You get the notifications that oh! Leverage redemption is doing a noir episode! And you think of course, of COURSE THE Sophie Devereaux will be the femme fatale. Makes sense right? Earth revolves the sun, moon makes the tides, and Sophie Devereaux is a femme fatale running a con. Right. Right?
But then, Parker!!!! Parker, the one who stabbed a guy after she was triggered and jumped off of a balcony in a foreign country. Parker, who used chloroform coz she couldn’t distract a guy away from his desk. Parker, who used excessive borderline obsessive note taking to talk to a mark. Parker, who cried when a mark read her trauma from her micro expressions.
But then. Then it just, makes sense! It makes sense because like she says, she has gone through extensive therapy for YEARS! She has processed her trauma, her grief, her years of being ‘othered’ till she found her people. Parker has lived, and loved, and toppled empires of crime.
And none of this has made her more ‘palatable’. It would’ve been so easy, SO EASY, to put forth a more ‘easy to go’ Parker to the audience and tell them OH! She just ‘grew up’.
But they didn’t. She’s still a thief, she’s still unnerving, she’s still doing things that can’t be explained using classical physics because she is Parker. Moreover, she is a mastermind, she is the head of Leverage International managing many teams at the same time. OG Parker couldn’t be the femme fatale for a noir episode. However!!!! In the original series, Parker held Tara by the throat threatened to throw her off of the roof and said ‘I dangle off of rooftops with my fingertips’. She has always had the capacity it. But Redemption Parker? She has had time! She has had time to process and hone that capacity. So femme fatale? Of course. Of course!
