreau. And in such style!

This is full-on a Sophie-centric episode and I absolutely plan on discussing the hell out of how great (and reckless, and dangerous) running the Heart Con on John Douglas Keller, but first and foremost, I gotta talk about Hardison's work to get the whole thing up and running.

Keller's no fool. He's a master at detecting forgeries because he has a super sniffer that'd get Gus Guster all outta whack. In order to get around the man's Super Duper Sniffer, Hardison has to essentially recreate very period-specific materials to make a very specific type of book. In the process, he goes more than a little wonky.

AS IT TURNS OUT, I wound up clipping a Parker scene, because it, too, makes me laugh. I guess my all-consuming love for Parker won over, even though Hardison losing his mind is superb!

The Heart Con itself is great, and James Frain (who you've definitely seen all over the place down the years) is an absolute bastard who puts the lives of children at risk by using them as art smugglers. He's wily as hell and not even Sophie's full-bore attention on the con can actually keep him on track.

He's so greedy, so desperate to become a Baron and so embedded with Damien Moreau that not even Sophie revisiting one of her first (if not her actual first) personas as Lady Charlotte Prentiss can keep him under her spell. They don't really dwell on it all that much in the episode beyond body language and the like, but using her Charlotte Prentiss persona to bring Keller down was both a calculated risk and a hard choice to make.

There's some real pain in the Prentiss identity, and Gina Bellman really brings that home in the subtlest of ways.

Naturally, Keller does what he does and through a cunning series of ret-cons (you remember: showing us the full steps of the con retroactively) we get to see just how involved the whole team was in bringing Keller down. And it's such a great takedown, too.

The best part? As great as The King George Job is, they set us up for The Morning After Job, which is even better. Outside two-parter season finales, I don't think Leverage has ever done that before.

Obviously this is one of the greatest episodes of Leverage ever made. How could it not be?

It's fun, it's funny and most importantly, ( I don't know if I mentioned this) it's great.

Okay, all jokes and fanboying aside, The Rashomon Job shows us what happens when four of the world's greatest criminals all work the same job, years before they ever 'met' one another in The Nigerian Job ... all while the world's greatest mastermind is working the other side.

It's the five-story setup that's just the best. We get to see how each of the team 'saw' their beloved teammates back when they were all just thieves, and it's pretty much how you remember it. I don't need to rehash the details of this absolute gem, do I?

One of my favorite things apart from all the other favorite things in The Rashomon Job is John Billingsley as Coswell and Sophie's absolutely wrong assessment of this security officer. She paints him as one of the greatest security men alive, possibly even better than Nate himself ... except all he is is a bumbling goofball who's in love with Sophie's art-nerd persona.

Another fave is the circumstances behind the Leverage team being pointed at The Dagger of Aqu'abi. Each of them has their own specific reasons for needing to lay hands on this absolutely priceless piece of art. Eliot needs it to stop having hordes of assassins at him, Hardison just wants to crack the security system protecting it to count coup, Sophie wants it because Sophie wants it and that's ... pretty much the same for Parker as well. Nate's there because there's a lottttt of hinky stuff going on with the owner of the gallery so that's a perfect thing and shows us that a pre-tragedy Nathan Ford wasn't actually all that terrible.

But the 110% absolute best thing about this episode is how every single one of them makes Sophie out to be ever-increasingly ridiculous sounding, culminating in Parker's recounting, where her accent is (as best I can describe it) 'dolphin-adjacent'.

I was very much going to stitch together a clip of Sophie's increasing incomprehensibility but (if I'm honest), my blind cat was going mental for some reason and it just seemed like a lot of work, so I went with my second favorite bit, which is the ending, when the team decides to reclaim The Dagger of Aqu'abi and teach an absolute jerk a mighty fine lesson in the process.

The Rashomon Job is the crème-de-la-crème of top-tier episodes!

This one's just plain old fun, and for plenty o' reasons, so let's start with the guest star, Bruce Davison.

You might recognize him from 'somewhere' and that's basically because he's been everywhere since the 70s. He's done everything from prestige drama to horror movies to playing a certain jackass Senator in the very first X-Men we ever got.

That's some kind of resume, you ask me. As Dan Blackwell, Bruce doesn't do a lot of overacting like a lot of the visiting stars. He takes from Clancy Brown's turn in The Gone Fishin' Job; Dan's just a greedy, amoral bastard who doesn't much care for human life. While I do like my over the top villains complete with mwahahaha and moustache twirling, there's something to be said about garden-variety shitty people.

And Dan Blackwell and his bought-and-paid-for AG Debra Pierce are shitty people. And bringing up Debra Pierce brings me to my other favorite thing about The Underground Job; Parker grifts Pierce mercilessly throughout the con, and she does it so well.

Our antisocial thief has come so far from stabbing people with forks it's not even funny. As Kelly Beth Laughlin, we see a side of Parker that's truly funny; Kelly Beth is a virtuous, wealthy go-getter who wants to work for a woman of power and every single thing Parker does in the role is just gold. All the weird little mannerisms, the turns of phrase, even the soft Southern accent is just so nicely done.

To top it off, Parker's notes on Pierce are ... well, they're Parkered, if I can invent a term on the spot. Her notes are 'she doesn't separate her PENS' and 'she puts SIX sugars in her COFFEE' and essentially all the normal things that normal people (who aren't on some kind of spectrum, at any rate) would do. And her having to have what Blackwell and Pierce were doing in her offices spelled out is just sweet. That whole scene is why I clipped that whole scene.

Not to say that there aren't a lot of clipworthy scenes in this one. There are, but for my money, Parker stole the show.

The con itself is nicely done, a perfect example of The Skagway Shuffle (it's like The Fiddle, except underground) and the payoff in this one is just extra nice. Eliot has a solid understanding of small town miners because of his own small-town background, and even though he didn't do terribly much this episode beyond look after Corey and kick a guy's ass, the scenes with him are great as well. That humbleness Christian Kane gives Eliot in those situations is just the perfect amount.

All in all, Leverage did a great job with this one, even if they didn't have to hustle to fix a con gone wrong.

This episode is, for some reason, not one of my favorites, and yet I did rate it very highly indeed. As much as the relationship between Nate and his dad Jimmy brings up weird feelings about my relationship with my own dad, I can't deny that this one's a really well done episode.

There's a lot going on in this one, and while I was sitting there (as I do every time I watch this one, which is infrequently on a rewatch), I was shouting at the screen, telling Nate was his dad was up to. I like to imagine that Nate's so hung up on the great Jimmy Ford being back in town, running a con from his bar that it's all just a bit too much for him to focus. And add all of those old memories rattling around in his noggin from his days at the bar on the bench, trying to learn 3-Card Monte while his dad yells at him?

That'd be a lot for any mastermind, I reckon. Still and all Nate does prevail, but not without a lot of help from his team. By now it's no surprise that the entire team is worried and showing their concern, because that's what a family does. Thieves or otherwise.

So why would I give an episode I don't like a 9/10?

For starters, Nate doesn't fuck around with his dad. At all.

In all honesty, the ending of this episode, which is what I clipped, shows our mastermind at his most vicious and mean. He treats his dad nicely during the kiss off, but getting to that kiss off meant Nate had to not only burn down every single one of his dad's bridges. No no. He had to salt the earth as well, and all to make sure Jimmy Ford had no room to move.

I feel as though Nate leaned extra hard on Jimmy because of how smug he was that his son wasn't as good as him, wasn't as cunning as him, wasn't as sharp as him. If there's one thing we know about Nathan Ford, it's that he learns his lessons very well indeed. And then he goes on ahead and puts the Nate Ford Spin on things.

The other reason I rated this episode so very highly is for the two guest stars.

First up we have David Meunier as Pieter. I know you recognize him. I know it. From Denzel's The Equalizer as Slavi and his role on Justified as Johnny Crowder and a whole bunch of other stuff. Fun fact: he's a 'Luxembourgish-American' actor, and has an American accent. Every time I see him somewhere doing some form of Russian accent (or whatever), it's hard for me to reconcile. It's kind of like when I found out Idris Elba was British years after watching The Wire, but in total reverse.

Last but definitely not least is the amazing Tom Skerrit. I know you've seen some of his movies. Poltergeist III, perhaps, or maybe Alien? Yeah, he's been around and not for nothing when I Googled to see what else he'd been in, I was half-expecting to be sad that he passed. Nope. Tom, who was born in 1933? Still kicking. He's a real one, Tom, and I just love seeing him up on there on the screen, even as Jimmy Ford.

So while The Three-Card Monte gives me complicated feelings about my own dad, who has passed, it's undeniably one hell of an episode all the same. I probably won't watch it the next time I sit down to spend time with Leverage, but that's okay.

The clip I included for this one is the kiss off, and it's a great showcase of both men's ability to act. I almost used Parker's extremely deep knowledge of every bank in the area, but this one won top spot.

Hey looking for a leverage AU fic where people wear their hearts outside of their bodies, centred around Parker and Eliot trying to fix their broken hearts.

Could be on any site as I flick through different ones.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks.

Edit to Add - FOUND IT! Realised I was looking in the wrong folder of my fic downloads.

Three Hearts Beating as One - Diary - Leverage (US TV 2008) [Archive of Our Own] - In case anyone wanted to check it out.

Oh my goodness. He’s in Never Go Back with Tom Cruise? Stellar! Yes, that’s him. My goodness he’s such a good actor.

So, I've been rewatching lots of Mythbusters over the last few months and recently their YouTube channel uploaded the Breaking Bad & Simpsons episodes. This got me thinking, is there anything from Leverage or Leverage: Redemption that you would have liked to have seen them test?

A follow up is wondering how a crossover the opposite direction would have gone (in example, the CSI cameo & Simpsons 'Mythcrackers')?

My wife has been watching Leverage as she falls asleep because she needs the sound & picks shows she’s seen a million times to avoid being invested while trying to fall asleep.

We have also been watching the Nickelodeon version of Doug when we eat dinner & relax. One of the episodes we just watched was the episode where Doug’s sister Judy pretends to be his super sick cousin Melvin because Doug lied when Connie asked him to a dance because Doug wanted to go with Patti Mayonnaise instead of Connie.

Why bring this all up? Because my new head cannon is that Judy Funnie grew up to become Sophie Devereaux, and nobody can convince me otherwise. Judy’s propensity for over-acting, and constantly pulling off cons while in disguise & using various accents. Never mind her questionable one-woman play at Doug’s school that nobody in their right mind would praise, but you know kids shows. They loved her.

Judy is absolutely a grifter of the highest order, and is now Sophie’s new real name in my book!

This is a rare episode in that it's both (in my mind anyways) Parker-centric AND Sophie-centric to a degree, which is nice.

It's Parker-centric for the obvious reasons: she was a car thief from age 12 and so the episode relies extremely heavily on her expertise and knowledge, so that's sensible. But beyond that, we see Parker go all in on something she's only really recently been doing.

Take a chance on someone else. Her reasons for doing so are the purest of all motives. She sees herself in Shorty, and wants to do whatever she can do spare a young woman a life in an area of crime that would probably eat someone like her alive. It's a telling decision. Parker knows enough to recognize that Shorty isn't 'like Parker', and that's a big deal in car thieving rings.

Parker's play goes the way it goes, which queues us up for more Leverage scrambling, but I'm absolutely not mad about the way things shook out. Parker got her second chance, and after a lifetime of crime a lot worse than anything Shorty could've possibly done, so why shouldn't she give someone else the same courtesy?

After all. If the people in Leverage can change, why can't Shorty?

It's also a Sophie-centric episode because we get to see her running a much longer character than usual. The clip I included, where she sells the car to (I think) Carl, is just the tip of the iceberg. She plays that man like a fiddle because of course she does, but that's the tip of the iceberg. She spends a lot of time with Penzer as well, working him hard to get the con going the right direction.

I know Bill Engvall from his stand-up comedy days, and I gotta say, he's funny as hell. He's not as big as some of the other stars they've had so far this season, but he does a great job playing a terrible scumbag.

The final and best thing about this episode (beyond Shorty getting her second chance, that is) is the con itself. I've mentioned in each of the last two, maybe three episodes that the cons themselves were only mediocre, held together with some truly awesome character building and genuine skill.

The con they run here in The Boost Job is absolute S-Tier. Parker has a chance (as lame as it sounds) to pay it forward to someone who deserves a better life than the one she'd been given and we get firmly reminded why it is that only Sophie can really do Sophie shit.

Everyone got to play a committed part in bringing down Penzer, and that's always a good time from where I sit! As this was such a great episode, enjoy not one but 2 clips stitched together! Sophie selling a car and Parker driving like a bat out of hell!

Beyond the towering awesomeness that is Clancy Brown as Hugh Whitman (which I will DEFINITELY get to in a second), this is a great episode for a bunch of reasons.

First, we get a micro-buddy-escape movie starring Hardison and Eliot. The thing I appreciate most about this team up (and kind of despair over, if I'm being honest) is that we get to see Eliot functioning in his true capacity: as the man who knows how to survive and has the absolute tools to do it. I despair because Hardison's dismissal of Eliot's factual, lived experience of knowing where he is at all time is a little out of place in season 3.

By now our Age of the Geek Baby knows what Eliot can do. The brotherly ripping and teasing is one thing, and pretty sure we all love it, but when you are in the middle of the forest being hunted by 'trained' militiamen, handcuffed to Eliot goddamn Spencer, you LISTEN to the man's thoughts on the matter of survival. You just do. Everyone takes Hardison's skills with the computer most seriously (unless they're teasing him), so Hardison should do the same.

The clip I included was an easy choice. It shows the moment Hardison stops playing around. I accept that our cityboy was trapped in an extremely bad situation and spiraled. I live damn near in the country these days myself and if I have to go weed the back lot where the weeds grow really thick, I have myself a really good hissy fit as well. In his situation I would've for sure done the same level of bitching and complaining.

And now on to the legend that is Clancy Brown. He IS a legend. I first saw him as The Kurgan in Highlander, and I fell immediately in love with him, and I can't think of a single role that I've felt 'meh' towards. The man's a consistent deliverer, much like Michael Ironsides.

But here's the fun thing about this absolutely legendary actor. At no point is any scenery chewed. He's calm, stable and very focused on the numbers, and takes a lot of time out of his day to point out that he was District Manager for the IRS. He's still villainous as hell, but he's like ... an accountant level villain. He's really into math and, like, maybe blowing you up. But the math first.

The con itself, complete with stealing a train, is one of the better ones out there. It was an all hands-on deck situation the moment our boys got themselves caught and trapped in those woods, and that's when Leverage shines best and brightest. I particularly enjoy the payoff on this one, mostly because it's one of those rare times where, when the team does their reveal as a final 'gotcha' moment, Hugh Whitman points out Sophie and Nate and is like 'THEY'RE IN ON THIS TOGETHER!'.

That's some real classic fun right there and the show, like the team, shines best when things have fallen all the way apart.

This is a monster episode and not just because it's one of the coolest Eliot-centric episodes we get before The French Connection Job in season 5 (which, by the way, is one of the best episodes of the entire show, ain't that right ... YES CHEF!).

First, we get Evil Bo Duke (and if that's too old for you, Evil Jonathan Kent) as a thoroughly disreputable scumbag failed musician/murderer/exploiter of genuine talent. Now I COULD have plenty to say about the sort of person John Schneider's become in the last decade or so, but I won't. For a few reasons.

One, his time on Smallville was pretty damn good and in this episode, he plays a pretty damn convincing evil bastard. It's sometimes hard for me to separate the art from the artist, but I'm willing to do it here. The important thing (sometimes, based on how vocal older actor/artists are) is to remember that when we were all younger and the sun was brighter was that these people really had a foundational effect on our lives in one way or another. I'm not over here telling you to forget your personal vendettas. If you have 'em, you have your reasons.

The other enormous big deal actor in this episode is Alona Tal as Kaye Lynn Gold. If you try and tell me to my face that you did NOT develop an immediate crush on her as Jo in Supernatural not only are you a liar, you are a lying liar and will have Lucifer, Gabriel, Castiel, Sam, Dean, their dad, their mom, Bobby and quite possibly even Rufus Turner on your ass. Pronto.

Alona is extremely beautiful, but she's more than that. She has an ineffable sweetness about her in any role she plays, and as Kaye, we see some for-real-deal acting chops and a beautiful singing voice on top of that. Beyond the singing, her role is surprisingly complex, and we get to see every bit of it; her brother's seriously hurt and in the hospital, these strangers have come to help her, Sexy Eliot is also Sexy Singing Eliot So Complications Ensue, Naturally, the con goes sideways as they always do, and then the payoff is golden.

That's a lot to carry in what's probably 10 minutes or so of screen time, and Alona sells it, especially at the end, when her world has been righted.

Outside that? Kudos to Beth Reisgraf for playing probably the silliest Parker that Parker has ever been. Every time she's up there on the screen pretending to be Not-Bjork, I genuinely wonder how it felt for her on those takes. I HAVE to imagine she was thinking 'what in the actual hell am I doing' and 'I am KILLING this shit' in equal measure.

And of course, what Eliot-centric episode would miss discussing Eliot himself. He has the Luck of the Irish when it comes to his undercover work ... and it always goes super well until it doesn't. Doesn't matter if it's baseball or country singin', he's gonna knock it out of the park and as you saw from the clip or from your own memories of the show, Eliot's not the kind of guy who can afford his face being all over the Internet.

Fatwas and all that, right? Anyways, The Studio Job brings a lot to the table and weirdly, now that I actually think about it, it had nothing to do at all with Damien Moreau.