Does anyone else ever get the feeling that when the leverage writers were creating the three guys' characters, their plan was to make the easiest ever game of fuck marry kill
A tiny preview of my next smut instalment, which I'm editing right now: an appropriate title I considered but am not using is "The Three Fs" [as in fight, flight and fornicate]
actually i need to borrow this gif because holy shit this is EPISODE THREE and Nate can just DO that. Can just. Grab Eliot Spencer while he’s holding a knife.
i think one of the nate eliot things is that they're both fucking unhinged. there's something feral about them, something that's capable of disregarding basic humanity. we know eliot is a killer, and a ruthless one at that, and he's not afraid of being in those kind of situations, which in a way dehumanises him, this inability to feel fear.
and nate. nate!! that man is terrifying! get in line, or get out of the way is his motto, and he applies it to absolutely everyone. especially in the earlier seasons, and yes he applies it to sophie (who is unarguably closest to him) too! for maggie he decides that she will get out of the way (because falling in line with him would mean that she would break the law, and she's a Good Citizen, not a Criminal or a Thief, and it never occurs to him that it's not a black and white situation... or that his ex wife matches his crazy).
and if you do neither, he ends you. simple as that. he doesn't kill you and he doesn't physically harm you, but what he does is arguably worse, because he ruins your life in ways eliot can't.
and they very quickly recognise each other as apex predators and both allow the other to use that for their crusade. eliot is a weapon that needs pointing in the right direction, that's what he's getting out of their relationship; and nate needs someone who'll have a go at him and who he can't actually hurt. because nate ruins lives by ruining their reputations, and what reputation does eliot have to lose? and conversely, not even nate ford could convince the world that eliot spencer isn't really fucking dangerous
(sidenote: that's why making moreau watch eliot spencer decrying the evil presidential dog fights is so fucking funny. there's an excellent post about it somewhere on here)
eliot thinks he's further along the path of being something inhuman, and he also thinks nate can still be saved from becoming that too. being an insurance cop, a "good guy" (btw a very laughable concept about how working in insurance makes you a good person. like. if that were the case then how come the same "good guys" let nate's son die so they didn't have to pay for his treatment?), was what kept nate on the straight and narrow before, and now giving him something to do might stop him from going completely off the rails ("how long until you fall apart again? a guy like you can't be out of the game, that's why you were a wreck. you need the chase" is what eliot's saying to convince nate to stay with the team).
unfortunately running with criminals doesn't fix nate the way eliot would like for it to, because the guy suddenly stops recognising any and all societal rules and overcompensates by trying to keep full control of everything all the time. he is so unreasonably mad at sophie for trying to help her friend teresa who got screwed over by marcone.
"she should've known what she got into, her husband working with the mob" and cpl perry from the ep before should've known what he got into, joining the military, but for some reason he's worth helping because he didn't "choose" to become a criminal. did teresa choose to get in with the mob or did she and her husband just not have another chance?
and when the entire team agrees they want to take that job, nate throws a hissy fit. tells them all to walk if they don't like the way he runs the team.
so does leverage fix nate? maybe after five seasons. but at first it makes him worse because between "not having to abide by normal human laws anymore" and the alcohol he completely loses his restraint
and eliot gets that. eliot has been there, has completely lost any and all principles (working for moreau mostly) and is now trying to glue the pieces of himself back together into something that isn't horrible. but nate isn't there yet. nate is still violent and dangerous, and eliot is the only one on the team who isn't disgusted by it. sophie certainly is. hardison and parker are too, even if they don't say it out loud. eliot may not like it, but he gets it.
and in return, nate is the only one who knows about what happened in the big bang job. he can hold eliot back with as little as a gesture or a look and it's not a slight to eliot at all. eliot trusts nate to point him in the right direction because they both need the same thing:
to be a good man.
also:
eliot: what, you think the only thing i know how to do is bust heads?
nate: no... well, yeah.
eliot: hold a knife like this, cuts through an onion. hold a knife like this, cuts thought like eight yakuza in 4 seconds. screams, carnage...
nate: yeah good point actually
like apart from how it's funny, any normal person would react with some version of "that's so fucked up". and nate is just like yeah nah that tracks actually, fair enough, do carry on
also @scotchiegirl something about nate and eliot and violence? sorry for tagging you aslkdjfhasdlkfj i just had ThoughtsTM
"Nate is still violent and dangerous and Eliot is the only one on the team who isn't disgusted by it." YESSS because Eliot recognizes himself!!! Nate and Eliot recognize themselves in each other!! They're not the same man, their dynamic is nothing so simple as looking in the mirror, but they are facets of the same gem and they ping off each other so well.
The other side of this being that Nate's type of violence humanizes Eliot and Eliot's type of violence humanizes Nate!!
Nate's violence is... Well, I won't say impersonal, but it is big picture violence. It's violence that takes on a huge mess and turns it into perfectly curated justice against monsters, poetic violence wherein these bloated greedy companies are the authors of their own destruction in a sense.
"get in line or get out of my way" is, like you said, a philosophy that he applies to everyone! We can see this with Maggie, but even with Hardison in the Scheherezade Job! Hardison's nerves and the potential he will flub his role is getting in Nate's way! And so he neutralizes them. Not by benching Hardison (although we see with both Tara and Eliot at certain points that he's not above benching members of his team who disagree with him or are getting in his way) but he neutralizes the parts of Hardison giving him problems in a very violent way. Not physically violent, but mentally violent. With Hypnosis.
"All alone again," Sophie says as she follows the others out the door when Nate admits to hypnotizing Hardison and makes it Hardison's problem that Hardison wouldn't do that and that's why Hardison wouldn't be able to run his own team. "Sometimes I think you like it that way."
But Nate's violence also includes full bodied pictures of all his team members, with all their strengths in proportion. Once he learns new things about them, he dockets it neatly as information and fleshes out his picture of these people he loves, and no part of it disgusts him. Eliot smashes a man's face in with a serving tray and Nate calmly asks out of curiosity if he killed that man with an appetizer. Parker stabs their mark with a fork and he goes "huh, now where would she go?" He uses the exact method on the Serbian model that he would use on Sophie cause he knows Sophie and knows it would work.
Nate's picture of Eliot is fully fleshed out. The fact that Eliot can kill and that he hates guns hold equal importance to him. Eliot's skill in a kitchen is in equal proportion to any of his other skills, whether that's his voice, or his charm, or his weapons and fists. And if Eliot says he might need to kill someone in order to finish the big picture, Nate preemptively forgives him. Nate sees Eliot as the whole picture, each new bit of information sliding into place to create a man that's loyal and as gentle and protective and nurturing as he is deadly and efficient.
And in response, Eliot's form of violence humanizes Nate. Eliot's violence is incredibly hands on and personal, it's specific to a case. His cases are all either close personal friends or people who remind him of home and family. He begs Nate to take down just one store if he can't take down a whole corrupt chain. Eliot sees the emotional and personal side of Nate that Nate can't bring himself to see yet. It hurts too bad for Nate to look at it closely, so Eliot pokes it for him, reminds him of it when Nate gets too moralizing and big picture and lost in his head.
Nate wants to shoot Dubenich with his father's gun. It's big picture, it's beautiful, it's poetic justice. Eliot reminds Nate that on a personal level, deliberately killing someone changes you and Nate is not prepared to live with who he'll become.
Eliot's forte is in personal connections, in literally hands on experience with people, while Nate's is in big picture. "You were all trying to solve the crime in your way. I just wanted to solve the crime."
By pinging off each other, they're able to both reach equilibrium in their levels of violence and humanity. They're both able to haul each other back from the edge and be that good man they know the other person believes them to be.
The thing about Eliot Spencer is that, whether or not he chooses to go through with it, he always has an eye to 'what is the most annoying thing I can do in this situation.' He only chooses to do the annoying thing about 15% of the time--usually Hardison or Parker has the "annoy the team members" job on lock, a good 20% of the time it's Sophie or Nate, and the rest of the time he's being a professional on job--but the man is always aware of what he could do which would be the most likely to annoy people.
Poke Nate's ego about Sophie having a team before them? On it. Hug Hardison in an annoyingly back-slapping way when his almost-girlfriend refused him? Of course. Giggle and ignore Sophie when she tells him to kill a cockroach? Abso-friggin-lutely. Dead-pan 'yes, and' Parker when she's asking about conspiracy theories? Sign him up.
The man is a little shit who is (unfortunately) also a professional and he loves messing with people.
(^ man two seconds from raining irritation on an unsuspecting mark)
Quick reality check though. Please remember to take off your fandom glasses once in a while. If you are just watching the original five seasons, and acknowledge that Word of God is not actual text:
- The OT3 is not canon
- The only canonically gay character is a cop
- Cops are generally good even though there are lots of bad apples
- Military contractors and corrupt politicians are bad, but the military is essentially good
- The military is essentially good even though they send people like Eliot around the world to do “hinky” stuff
- Torture works and is good when the good guys use it
- Corporations can be ethical, you just have to take the Bad CEOs out of power and replace them with Good CEOs
I think you misunderstood the post. I don’t believe any of these things. I’m saying that the SHOW portrays things this way within their universe.
Basically people idealize the show as this super leftist anti-capitalist queer thing and forget that the actual text was written in the 2000s and has a lot of bad takes.
From a Brit's point of view it really doesn't seem particularly left wing or even anti-capitalist.
There is a reverence for the military, the police and the christian church that makes some episodes unwatchable for me. It supports horse racing.
Big companies are on the whole good it's just evil CEOs that are the problem
There is no exploration of what destroying a company or a whole corporation does to the ordinary people employed by that entity. e.g. shut down a supermarket employing dozens of people to support a small business employing 1 or 2 people might tank the local economy of a small town. Taking down a corporation puts thousands of ordinary people out of work.
Elliot still works for the militaristic state.
Sophie and Parker are still thieves who take public property from museums and hoard it away in warehouses.
Hardison seems to have the strongest social conscience but even he doesn't look at the wider picture of how their work affects people.
Nate only wants to fight the medical insurance system because he was personally affected other than that he supports the status quo.
Though I love Leverage for its plotting and general cleverness I prefer Hustle (similar UK series) where the characters are unashamedly thieves who help others out of a sense of actual community.
I love Leverage but ppl put John Rogers on a pedestal also (on a lot of topics).
I don’t care what he says on twitter, he didn’t “write the only openly anti-capitalist tv show”, I’m not gonna forget that he said on his blog that he is a capitalist and isn’t anti-corporation, just believes that there are bad apples*.
*of course people’s political beliefs can and should change and evolve over time but it’s the bragging that pisses me off lol
In 2009 I went to a big-screen showing of Serenity hosted by the local “Browncoats Club.” Before the movie they played a clip of Joss Whedon talking about “why I write strong female characters.” And then everyone clapped. That is not a joke. The entire theater literally clapped and cheered for our brilliant feminist nerd icon Joss Whedon.
I am not saying John Rogers is anything like Joss Whedon. But that experience has made me very aware and very uncomfortable with the way fandoms can put creators on a pedestal, as well as the way fandoms can end up ostracizing anyone who criticizes them. I have seen both those things happen in the Leverage fandom, and I have seen people leave the fandom because of it (and I almost did too).
I don’t say any of this to shit on the fandom. I say it because I LOVE the fandom and I want everyone in it to feel comfortable voicing their opinions so they can stay here and have fun with us.
Neither enemies to lovers nor slow burn but a secret third thing called Schrödinger's intimacy. We are in love and we are not in love do NOT open that lid I swear to God.
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