Me watching Leverage for the first time: Eliot and Parker are the best, I love them so much. Hardison is pretty cool too, but Parker and Eliot do all the awesome stuff.
Me watching Leverage for the 485th time: Hardison is the most talented wonderful person in the entire show. While all the main characters are shown to be extremely skilled in their fields, Hardison is consistently shown to be remarkably good at picking up and mastering new skills in a matter of days and even hours. He is able to master enough of old book manufacture to convince a historian his fake is authentic, he is able to explain to someone over the phone how to land a plane, he picks up a violin for the first time in years and, with a bit of manipulation from Nate, manages to play one of the most difficult pieces ever written. When Hardison expresses worry about saving an entire city, and theoretically the entire world, from the spanish flu, a disease that previously killed about 1/30th of the worldās population, Eliot says heās not worried because Hardison is the smartest man heās ever met. When Moreau says he has the media, the guns, and the government, Nate responds with āI have a 24-year-old genius with a smartphone and a problem with authority. You never really stood a chance.ā
Hardison does almost all of the background work for any given con, with little to no thanks. He creates all the aliases, all the backgrounds, scopes out the ideal places to set up shop, organises all needed travel, runs backgrounds on nearly every person the team meets, and then packages all the relevant information into a little 3 minute slideshow that is easily understood by everybody in the room without being condescending.
Heās also one of the more emotionally mature of the main characters, tied only with Eliot. Unlike Eliot, however, Hardison is not only in touch with his feelings but able and willing to express them outwardly in non-self-destructive ways. He has a variety of hobbies (MMORPGs, brewery, watching movies, remixing music, etc) instead of just one or two that heās shoehorned into whenever he has free time (drinking, stealing, bungee jumping, fighting people).
He is repeatably shown to be the most concerned with keeping the team together and also repeatably shown to be the softest. Parker, Nate, and Eliot are shown to make questionable decisions if they believe itās for the greater good (of the con, of the team, etc), and Sophie is rarely in position to make a decision like that and often chooses her own survival in situations where she is, but Hardison, consistenly, has massive amounts of empathy for others, to the point where Eliot tells Parker that Hardison would have died in the ice cave on the mountain, because he would have tried so hard to bring the manās body back to his wife. When Parker is unable to express explicitly that she likes Hardison, saying sheās having feelings about pretzels, Hardisonās response is to offer pretzels and say that they are there when she decides if she wants them. He doesnāt pressure her into making a statement or a decision, even by saying that he likes her (because thereās an inherent pressure to reciprocate those feelings when youāre under a microscope like that).
From what we know of the main characters, Nateās first act of crime was one of revenge, as was Parkerās. Sophieās was of self-interest, and Eliot was following orders and went too deep, then felt he couldnāt turn back.
Hardisonās first crime was stealing money from an institution that could readily afford it in order to pay the medical bills of his caregiver.
Heās the absolute best and I love him.
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