So, in between the absolute and utter chaos of This Is The Real Life, I’ve been sitting down to rewatch Leverage here and there, for the sake of preserving my sanity, and I did The 15 Minute Job a few days and noticed something.
Here’s the thing: this is the third (and last) time I can recall Nate telling Eliot to walk away from the job. (Well, kind of.)
Nate: All right. We can still make this work.
Eliot: I don’t know why I’m sitting here listening to a new plan.
Parker: Well, the first one’s not going all that well.
Sophie: This playing-with-fame thing, it’s reckless.
Eliot: You’re not controlling the mark. All right, we’re operating without a net. Somebody’s gonna get hurt.
Nate: Eliot, why don’t you just take the rest of the job off?
(Eliot gives Nate a long look before pushing back his chair and leaves the table. Parker does the same)
Sophie: Consciously or not, I think you look at Reed Rockwell and see everything you hate about Nathan –
Nate: Any way I can get you to not finish that thought?
Sophie: Every time something goes wrong, you push harder, and now you’re pushing to ruin Rockwell so hard, you’re going to end up ruining yourself. Maybe that’s what you’re trying to do.
(I’m keeping Sophie’s bit in for a reason, by the way. We’ll get to that in a minute.)
Now, this is the fourth season. It’s more than a bit out of the ordinary at this point, actually, because for the most part Eliot and Nate rarely conflict anymore. But it follows an old pattern: Nate goes over the edge, Eliot calls him on it, Nate gets annoyed and tells him to back off.
There’s two other instances of this that I can remember: The Snow Job (waaaaaaaaay back at the start) and The Maltese Falcon Job (you know, where it all went to hell). Admittedly the latter is less “walk off the job” and more “seriously insult,” but either way, both times it’s Eliot calling Nate on his bullshit—
Nate: Guys, you got to trust me, all right? You’ve trusted me before, and with your life.
Eliot (slams his hand down on the table): Not when you’re drunk.
Eliot: You’re not in control of yourself.
Nate: So, what, you’re gonna control me? Is that it?
Eliot: Ah, I ain’t your daddy. You can drink yourself into a coma as far as I’m concerned, but you take me down with you – then it’s my problem.
Nate: You know, you talk too much. You ought to just go skip some rope.
Eliot: What? What? (gets up angrily)
Eliot: You want me to skip something? (heads across the room)
Sophie: Hey, hey! (gets in front of Eliot)
Eliot: I’ll skip your drunk ass off this marble floor.
Sophie: Okay, I need to speak to Nate alone. For a second.
Eliot (turning away): Yeah, do that.
(Eliot leaves, followed by Hardison and Parker, who lingers to give Sophie a meaningful look. Sophie sits on the arm of the couch)
Nate: Now, don’t you dare give me the “we’re all a family” speech.
Sophie: Mnh-Mnh. No speeches. Just a question. Is this helping you? Hmm? If you give Wayne Scott back what he lost, will you be satisfied?
Nate: You know me. I can do this.
Sophie: I knew you two years ago.
Nate: Well, I’m still the same person.
Nate: Don’t worry about Sterling.
Eliot: Did you just say, “Don’t worry about Sterling?”
Nate: Yeah, don’t worry about Sterling. What you don’t think I can beat Sterling?
Eliot: I think in the last six months, Nate, I’ve heard you talk about beating the Triads, beating the Russians. All right? Maggie’s boyfriend. Huh? How’d that work out? We all said that meet was a bad idea, right? But you got a taste for taking down this Mayor and you can’t resist.
Nate: You wanna walk away? Walk away.
Eliot: I’m not walkin’ away. It’s not my job. My job is to get your back. And, Nate, I’m gonna do it. All the way down. But I need you to do your job.
Parker: Be Nathan Ford. Be the person we came back for.
Intriguingly, Eliot does walk away—for a bit—in both Snow and 15 Minute. But he comes back both times. And you know what? Kudos to him for walking away, because that’s exactly what he needed to do. Snow obviously wouldn’t have ended well, and 15 Minute was just waiting to blow up. He demonstrates healthy anger management beautifully: walk away, cool off, and then come back to the problem later with a clear head.
Also, based on the conversation in Maltese, I suspect that Nate knows full well he won’t walk away in 15 Minute too. I’m guessing that’s more an “I’m done with you pushing me” warning instead.
Notice something else about those times, though?
Both times, Sophie doesn’t interrupt or try to add on to Eliot’s piece, and then, when he leaves, proceeds to metaphorically grab Nate’s ear and ask him about the thing that’s putting the job at risk… and, incidentally, the thing Eliot’s worried about. Because every time, every single time, he’s hit exactly the right mark. If anything, that’s why Nate gets angry. He knows Eliot’s right; he just doesn’t want to believe it.
Thing is, Eliot’s wake-up calls are a bucket of ice water, whereas Sophie’s approach is, well, hers. She’s more artful about it, and she knows how to dance circles around Nate. There’s also their respective dynamics. Nate respects Eliot (…most of the time), but, because it’s Nate, he tends to take those wake-up calls as a challenge rather than a warning. (…something something Nate’s problems with toxic masculinity and refusing to back down, probably.) But he’s a whole lot less likely to do that with Sophie, perhaps partly because he knows she’ll probably just use it as ammo if he does.
This is, in a way, pushing at Nate on two fronts: Eliot’s upfront and blunt warnings, and Sophie’s gentler pushing. Eliot cracks down, Nate gets the hard “I’m doing something wrong but I really don’t want to admit it” moment, and then Sophie snares him and forces him to keep staring that wrongness in the face. Does Eliot intend to give her that opening? Probably not (certainly not in Snow, and, for obvious reasons, not in Maltese). But she’s able to take advantage of it pretty well.
Intriguingly, we get a swapped version of this in The Last Dam Job, when Sophie tries to get Nate to listen about killing Dubenich and winds up calling on Eliot to talk him down instead. Her softer approach won’t work in that situation, so she needs Eliot’s ice-bucket instead, because this time it’s the only thing that might get Nate to wake up. But her initial approach softens him up for Eliot. It’s easier for Nate to hear him out when he’s already had that seed of doubt planted in his mind, and Eliot takes a gentler approach that time around.
Also worthy of note: in both Snow and 15 Minute, while Nate goes on, he does seem to listen to both of them. He backs off a bit. Not much, but he does. It’s unvoiced, but they do shift his perspective.
And in Maltese Falcon, when Eliot puts his foot down and says I will not walk away, Nate listens to him then, too. However, that time, Sophie isn’t there to push at Nate—and while he cools off a little, he doesn’t have her to push that point all the way home… and the crew winds up nearly getting themselves killed until she steps in. Tara says that Sophie had the plan built in because she knew the trio would follow him “all the way down,” as Eliot puts it.
This is, I think, partly because Eliot knows he cannot walk away. If he does, someone’s going to get hurt. So even when he thinks it’s at the worst point, even when he’s sure that it’s going to end badly… he stays. Because he knows it’ll end way worse if he’s not there.
Except Nate knows that. Which means that he will keep going, if he’s being really blind and stubborn about it, and so Sophie is essential to pulling him back too.
Anyway. It’s a good demonstration of how both Sophie and Eliot wind up pulling on Nate in their respective ways, and how they’re both essential to keeping him from getting the crew killed. They’ve both got a lot of influence on Nate in ways Parker and Hardison don’t. Eliot’s seen stuff, and if he says something’s too dangerous, it’s too dangerous. Not that Nate always listens, and they do pull through. But whenever Eliot puts his foot down, it’s really important to listen, because he knows exactly what he’s talking about.
Trouble is, Nate’s a reckless jackass—who, moreover, really likes a challenge, and really hates losing, and thus has precisely zero idea when to back the hell off. Sophie’s important for any number of reasons. But one of the big ones is getting him to listen when Eliot says “this isn’t right.”
So… yeah. They’re counterweights, basically. (And definitely the only reason why the crew is still alive.)
