I'm a teacher. I'm a dreamer. I have my own world that I have created that is filled with Disney, Muppets, Criminal Minds, Sanctuary, Merlin, Stargate: SG-1, Sleeping Beauty, NCIS, and so much more. I am more than I appear--you just have to look.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's my understanding that in the criminal underworld, only two things are really widely known about Parker:
Parker is insane
Parker is a world-famous thiefāthe Parker
No one really knows what she looks like, who she works for, or even that she is a she.
So may I suggest "The 101 Parkers Job":
There's a global job so huge and so important that it behooves the Leverage crew to split up and convince many, many marks that the person they're dealing with is the Parker. Obviously, Parker can only be in place at a time, so this includes the usual suspectsāEliot, Hardison, Sophie, Harry, and Breannaāplus lots of members of Leverage International as well as some surprise faces, including Maggie, Quinn, McSweeten, Tara, and Sterling (and that's just the tip of the iceberg), all pretending to be Parker. For one glorious episode, they are all Parker, embodying all of the weirdness and skill that entails to the best of their abilities, guided by comms in the most chaotic job possible.
Something about this bugged me. Other than the typical, Eliot Spencer grazing over and minimizing a tramatic event, there was a hesitation in how he described getting ādropped off.ā And this is definitely something that I think Christian Kane took creative license on, filling in the script where it left off. But there was something I recognized hereāand it actually wasnāt the first place that I saw it.
Oh yeah, you know where Iām going with this.
To state the obvious, recognizing and dealing with child abuse is alwaysāalwaysāa horrible thing, and itās expected for someone who genuinely cares to react vicerally, as Eliot did throughout the entire episode. However, there was something more, and I always thought so, but āThe Fractured Jobā just sealed the deal for me. Something about how Eliot recognized what Randy was going through just by seeing his back, standing next to his dad. Obviously, Eliot shows throughout the show that heās great at reading body language, and he is very observant, but he also phased out so many times in the episode. There was a personal element here, something that Eliot recognized in Randy off of personal experience.
We were never told how old Eliot was when he was saved from or abandoned by his biological parents, just that he was young enough to be in a picture with Billy Spencer around the age of 10 or 12.
But with how he acted in āThe Order 23 Jobā and āThe Fractured Jobāā¦ there is nothing I can think of that would convince me his story wasnāt very similar to Randyās.
And working off of this, however his biological parents abused him, it adds so much depth to the why of how he treats kids, treats Parker.
Which leads me to point out his conversation with Randy, and how well he handles all of it: he has brief moments of intense eye contact and facial expression, that he breaks off just as fastāengaging, but not intimidating. He always is the one who looks away first.
And when Randy comes out of his shell a bit, he doesnāt bombard him with questionsāhe never even asks Randy directly, ever, in this conversation, if his father is the one who broke his armāhe just shows Randy that he knows, and takes the pressure off for him to tell the truth.
Which plays back into his conversation with Randyās dad in the stairwell...
And this one line that just guts me every time:
And when he tells Randy:
āYou could go up to oneā¦ and tell them what happened to your arm."
Thereās this moment, this moment:
The look on his face here, made me know something was up. Yes, absolutely, Eliot is a compassionate and highly protective person, especially when it comes to kidsāhe would have helped Randy either way, but thereās something else here too: personal experience.
If it wasnāt obvious enough in everything else, we have this:
Hardison jump-scares him. And Parker, in āThe Studio Job,ā was super surprised whenever she was able to shock him, because sheācat-burglar extrodinare, was never able to sneak up on him before. And Hardisonā¦ sorry buddy, you aren't quiet.
Eliotās there, talking to Randy, but the whole time half his mind is somewhere else.
And now I canāt get it out of my head, so Iām putting it in yours.
I canāt stop seeing Eliot, at however young an ageāyoungāwith a broken arm and bruises he keeps explaining away, because his daddy taught him how to lie. Then a young woman seeing him at the hospitalāactually seeing himāand taking him home to a place where she became his mother and Billy Spencer his father. Where he later locked himself in the woodshed to get over his claustrophobia...
the leverage ot3 is Like That because aldis hodge, christian kane, and beth riesgraf decided in season 2 to make a blooper of themselves pretending to get caught having a threesome on set and it set the tone for the character dynamics from then on
āGet a rat and put it in a cage and give it two water bottles. One is just water, and one is water laced with either heroin or cocaine. If you do that, the rat will almost always prefer the drugged water and almost always kill itself very quickly, right, within a couple of weeks. So there you go. Itās our theory of addiction. Bruce comes along in the ā70s and said, āWell, hang on a minute. Weāre putting the rat in an empty cage. Itās got nothing to do. Letās try this a little bit differently.ā So Bruce built Rat Park, and Rat Park is like heaven for rats. Everything your rat about town could want, itās got in Rat Park. Itās got lovely food. Itās got sex. Itās got loads of other rats to be friends with. Itās got loads of colored balls. Everything your rat could want. And theyāve got both the water bottles. Theyāve got the drugged water and the normal water. But hereās the fascinating thing. In Rat Park, they donāt like the drugged water. They hardly use any of it. None of them ever overdose. None of them ever use in a way that looks like compulsion or addiction. Thereās a really interesting human example Iāll tell you about in a minute, but what Bruce says is that shows that both the right-wing and left-wing theories of addiction are wrong. So the right-wing theory is itās a moral failing, youāre a hedonist, you party too hard. The left-wing theory is it takes you over, your brain is hijacked. Bruce says itās not your morality, itās not your brain; itās your cage. Addiction is largely an adaptation to your environment. [ā¦] Weāve created a society where significant numbers of our fellow citizens cannot bear to be present in their lives without being drugged, right? Weāve created a hyperconsumerist, hyperindividualist, isolated world that is, for a lot of people, much more like that first cage than it is like the bonded, connected cages that we need. The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection. And our whole society, the engine of our society, is geared towards making us connect with things. If you are not a good consumer capitalist citizen, if youāre spending your time bonding with the people around you and not buying stuffāin fact, we are trained from a very young age to focus our hopes and our dreams and our ambitions on things we can buy and consume. And drug addiction is really a subset of that.ā
ā Johann Hari, Does Capitalism Drive Drug Addiction?
can we take a moment to appreciate hardison's ingenuity in the mile high job?
Need to transform from maintenance worker to office worker? Accuse someone of discrimination!
Need to get your fake boss out of the office? Whoops, urgent meeting nobody seems to remember putting on the books!
Need to get your real boss off your back for being late to work? Fake a power outage! (Come on, we've all done it...except me)
Need to get your fake boss out of the office again? It's your birthday! (I love how this also implies haldeman attends the birthday parties of all his employees despite being very busy)
Need to get the hard drive out of the building safely and in an unsuspecting manner? Bam! Get fired!
This whole episode is one roller coaster after another.
parker is the one instantly interested in nate's ability to see the big picture. in the first ten minutes of the Nigerian job nate tells her how he knows the guards aren't at their station and she goes "I would've missed that." then at the end of the episode, she's the one that she's good at one thing, but he knows other things. she's always learning things from the others in a way no one else is. sometimes crime things, sometimes real life/social things, sometimes both. eliot teaches her to fight, sophie teaches her to grift, she doesn't hack, but she handles tech better than anyone but hardison. (eliot teaches her to like things, sophie teaches her how to have/be a friend, hardison teaches her to trust) she runs her own jobs, on her own, where the rest of the team never does. at first it doesn't work (the inside job) but then it does ( the broken wing job). obviously we see nate actually pull her into the planning in the long goodbye job in preparation for the ending, but she's been interested in learning from him, learning how to do what he does, since the very start. at first I think it was out of her self-preservation mindset, she didn't expect to have people to back her up, maybe ever. but even after she figures out they're sticking around, she won't have to run jobs alone, she keeps learning. from nate, from sophie, from eliot, from hardison, even tara. eventually, from harry. because of harry, from breanna. she accepts their input in a way nate never did, in a way nate never could. his "sicko love of control" wouldn't let him. but from the start, parker lets them teach her. and that carries over in the way she leads. she controls herself, never them. she makes the final call, but she wants input first. not because she can't make the decision herself, but because she sees the big picture in a different way than nate. she's watched the team save each other's skin over and over because one person noticed or knew something no one else did, and she knows she isn't always that person. they all grow so much in those first five years, and I don't know if I even think parker grew the most. but I do think she grew the most intentionally. she looked at all the others, saw what skills they had that she didn't, and decided she would learn.
theres a billion funny things about sophie and nates relationship but the best one is literally the first scene they share
because nate is SO REPRESSED that for the entire first season his entire background is Dead Son, Bitter Alcoholic, and Worked At IYS. you dont even find out about his wife until the season finale. this man is not giving ANYTHING away. you learn more about *elliot goddamn spencer* than nate in season 1, and elliot is a fucking government black ops spook
but then in the first episode hes like "we need a new face, we need somebody the mark doesnt know... omg lets go get sophie <3 shes so wonderful and amazing shes the best criminal youve ever seen" just bragging about his Not-Wife to anybody who will listen
and sophies like No No I'm Honest Now
and nate says I'm Not
and sophie has this little headtilt of like. holy shit he wants to break the law i HAVE to fuck him now. and the conversation goes on and nate asks if shes in and sophies head fucking VIBRATES from how hard shes nodding her agreement
and meanwhile parker hardison and elliot have to pretend theyre not watching their boss have weird grifter mindgame sex in a dirty alleyway
I think "The Hangover" movies would work better as a whole movie genre. The beginning is always the same: group of friends wake up hungover as hell, to start figuring out what the hell happened last night. Turns out a lot happened. As a tradition of the genre, there's always an animal in the house that has no logical reason to be there.
But get this: The same premise every time, but in wildly different times and places. Victorian England, the gentlemen went fuckshit with some nice sherry, wrote some questionable letters, worked together to compose an absolutely idiotic thinkpiece essay and sent it to the local newsprint (the publishing of it must be stopped) and for some reason there's an ostrich.
A troupe of travelling performers in the late Kofun period wake up in the stables of an inn, and the main plot point is the little beast sleeping on someone's chest. None of them have ever seen a cat before, but one knows enough to tell that those are imperial pets, and whoever's fucking cat that is will both be capable and willing to kill whoever stole it. So they'd better fucking return it.
A Tepehuan group of youths find themselves way out of the place that they last remember they had been, for some reason someone's balls have been shaved and painted red, and the strange out of place animal sleeping at their makeshift campsite is some random swedish guy. The spaniards don't seem to know how the fuck he ended up there, either, but they clearly do not have a mutual language with each other.
and while weāre at it, fuck this idea that ONE ACCOUNT has to belong uniquely to ONE PERSON. This is the same thing these silicon valley fucks want; their vision of the future where everyone has a unique biometric ID code implanted in their body is the ultimate extension of Netflixās āno password sharingā policy. You want to use your friendās car? Sorry, you canāt, you need to be an authorized user. Your mother wants to let you look something up on her OED account? Too bad! Thatās only for her! The concept of perfect market efficiency gives them greedy little money bag eyes.
If I pay money to have a newspaper sent to my house, they donāt charge me extra when I show it to my dad. This password sharing thing isnāt just a Netflix problem; donāt be surprised if it shows up elsewhere in other forms. Stamp this idea out now or weāll be stuck with it.
This is by far the most popular post I have and I have to say: good, Iām right. Password sharing and ID verification are going to kill the internet. not oooh in 50 years. in like 5 more.
something thats very interesting about The Nigerian Job is that they INSTANTLY nail how good the characters are at their job. you dont need to wait, they just immediately show you that these are the best of the best and you instantly buy what Leverage is selling you.
because unlike a lot of other episodes, *this* heist is almost completely continuous with nearly zero downtime. you could reasonably assume that only one or two minutes are being skipped, and thats likely due to the show skipping over the travel time of people physically moving through the building.
as a result, on rewatches, you become aware that this heist took them all of TEN MINUTES to pull off. thats how good they are. in other crime shows, this would be a whole ordeal that takes up half the episode, but for these guys? ten minutes. at most.
