I Realize There Are Some Jobs That Are Too Big For Leverage (eg Taking Down A Predatory Big-box Stores

Had no idea how badly we all needed "The Girls Night Out Job Pt. 2" in 2025

Pitching Leverage to a socialist friend: "The heist team gets hired by people who have been victimized by these corporate baddies, so there is always a scene at the beginning where some lady is telling the team 'my dad died because he couldn't afford his diabetes medication after the new factory owner Joshua Dirtbag the Third cut his hours' and the team is like 'say no more. we will put on elaborate disguises and convince him to bet on a fake racehorse, and somehow at the end of it you will have all his money and he will go to jail'."

leverage has always been pretty obvious with it's messaging, but redemption season 3 starts off with a generic american white guy who sells hot wings stealing water from american towns and then selling it to the highest bidder on an international auction from his private villa in paris that is attended by government official and terrorists both.

this is as subtle as a cannon shot.

What's in a name:

The team leveraging Hardison's first name to get him to take them seriously.

It started with the Grave Danger Job. With Parker's panicked "I need you. Do you hear me, Alec? I need you!" It isn't something that's conscious or anything, but all of them lean into it occasionally.

"Alec, just drop it," Nate stares at Hardison, watching the young man realize maybe he'd been pushing Nate too hard on a topic that was a sore subject. Alec nods grimly and backs down.

"Hardison, how long have you been up?" Sophie asks gently, watching the genius wipe the grit from his eyes, his latest forging project laid out around him. When he mumbles something about not remembering, needing to finish, Sophie catches his chin in a manicured hand and holds his attention. "Alec, go to bed." He goes.

"Come on, man, get off the screen for a little while, let's go get some sun," Eliot pokes him after a long job on top of a new World of Warcraft update. Hardison can't even remember what he said back, something glib he's sure, but he remembers the hesitation in Eliot's voice. "Alec, please. You're gonna fuck up your eyesight before you're thirty, staring at blue light a foot away from your face. Please?" Hardison goes with him. They go to an outdoor gun range. Hardison rags Eliot about them both not liking guns, but listens as his best friend talks him through focusing on targets of different distances. He'll never have Eliot's skill, but it's a quick way to help his eyesight and he turns out to be half decent with practice.

"Alec, I'm serious!" Parker pleads with him, a picture of some conspiracy theory held up in her hands. "I need to know if this is real or not, please. Because it doesn't seem real and then it does seem real and Eliot won't give me a straight answer and Nate won't give me any answer at all, and I need to know if-" if I'm going crazy, she doesn't say, but he hears it now. He lays a hand over hers and explains that it's not real, explains the joke patiently until she understands and can laugh at it and "yes, and" Eliot when that particular theory comes up again.

"Hey y'all, it's Alec," he says, a gun to his head and a phone in his hand, one chance to get it right, to make them understand that this is serious. He can practically hear them all sitting up in the tones of their voices, in the grimness of the rapid fire questions, and he breathes a sigh of relief. They'll come get him. They know it's serious.

I've probably watched too much Leverage, because a man in campus cop uniform came in to ask questions about our box office safe today and my boss let him in and gave him all the info he wanted, no questions asked, and all I could think is that we are horrifically easy to con

Thinking ab what episode would be the sexiest for a time loop. The thing is there are so many options. Steranko episode time loop but the steranko is also caught in it & starts preparing for parker. Hardison & eliot at the pool with moreau with eliot trying over and over to make the conversation that much faster, to find the right words so hardison can survive. Dubenich being the one caught in a loop & using that to manipulate them better in the pilot until they figure out that something is fishy.....

decided to rewatch the carnival job tonight and as much as i love when the cons get goofy, or there's a really satisfying gloat at the end, my most favorite thing is the way this episode goes from "this is a standard con" to "kid's missing? scorched fuckin earth baby" in less than 30 seconds

y’all ever see a piece of fan content about your favorite character that is so horrifically different from what you personally believe and you just

They should install public grappling hook points

What are some of your favourite Parker and Eliot moments from the og series?

i have the same favourites as everyone else, i'm sorry to say! top three have to be ice cave (duh), parking lot (duh x2) and then my wildcard bonus pick is spy truck.

ice cave is... it's the ice cave. it's THE parker and eliot scene, it's the one everyone keeps calling back to, it's the one that defines parker's arc for a whole two seasons and begins to properly wrap up eliot's. there's a lot you can say about how it affects parker, how eliot kindly guides her away from straying off-track. but it affects eliot, too, or at least reveals stuff; it's so raw for him in large part because it takes place not four weeks after the warehouse. he's still reeling and eliot's whole arc in s4 is basically Processing™️what happened, which starts here. so it's rough and it's raw and it's powerful, plus absolutely INCREDIBLE acting from both beth and christian. everyone's said their peice on this one, and for good reason.

parking lot is obviously an eliot and team scene rather than eliot and parker specifically. she's only got one line during the eliot part of it all, but it prompts the most important exchange of the whole scene.

P: "What did you d-" E: "Don't ask me that, Parker. Because if you ask me, I'm going to tell you. So please... don't ask me."

and yeah yeah yeah everyone's analysed this part in regards to eliot but what we don't talk about enough is how important it is that it's parker who asked and parker who he said that to. because there will always be an innocence about her - yes she's the one who's the most like him, yes she's the other one who'll do the things the rest of them won't, but there will always be an innocence about her. the woman who says she never hurt anyone but is proveably a crack shot with a pistol, the girl who loves christmas and still believes in santa, the thief who thinks jimmy choos refers to a person instead of shoes. she's not a child and the show does an excellent job of not infantilising her, but there's a vunerability to parker that's unique to her. eliot's not begging to not tell her. he's begging for her not to ask. as we see later in the ice cave scene, the two of them are all too often mirrors of one another's pain, and that's seen really clearly here. he doesn't even look at her until telling her to not ask, and then that explanation has him almost breaking down. he'd tell her. he trusts her, and the team, enough to tell. and that's why he can't bear them asking, can't bear her asking. because he cannot let parker of all people see the rivers of blood on his hands.

bonus pick! there's a lot i could have taken as a third option, especially given as you haven't restricted me to three and i've already gotten the two heavy hitters out of the way. but i'm going to say parker convincing eliot to stay in the spy truck in rundown.

P: We agreed we all change. Better or worse, we change together.

it's pretty much the only moment in the original show where eliot and parker's power dynamic is, however breify, reversed. for the most part she's very much someone who he strives to protect, and unlike eliot and hardison you rarely get the sense that they're equals in the relationship (one of the things i really love about redemption is that it remembers to change this about a lot more, and you get parker supporting eliot as a more common occurence). but here, parker's voice is clear and commanding - she knows the right thing to say and for a minute she's the one with the power here, she's the one with the wisdom that he needs to hear. i just love it as both a self-contained moment and a harbinger of what's to come.